The Weekly Flail — October 6, 2023

Winnowing the media chaff

Culture

Religion continues to decline. A new AP-NORC Poll shows that 30% of Americans have no religion, including 43% of the 18 to 29 age group. This continued a long trend that was slow coming to America.

The future is evident in the rest of the modern world:

• 🇯🇵 In Japan, 70% of people in Japan say they have nonreligious feelings.
• 🇮🇹 Nearly 80% of Italians say they’re Catholic. But most view it as a tradition, with fewer than 20% attending services weekly.
• 🇮🇱 Israel, a country with about 7 million Jews, is remarkably nonreligious: Just 33% said they practiced “traditional” religious worship. The conflict between secular and ultra-religious Israelis has grown in recent years. Axios

It seems that America’s remaining religious zealots are political rather than spiritual. Religion (Christianity) is still vital as a community center.

The growing dominance of ‘nones’ indicates this is not a point of debate but is no longer relevant.

A theatre in Norfolk believes it has discovered the only surviving stage on which William Shakespeare performed.

The theater was built in 1445, and the stage floor has been dated to that century. Whether Shakespeare performed on that floor is a conjecture, but the circumstantial evidence is strong.

In our age of threatened survival, a four-hundred-year-old timber floor is comforting.

Climate Crisis

It has been hot and is worsening in the southern hemisphere.

A headline caught my fancy. A climate scientist in England declared September’s temperatures “Gobsmackingly bananas!” One needs to find humor wherever one can in this era.

The bad news that has not been broadcast adequately, as usual, is that September, the hottest month ever recorded, broke August’s record that had broken July’s record. The extent of forest fires and drought should finally attract everyone’s attention, but no, it did not.

To quote from a reader’s comment to my article Making It to 2030:

In the province where I live in Canada we had a provincial election and campaign during which NO mention was made of climate change by any candidate. Hard to believe but true.

Of course, we all know that the candidates for president in America’s Fascist Party refused even to acknowledge the Climate Crisis in their last debate. They are, in any case, utterly irrelevant to life on this planet.

The Political Clown Show

Joe Biden decided to extend the infamous and useless border wall with Mexico. This is political panic, with the howling idiots demanding that something be done about refugees seeking safety in North America.

The problem is that New York and Chicago are panicking over hundreds of thousands of climate refugees being shipped north by the fascist assholes in Florida and Texas. We have a side disaster with Biden now deporting Venezuelan refugees back to Venezuela. How is that helping?

As I have said elsewhere (see Making It to 2030 and Clowns, Clowns Everywhere, this is not a short-term problem solvable by local clowns in border states. This is a planetary problem that has just gotten started.

Until the nation-state system collapses and we get planetary management (by or after 2030), the nation-states that created this disaster while exploiting all the other populations must get their shit together and deal with it.

Is it too difficult for America, before it recedes into fascist idiocy, to organize huge refugee camps with everything needed for several million climate refugees? This then needs to be done for all regions of the planet that climate refugees are inundating.

I agree it is ridiculous to arbitrarily dump hundreds of thousands of climate refugees on even the wealthiest metropoles as a solution. This may shock the percentage of the population that retains denial as their primary response, but these refugees are never going home.

Another suggestion: We have extensive and hugely funded military bases with the resources to build quick encampments until permanent facilities can be constructed. We should convert these to staging areas for the new population centers.

This takes care of two problems at once and sets a model for the northern hemisphere and all components of the American Empire.

The first step is to declare a national climate emergency pending the declaration of a planetary climate emergency. Repurposing wasted billions of resources would make Joe Biden a universal hero within two years.

Thoughts on AI

While everyone worries about AI as they should, they worry about the wrong things. What will be transformed in the immediate future, pending disruption from the Climate Crisis, will be the detailed work of analysis and planning.

As we better understand Large Language Models, we will begin to personally capture our daily content and feed that to our assistants, who will increasingly take control. Many startups are working on the first stages of this now.

The focus of these systems will be simple automatons rather than high-powered LLMS. We can now automate thinking, but this will happen at the simple level that determines most of what people in management positions do.

There will be AI specialists and generalists, idiot savants and jack-of-all-trades. How that manifests today is with models focused on programming or those focused on general text generation. They’ll either be good at one specific thing or serviceable at a great many things.

As a result, over the next few years, a decent percentage of thinking you do today will no longer be required (or compensated). Source

Staying ahead of this will be difficult as we are all directed to look at the wrong things. This is a complete paradigm change while the old world collapses around us.

It is an exciting time.

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