Harry the Human: April 2025

Friday, April 18, 2025

Las Vegas getaway!

Update, Friday, 4/18/25: Dear Readers, my wife and I have arrived in Las Vegas. You can read the prologue to this adventure on Lasken's Log at https://laskenlog.blogspot.com/. For philosophical and technical reasons, I'm transferring updates on our trip here, to Harry the Human's realm.

At this moment I'm on my laptop on the 9th floor of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas; my wife's doing her online class across the room. I just got back from a long walk through the Luxor casino into the Mandalay Bay casino and retail area. I also wanted to walk outside for the cool desert evening, but this place is not designed for walking outside- which is a wasteland of construction and busy streets without sidewalks. I must say, though, that I adore the large copies of ancient Egyptian sculptures in the Luxor lobby. I find them captivating, though they lack the power to make me gamble. They did make me want to stay here, so that I could drive once around the entryway, flanked by imposing columns, the Sphinx, and a pyramidal hotel, before seeking the massive airport sized parking lot. What a sucker I am for falling for those faux antiquities. On the other hand, they offer good focal points, especially this Passover week, for meditation on God's immediate purpose in launching the 10 plagues against the Hebrews. Each of those attacks was designed to destroy a specific Egyptian god, from Horus to Ra. The best known plague, the killing of the firstborn, was intended to kill the pharaoh, considered a god. And yet here they are, the Egyptian gods, back again in Las Vegas!

Update, Saturday, 4/19/25, 8:00 AM: The casino/resorts of Las Vegas are hermetically sealed from the surrounding desert, to maximize gambling revenue, and I long to escape to Red Rock Canyon, 15 miles west, where the Southern Paiute and many earlier native American tribes hunted and sat around fires over the last 10,000 years. What would be their reaction if they suddenly had a vision of modern Las Vegas? Certainly shock and incomprehension, the same reaction we would have if we viewed our culture a hundred years from now. The desert was not planned into our current trip, though. This is an exploration of the city. Today we see a show at the new Sphere. It is advertised as "immersive," as Red Rock would have been. I expect to enjoy the show, in spite of my whining about the desert.

As far as gambling, I have an impulse to play blackjack, even if only for the thrill of coming up against an insurmountable force, the dealer, and I have an idea about funds I might designate for this. I earned an extra $50 last week from the Los Angeles Unified School District and feel guilty about what I had to do to earn it. The district notified me that my certification would expire if I did not take an online course called "Challenging Whiteness." This course informed me that, although individual white people might be acceptable if they speak the party line, "whiteness," as a generic catch-all term, suggests, in some overriding sense, a morally deficient group. Racial pride is a plus, but a doctrine of racial moral superiority has been at the foundation of all racist and fascist ideology. This Woke party line, which has so far escaped Trump's raging eraser, is doing exactly nothing to help children in the district learn to read. In fact the opposite is happening, to all races of students. We now play recorded narrations of assigned books by sophisticated companies like Schoology so that students can sit in class and listen to books read to them instead of reading them. Under this model very few teachers require students to read on their own, and the results are plain to see: American young people's reading skills are plummeting. Our culture is perhaps moving away from expecting people to read, beyond simple sentences on websites and machines. Back to Vegas, my idea is to feed the ill-got 50 bucks to the implacable Egyptian gods of the blackjack dealer, in a penance of sorts for my compliance with the wasted money and efforts of our school district.

Update, Same day, 5:15 PM, The Sphere show, "Postcard from Earth" was a wonder, masterfully written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel. The "movie" is not projected onto the screen, but is projected by it, using over 200 million embedded pixels. New sound systems direct sounds to specific spots in space. The seats rumble when elephants walk by. The realism is shocking. The story, too, is compelling, basically a sci fi tale of how life arose on Earth, grew everywhere, then was dominated by humans, who wrecked the place, at the last moment sending people into space to faraway planets to start the whole thing over. The movie (if that's still the term) is well worth seeing. In the lobby, AI powered robots talked to the public, making up conversation including witticisms and philosophical insights. The staff was efficient and friendly, even lining up at the exit to smile and wave goodbye. This is the good face of AI, put together to sell us on it. It does look pretty cool, but you have to admit that no one anywhere is being asked to give an opinion on how we should conduct this revolution. It's just happening, whatever anyone thinks or doesn't think about it.

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

New blog: AI conversations

Dear Readers, check out my new blog where I explore the inner workings of Google's AI, Gemini: "AI conversations" (https://smartypantsgemini.blogspot.com/). We discuss sex, politics and consciousness. D.L.

Thursday, April 3, 2025

Will the real emperor please stand

By the late 18th century, people at all levels of British society, from the very wealthy to the destitute, were addicted to tea, imported from China mostly by the Portuguese. The British wanted to know more about China, this distant, indirect trading partner to whose product they were addicted. The Chinese seemed to be calling the shots in trade deals, demanding payment in silver, running a large trade imbalance and forbidding traders from leaving highly restricted areas of China or learning Chinese. The British wanted to negotiate at least as equals, so in 1793 King George III sent a colonial administrator, George Macartney, on Britain's first diplomatic mission to the ruler of China, the Qianlong Emperor. As a gift to commemorate the emperor's birthday, Macartney attempted to give him a gold box studded with diamonds, but before he could do this, to his shock, Macartney was ordered to kowtow (literally: "bang the head") before the emperor, an act in which "supplicants," as representatives of trading nations were termed, had to kneel and bow down until their foreheads touched the floor, an obvious expression of subservience. This was considered appropriate even for another ruler's delegate because the emperor was the "Son of Heaven," the representative of the divine on earth, so all other monarchs and leaders on Earth were subordinate to him. Macartney refused to kowtow because he believed that George III, though by then a "constitutional monarch" who shared power with Parliament, was certainly an equal ruler to any. The emperor took the gold box and tossed it aside as one would a cheap bauble. The mission was a failure, and 50 years later the British invaded China in the Opium Wars, forcing China to accept imports of opium and widespread addiction to it. It's basically a history of rival drug gangs.

The obsession with trade balances and the question of who is supplicating whom is reminiscent of today, as President Trump imposed a 34% tariff on China affecting U.S. imports of Chinese produced hi-tech, pharmaceuticals, auto parts and other addictive elements of modern culture. Chinese president Xi responded with a 34% tariff affecting imports of U.S. agricultural goods and restricting export to the U.S. of rare earth minerals essential in producing highly addictive electronics. Trump responded with an additional 34% tariff, China did the same and the struggle has escalated so that now each country has levied over 130% in tariffs on the other.

Financial chaos is the immediate result, though the struggle is not only about money; it also involves people's sensitive national identities, represented by the egos of leaders. Who is emperor over whom? Should Trump grovel and say, "Oh great Emperor Xi, Americans need you more than you need them! Please have mercy on us!" Or should Xi bang his head and cry, "Exalted Emperor Trump, the Chinese people need your creative spirit more than you need our cheap copies of things you invented!"

Ironically, if this manufactured trade war becomes real and helps spark World War III, the ultimate cause will be neither egos nor money (at least not money lost and gained in the stock market). The war will be a realized goal of a quickly evolving international intrigue. While most people try to stay alive, intrigue participants, salivating at the prospect of new monopolies to divvy up, will use the smoke screen of chaos to assemble techno-societies from which displaced, old-order humans will be excluded- reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's visionary 1932 novel, Brave New World, in which cloned humans live in the cities, while old-style humans, called "savages," are confined to desert camps. The most obscene word in the language is "mother".

Who cares which man is the real emperor when both cultures are about to be replaced by bio-engineered, AI managed humanoids?