In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As usual. Glenn Reynolds shilled his latest New York Post column on Instapundit this morning: What if AIs set out to conquer the world . . . with love? His most unintentionally insightful observation: [L]et’s face it, you don’t need a 120,000 IQ to fool humans. Or even a 120 one. If I had to guess, as I've said before, I'd put that man's own IQ at not much higher than 120 himself, allowing for his Yale Law degree and that he passed a bar exam, but in most areas, he's just not that smart. As I pointed out the other day, he believes in Ray Kurzweil's Technological Singularity, in which individual human consciousnesses will upload into a giant computer by 2045 or so (or something like that), but in case that doesn't happen, he has a contract with Alcor to freeze (or "vitrify") his head upon his death, because at some point in the future, "science" will have found a way to resuscitate his brain and bring his body back to life. Somehow ...

Here's one question that's been bugging me for several days: someone at Savannah Guthrie's level must be surrounded by an army of agents, lawyers, publicists, image consultants, and so forth, retained by both her and NBC. Some of these people must also be able to double as crisis managers, since someone in that position is likely to have some type of public "crisis" at any time, whether it be family dispute, serious illness, infidelity, divorce, DUI, shoplifting arrest, whatever, these are people who are skilled at keeping you out of the news or getting you into it as needed. The biggest dog that isn't barking here is that there's no evidence of a professional publicist-cum-crisis-manager invovled in this whole hinky kidnapping story. But let's leave aside Savannah's status as a national media figure. Even a prosperous middle-class family is typically advised to have a trusted family spokesperson, maybe a good friend who's also a lawyer, ...

Todsy's post was delaywd due to network issues. As investigators continue to find nothing new in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping, amid non-stop breathless coverage that might have been custom designed by Savannah's and NBC's publicists, Fox News interviews Former NYPD officer Tom Smith at 2:50 in the video above and actually asks some real questions: Q: Can you say now with certainty that these ransom notes are authentic, or could they still be fraudulent? A: Oh, they could definitely still be fraudulent. I'm not sold on them 100% at all. . . . When you have a kidnapping, kidnappings are quick. Get them, negotiate, give me the money, get the person back. That's how kidnappings happen, because even the perpetrators don't want to hold onto the victims too long, because that enables police to track them down quicker. So the length of time is concerning. And how much deadline after deadline after deadline is going on, so it's sort of desperation as well....

Andy Ngo writes in The New York Post, The anti-ICE activists are an insurgency, not a protest movement : On Saturday, the Democratic Socialists of America celebrated hitting 100,000 members. Almost on cue, their footprint in organizing anti-ICE so-called “protests” continues to grow. But these are not protests. They are coordinated obstruction campaigns modeled on the playbook of revolutionary insurgency inspired by violent revolutions. That much is clear from the latest reporting in The California Post, documenting how militant far-left activists from the Golden State are advising radicals in New York on the latest tactics for sabotaging federal immigration operations. But also yesterday , Immigrant groups have a message for their mostly White allies: Quit blowing the whistle on ICE. Fox News Digital has reviewed days of messages inside Signal chat rooms that reveal that a new internal feud has erupted inside the anti-ICE protest industry, pitting immigrant-led or...

Kidnapping for ransom went out of style with the Lindbergh Baby, but even that case was hinky . [T]he famous father took personal charge of many aspects of the investigation. He isolated household staff who may have had knowledge of his son’s medical condition from questioning by authorities including J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Also, following a cursory autopsy, he ordered the body cremated and the ashes scattered. And of course, it was a media sensation. Fast forward to the JonBenét Ramsey case , which involved a hinky ransom note, even though the child was later found strangled in the family home. It was also a media sensation, especially due to JonBenét's participation in child beauty pageants. But there are very few parallels in the real world. YouTuber crminal lawyer Bruce Rivers says on his channel, "I've been practicing law for almost thirty years. I've never once seen a kidnapping-ransom case." In other words, all the cases we see seem to...

Thinking about Glenn Reynolds, Ray Kurzweil, and cryonics, I began to go back to the only undergraduate courses that I've been able to use throughout my adult life (though they've consistently also gotten me into trouble, too), my minor in Philosophy. The video embedded above is by Jeffrey Kaplan, a Philosophy prof at UNC Greensboro, whose online courses I've found useful in keeping my thinking active in the field. In this one, he discusses the philosophical concept of a "zombie", a being that is physically identical to a human in every way. It behaves, talks, and reacts exactly like a person, but there is "nobody home" inside. This is a thought experiment that is used against the argument of physicalism, which is roughly equivalent to materialism. It seems to me that this is the philosophy underlying cryonics: notwithstanding you have been legally dead for hundreds of years, if you were vitrified, properly frozen quickly enough after your death, ...

I was all ready to talk about The Washington Post this morning, when I ran into this at Instapundit : Glenn Reynolds shills a Substack essay proposing that "the Singularity" is already here. He begins by citing Ray Kurzweil. At best, Kurzweil is an idiot savant , posssibly a brilliant inventor, but also, according to Wikipedia , a believer in freezing his body aftrer death in hopes of having it resuscitated at some future point: Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. After his death, he has a plan to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him. As of 2005, Reynolds was a big fan of this quackery, enthusiastically promoting the work of both Kurzweil and Aubrey de Gray , a promoter of human lifespan extension. According to the Wikipedia link, De Grey is a cryonicist, having signed up with Alcor. When...