This is unnerving

I am someone who thinks that self-driving cars are the future and am not opposed to them. But I was not aware that they had already been allowed on public streets. This unnerving video shows a driver and passenger in a Tesla self-driving car fast asleep while speeding along the Massachusetts turnpike. Tesla says that drivers should be awake and have their hands on the wheel, ready to take control if necessary.

This driver has way more confidence in this new technology than I have. I would not have the nerve to fall asleep like that.

Here we go again, trying to argue that science proves the existence of god

Apparently yet another new book is out that tries to make the scientific case for god’s existence. According to the publisher’s blurb, these are the five main arguments “for the existence of God and of intelligent design of both the universe and life.”

1.) Evidence showing that the material universe had a beginning; 2.) Evidence showing that, from its beginning, the universe was been finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life; 3.) Evidence from biology showing that after the universe came into being, large amounts of genetic information similar to computer code came about in DNA that made, and continue to make, life possible; 4.) Evidence from research conducted at the University of Virginia School of Medicine showing that the brain does not create consciousness, but rather, that the brain can be compared to a cell phone or a radio that receives consciousness that originates somewhere else, and then integrates it with the body; 5.) Evidence from quantum mechanics and a number of other sources that consciousness or mind—the medium of thought—is nonlocal and appears to be present everywhere.

This book will likely appeal to those believers who seek to find some scientific sounding justification for their beliefs that goes beyond saying that they believe because they want to or need to believe or because they grew up believing. The link above tells you how to get a free Kindle download before September 13.

My own forthcoming book THE GREAT PARADOX OF SCIENCE: Why its conclusions can be relied upon even though they cannot be proven seeks to challenge some of the misapprehensions about the nature of science that underlies such arguments.

The Taliban meeting reportedly collapsed because of Trump’s ego

The surprise announcement by Donald Trump that he had canceled the secret meeting he had scheduled at Camp David with the leaders of the Taliban and the Afghan government has led to a lot of speculation as to what the deal might have contained and the real reasons for the cancellation. No one really buys Trump’s reason that it was because of the bombing on Thursday that killed a US soldier, because there had been no agreement about a ceasefire and both sides had been continuing hostilities anyway.
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Women’s rights and equality

Victoria Batemen, director of studies, fellow and college lecturer in economics at Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge, argues that making the world more free, fair, and prosperous begins with giving women control over their own bodies to do with as they like, which includes them having the right to wear as much or as little clothing as they like and to do sex work.
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Why did Trump cancel the Afghanistan talks?

It has been an open secret that Donald Trump’s envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalizad has been having ‘secret’ talks with the Taliban about the withdrawal of some of the 13,000 US troops from that country as part of a larger peace deal. Ending US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria were Trump’s key promises in his election campaign and the lack of achieving any of those may have been heavy on his mind so the fact of there being negotiations over troop withdrawals were not a surprise.
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The fact that ‘both sides’ criticize you does not mean you are neutral

Mainstream media journalists and editors like to pride themselves on their ‘political neutrality’, that they do not take sides. Some even claim they do not vote in elections because of their commitment to this neutrality. Thoughtful media analyses have long since debunked that idea, pointing out that though some journalists might not consciously bias their reporting (though others of course do), the institutional filters that exist in media institutions ensure that only people who have a certain limited range of views can survive in the media institutions. These people are then given the freedom to say and write what they want without explicit orders from the top because the media entity is confident that they will stay within the boundaries. If on occasion a journalist goes rogue and challenges the consensus, they are taken to task or dismissed, thus warning any other journalists of the dangers of straying from their assigned path
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Making films in the days before post-production sound

I recently watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930) that can be seen in its entirety online (see below). I have long been a fan of Hitchcock’s films but had not seen this one and was curious as to what his early efforts looked like.

It is not a great film but I learned something about how limited filmmakers were in their options in those days. As I was watching it, it felt strangely different and I finally pinned it down to the lack of ambient sounds, especially a soundtrack. With modern films, one hears music that sets the mood, footsteps when people walk, doors shutting, and all the other sounds that accompany the action. But in this case, there was mostly silence apart from dialogue, and it was the absence of such sounds that seemed strange.

In reading about the film later, I learned that in 1930, there was no post-production possibility of adding sounds after filming was completed, like they do now with Foley artists and adding a musical score. Any sound in the film had to be picked up by the microphones that picked up the dialogue while filming the scene. So for example, in this film at the 34:00 mark, we hear a character’s thoughts as a voiceover while he is shaving while a radio played music. How this was done was by having the actor’s voice pre-recorded and played on a phonograph while an actual orchestra on the set played the music.

Here’s the full film.

Why you should never listen to the foreign policy establishment on war

It is a predictable pattern. As the US gears up for war, any war, the foreign policy establishment reacts like soldiers to a bugle call, quickly lining up to support it, irrespective of where they supposedly stand on other political issues, and whether they are self-identified as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.

On the occasion of the death of Leslie Gelb, one of the many ‘liberal interventionists’ who cheered on the Iraq war, Philip Weiss reminds us of something that Gelb said when asked later to explain why he initially supported the invasion of Iraq, something that he said that he later regretted.

“My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”

That pretty much sums it up. ‘Credibility’ is not dependent on being right but on being supportive of wars. All these people in the establishment media know the unwritten rules of the game, that if you oppose, or just even seriously question, any of America’s wars, you are not considered ‘serious’ and will immediately become a pariah and lose your media and professional platforms. As the cliché goes, they know which side of their bread is buttered.

For these people, it is easier to quickly support the war and then when things turn sour, as they almost inevitably do, to express regret and say that ‘everyone’ agreed with them. In this way, blame is spread so thinly that no one gets expelled from the ranks of punditry and they can respond enthusiastically to the next bugle call. This is why we still see Andrew Sullivan, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and the rest still around pontificating in the media, while people like Phil Donahue who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning were sent into the wilderness and remain there.

In-depth look at Tulsi Gabbard

Presidential candidate and Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is a bit of an enigma, hard to pin a label on. She has incurred the wrath and venom of the Democratic party establishment for reasons that are not totally clear to me but seem to involve the fact that she does not take an instinctively hostile attitude to the designated enemies of the political establishment, namely Russia, China, Syria, and Iran. Edward Isaac-Devore tried to understand the reasons for this antipathy. He says that the party establishment seems convinced that she has some ulterior motives for running for president even though they cannot articulate what it might be.
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