Daily Archives: July 4, 2022

The biggest reason why "Fringe" left such a high bar is the incredibly well-written characters, who are played by a hugely talented cast. The bond between Olivia, Peter, Walter, and Astrid (Jasika Nicole) is so strong because of the horrors they face on a daily basis, and it isn't surprising that they're a dysfunctional family by the time Season 5 comes to a close. But the emotional crux of the show comes from Olivia's journey into the unknown and the secrets that are unearthed about her past because of her investigations.

She's essentially asking the question, "Who am I?" for the entire series, because of the mysteries that overlap into her own life. These quandaries involve discovering the truth about her Cortexiphan-induced powers, whether she's her own person in the face of an alternate universe, and whether she can ever feel comfortable enough to start a relationship with Peter. Anna Torv's unflinching performance is nothing short of excellent (although "Mindhunter" fans won't be surprised!), and when Olivia finally gets to be with her family by the end of the series, it's so heartwarming to see her happy and fulfilled.

Torv's performance is only enhanced by her dynamic with Joshua Jackson as Peter because their relationship never feels forced it naturally grows over the course of two seasons. But just like the idea of the alternate universe, it's incredibly rewarding for the audience to finally see them together after struggling with an evil doppelganger, plot twists about their respective histories, and saving the world from the Observers.

"Fringe" knows what audiences expect from a sci-fi drama it bravely explores its own mythology and characters with a unique edge that makes it a true treat to watch.

Read this article:
Network TV Hasn't Been The Same Since This Sci-Fi Drama Left The Air - Looper

In his superb book, Dominion, historian Tom Holland finds parallels between the early Christians and todays judgemental theorists of gender and race. Both can be called social-justice warriors, he notes. Each sees a judgement day close at hand, and each has zealots who relish their role as judge, jury and hangman. Wokeness is just one modern mania that has a distinctly religious quality. Arguably, there are two other modern religions that eclipse wokeness in their scope and ambition: environmentalism and artificial intelligence (AI).

Environmentalism expresses a desire to subordinate human development and welfare to a new, all-encompassing mission that of reducing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. An emergency or a crisis has been declared by activists, one which supposedly requires the suspension of political and moral norms. Every aspect of our lives is recast into this new moral framework.

Karl Marx recognised how religion gives society its shape and moral order. He called religion the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point dhonneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. But Marx also recognised religions devotion to the idea that human beings are exceptional and unique: It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence. Religion is a form of fetishised or estranged humanism, Marx was saying.

Environmentalism turns this celebration of humanity on its head. Human activities are measured by the harm or impacts they cause to the natural order, and all human activity is therefore sinful. We ate the forbidden fruit by burning fossil fuels and by daring to increase human welfare and now we must pay. Even the UK prime minister signals his support for this philosophical belief when he describes the Industrial Revolution as a derangement of nature, or a doomsday machine.

Equally religious, and equally anti-human, is the current infatuation with AI. We are currently in the third wave of enthusiasm for AI in 65 years, during which periods of high hopes and investment in AI have been followed by periods of derision. This time, however, belief in the transformative power of AI has penetrated the policy, media and administrative classes as thoroughly as the belief in apocalyptic climate change.

Todays AI develops an idea that has been around from the start. It uses multi-layered neural networks which calculate probabilities to find statistical regularities or patterns.

The field is rife with anthropomorphic metaphors: AI is undergoing training, for example, or deep learning. But these terms are really misdirections, for the software has acquired no knowledge or understanding of the underlying data it is processing. Instead, the software has bludgeoned its way through a task using brute force producing a statistical approximation to achieve a result.

A better name for the various activities currently undertaken by AI may be heuristic software. But then this might remind us that its guesswork, and that things can go wrong. Sometimes this guesswork can be impressive. At other times it is sufficient to be useful. Often it is not, and AIs ignorance of the real world can be painful, and hilarious.

But companies selling AI software or services claim a great deal more on AIs behalf. AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on, insists Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Googles parent company. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire, he even claimed last year.

Our political elites accept such claims at face value, because it allows them to indulge in a little vanity. They can imagine themselves taking their place alongside the boffins, as visionaries or vanguardistas, as the future sweeps in. Five years ago, I was one of over 200 people and only three from the professional media invited to give oral evidence to a House of Lords inquiry into artificial intelligence. In advance, we were given nine points on which the lords might wish to hear our views. One of these was how we would prepare the population for the sweeping changes that were to come from new developments in AI. Apparently, as journalists we were not expected to question such improbable claims. It was taken as a given that AI would soon be a smashing success.

Five years on, the hype has reached new levels of absurdity, with artistic pastiches of models, like Open AIs GPT-3 language generator, being mistaken for human-like sentience.

The political class was promised a fourth industrial revolution, but AI is conspicuously failing to deliver tangible practical results. Yes, it is becoming another useful tool in the data-analytics toolbox. But it has failed to make an impact on other key areas, such as robotics, just as sceptical robotics scientists predicted.

Not one radiologist has been made redundant by AI, the neuroscientist and author Gary Marcus pointed out recently. Marcus has argued for some time that the current approach to AI has hit a wall, and is proving to have very little use outside the IT industry. AI remains extremely crude and dumb. For his pains, he finds himself in the same boat as so-called climate deniers. And with uncanny echoes of Climategate, the AI priesthood even refuses to allow researchers like Marcus to view or test the models themselves, in case they find something wrong with them. Nevertheless, the stunts and AI is a faith that requires regular miracles get ever more spectacular.

In fact, invoking religion or magic when flogging AI is not new. The original term was a triumph of marketing. A young professor called John McCarthy, who co-edited an obscure academic journal called the Journal of Automata Studies, decided that this new branch of mathematics could use some pizazz. Automata werent sexy enough. I invented it when we were trying to get money for a summer study, McCarthy would later admit.

The appeal of being God, of artificially giving birth, was something Professor Sir James Lighthill identified as one of AIs promises. Lighthill undertook the review that cancelled most of the funding for AI in 1973. Today, DeepMind the AI subsidiary of Alphabet is a master at evoking unexpected or creative outcomes supposedly produced by its deep-learning applications, which critics refer to as Its alive! moments. These tricks work spectacularly well with journalists, who are only too willing to suspend their scepticism. Such credulity is abundant, for example, in a long cover feature in The Economist this month, which marvels at the emergent properties of an AI that border on the uncanny.

Throughout those first and second AI summers, religious claims were never far away. During the second revival of AI in the 1980s, philosopher Mary Midgley lamented how dreary and familiar all the great claims about AI sounded to her.

They promise the human race a comprehensive miracle, a private providence, a mysterious saviour, a deliverer, a heaven, a guarantee of an endless happy future for the blessed who will put their faith in science and devoutly submit to it, she wrote in a review of a 1984 book by Professor Donald Michie, one of the leading British AI academics (Michie led one of the few departments to survive the 1970s AI winter). Is it clear why I was reminded of hymn books?, asked Midgley. Michie exhibited a crude indiscriminating euphoria, she wrote, and there is no better description of his successors 50 years later they too have a liturgical quality.

What AI shares with radical environmentalism is a longing to create an external moral arbiter. With apocalyptic climate change, the planet is judging us because we dared improve our lot. In AIs Jesuit wing transhumanism man hasnt fallen, we were just awful all along. Among transhumanists, there is a revulsion toward the physical body, which decays and defines a fixed form, and also a revulsion at what is characterised as our hopeless irrationality. We have always been inferior to the machines, they argue, but those machines just hadnt been invented yet. By submitting to the machines, we become free, as Grimes 2018 single, We Appreciate Power, articulates:

People like to say that were insaneBut AI will reward us when it reignsPledge allegiance to the worlds most powerful computerSimulation: its the future.

Here the religious overtones are explicit immortality is achieved by digitising the physical and uploading it. The deeply misanthropic idea that humans are not unique, and are in fact a bit rubbish, is not a new invention of the AI evangelists, of course. It has become commonplace in fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science to argue that consciousness is a trick of the mind, that the subjective self is an illusion or a trick of the brain circuitry. Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett was making this case three decades ago. A parallel, materialist view is even older: the proposition that were just poorly functioning machinery was expressed by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, where he wrote: You, dear human, are simply a gigantic lumbering robot.

In the early 2000s, computer pioneer and technology critic Jaron Lanier recognised these two beliefs as two cheeks of the same backside a backside he called cybernetic totalism. He was dismayed that so many highly intelligent friends of his in science and technology were sympathetic to this collection of prejudices, in part or in whole. Of the six characteristics he identified of this worldview, one was that subjective experience either doesnt exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect. Subjectivity has long been unfashionable among the intelligentsia, as James Heartfield identified in The Death of the Subject Explained in 2002. Twentieth-century literary fashions like structuralism, cognitive science and more recently behavioural science merely added some intellectual respectability to these prejudices.

Two decades ago, Lanier already had an explanation for the supposedly magical and emergent properties of todays AI. To make the computers look smart, we have to make ourselves stupid, he observed. It requires a curious act of self-abasement. Unfortunately, abasing ourselves is a habit to which our elites seem strangely addicted. Hollowing out what it means to be human has cleared the path for both artificial intelligence and apocalyptic environmentalism, two of the most powerful religions of the 21st century.

Andrew Orlowski is a weekly columnist at the Daily Telegraph. Follow him on Twitter: @AndrewOrlowski.

Read the rest here:
The myth of 'artificial intelligence' - spiked - Spiked

On July 4, 1941, five months before the United States entered World War II, then-Msgr. Fulton Sheen published A Declaration of Dependence to stir Americas soul into realizing what its independence entailed and to warn Americans what they must do to keep it. This work of Sheen, a true prophet, is even more timely for today, as the world fills with more violence, irrationality, growing abandonment of God and religion, idolatry of self and much more.

A Declaration of Dependence has been reprinted and rereleased for July 4 as the saintly bishops urgent wake-up call for the United States.

Men are visited with the effects of their own sins, wrote Sheen. In other words, sin brings adversity, and such adversity is the expression of Gods chastisement of sin, brought about by the action of man himself. We are living in such a period of history now the sad hour wherein we are gathering the bitter fruits of our apostasy from God. Wars from without; class hatreds, bigotry, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, atheism, and immoralities from within are the harvest of our godlessness. I know that there are many who profess belief in God, but they do not act on that belief. What recognition is given to the moral law in politics, economics, or education? How many Americans who say they believe in God went to their church or to their synagogue last Sunday or Sabbath?

His words became timeless reminders of what was already on the horizon for today.

Allan Smith, the editor of this new edition, plus other Sheen works, described to the Register how the prolific bishop wrote several books during those years as the world was engulfed in war. Sheen was really pushing hard, just to remind us and say, Were going to do World War III really quickly if you dont get this right.

It was essential to correctly understand that double aspect or meaning of Americas Declaration of Independence. As Smith explained, Sheen begins really saying to America: Remember, the Declaration of Independence means a Declaration of Dependence. He was also saying that the intentions of our Founding Fathers were that we would be a nation under God. All these men wrote this because they wanted us to say, We need God.

Sheen began his title chapter by observing, as Smith explained, how everyone talks of rights and few of duties, so that it is important for us Americans to recall that the Declaration of Independence is also a Declaration of Dependence. The Declaration of Independence asserts a double dependence: dependence on God and dependence on law as derived from God.

Quoting the opening of Americas founding document, Sheen emphasized, Notice these words: The Creator has endowed men with rights and liberties; men got them from God! In other words, we are dependent on God, and that initial dependence is the foundation of our independence. Each person has a value because God made him, not because the State recognizes him. The day we adopt in our democracy the already widespread ideas of some American jurists that right and justice depend on convention and the spirit of the times, we shall write the death warrant of our independence. He continued,

Smith pointed out that, in the books first chapter, Sheen talks about the revolutionary tempo and how its irrational. Its violent, and its atheistic. And he mentions how atheism is not so much I dont believe in God. Its like, I want to get rid of God. Its always very violent.

Indeed, as Sheen clarified, The spirit of revolution has three characteristic notes. It is: (1) irrational, (2) violent, (3) atheistic. He further explained, Irrationality developed quickly in the modern world after it lost faith in God, and it is important to note that violence follows from irrationality. When a man loses his reason, he becomes violent.

Sheen next observed,

In his book written as America celebrated its last Independence Day before entering World War II, the bishop emphasized: Mark these words: The enemy of the world in the near future is going to be Communism, which is using peace when it can and war when it must, and which is preparing, when Europe is exhausted from war, to sweep over it like a vulture to tear its flesh. When Russia falls, America will be the new seat of Communism.

Sheen always prophesied that communism would return back where it came from, the West, explained Peter Howard, president of the Fulton Sheen Institute. He reminded us that Karl Marxs philosophy came from Germany, his economics from England, and his sociology from France. It only took root in Russia because Russia, as Sheen put it, has the Asiatic soul of fire that communism needed to ignite, and then through violence spread its errors in the East.

In A Declaration of Dependence, Sheen foresaw what others did not. Howard, having received his doctorate in sacred theology focused on the work of Sheen from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum), explained how communism has penetrated the West through ideological subversion.

Sheen nailed it back in 1941, when he said that the essence of todays conflict was between three philosophies of life, Howard told the Register. These philosophies revolved around the question of whether man is a useful tool of the state, as totalitarians believe; whether man is only an animal, as the materialists and secularists believe; or whether man is made in the image of God, as the Christians believe.

What is prevailing now, Howard added, are the first two philosophies, which are anti-democratic, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and anti-human.

False prophets were saying, as seen today, Howard continued, that freedom means the right to do whatever you please; that to inculcate in the growing child a sense of right and wrong is to be unprogressive.

Smith explained that Sheen brought out in this book, as he did elsewhere, that there are two types of people: those who want to embrace the cross of Jesus Christ and those who say they dont want a cross. But when they fling off the cross of Jesus Christ, they get the cross of communism, the cross of materialism, the cross of consumerism, the cross of Marxism, Smith said.

Howard added, As Sheen put it, Communism is coming back again on the Western world because something died in the Western world namely, the strong faith of men in the God that made them.

With Europe having explicitly and implicitly abandoned its Catholic roots, America is the last force on earth that can stand between a free world and the diabolical transhumanist agenda of the totalitarian global elite, Howard explained. But America is at its weakest morally, politically and economically, and its collapse is now seen by many as imminent because many have sold out Americas foundational principles.

Still, a glimmer of hope remains, hinging on our response.

This is why America needs a new Declaration of Dependence now, Howard said, offering a Sheen solution.

It must now face and take up courageously the revolution of what Sheen calls the passive barbarism from within, while also defeating the active barbarism from without which attacks our freedom. We will only do this by rediscovering and instituting into every dimension of society Americas Christian roots (that precede 1776). This is why the Church and its saints must rise now, because we are the only ones with the fullness of that answer.

Sheen was adamant that we will never rid our nation of its political, economic and cultural problems unless we restore the Christian philosophy of life which single-handedly built Western civilization, Howard added.

Indeed, Sheen wrote,

Youth has no trouble seeing the truth in Sheens words and warnings. Jenna Drummond, a senior at The Catholic University of America who continues to focus projects and an upcoming thesis on Sheen and his development of ideas on communism beginning in his early years, finds a lot of what he says is mind-boggling because its so true now. It was true when he said it in the 1930s, in the 1940s and 1950s, and it has proven itself over and over again.

Referring to one of Sheens speeches at a Eucharistic congress before World War II, she said, He gave this really beautiful speech about communism, capitalism and Catholicism, explaining how everybody seeks liberty and equality, but what people really need is the fraternity of Catholicism, with everything rooted in God, because thats the only way that anybody will have real peace when everybody knows that theyre individually known and loved by God, she told the Register.

Drummond suggests celebrating this Independence Day in a Sheen way by spending a Holy Hour praying for our country because theres a lot going on right now, especially with the big decisions about Roe coming out, things like that, but also with the turmoil in Ukraine and Russia. As Sheen made a Holy Hour daily, people can make an Independence Day Holy Hour, she said, praising God for mercy on our country thus far, and begging for it to continue so that we can continue to celebrate Independence Day.

As Sheen wrote, Our love of God as a nation must begin with fear, for the fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom (Proverbs 9:10): first the fear of the sanctions of his justice, then the fear of betraying the blessings of mercy. He pointed to Israels history, showing how God punishes both his own people and their enemies: punitive against the Assyrians, ending in their desolation; paternal correction upon the Jews, ending in their restoration.

With all these insights and warnings throughout history, Sheen asked, Shall we go on with our godless education, our shattered family life, our class wars, our political intrigues, and our undisciplined and uncircumcised hearts, because we foolishly believe the only enemy we have is across the sea? In the name of God, let us face the facts and admit our guilt.

There are too many divisions and classes among us in America now; too many hates, too few deep loves. We will find the secret in the humblest coin of our realm, Sheen explained. So many have been interested in seeking dollars that they have quite forgotten the wisdom that is written on the penny. Take a penny into your hand: on one side you will find written the words E pluribus unum: we who are many are one. If you want to find out how the many are made one, turn the penny over, and you will find the answer: In God we trust.

Go here to see the original:
Fulton Sheens July 4 Declaration of Dependence - National Catholic Register