July 15

 Half past a warm July. We just got the electric bill and it reflects that fact. It always goes up a bit in summer and winter. It rained last night. The weather reports predicted a mixed day today. BBC reports that Europe is suffering from its own heat wave with temperatures in some areas hitting triple digits and some tourist attractions and commercial outlets ordered closed during the worst of the daily heat.

Yesterday the Screen Actors Guild joined the Writers Guild in strike. I noticed that a big sticking point involves AI and streaming which both threaten acting and writing jobs. As I listened to some of the reporting I was thinking back to when I was researching comic books for a dissertation I never finished. I found one title (American Flagg) from the mid 1980s that had an interesting premise: in 2031 the world power centers had relocated to Mars and controlled society through commercial centers called Plexes whose police force was the Plexus Rangers. The main character was a new deputy ranger, Ruben Flagg. He was the star of an action series whose role was taken over by what we today would call AI/CGI leaving him with out work. The latest Indiana Jones movie uses AI to recreate the young Harrison Ford for a large part of the movie. So many of the movies, and not just Sci-fi and fantasy genres, involve CGI. It hasn't been all that long since we had CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and now we have fantastic battle scenes in Midway.

David Brian has a post today that deals both with our political conundrums and the Hollywood strike and asks, a bit down the page, "do we choose progress?" The problems is he never defines what "progress" is? Is it progress when people lose livelihoods in a society that expects them to bear all of the costs of finding a new one? Is adopting technology simply because it is new with no thought of the social and economic consequences progress? The term "progress" involves a movement from one place or condition to another but doesn't in and of itself include "better." So to judge "progress" we have to define what is better and for whom. Right now progress has diminished to mean "it makes money for someone."

 Although my ancestors came to this country long before Infidel753's did and 3/8 of them probably came across the Behring land bridge during the last ice age, I can sympathize with his assessment of summer. I don't think any human was adapted by genetics for the summers we have experienced with greater frequency over the last couple of decades.

AP News has a long article dissecting a new poll which reveals a lot of Americans are rather disillusioned about democracy. The article does a good job of showing how people feel that the political system isn't delivering on what people feel is important. I didn't see any reference to a problem I have been watching for the last thirty years: more and more people are unwilling to accept the results of elections. The most egregious example comes from the last couple of election cycles. The Former Guy insisted from his first campaign that the only way he would lose is if the election was rigged. He followed up with his loss with a concerted campaign to overturn the election by any means at hand. His acolytes are still maintaining that the election wasn't fair. The will acknowledge that Biden is president but not that he won.