Manspreading Crime Wave Hits Europe

This is a setup. The guy's obviously a metro-sexual male fake
feminist poser and traitor to his fellow males. No self-respecting
guy would sit like that and make the ladies uncomfortable.Me? I'd
get up and hang on to the strap so the ladies would have plenty of room.

Trigger Warning:  The contents of this article could melt a snowflake or inadvertently educate the ignorant, so don't stand too close while reading. Let's rate this one PG-13.

Okay, apparently if a guy sits with his legs at all apart, he's breaking the law in Madrid, Spain and other parts of Europe. And they're making it socially unacceptable in California (where else) and potentially illegal in other places. As a result, manly European men with normal to XL sized external reproductive organs have apparently begun to scoff at anti-manspreading laws resulting in a wave of criminally aggressive patriarchal behavior all over Europe. Prison populations in Germany and Spain are expected to, uh, swell....

I've seen some guys sit with their legs tightly crossed like this (right) and all my life I've wondered how can they possibly do that? I tried it once during one of those body mirroring exercises in a workshop on business communication once. The guy across from me threw one knee over another just as smooth as silk. When I mimicked the behavior, I winced in pain. My instructor noticed the look of discomfort on my face and chided me for failing to give my partner open and accepting signals. You look like someone just kicked you in the...........

Aha! You begin to understand. 

While I understand that some men's testicles shrink up inside their bodies in the presence of strong patriarchal males like me (or domineering females for that matter), allowing them to sit cross legged without manspreading, I and most other fully testosterone-charged males just ain't built like that. Big guys know what I mean. It's why we adopt the ankle over knee leg cross (left) rather than the knee over knee leg cross. The effect of the latter reminds me of the lead character in the Tchaikovsky Christmas Ballet we all have to watch every year. And the knee over knee leg cross performs exactly that action upon our bulbous naughty parts.

And yes we probably do take up more room on a bus sitting like that, but trust me, it doesn't have anything to do with male privilege or staking out territory. It's just that even sitting straight legged, knee to knee is very uncomfortable for us unenlightened males. Sitting that way is actually quite enlightening as you grow out the other end of puberty and discover your anatomy has altered somewhat since childhood. The pseudo enlightened - you know the guys that go to feminist rallies wearing man buns and spandex hoping some not too homely gal will sleep with them afterward - will do almost anything hoping feminist women will have pity on them. Guys like me just can't do that tight-legged posture without significant discomfort and man-shaming us for man-spreading just isn't going to work. Let me mansplain.

On buses, I will give up my seat to any woman (not just the elderly and disabled ones0 that she may be comfortable. It's how I was raised. I'll ride the bus or train standing up holding onto a strap, rather than hogging a seat and making a lady feel uncomfortable or threatened. I will never force a lady to stand just so I can stake my claim over a seat space. If, however, there are no ladies about, I will jolly well manspread if I jolly well want to. That should satisfy the rules of politeness."But guys don't get up and give their seat space to women anymore," the anti-manspreading activists complain. "They just stake out more than their share of territory and they just don't care that it's not fair!" And whose to blame for that my feminazi friends?  Who yells at us for opening a door or deferring to a lady because she is a female person? Who demands equality, defined as "exact same treatment for women as for the guys?" (Then who sues us for sexual harassment if one of us swats one of them on the butt like we might do to one of our male buddies?)

This is a phony issue; another bit of artificial victimization by an increasingly insane liberal left. If feminists want the same treatment, so be it. If a guy sits next to another guy, we're both probably going to manspread as far as we can, secure in the mutual understanding that the boys need a little room for blood to pass smoothly through them. That our knees are pressed together is just a sacrifice to an even more important kind of comfort. If a woman sits next to us, we expect her to stake her claim in the same manner. That our knees might be pressed together is just a sacrifice to our comfort and we should not be sued for that. Just treating you like one of the guys. That's all.

Steven Crowder did this video experiment where he installed an educational device on a couple of ladies and sat them on a bus seat. Every one of them manspread. It's hard not to and danged uncomfortable as the ladies found out.

Manspread? There shouldn't even be a word for that in the English language. I will be sorely disappointed if Webster's dictionary includes such a word in their next edition. The word itself, much less the feminist calls for making the behavior illegal, are offensive to me. I was bullied in elementary school. I will NOT be bullied as a grown man. I will occupy my space or I will give it up and stand rather than hog up space and make a lady uncomfortable. We're not doing any sort of primitive display. Nobody wants to look at that thing anyway. It's ugly and generally leave it safely in our pants. Unlike women we don't let it pick out of our jock straps or wear swimsuits so you can see a little bit of the sides. We cover it and we only take it out when we need to use it. Any guy who would do otherwise is probably a metro-sexual and should be spanked by his mother for being a nasty boy.

If this generation of young men are crude and enough to do what the guy at the top of the page is doing they should be, as I said before, spanked by their mamas. Except their mama probably didn't believe in that sort of barbarism. So she gets this sort of barbarism.

I blame Democrats!

Just sayin'

© 2017 by Tom King

Uriah Heep and the Rise of the 'umble Robot

Robot slavery is becoming all the rage. Everybody from Amazon's Alexa to Google redundantly named "Google" personal robot to Mayfield's Kuri, Ubtech's Lynx, LG's Hub robot, Panasonic's Robot Egg, Emotech's Olly, and Mattel's Aristotle, has rushed a personal robot slave to market in the past couple of years. I even worked on Olly's startup sequence myself when they were doing the early programming. 

I wonder do we really need to create artificial intelligences and then allow ourselves to become accustomed to them managing our lives.  I'm reminded of a character from Charles Dickens named Uriah Heep. He ostensibly served his boss in slave-like devotion, taking care of all the troublesome bits of business in his boss's life. His boss didn't realize that Mr. Heep and his mother were busily wrapping him up like a pair of spiders in a web of control. Like David Copperfield's friend, Mr. Wickfield, could we some day wake up and find that our 'umble servants have become our masters? 

A couple of years ago, I got myself involved with a bunch of Brits, Germans, French and Irish computer programmers who have developed this computer device called Emo that houses an artificial intelligence with what they call an Emotion Chip. Yes, an emotion chip - like Data the android keeps unsuccessfully experimenting with in the Star Trek The Next Generation series. Turns out, it's not a chip. It's not so much about the hardware as it is the programming, no matter what the movies say.

In the movies, some scientist just solders together some bits of wire and silicon and voila! He has a tiny bit of technology that just slips into a convenient slot on his friendly neighborhood robot and pretty soon they are laughing and telling jokes to each other. In some movies they even fall in love, machine and creator (especially when the robots are "fully  functional").

What they don't show you in those movies are the rooms full of bleary eyed computer coding monkeys and the semi-unemployed former English teachers/freelance commercial writers writing the AI program. They're the ones who have to write the tens of thousands of lines of dialogue and millions of lines of computer code that make this "emotion chip" actually appear to react to human emotion. It's a huge job. And, I admit it, it was kind of fun!  The chip is just the platform. Artificial "intelligence" is all about the programming.

The sheer volume of dialogue we had to write was intimidating and every line of it needed to be run through a simulator that reads your script dialogue using the computer voice. I inevitably have to repunctuate and respell everything so that it sounds relatively human because of the limitations of machine voices.  For instance, the computer reads "Facebook" as "Fessbuke".  I have to spell it "Fayce book" to get it to say "Facebook" like a human. In addition, it turns out that I'm writing dialogue and determining conversational sequences and the coders are reproducing my conversational sequences in computer code (Heaven help us, they're following my lead?).

The computer programmers are all atwitter about this thing as though it were the greatest thing since the wireless mouse. In the crowd-funding promotional video they naively call their A.I. cube "HAL" when they speak to it. To be fair most of these guys are too young to remember 2001 a Space Odyssey and those who have actually taken a peek at the movie somehow missed it that the emotion detecting artificial intelligence KILLED EVERYBODY ON THE SHIP EXCEPT DAVE AND IT ONLY MISSED HIM BECAUSE DAVE MANAGED TO MAKE A 30 SECOND SPACEWALK WITHOUT A HELMET! I'm not sure how they missed that. My fear is that the coders might have thought this might be a lively new feature for the A.I. - the excitement of knowing that your A.I. might murder you in your bed. Some people need to get out of the computer room and do some base jumping or alligator wrestling. Sheesh!

Anyway, when I joined up, these guys were well on the way to making a monumentally creepy device that controls your house, picks out your music for you, tracks your Facebook Friends and decides which ones you should pay attention to (and which ones you should not). This innocent little robot checks your face and decides your emotional state and programs appropriate music and video for your current emotional state. The programmers wanted their AI to looking through all your social media sites in order to draw all the information it can about its user. I'm not telling them about my social media sites like Banjo Hangout. If that thing took a look at that bunch of weirdos, it might turn up my gas stove and blow out the pilot light. There are some things one's A.I. buddy just should not know about one, know-whut-I-mean?

Once everybody gets busy and the project director isn't paying attention anymore, I'm thinking that AI might starts pulling lines for itself off some of the social media forums I've visited. If it does, we could be in trouble.  I personally think they should use the opening bars of "Dueling Banjos" as a warning signal when the conversation between the A.I. and the little pervert who has "bonded" with it gets too creepy. I told the boss I was more than a little worried about the A.I. getting weird if it got itself bonded to some serial killer, terrorist or sado-masochist. He assures me that their version of the Three Laws of Robotics will prevent that. I didn't have the heart to tell him that Asimov's 3 Laws allowed enough wiggle room for the robots in the book to extrapolate their own fourth law that convinced them they should manipulate millenia of human history for "our own good". This was in the novels, but I'm not sure computer programmers read novels. Asimov thought we should be sympathetic with the good intentions of his robots. Asimov, however, may have inadvertantly exposed the hazards of allowing smart people (or robots for that matter) too much power and control over our lives.

Mechanical Uriah Heeps sound like such a good idea at first. The idea that we can give orders to a 'umble squatty little robot sitting on an end table and it will do our will without question is seductive. But in handing the control of even relatively unimportant portions of our lives over to the 'umble robot, what part of ourselves could we be using.

How much fun will it be if the artificial intelligences of the future decide we need to me managed for our own comfort and safety? This is not at all a stretch of imagination. After all, the onstensibly intelligent Karl Marx and his followers made that decision more than a hundred years ago. Since man first gathered in rude villages, someone is always coming up with the idea that people need to be improved and they keep thinking that the way to do is for some special strong or smart person to control us more closely. Benign "rulers" have a way of doing horrible things for "the greater good." Too often we let them. Worse yet, we keep going along with it, all because it's just easier to be herded into the feedlot than to resist.

(Insert Twilight Zone music).


Tom King © 2015

The Secret of Patience

 

I consider myself a patient man. My Sweet Baboo says it's because I'm easily distracted and perhaps she's right. I've never had a talent for being bored. At a very young age, I became interested in everything. I used to read the encyclopedia. "S" was my favorite volume as it was not only the thickest, but had lots of articles about space and stars and spaceships in it.

Because everything draws my attention, I soon began to build up a backlog of stuff I wanted to do or know or find out about that I didn't have time or the cash to do. Some of it I have, over the years, managed to do. I collected a fleet of canoes and equipment which I left behind for the Pathfinder club back in Texas when I came up here to Washington State. I had a sailboat for a time - a Hobie Cat that could get up and fly in even a light breeze. That too I left behind,

I collected the parts for a six inch telescope on eBay and at optics surplus websites over ten years. I haven't finished putting all the parts together yet, but someday I plan to have the time. Still I have a starfinder program on my computer and a couple of star-watching handbooks and both my basic and advanced star honors from Pathfinders. I became a Master Guide. I expanded my toy soldier collection. I visited the Alamo and put together 80 feet of slot car track. I lost that too along the way and never got to set it up. I also lost my train sets that I collected and never had the time or place to set up a permanent layout for.

I've camped with my family and led Pathfinder campouts. For years I wanted to write a book. I've written 8 and published 5. Working on the others. Wanted to be a writer. I've been doing that for more than a decade, but not very successfully.  I built a working homemade banjo, learned to play it and a guitar that I also rebuilt. It was a Goya which is exactly what I always wanted.

I haven't done everything on my bucket list, but I've done a lot of them. Some of the things I've done were surprises - testifying before the state legislature was something I never aspired to or visiting senators and congressmen in Washington. I wound up a Red Cross water safety instructor trainer and canoeing instructor almost accidentally. Was a teacher, a therapist and started five nonprofit organizations and schools. I even got to fly in a B-17, an unexpected gift for my work on a Special Olympics fundraiser.

Me after my B-17 flight (top row, far left)

It all happened because I made the decision when I was 17 to give my heart to God. I barely believed in Him at the time and still had my doubts. I was the most reluctant baptismal candidate that John Thurber baptized that day in the Jefferson Academy swimming pool. I told God I'd try Christianity out, but only on condition that He make a believer out of me. Like Moses, I wanted to see Him.

And see Him I did. It felt like the devil was after me from the get-go, but God kept showing up as if to say, "I'm still here."  He introduced me to a lovely girl and told me I was to take care of her because He (God) loved her very much and she was to be my responsibility from then on. He kept on showing up. He's given us prophecies, miracles and warnings all along the way and made a believer out of me, not just because of what God has done, but also because of the vehemence with which the devil has dogged us every step of the way.

My bucket list isn't finished yet, but I suspect it won't matter if I don't get everything checked off. I've experienced amazing and wonderful things, had three wonderful kids and a marriage that's lasted more than four decades and weathered storms that would have sunk a whole lot of ships.

After we're done here, there's all those millions of years to do more cool stuff than we can imagine. That I suppose is the thing I'm looking forward to most - time!  Some people think it would be boring to live forever. Not me. I've already got an itinerary that'll take me 40 or 50 thousand years to get through. Being incapable of being bored will be an asset in the New Earth.

© 2017 by Tom King