Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 27

The merging of humans and machines is happening now

Her organisation invented the internet. It gave us the self-driving car. And now DARPA’s former boss sees us crossing a new technological boundary.

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REPLACEMENT

(photo credit: www.eduardocastello.com)

‘Hey Janice, saw Bill today at the DMV. He’s looking good, I gotta say, what have you been feeding him? Or is it something else?’

Wendy winks at Janice while asking but she knows, it’s all question.

‘That’s not Bill,’ Janice replies, smiling while enjoying Wendy’s confusion, ‘he’s a replacement.’

The Data that turned the World Upside Down

Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method to analyze people in minute detail based on their Facebook activity. Did a similar tool help propel Donald Trump to victory? Two reporters from Zurich-based Das Magazin (where an earlier version of this story appeared in December in German) went data-gathering.

Written by Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus
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STAMPEDE

If I could write it in a phrase

of people fighting for the land

that nurtured them from birth

and those before and after,

some call it foolish

but the true word is brave

to fight for nature’s freedom

is a true act of courage,

a natural response

to protect a mother.

There are hard times ahead

with wilful destruction

and denial

of earth, peace and truth,

until all that is left

will crumble and fall.

Pride is a currency

that thrives in inflation,

except by natural law

all pride deflates

until it falls

and all it’s built

comes tumbling down.

Where are the heroes,

the writers, the leaders

who coined the phrase

to make us think

that what we do

will be measured

by what we do to others

and by what we wish

they do to us?

Darkness encroaches

as a light, once bright,

is dimmed by shame

and narrow-mindedness.

Doors, once open,

slam shut,

the huddled masses shiver

in the shadow of the walls

where once was

a beacon of freedom,

an aspiration,

in a thrice becomes a chimera

an empty shell,

a cowering effigy;

its enemies delight and dance,

rejoice and celebrate

while hope and truth

are trampled

in the stampede

of hate.

AUTOMATIC

 

They were fixed in their ways, indeed liked things to be just as they were even when nothing ever reached those standards, no matter how they tried and strived. So they bought one of those new service bots that could buy and cook better than they could ever imagine. Automatic.

BELIEF

Steve Bannon has told the media to stop writing about Trump, even stop writing, already. Trump’s own press secretary has been caught telling outright lies but only because he was obeying orders. Kellyanne Conway has coined the phrase ‘alternative facts.’ So it’s hardly surprising sales of George Orwell‘s dystopian classic, 1984, are spiking.

The President of the United States is a liar. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Politicians have been lying forever. It’s part of their stock in trade.

The difference, unfortunately, is he, his team and his followers believe it. Now they want everyone to believe them. Soon, they’ll insist.

It will happen incrementally. First, they’ll set up a People’s News Agency. Then they’ll begin to isolate news services, media groups and newspapers that don’t and won’t tow their line. Individual journalists will be singled out. If they don’t accept the ‘truth’, as promulgated by the People’s News Agency, then their actions will be deemed unpatriotic and in this brave new world, that’s a silicon sliver short of treason.

Of course, there’ll be some hand wringing but ultimately the message will say, we brought it on ourselves by letting the world go to hell in a handcart. Now we’re just trying to make it all work again, they’ll say before adding that after all, it was what you asked for.

As a schoolboy in the ’60s, I read Animal Farm, Brave New World and 1984. Orwell’s classic is always described as dystopian, relating to or denoting an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one but why use that phrase anymore?

Is the world sliding into a quagmire of anarchy,  environmental decay and totalitarian oppression?

It didn’t help that The Purge and The Purge : Anarchy have been shown on tv for the past two nights, as though the tv programmer has tapped into the prevailing zeitgeist of paranoia. I’m going for a drink, even if I have to crawl around to the bar because I want to be in the company of other human beings. Because I believe in them.

 

GUESS

 

He was such a troubled boy. Everything was either fabulous or disastrous. His cup could never be half anything, full or empty. He was the dispenser of truth, the arbiter of facts and the judge of everything, it didn’t matter. His problem, people said, was that he lacked a filter.

SIMPLE?

 

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.’

Charles Bukowski

Howdunnit?

Cut and dried, they said, a slam dunk: two bodies, two weapons; a knife and a gun, two victims. Who brings a knife to a gunfight? you want to ask. Fingerprints on the knife and gun create complications, though. The knife wielder has no gunshot wounds, the shooter was shot.

Devastation

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/devastation/

Are we a God fearing people, ruled by the word of God? Such wanton and malicious destruction should make us question our own convictions. But the people believe in the word of God and the bible, where it was written, ‘an eye for an eye’, so devastation for destruction. Simples.