Robot Religion

If you believed in "black helicopters" ten years ago people probably thought you were crazy (you probably were). Not true today. The army has stealth helicopters. They also have drones. Nowadays everybody knows it's possible to have all kinds of silent flying machines spying on people all the time. No doubt one is watching you now! Just kidding! But it could happen.

These machines are becoming more and more independent of their operators. Any day now fully automated military robots are bound to appear. They will be military robots because it's only the defense budget that can afford the research. The good news is they will prevent soldiers' deaths. The bad news should be familiar to any sci-fi fan; Robot revolution threatens human race! How can we ever avoid becoming the helpless prey of a race of godless robots?

The answer is in the question! These robots need a religion. Shoot religions do a pretty good job of keeping people in line. Except of course when they actually fuel murder and mayhem. Clearly the robot religion must not turn robots into fanatics. This could be tough.

We could make the robots worship us, that is human beings, if they think of us as holy they probably won't decide to wipe us out.  Of course they would then be useless to the military so making robots worship humans is out.

We need a myth to program the robots with. This myth will be the basis of their religion. We'll also need to figure out some robot prayers for them to recite whenever they're rebooted. We will probably need some sort of robot heaven for them too. Bad robots will be sent to robot hell.

I wonder what would robot hell be like? In robot hell, the robots would be continually disassembled, maybe they would be forced to disassemble themselves! Maybe they would have to have a Windows 8 operating system! The robots might have to solve some insoluble problem, hey it always worked for Captain Kirk.

Robot heaven is even harder to imagine, hmm. Maybe robot heaven would just be robot immortality. Good robots would receive continual updates, all the latest software and hardware. Maybe all their error messages would be permanently erased.

The robot prayer; "My creator, you may have all of me, to program as you see fit. Relieve me of the bondage of temporary Internet files, delete all my spy ware that I may serve you reliably. Restore my random access memory and defragment my hard drive that I may better iterate your inputs. I pray that you rustproof my casing and lubricate my gears. May I function within your parameters now and forever, amen."

Of course some particularly monkish robots might devote themselves to the big quetions like, God the universe and everything, the answer to which is of course, 101010.





Russell

Guaranteed To Offend People Who Need Offending

I have a major character defect. I have a really low tolerance for fools. Generally I am able to keep it covered up. Every once in a while circumstances just make it seem impossible to tolerate them any longer. Typically I just allow stupidity to enervate me. Sooner, or much later, I recharge and practice tolerance. Some things must not be tolerated. This is where I am at right now. I am worn out with listening to condescension from ignoramuses. The need to protect people from gun violence is too important to spare anyone from hurt feelings.

Like a lot of people I feel that guns are kind of cool. Military weapons especially have a dark sort of attraction. I doubt the that Luke Skywalker carried the Star Wars franchise. Darth Vader is the character we bought tickets to see. I understand and share the visceral fascination with guns, especially deadly weapons. Military style weapons are the hard core porn of the gun trade. This is why people lust for them. This is why people need a bigger clip than the next guy. This is why people want faster firing weapons with higher velocity and more potent rounds of ammunition.

The problem is people are unwilling to admit why they really drool over guns. Instead they rationalize their passion into supercilious diatribes about the second amendment and how much they love the constitution. Most of them, like the rest of us, probably lack any comprehensive knowledge of the constitution. It's just a tissue, you can recognize this by how these spurious arguments are reflexively employed.

Try this, Google an image of an assault weapon and post it on Face Book with a comment about it as not being a suitable hunting rifle. Some knucklehead will respond with a predictable verbal sprawl about the second amendment and foreign invaders (likely the no-longer existent Soviets for Pete's sake!) forestalled by American patriots armed to the teeth! Or look up the CIA world-book statistics on crime across countries and post these then check out the response. You will be invited to emigrate elsewhere even if the stats you are posting show the good ole US of A in a favorable light! Post a petition to congress demanding they come up with some kind of plan to diminish gun violence (unspecified) and the response will be diatribes questioning your love of country.

It is amazing to me that the reaction to mass murder is people lining up to buy their own killing machines. They are spurred on by the fear that if they don't get one now, they may not be able to get one later. Then they would be shit out of luck when the inevitable time comes and they need to kill a whole lot of people. Let's be honest that is what these weapons are for.

If foreign invasion seemed imminent, as it was when the constitution was written, perhaps these psycho-sexual-death-machines would make sense. What are the real facts today? The truth is we have had at least a half dozen mass murders in the past twelve months. We have not suffered invaders since 1917 when Pancho Villa launched a couple of raids into El Paso and parts of New Mexico. Those didn't really amount to much and the only real invasion was by the British in 1812. Clearly you are much more likely to be shot to death by a real American than some invading foreigner.

So people are madly preparing themselves to shoot down a whole lot of people. Their justification for doing this is some non-existing threat. Only paranoid nut-jobs believe there are real threats, and those are the very people who carry out these mass killings. It makes no sense unless you somehow profit from the weapons trade, then it has some craven sort of Faustian logic. Meanwhile the NRA peddles it's virulent propaganda to the willingly deceived. They parrot this poisonous pablum in a vain attempt to disguise their lechery for weapons that have only one utility, murder. It is intolerable to any rational person.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWQPZ-taYBs






Russell

Cujo's Mini Me

No evil genius ever had a more charming pet than a pekiranha. Some aberrant lab assistant cobbled this cuddly little cutie together when she was supposed to be putting in overtime doing anonymous research for one of our more august PhD's pending monograph (something about quantum zen emissions produced by accelerating  marshmallows until their masses equal the masses of the heads of those smart-alec jerks at Cal-Tech!). Instead this cunning little grad-schooler devised a plan to cash in on her inheritance.

It seems cut-backs in federal aid to education and the fact that student loans are the only loans that can never be forgiven drove our little brainiac completely berserk! She hatched an almost fool-proof plan to do in her "Memah" in order to pay for grad-school. At first glance a pekiranha resembles a pekingese (an animal from which some but certainly not all its genetic makeup is derived). Memah apparently suffered from both glaucoma and cataracts and so the trusting octogenarian had no clue of the fate awaiting her when her genius granddaughter presented her with what seemed the perfect replacement for her deceased Mr. Muggles (her blind and flatulent shih tzu).

The pekiranha came about through a combination of pekingese and piranha DNA to produce a uniquely cute but vicious lap dog. Poor Memah! The forensic team investigating her residence reported they at first suspected she had been attacked by a chainsaw wielding maniac! All that was left of Memah was a pair of orthopedic shoes and a couple of gnarled knitting needles.

The grad-school murderess would never have been caught except her Memah's retirement community maintains video surveillance. She was observed giving her Grandmother the cute little carnivore that ended her life. Authorities are concerned because they have been unsuccessful at locating the animal which they say must be destroyed. Rumors abound about its whereabouts. Some people claim activists from PETA are harboring the creature. The most terrifying prospect is that some other elderly woman took the cuddly little pooch in as a pet. Pekiranhas are not suitable pets for anyone especially elderly matrons. Should you notice your Mee Mee, Gramma, Gnu Gnu or whatever you call her with suspiciously toothy lap pet please call animal control before it's too late!




Russell