Civil Commotion

A sampling of last night’s tweets from a Detroit-area scanner monitor.

And it’s only Wednesday night. Wait till the weekend gets here.

Some time early this year — I don’t recall the circumstances, or why — Dawn and I decided to give Wal*Mart’s grocery service a try. You go online and fill your shopping cart, give them a credit- or debit-card, then arrive at the store at your appointment time and somebody puts the groceries in your car’s trunk. We’ve used the service ever since. It’s convenient, trustworthy, we’ve gotten to know and like the online shopping staff — who are well-trained, and mostly young — and we avoid the chaos of the Wal*Mart parking lot.

Well … dang. Those ambitious and likable kids, who probably thought they had caught a wave and were on the leading edge of retail, might soon be replaced by robots.

Walmart is testing a new robotics system that picks customers’ grocery orders. The retailer this morning announced it has partnered with Alert Innovation to deploy Alphabot, a system designed for Walmart, in its Salem, New Hampshire superstore. The automated technology will be installed in a 20,000-square foot extension connected to the store, which will also serve as the dedicated grocery pick-up point with drive-thru lanes for customers.

There’s no stopping progress, et cetera, et cetera, and I’ll probably use the service if it ever reaches us, but I have to admit I have some misgivings.

We are not ready for the society that is coming. Increasingly, work is being replaced by machines, and that trend is going to continue. This has an upside — fewer worker injuries, fewer worker errors. But … what is going to become of all those people for whom there are no jobs? In a world where perhaps 100-million (to pick a number) people are needed to design, build, and maintain the machines, what does everybody else do? This calls for some flavor of collectivism in order to prevent mass starvation, and destruction of the machines, but how are we to prepare for that day when the Deplorable One-third want to return us to the Bronze Age?

I have never in my life known a Christian who would deny this statement — and serenely absolve Him of responsibility for all the misery in the world. This, I am convinced, is because the devout don’t have thoughts; they have clichés that they witlessly repeat ad nauseum.

… a couple of years ago that Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter might contribute to undermining the Inerrant Bible.

Ken Ham may be accomplishing what hundreds of years of education have failed to accomplish: He might be enabling even witless dullards to understand that there’s a lot of make-believe in the Bible.

Well … what do you know? Attendance figures still aren’t making target.

They were supposed to come two by two, or better yet, stuffed into minivans and tour buses, but tourists to Kentucky’s life-sized Noah’s Ark attraction so far seem fine being left out in the rain.

The Ark Encounter has sold just over 860,000 tickets in the past year, according to the (Louisville, KY) Courier Journal, which obtained the numbers via a Freedom of Information request. That’s just one third of the high-end estimates park officials made when the attraction opened in 2016.

Heh. What they need to do is market it as an offbeat amusement park, and stop trying to peddle the idea that the Noah story is true, because anybody with a smidgen of brains is going to look at that ridiculous thing and know out-of-hand that it wasn’t built by a 480-year old man and his 3-sons.

What do you know? Forty-three per cent of Republicans believe the president ought to have the power to close down news outlets for bad behavior.

Freedom of the press may be guaranteed in the Constitution. But a plurality of Republicans want to give President Trump the authority to close down certain news outlets, according to a new public opinion survey conducted by Ipsos and provided exclusively to The Daily Beast.

[ … ]

All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.”

This saddens, but I don’t think it should surprise. After all, Trump promised during his campaign to break the press to his saddle — and Republicans couldn’t wait to soil themselves and vote for him. As I said here, a fake reality has to be maintained. That’s hard to do when the press is free, which is why it’s in the First Amendment. Trump is exactly who the Founders meant to protect the country from — and shame on us if we don’t protect the tools they had the foresight to give us.