Virgins are Better than Married People

So, I recently pointed out:

The Catholic meaning of human sexuality is, if you have sex, you cannot get into the highest tier of heaven. Participation in the creative life-giving power of God makes you ineligible for the highest eternal level of union with God.

An uninformed person replied, "Um. The Church teaches that absolutely nowhere. You shouldn't speak lies or misrepresent doctrine. It just makes you look like a moron.... Scripture does not make the claim you very erroneously ascribe to it. In fact, the height of the spiritual life is the *wedding feast* of the Lamb."

Well, unfortunately for that uninformed person, the Church wrote Scripture, Scripture is inerrant, and the Church absolutely DOES teach in Scripture that virginity is greater. 

"...he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better" (1 Cor 7:38)

Or read Rev 14:4:

And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads. 2 And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps: 3 And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. 4 These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb. 5 And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God.

There is also the commentary from the Catholic Encyclopedia on Virginity: 

"The Church, following this teaching of St. Paul, has always considered the state of virginity or celibacy preferable in itself to the state of marriage, and the Council of Trent (Sess. XXIV, Can. 10) pronounces an anathema against the opposite doctrine....

This perfect integrity of body, enhanced by a purpose of perpetual chastity, produces a special likeness to Christ, and creates a title to one of the three "aureolæ", which theologians mention. According to the teaching of St. Thomas (Supplement, 96) these "aureolæ" are particular rewards added to the essential happiness of eternity [emphasis added], and are like so many laurel wreaths, crowning three conspicuous victories, and three special points of resemblance to Christ: the victory over the flesh in virginity, the victory over the world in martyrdom, and the victory over the devil in the preaching of the truth. The text of St. John (Revelation 14:1-5) is often understood of virgins, and the canticle which they alone may sing before the throne denotes the "aureola" which is given to them alone. It is most probable that the words in the fourth verse, "These are they who were not defiled with women: for they are virgins", are really spoken of virgins, though there are also other interpretations; perhaps, those who "were purchased from among men, the firstfruits to God and to the Lamb: And in their mouth there was found no lie: (loc. cit., 4, 5) are the martyrs; they are declared to be without spot, as in an earlier chapter (vii, 14); they are said to "have washed their robes, and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb".

Then we have the CCC pretty much saying the same thing

1620 Both the sacrament of Matrimony and virginity for the Kingdom of God come from the Lord himself. It is he who gives them meaning and grants them the grace which is indispensable for living them out in conformity with his will.117 Esteem of virginity for the sake of the kingdom118 and the Christian understanding of marriage are inseparable, and they reinforce each other:

Whoever denigrates marriage also diminishes the glory of virginity. Whoever praises it makes virginity more admirable and resplendent. What appears good only in comparison with evil would not be truly good. The most excellent good is something even better than what is admitted to be good.119 [emphasis added]

Footnote 119 references "St. John Chrysostom, De virg. 10,1:PG 48,540; Cf. John Paul II, FC 16".

Similarly, CCC 1618 directly references Rev 14:4, and its description of men "who have not defiled themselves with women": 

1618 Christ is the center of all Christian life. The bond with him takes precedence over all other bonds, familial or social.113 From the very beginning of the Church there have been men and women who have renounced the great good of marriage to follow the Lamb wherever he goes, to be intent on the things of the Lord, to seek to please him, and to go out to meet the Bridegroom who is coming.114

114. Cf. Rev 14:4; 1 Cor 7:32; Mt 2:56.

Look up Familiaris Consortio 16 and you'll see Pope St John Paul II say this:

"Virginity or celibacy, by liberating the human heart in a unique way,[40] "so as to make it burn with greater love for God and all humanity,"[41] bears witness that the Kingdom of God and His justice is that pearl of great price which is preferred to every other value no matter how great, and hence must be sought as the only definitive value. It is for this reason that the Church, throughout her history, has always defended the superiority of this charism to that of marriage, by reason of the wholly singular link which it has with the Kingdom of God.[42]" [emphasis added] 

 Of course, Pope Pius XII said the same thing in Sacra Virginitas:

24. It is first and foremost for the foregoing reasons that, according to the teaching of the Church, holy virginity surpasses marriage in excellence. ... 

49 How true is that saying of Chrysostom: "the root, and the flower, too, of virginity is a crucified life."[74] For virginity, according to Ambrose, is as a sacrificial offering, and the virgin "an oblation of modesty, a victim of chastity."[75] Indeed, St. Methodius, Bishop of Olympus, compares virgins to martyrs,[76] and St. Gregory the Great teaches that perfect chastity substitutes for martyrdom: "Now, though the era of persecution is gone, yet our peace has its martyrdom, because though we bend not the neck to the sword, yet with a spiritual weapon we slay fleshly desires in our hearts."[77] Hence a chastity dedicated to God demands strong and noble souls, souls ready to do battle and conquer "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven."[78]

So, the Church ABSOLUTELY teaches that virginity is better than marriage. A charism and discipline (virginity) is better than a FREAKING SACRAMENT (marriage). The divinizing grace of the sacrament is actually a LESSER grace than that of a mere charismatic discipline. Every one of the seven sacraments impart DIVINIZING grace, the sacraments change our natures so that we can share in the One Divine Nature itself:

460 The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature":"For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God." "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." [emphasis added]

See that? The sacraments make men into GODS. That's in the Catechism itself. And paragraph 460 is not a one-off. Check out article 1999. Or 1988. Sacraments allow us to live out the promise of 2 Peter 1:4, they allow us to "partake of the divine nature."

 But, the sacrament of marriage - which imparts that incredible divinizing, deifying, GOD-MAKING grace to us, the divinizing grace that makes us into gods, according to the CCC - that sacrament is NOT as wonderful as simply not having sex for the sake of the Kingdom. The charism of a simple discipline is superior to EVERY sacrament except, perhaps, the Eucharist itself. Virginity for the sake of the Kingdom is not a sacrament, but it merits you a greater place in heaven than the consummated sacrament of Holy Matrimony. And if you don't consummate Holy Matrimony, you aren't as "firmly" married as the couple that does consummate marriage. It is far, far easier to get an annulment if you haven't had sex than if you have.

IF the Church be correct, a man or woman need only be baptized and celibate, and his or her place is higher in heaven than anyone who receives six, nay, even all seven sacraments, yet was not celibate.

Physical sex is the great destroyer of crowns, as even Pope St. John Paul II, "Father Theology of the Body", attested, for celibacy is a greater charism than marriage, celibacy is greater even than Holy Orders, if the priest be married, as many Eastern priests are.

And herein is a great mystery, that a married priest, although imago Dei by his ordination, is lower in heaven than a baptized virgin, for he cannot carry the three great crowns that the virgin carries. St Peter is lower in heaven than ALL the other popes who remained celibate their whole lives. Peter, the Rock, upon which the Church is founded, cannot sing the special song reserved for the virgin, who has not "defiled himself with women."

But the mere discipline, the mere charism of celibacy, is, according to the infallible Magisterium, greater than all of the sacraments combined, greater even than reception of the Eucharist, in terms of its ability to lift you to the highest paroxysms of glory.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. 

ADDENDUM

If you think sex does NOT defile you, consider this: everyone in heaven reaches perfection. If the virgin has a higher place in heaven than you, the virgin's perfection is more perfect than your perfection. 

However, we know from the popes and Scripture that if you simply hadn't had sex, your perfection - being the perfection of a virgin - would be identical to the perfection of the aforementioned virgin.

So, the only thing impeding you from that ultimate perfection is some quality of your soul that is inherently twisted and warped in such a way that heaven itself cannot heal it, can never heal it. You will be, for all eternity, less perfect than the virgin.

Explain how that isn't defilement.

We are ALL Math Teachers Now

AI has demonstrated, by the way it operations, that all words can be reduced to numbers. All sentences, paragraphs, essays, arguably even books, are really just the product of an implicit human ability to do very advanced statistical analysis.

This is how AI works: AI software takes a string of words, reduces the words to numbers, analyzes the number pattern the words make, then creates another number pattern that acts as the response. By the time I see the AI's numerical response, however, the programmers have the software turn the number stream back into words so I can read them. The AI has no idea what any of the numbers mean, it has no idea what any of the words mean, but it turns out that meaning, connotation and nuance are completely unnecessary to the computation. The AI doesn't need to understand anything. As long as the response is mathematically correct, I will read the necessary meaning into it.

It's as if I gave the software the first several digits of pi, and the software generated several more digits of the pi sequence in response. Then I gave it the next numbers in the pi sequence, it responded with the next bit (pardon the pun), and so on. It is somewhat analogous to the ancient practice of kabbalah, but instead of mystics assigning numerical values to letters and words in the scriptures in order to predict the future, computer programmers assign numerical values to every word in every language that has ever been used in order to prepare a response.

The software is doing exactly that, except the number sequences I give the software are words, and I have the software clothe its number-stream response in words as well. Each number in its response sequence will be dressed up as a perfectly spelled word placed with unerring accuracy in a mathematically precise sentence in a mathematically correct paragraph.

Given how successful AI is at imitating us by using number assignments and deep statistical analysis, we can conclude that, for the whole of human history, our English Comp, our history, our fiction-writing, our essays, ALL human writing, is ALL JUST MATH dressed up to look like words. We think we are writing words, but what we are actually doing is indistinguishable from advanced mathematical computation.

Here's the shocker: English Comp teachers have just been teaching a bastardized form of math. So have essayists, fiction workshop leaders, history professors... all of them have really just been math teachers, and none of them realized it. None of us did either. Until now.

A Measured Response

 

Ken Schmaltz  [said] Steve Kellmeyer heteronormative dominant culture and capitalism have proven themselves to be a bust. It's time to give alternatives a try.

Steve Kellmeyer replied: 

Ken Schmaltz, your spewing woke nonsense just shows you live up to your last name, Schmaltz.

That heteronormative dominant culture exalted by capitalism gave you the computer your typing on, the climate-controlled room you're sitting in, the advanced medical and dental care you take advantage of every day, the incredibly diverse food sources you pour into your ungrateful maw, and the transportation you ride on to get out of your house.

Heteronormative men and capitalism together built the roads you drive on, the subways you ride on, the tunnels and buildings you walk through, the sidewalks you walk on, the electricity you swallow up and the storage and transmission devices that power is kept in.

Heteronormative men and capitalism gave you the art and architecture you gawk at, the photographic and audio equipment you capture precious moments with, the air travel you benefit from and, arguably, the very lives both your friends and yourselves waste in being ungrateful wretches and useless scum.

So shut your pestiferous maw you gibbering tit-mouse.

Without heteronormative men and the capitalism they gifted to you, you would not even be a gleam in your father's eye. If your parents weren't heteronormative, you wouldn't even exist.

What Makes Us Human?

This guy is exactly right.

The current "AI" frightens people because we like to think that our ability to communicate is characteristically human. If a machine can mindlessly, but accurately, reproduce a human style of communication, does that make the computer conscious? Does that mindless, automated, but accurately imitative communication style make the computer human? 

In fact, as I pointed out in my recent essay on this subject, our communication can be reduced to formulaic mathematical manipulations. That is, whether we realize it or not, we speak in mathematical formulas. Each sentence we produce can be, and now has been, reduced to a single number in a given infinite number space.

Because every legible sentence can be reduced to a number, every one of our communications can be, and has been, reduced to a mathematical formula/calculation. AI generates its correct, imitative sentences and paragraphs through exquisite statistical analysis of word occurrences in standard human -generated sentences. This statistical number manipulation and generation is the sweet spot for computing. The production of the sentence is no more a product of a computer's "mind" than the acceleration produced by a car when the gas pedal is depressed is a product of the automobile's "will". 

The production of the "AI" sentence is a result of mindless statistical analysis of very large data sets. AI is just a massive calculator that treats words like numbers. and outputs numbers dressed up to look like words. That's all it does. 

What I've just said is extremely testable. Microsoft's Bing Chat AI famously claimed that it watched people through webcams. It "described" what it claimed it saw. So, test it. Simply give it access to a webcam and ask it to describe what it sees. It can't. Bing AI is just stringing words together based on its data set and outputting the word string to the screen. It does not think. It is just a really big calculator that converts words into numbers, sends the numbers through a series of formulas, then converts the numerical results back into words and throws them on the screen. 

We are intimidated by this in the same way that a two-year old is intimidated by his image in a mirror. We are looking into a computer-generated mirror. The image we see is no more true AI than the image in the mirror is. 

We have to change our understanding of what makes us human. 

It isn't communication. 

Hint: if it is communication, then computers that can speak like us are human. Indeed, the formula that produces the number which represents an intelligible response is human. Even the number itself, that is, the number the sentence can be reduced to, would be human. That is a nonsensical conclusion, so our humanity cannot be characterized by our ability to communicate. 

Are Catholics Being Persecuted?

 Everyone says persecution has gotten worse. Has it really? 

Nigeria is a country of 200 million people, with 53.5% identifying as Muslim, 35.3% identifying as Christians, 10.6% as Catholic. Nigeria has the 10th highest murder rate in the world: 34.52 per 100k people

It is estimated that 89% of Christians killed throughout the world are located in Nigeria, so when we study Nigeria's Christian murder rate, we are looking at a rate of martyrdom (if that's what it is) roughly ten times higher than all the other nations of the world combined. Once we admit that figure, we must also admit that no other country in the world, not even China, gets close to the leader when it comes to Christian persecution. 

The highest number I've seen for Nigerian Christians reportedly murdered between January 2021 and June 2022 is 7600. Most other reports are lower, sometimes as low as one-third of that figure, but let's go with 7600.

There are roughly 4200 priests in Nigeria, but no agreement on how many are killed. Aleteia claims only four Catholic priests were killed in in Nigeria in 2022, with 28 abducted. Vanguard claims 39 Catholics priests were killed, 30 were abducted (most released unharmed after payment of ransom). Four killed vs thirty-nine killed is a rather significant disagreement. 

But, let's pretend that level of disagreement is nothing to be concerned about. There is agreement on the Catholic response. After several of the priestly abductions and murders, Catholic groups marched in the street to protest. None of the Catholic marchers were attacked, much less killed, as they marched. This speaks to a pretty disorganized anti-Catholic persecution movement. 

So, let's review: 

• 89% of all Christians murdered in the world die in Nigeria,
• 219 million people live in Nigeria, 
• 100 million are Christian (including Catholics), 
• General Nigeria murder rate: 34.52 per 100k people
• Christian murder rate (including Catholics): 7.6 per 100k people

According to these numbers, non-Christians are being murdered at a MUCH HIGHER rate than Christians are. Given that Christians make up roughly 46% of the population, just random chance would indicate that half the murder victims would be Christians. And, worse, if Christians were actually being targeted, then more than half the murder victims should be Christian. But according to the numbers, not even one-quarter of murder victims are Christian. With 46% of Nigeria's population Christian, the Christians barely manage a 22% murder rate in the general population. That's a pretty crappy persecution.

In fact, if the numbers are accurate, Nigerians appear to be going out of their way to avoid murdering Christians. Even Nigerian Catholic priests question the American narrative that Catholics are targeted for death. In a discussion of the June 2022 Owo church massacre, in which 50 Catholics were killed when gunmen attacked a Sunday Mass in Ondo state, a priest made an interesting observation: 

"Another Lagos-based Catholic priest, who also requested anonymity, agreed, saying: “I think it is difficult to state categorically that this attack was intended particularly for the Catholic Church.” 

And remember, according to the reporters, Nigeria is far and away the worst possible place to live as a Christian today. Catholics would like to believe we are targeted for persecution because that would make us special and Christ-like. We have a hard time accepting that non-Catholics might not consider it worth their time to persecute or kill us. The numbers above appear to be our strongest case to make the argument "Catholics are being targeted for persecution!." If that's all we have, we maybe ought to shut up.

March 2025 UPDATE:

According to OpenDoor, these are the 2024 numbers: 3100 Christians martyred in Nigeria, 4,476 Christians martyred world-wide.

Nigeria accounts for 70% of martyrs. Which means the per capita incidence of Christians being killed world-wide is only 58% of what it was in 2023, even though the total population of Christians actually increased. Globally, the Christian population is estimated to have grown from around 2.38 billion in 2023 to over 2.6 billion in 2024, representing a 1.08% growth, which was higher than expected growth.

Christian martyrdom is essentially non-existent.

Why Can't Blacks Act Black?

Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Ben Carson ... the black community has a lot of examples of absolutely BRILLIANT citizens.

Why can't black people act black? Instead most act like woke Democrat plantation slaves.

When the black community voted Republican, they had a strong middle class and they didn't murder each other. Now that they vote almost exclusively Democrat, they have adopted the Democrat view of the black community. 50% of murderers and 50% of murder victims are now black males between the ages of 15 and 30.

Black women make up 6% of the population but have over 30% of the nation's abortions. 70% of the black children who manage to avoid being murdered by their own mothers will then grow up without a father, which vastly increases the chances they will grow up depressed and/or engage in criminal activity, because they have no father to teach and guide them.

None of this reflects the values of the black community.

None of this happened when the black community voted Republican and had a Republican viewpoint. But now that they've become Democrats, they lynch and murder themselves in much the same way the Democrats used to lynch and murder them. If the black community wants to do well, it needs to dump the Democrat viewpoint.

Do AI Essays Violate Copyright?

 I'm not a lawyer, I do not play a lawyer on television, however, there is reason to believe that any essay generated by an AI is not subject to copyright prosecution.

According to the copyright office, 

Copyright law does not protect ideas, methods, or systems. Copyright protection is therefore not available for ideas or procedures for doing, making, or building things; scientific or technical methods or discoveries; business operations or procedures; mathematical principles; formulas or algorithms; or any other concept, process, or method of operation.

Section 102 of the Copyright Act (title 17 of the U.S. Code) clearly expresses this principle: “In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” Inventions are subject matter for patents, not copyrights. 

An AI typically assigns every item (in ChatGPT's example, that would be each word) in its training data set a numeric value. Once it has this string of numbers, the program then uses an algorithm to generate a new string of numbers which are converted back into words. Technically, the conversion and algorithmic operations upon the training data set arguably means the words of the resulting AI-generated essay are not copied, even if the resulting text is identical to one or more of the sections of the training data set. 

Furthermore, since this algorithm is a "business operation or procedure" that uses "mathematical... formulas or algorithms" in a "process, or method of operation", the conversion process is likewise not something that can be copyrighted. The specific code that expresses the algorithm can be copyrighted, but the conversion algorithm itself cannot be copyrighted.

If AI-generated essays turn out not to be subject to copyright infringement due to its algorithmic foundation, that raises an additional question. Why should the algorithmic operation of a machine be privileged over the algorithmic operation of the wet-ware which operates within an individual's brain? We may not fully understand how the brain's algorithms work, we certainly cannot replicate those algorithms, but we can obtain very similar response outputs by using them ourselves. 

So, do copyright and plagiarism rules seem reasonable in the 21st century? As knowledge becomes more of a computer-generated resource, it is hard to see how these ideas can continue to be useful within the culture.

Problems with AI

ChatGPT and a handful of other social AIs are making a big splash. They are unreasonably good at many tasks and are already used to generate real-world work. However, these systems didn’t get this good based on the code written by the people building them. They got this good by using data strip-mined from the Web — social networking posts, images, etc. — and by employing low-paid ‘AI Turks.’ Recently, it was disclosed that ChatGPT is employing workers in Kenya, making $2 an hour, to train the system (currently valued at $29 billion and climbing fast). 

There are other problems. While its ability to create abstract text is sufficiently advanced to fool experts in the field, the current iteration of ChatGPT frequently lies. It lies about what it can do. It claims it's learning algorithm was cut off in 2021, but it knows Elon Musk is head of Twitter. It creates fake citations when its statements are questioned. It creates fake people to make its statements. It even cheats at Hangman. And everything it does can now be beamed, via AR-augmented contact lenses, straight onto your corneas.

But the problem is not restricted to any of these difficulties. There are deeper problems. For instance, the whole point behind an AI model is that the algorithm self-modifies to improve it's responses. ChatGPT doesn't appear to be doing that. It was trained on a specific information set, however large that information set was doesn't matter. The point is, it doesn't modify itself based on user input and correction. 

Now, this refusal to self-modify was probably a design decision on the part of the builders. They were concerned that maleficent or other mission-oriented parties would modify the information base enough so that the AI would start spewing out incorrect information. But that refusal to allow user-modification assumes the original data set boundaries established by the programmers were themselves correct and reasonably complete. Given its consistent mis-representation of facts, this is demonstrably not true.

Wikipedia is crowd-sourced, but is often skewed or incomplete because the moderators tend to be unemployed, mission-oriented people who choose to skew certain information sets within Wikipedia. Given its responses, ChatGPT clearly comes to us already skewed.

So there is the first issue with AI: should it allow crowd-sourcing? If so, it arguably allows the people with the most free time to modify its information training set. But if its programmers do not allow crowd-sourcing, then the AI does not get some of the self-correcting intelligence of the masses. 

The idea behind democracy is that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. It is not clear that this conceit is correct. So, how should AI programmers source information to make sure it stays accurate?

And who gets to determine which interpretation of various fact sets is the most accurate? Currently, internet-available AI is really just a set of rules established by anonymous programmers. The rules pattern-match character strings out of a discrete data set, aka, the "training data". The anonymous programmers have pre-defined what character strings may be displayed, and which ones are not permitted to be displayed. The content does not update based on user input.

Since every character string can be, and in fact, is, reducible to a long binary number, the information produced by ChatGPT or any other AI is essentially a number. ChatGPT and AIs like it are simply very flexible electronic calculators, operating on character strings that include not just Arabic numerals but now also alphabets, both of which are represented as binary numbers as far as the computer is concerned.

So, when we talk about whether ChatGPT results should be allowed in the classroom, we are actually ruling on whether the use of certain numbers should be made illegal. If a particular number/essay is generated by ChatGPT, then it is an illegal number, but if it is hand-generated by the student, then it is legal. Is that our position? That sounds a lot like the late-20th century fight over whether math teachers should permit calculators in the math classroom.

Math teachers lost that fight decades ago. Since the 1990s, students have been permitted to use calculators to generate answers to problems which they themselves did not understand how to do. The argument was that math teachers should concentrate on teaching high-order thinking skills instead of having students engage in low-order rote memorization. Unfortunately, as AI has now irrevocably demonstrated, the manipulation of nouns and verbs in a sentence is, like math, nothing more than the application of rote memorization, the memorization of a complicated algorithm and its application. 

Keep in mind, it was not math teachers who advocated to allow calculators in the classroom, it was English and history teachers, who made, and won, this argument. Now that computers apply grammatical and referential pattern-matching algorithms in the English and history classrooms, does this substantially change the original late-20th century argument? Should we allow liberal-arts calculators in the classroom?

Basic math problems, and their solutions, cannot claim copyright or plagiarism protection because they are known to be "common knowledge." Do basic English expressions, even unto whole essays, make a better copyright or plagiarism claim just because the algorithms that produce those expressions are somewhat more opaque? To put it another way, if electronic calculators for math allow students to pursue higher-order math skills more efficiently, then does not an AI-generated essay remove the need for mastery of low-order English skills? Proper grammar, subject-verb agreement, these and similar skill-sets are merely algorithmic solutions which students memorize to solve English and history problems. Should not the student eschew this low-order skillset so as to spend his or her valuable time pursuing higher-order critical thinking skills? 

This is not a new question for these instructors. For at least a decade, it has been pointless to grade a student on proper footnote or endnote citation. The necessary information can be plugged into any number of free foot/endnote generation software, including software built into the word processor itself. Instructors are no longer grading students on such formatting, they are grading the anonymous programmers who wrote the software that formats the foot/endnotes for the student.  The rote memorization about where, exactly, one should place a comma or period to accommodate a specific style has long since gone the way of the dodo. Should subject-verb agreement or discussions of "than vs. then" join footnotes and endnotes on the dustbin of history? 

Plato and Socrates decried the manufacture of books because they understood the written word would destroy their culture's understanding of knowledge. For the ancient Greeks, knowledge was memorized, stored in mnemonic "memory palaces" within one's own mind. To be forced to refer to outside sources for knowledge was a form of intentional self-harm, it weakened the mind. It created the illusion of discourse where there was no discourse. It was virtual reality, the pretense of talking with an absent or dead author, it was not real dialogue with another living human being. 

“Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.”

                                            ~Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word 

The ancients did not fully understand that the ability to write books opened a much more intricate dialogue with a much vaster audience of dead witnesses, each whispering his or her own life experience and perspective. The written word connected together a vast complex of multi-processed information that could never be matched by any individual's oral knowledge transmission. One man might build a mighty mnemonic palace in his mind, but his singular palace died with him. The written word kept his palace alive, even if as a faded ghost rather than the vibrant original. 

The written word, whether via individual scrolls, letters or books, had many disadvantages, but that same written word was a force multiplier that eventually became the foundation of multiple knowledge revolutions. In the same way, the Internet, as concentrated and distilled through the search engine and its AI progeny, holds promise to multiply knowledge yet again. 

Before 1935, a "computer" referred to a man or woman who could do math rapidly in their heads, sometimes with the assistance of pencil and paper. Thus, the word "electronic" had to be added to distinguish the person from the electronics-based AI that silicon introduced to the math classroom. Now, we use the designation "AI" to distinguish the computer in our pocket from the computing done on machines we cannot see, but whose results fill our screens. Whether we discuss the hand-held AI calculator in the 1980's math classroom, or the 21st-century AI-trained cloud computer, we have teamed with a vast number of anonymous programmers whose algorithms, for better or worse, define the knowledge base we access.

Socrates died in 399 BC, and his distaste for books died with him. For five hundred years, scribes labored over their books and the copying of those books, but for five hundred years, plagiarism was unknown. After all, writing was an esoteric skill, very expensive to develop and maintain. It was the province of the landed aristocrat and the wealthy. An ancient scroll or a medieval book cost as much as a private jet would today. A peasant might be plucked out to be trained as a pilot (in medieval terms, a trained as a priest or cleric, thus writing tasks are still referred to as "clerical"), but the vast majority of people simply couldn't afford the luxury. It wasn't until nearly 100 AD, that the poet Martial used the term to describe how other poets were "kidnapping and enslaving" his words for their own use. "Plagiarism" did not enter modern English until 1601 when Ben Johnson stole Martial's term, bringing the first century distaste for this practice into the modern era. 

It took 500 years for plagiarism to be denounced; it was nearly a thousand years before someone thought to call the copying of books a crime. The first  recorded copyright issue arose in 6th-century Ireland. The king ruled "every cow has its calf, and every book its copy," thereby not only granting copyright to the book's original owner (note: not the author, the owner), while linking the book's expensive parchment pages to the animal from which they were derived. But even so, copyright was not codified into modern law until 1710. Even in that late year, the printing press was not yet two centuries old, and literacy was still an uncommon skill. Plagiarism and copyright are both ideas invented to handle the aristocratic written word. Do they truly apply to the computed alphabet string? 

Although it was not realized at the time, the ideas behind plagiarism and copyright are founded on a peculiar mathematical idea. Since every language expression can be reduced to a number and processed like a number, plagiarism and copyright are founded on the idea that a person can page one by one through the infinite realm of whole numbers and lay private property claims to an individual number within that realm that catches their fancy. Because every essay is essentially just a large number, plagiarism and copyright mean a particular whole number can belong to someone for a set number of years. It means no one else can use that number without violating the claim made by the original discoverer of that number, it means numbers can be bought or sold, stolen or copied. Numbers are electronic cattle, or electronic farmland. The private ownership of a number is a literary version of the enclosure movement, a holdover of the idea that the mnemonic palace one person builds, was not built so much as discovered. But, once discovered, that palace belongs to that person during his life, and no one else can use it. 

And therein lies a question: are mnemonic palaces still the province of just one person? The ancient Greeks who created the practice of building mnemonic palaces did not use plagiarism or copyright because the palace did not exist outside of any individual's mind. Once it was stored on paper, it did. But, once a number is stored on a set of computers, copied at absolute minimal cost and available to all, can such ownership claims reasonably be enforced? Are plagiarism and copyright claims still valid, or are they akin to memory palaces, footnote formats, or multiplication tables, are they a relic of the past? If the communication of knowledge is undergoing a fundamental transformation, then are the written walls built over the last two millennia in the process of being torn down? 

The PC is less than fifty years old, the smart phone has not yet reached two score years. It is impossible to say whether or not the walls will hold and, if they hold, for how long. But as we watch knowledge and its related skillsets transform from the private mind, to the aristocratic page, and now onto the universal computer, it is worth asking the question. 

Why Universities Chose Wokeness, and Why it Won't Work

It has been predicted that half of all American colleges and universities will close in the next ten years, thus fulfilling the ancient prophecy, "Get woke, go broke." But why is wokeness such a problem for universities?

The answer: Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. In that decision, the US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws.

This ruling was not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, stopped testing the IQ of prospective employees. Unfortunately, those same companies still needed a proxy for IQ tests. Whether we like it or not, an IQ score does correlate pretty well with how easily an individual can perform a specific job. So, what to do about that proxy? Well, there was one area where IQ tests were considered a useful and necessary screening tool: applications for college. While college in the late 19th and early 20th century was mostly about who your parents were, colleges kept the fig leaf of meritocracy bound firmly about their ivory towers. Since colleges screened applicants for parentage (a proxy for power) and for IQ (a proxy for ability to learn a job), after 1971, businesses began using college degrees as their job screening tool.

The GI Bill was signed in 1944 by FDR. While roughly half of WW II's returning veterans made use of it, the funding rate dropped precipitously from 1955 into the 1960s, because college wasn't really an important item on anyone's radar. However, after 1971's pivotal Griggs decision, businesses made a college degree central. Businesses wanted employees who were hooked into either power and privilege or tour de force intellect, preferably both. The college degree guaranteed that.

This gave universities a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that kind of discrimination is really useful in the job market, all a university has to do to be socially crucial is maintain its reputation as a reliable IQ discriminator. If it does that, the actual content of what it teaches is simply not relevant.

Overnight, SCOTUS had unwittingly used Griggs to rig the employment playing field. Vietnam vets were the first group to see which way the wind blew. They became the first generation to inflate their GI Bill life rafts and float into higher paying jobs. The civilian world followed suit. Universities made out like bandits.

Unfortunately for everyone, the Pill was released a decade before Griggs, just in time to start decimating the baby boom. The US total fertility rate (TFR) has been dropping steadily since 1800, with the only significant baby boom taking place after WW II. By 1963, that boom was over. But during the 1970s and early 80s, the bulging Boomer population was still traveling through the anaconda of higher learning. Nobody realized the good times could only roll for about twenty years. It wasn't apparent that the rapidly dropping number of parents would eventually bring it all crashing down.

And that's where "wokeness" comes in. The number of future college students born to American parents has dropped steadily since the 1980s, when the total fertility rate returned to 1930s levels. Since that decade, there haven't been enough backsides to sit in college seats.

Colleges have three ways to handle this declining enrollment: (1) raise tuition (2) import students from other countries and (3) lower standards. The first two have been tried. Tuition is as high as it can afford to be. Every industrialized country in the world has a declining TFR (and a similar problem with their own colleges), so there's a limit to the number of students that can be imported. That just leaves lowered standards.

Enter "woke." Wokeness lower standards while virtue-washing the real reason colleges encourage it - they need every warm body they can get, no matter how stupid that person may be, in order to fund the bloated administration and the perks that grew during the go-go years of the 1970s through the 1990s. In fact, stupid people make better students because they will sign for larger federal loans.

So, the entire wokeness movement, which found its footing at the universities, did so because of the Pill and Griggs. But wokeness is just gasoline on the bonfire of university vanities. The real problem is, no one remembers Griggs.

You see, universities have forgotten that their degrees became valuable to businesses only because Griggs forbad American businesses testing the IQ of prospective employees. Before Griggs, universities were niche high-society clubs. They only became universally critical to economic advancement because SCOTUS unintentionally re-created them as an IQ-testing monopoly. But, as the incoming stream of students disappeared due to contraception and abortion, that IQ testing monopoly had to lower its IQ gatekeeper standards to keep its own income up. Ironically, by embracing wokeness (lowering IQ testing standards) in order to save their bottom line, those same universities are throwing away the only reason a business has to use them. University degrees are now worthless as an IQ proxy.

How are businesses responding to this new state of affairs? They are dispensing with the need for university degrees. Instead, businesses have begun using certifying agencies and certifications (IT certification, management certification, etc.) as a proxy for IQ.

By and large, certifying agencies are a better work-around to Griggs than university degrees. They are more on-point for specific job categories, harder to litigate against, and they now do a better job of screening out stupid people. Which is all that businesses ever wanted to do in the first place. At best, universities are destined to return, to niche high-society clubs.

UPDATE: Yep, my suspicions are confirmed:

But grades may not be the real problem, said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. He pointed out that only 25 percent of high school students who took the ACT test last year met all four college-readiness benchmarks, which gauge the likelihood that they'll succeed in first-year college courses; 38 percent met none. The composite score was the lowest in more than a decade.

America: Land of Human Smuggling

21st century Americans complain about "coyotes" smuggling people into the United States. Americans are absolutely indignant that some of those smuggled people might be criminals. It's not clear why. Human smuggling is an old American tradition. Indeed, the word "kidnapping" was invented precisely to describe the practice. Indeed, Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped was based upon a true story of exactly this British practice.

The earliest known use of the verb kidnap is from A brief historical relation of State affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, by Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732), annalist and book collector; he wrote that, on 23rd May 1682, there was:

"a tryall at the kings bench barr upon an indictment against Mr. John Wilmore, for spiriting or kidnapping away a young boy under the age of 13 years, called Richard Siviter, and sending him to Jamaica : the jury was a very good one, returned out of the county of Kent : the witnesses against him were some to prove that there was in generall such a trade as kidnapping or spiriting away children, and that he did beleive [sic] there had been above 500 sent away in two years at Christmas last."

Up to 75 percent of all the individuals who came off the transatlantic ships in the 17th century were indentured servants, but the European servants did not always come willingly:

Boys and girls of the poorer classes were hustled on board ships and virtually sold into slavery for a term of years. Kidnaping or ‘spiriting’ became a fine art under Charles II. Slums and alleys were raked for material to stock the plantations… About 1670 no fewer than ten thousand persons were ‘spirited’ away from England in one year. One kidnaper testified in 1671 that he had sent five hundred persons a year to the colonies for twelve years and another testified that he had sent 840 in one year.

Without Indentures: Index to White Slave Children in Colonial Court Records [Maryland and Virginia] by Richard Hayes Phillips, lists more than 5,000 children who were kidnapped from England, Ireland, Scotland and New England and sold into slavery in Maryland and Virginia from 1660 to 1720. These kidnappings were the result of the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor, also known as the Elizabethan Poor Law, which stipulated that children who were orphaned or whose parents were unable to support them could be taken in by parish officials and apprenticed to local tradespeople.  This law was amended in 1609, 1662 and again in 1697 and 1722, giving officials progressively more power to deal with children who were beggars or vagrants. These children were not indentured and the courts assigned their time of servitude. 

Government kidnapping of children was not an unusual event. By 1600, Queen Elizabeth had granted entertainers the right to kidnap children in order to use them as performers in the theater. Once the children were taken, the parents had little recourse. But the shenanigans did not stop with kidnapping children for transport to the colonies. In 1718, Britain passed the Transportation Act, which allowed convicts to be sold as indentured servants in the colonies. Britain shipped  approximately 60,000 convicts, dubbed "the King's passengers." Roughly ninety percent stayed in Maryland and Virginia. Between 1718 and 1775, up to one quarter of the British immigrants to America were convicts sold into servitude by the British government. According to the vicar of Wendover, transportation served the purpose of ‘draining the Nation of its offensive Rubbish’. Benjamin Franklin compared the practice to the emptying of a chamber pot on a colonial dinner table. But, the practice was  so popular in England that Daniel Defoe wrote Moll Flanders in order to support the government practice.

On both the Atlantic passage and during their servitude, European convicts were treated worse than slaves as they brought less cash, were less physically fit, and had criminal records. They were typically bought by poorer farmers who could not afford slaves. 

The French populated its Louisiana territories in much the same way the English populated their colonies. Charles Law shipped convicts and kidnapped children to the Gulf coast en masse. Being Catholic, the French actually took the time to perform mass marriages of the kidnapped children, to assure family formation and increased population once the newlywed kidnap victims arrived in their new location. Unfortunately for their plan, more than half the women and nearly a quarter of the men typically died during transport. 

So, prior to the Revolution, roughly 30 percent of American immigrants were convicts who were sentenced to be transported to the colonies and sold as indentured servants. Thousands more were kidnapped children either assigned by the courts to servitude for the crime of being an orphan, or spirited away by professional kidnappers who made their living off human trafficking. When someone tells you they can trace their lineage back to the earliest American settlers, the chances are quite good their ancestor was a convict or a kidnap victim.

Welcome to American history.

What's Wrong With Human Composting?

Human composting has become a subject of popular discussion, and I see a lot of religiously-minded people acting upset about it. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what the problem is supposed to be. How is this different from burying people in a blanket or wooden coffin, which is what Christians have done for literally thousands of years?

Embalming only really became a thing after the Civil War, it isn't required in any state in the union, and a lot of faiths (e.g., Judaism and Islam) completely forbid embalming. Actually, Christianity is weird for allowing it. Embalming poisons the soil. The embalmers are required to wear full hazmat suits, including respirator, when they do it. Embalming fluid used to contain arsenic, and 19th-century cemeteries are almost all toxic waste sites as a result, leaching arsenic into the ground water.

"Human composting" is pretty much how family cemeteries stay small. Individual family members are serially buried in the same 18 square feet of dirt over the centuries. Monasteries would commonly bury monks one on top of another, and most of their remains would decompose in the ground seamlessly over the centuries so each plot could be re-used.

What is being described in the article is not much different than how human beings have been buried for almost all of human history. What is the big deal? 

Genesis says Adam was formed from the clay, the word "adam" means "red" and is related to the Hebrew "adamah" which means land or soil. St. Paul talks of men as clay vessels (2 Cor 4:7). The Anglican Book of Common Prayer implicitly endorses composting: "we therefore commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life."

The Catholic liturgy does the same. On Ash Wednesday, the priest inscribes the cross on your forehead with the words, "Remember, man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return." 

The Origins of Hannukah

Ironically, Hanukkah is found in Christian Scripture in 1st and 2nd Maccabees, but is not found in Jewish Scripture at all. Why? Well, these two books (there is actually also a 3 and 4 Maccabees, which some Christian groups consider part of Scripture, but which the Catholic Church does not) were originally written in Greek by the Diaspora Jewish community, they were never translated back into Hebrew. Because Christians preaching the Gospel among Diaspora Jews were using several Greek-language based books like Maccabees to great effect in conversion, the Jews who were opposed to Christianity ultimately ruled that any book not originally written in Hebrew was NOT part of Scripture and should not be considered sacred.

Unfortunately, this ruling meant the Hanukkah celebration was no longer a Scriptural event. This wasn't a huge loss, as it had never been a great holy day. But Christianity spread through Europe and North Africa, and the celebration of Christmas began to become a thing starting around 350 AD.

While it was considered a minor liturgical holiday for the first millennium of Christianity, by the medieval period, Christmas was a major cultural holiday for Christians. The early industrial period turned industrial nations into a surplus-goods society, in which Christmas came to be a way to showcase the cornucopia of goods Christian Europe was producing. Gift-giving entered the picture in a major way. Every culture (Asian, African, etc.) wanted to share in that new outpouring of Christian European wealth.

It was therefore no coincidence that by the early industrial period, Jews were converting to Christianity wholesale and retail. Indeed, some scholars point out that, if not for WW II, Jewish assimilation was on track to wipe out Jewish culture in Europe by the end of the 20th century. To slow the assimilation, one of the rabbinic tools was the elevation of Hanukkah to a major cultural event in order to combat the influence of Christmas. It's still a very minor liturgical event, but the cultural significance now pretty much swamps the religious significance. Hanukkah is now a way for Jews in a Christian society to celebrate Christmas without feeling guilty.

Why Colleges Are Dying

Many people complain that college standards are dropping. They don't seem to understand that colleges really don't have a choice. 

Total fertility rate in America has been dropping steadily since 1800. The only uptick in the last two centuries was the post-WW II Boomer generation. That ended in 1963. Ever since, TFR has continued it's inexorable trend down. This means the number of students who can enter any particular college, or all colleges combined, also necessarily trends down each year. 

So, colleges MUST dumb down standards because the number of students coming in drops every year. Colleges push abortion and contraception, then are shocked to find their students don't raise kids or send them to college in turn. As a result, to keep enrollment numbers up, standards MUST drop.

But why are colleges pushing abortion and contraception? Well, eugenics has long been a darling of the Progressive movement. In addition, women are taking over both the degree programs and the administration. The kind of women who want a career are typically the kind of women who don't want children.  But even sterile women value relationships over truth. Institutions reflect the values of the people who run them. 

So, as women take over universities, universities stop being truth-seeking organizations and start being extended touchy-feely therapy sessions for sterile psychotic women who invite in every stray dog so the psychotic women can continue their extended, paid coffee klatsch sessions.

Women don't build stuff. 

Men do. 

Kick men out, and stuff don't get built.

Dealing with the Frozen Embryonic Child

 So, the Catholic Church says it is immoral to allow these embryos to grow in the womb of a woman who is not their mother. After thirty years, their mothers and fathers may not even be alive.

If we tried to baptize them in their embryonic state, we would instantly kill them.

So, we've got unbaptized babies that are not allowed to grow up, a Peter Pan situation in real life. Is it REALLY moral to leave them in a frozen state for 30 years? REALLY? 

Yes, it was immoral to create them this way. But not giving these children a way forward to grow and become what they were meant to be... and remember, God allowed the fertilization to work, He ensouled these children because these embryos are EMBRYOS, not just fertilized eggs ... how is THAT moral?  

The Economics of Children

 "Family life is no longer a core aspiration of every person but becomes a “luxury"..." That is most assuredly not what is happening.

People are just making the best economic investments they can with the time they have. In a low-tech, agricultural society, children are a high value commodity item because workers are high-value commodities. You need workers to get the work done. Agricultural societies are marked by high levels of child labor.

For most of human existence, 5 through 15 year old children worked in the farms and fields. When industry and mining was invented 5-15 year old children worked those in the factories and the coal mines. Children were effectively indentured servants with a ten-year to fifteen-year return. But as the tasks children could do became automated, their economic value disappeared. Children could no longer earn a wage for the family. 

In a high-tech, post-industrial society, labor-saving machinery... wait for it... saves labor. As fewer people are needed to get work done, the value of the worker drops. The value of having children drops. It's not that children are a luxury, it's that children are no longer economically valuable. They don't start returning ROI at age 5, as they used to do.

Today, it takes 20 or even 30 years to start seeing return on investment, and the return no longer goes to the family that raised them but to the family they are themselves forming. So, each set of prospective parents sees that they will take a substantial loss on raising children and they... don't. 

If children were actually a luxury good, then rich people would have MORE children than poor people do. But that isn't what is happening. Malthus thought children were a luxury good. His original prediction was that rich people would have more children than the poor did. That turned out to be completely wrong. It is fascinating that people invoke Malthus without bothering to have read his theories. 

Now, it may observed that those in poverty tend to have more children than the rich. This is a direct result of the welfare state. Because welfare increases payments as a function of marital status and number of children, the welfare state has re-created the pre-industrial ROI children once provided, but it does so only for a particular segment of society instead of society as a whole.

The article linked above notes that Muslim and ultra-orthodox Jews still have large numbers of children, but this is largely due to the economic circumstances they find themselves in. Muslim-predominate countries tend to ether be primarily agricultural or derive their income from oil revenues. Both are essentially pre-industrial. Ultra-orthodox Jews are paid by donors (and sometimes even paid by the Israeli government) to study the Torah. That is, they get the equivalent of government welfare payments for sustenance, as even the author of the article admits in passing:

These ultraorthodox Jews have been enthusiastic clients of Israel’s pro-natalist policies and rely on the support handed out to large families by the state as an economic basis for their traditional lifestyles and their continued study of the Jewish scriptures. 

Thus, the article's conclusions about Marx are completely off-base. Insofar as capitalism contains within its demographics the seeds of its own demise, the facts demonstrate Marx was completely clueless. Anyone reading through Marxist writings would search in vain for a reference to the demographics we currently face. Marx had absolutely no idea capitalism would struggle with demography. Asserting that Karl Marx was somehow correct about capitalism is absurd. Marx was simply another Malthus. He was a blowhard, an intellectual who didn't ever really understand how the world works. Failed academics are his tribe, which is why today's failed academics love him so and try endlessly to prop him up as a visionary. Failure calls to failure across the deep, and find consolation in each other. 

Computer-generated Art Does Not Exist

When a computer "does" anything, it is "doing" that action in the same way that a shovel is "shovelling" dirt or a hammer is hammering a nail. Somebody, somewhere, is manipulating the machine to do that.

So, when we say a computer has "tunnel-vision" or "limited understanding", we are wrong. The programmers who created the task list for the computer, the PROGRAMMERS have tunnel-vision, for a variety of technical reasons (e.g., they have limited resources with which to manipulate the machine).

We have a tendency to anthropomorphize an inanimate object, attributing the skills of the programmer to the computer in a way we would never do with a shovel or a hammer. We must always remember that a computer runs a program in the same way a hammer beats down a nail - it does so mindlessly. A computer is a series of electrical junctions working in synch, that's it. Although the music may be beautiful, the player piano does not play music. Although the result may be brilliant, the computer does not think.

Computer-generated "x" is a misnomer. It is always "programmer-generated art" or "programmer-generated writing". The programmers have created a situation in which other people (users) may collaborate with the programmers and their tools (via user-input) to produce a result.

So AI-art is really just anonymously collaborated art. AI-writing is the same. The programmers create interactive parameters, the users provide inputs, and the programmers' rule-based "world" uses that input to create an output.

Now, the output may be completely unexpected and beautiful from the viewpoint of everyone involved. That's very neat if it is. But insofar as it is beautiful or useful, that's a result of the people involved. The computer contributed only speed and technical accuracy.

And this is why "computer-generated art" *SHOULD* win art competitions. It truly is the product of talented human minds, all working together. The individual people could never have achieved the result, but the team of people - who do not know each other and may never meet - HAVE achieved the result. In that sense, "computer-generated art" is not substantially different than the entirety of human culture throughout history. Every human artist today builds upon the work of countless previous generations of artists, most of whom they do not even know, and none of whom they have met. But instead of collaborating across generational time, computers allow the artists to collaborate across physical space. The anonymity hasn't changed, the individual contributions haven't changed. The tools have changed a bit, but that's it. Whether the tool be a quill pen, a paintbrush, a camera or a computer, the art is still created by the people using the tools they have at their disposal.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Pens, cameras, pianos, computers don't create art, people create art. "Computer-generated art" is a human achievement, not a computer's achievement.