Surrogate Humans?

Elderly Japanese want to be grandparents, but few of the children they raised are having children of their own. There’s an acute grandchildren shortage and robots are filling the gap. According to sbs.com.au: “More than ten thousand of them are in homes and businesses across Japan. They’re purchased on payment plans, much like a cell phone.”

I first learned of this ten years ago when reading about demographic problems in Japan, and I thought the robot-grandchildren phenomenon very strange. It’s one thing for little girls to have talking dolls; I remember my sisters being thrilled with their “Chatty Cathy” dolls sixty years ago. The dolls had a little ring in the back of the neck so that if you pulled it and let go, it would say something childlike. But these are mature Japanese adults essentially playing with 21st century robotic dolls.

As with reading a novel, it would seem that a suspension of disbelief is necessary to “play” with a robotic grandchild. Children have little difficulty achieving this with their dolls and action figures, but it feels unhealthy for adults. I like novels, and I can suspend disbelief while reading, but I know the author is human and has created characters based on actual people — in part at least. Well-written novels can be realistic, but talking to a robot on a feeling level? I could never suspend disbelief enough to accomplish that.

I talk to Siri on my iPhone, to Alexa on my Amazon devices, and to robotic answering services on technical support lines, but I know they’re all disembodied automatons. There’s nothing human about them and I cannot imagine relating to them as if there were. An increasing number of people are though; some are even having sex with robots. Researching for this column I watched videos of people talking to sex robots about vaguely sexual subjects and I was surprised at the sophistication of the technology involved in creating these “sexbots.”

So far, the only sexbots I’ve seen are made to look female. Evidently, some males are so hyper-libidinous that a machine does the trick for them, and there are places they can go now to use robots for sex. A breitbart.com article reported robot brothels gaining popularity in Europe. At one Austrian brothel, many customers prefer a particular robot over real women and a Barcelona operation is looking to expand worldwide. Customers pay between $87 and $108 for an hour with a sexbot. Some are paying $10,000 — $15,000 to purchase one.

Sexbot brothel owners report that customers act out lurid fantasies with sexbots that they wouldn’t do with human females. This sounds dangerous, but even more dangerous are childlike robots for sex. While some think child sexbots are safe outlets for pedophiles, others suspect they’re not safe at all because they’re likely to heighten perverted desires in those who use them. Some countries ban them, but so far they’re legal in the United States. According to NBCNews: “Representative Dan Donovan (R-NY) introduced legislation that would ban the importation and distribution of child sex dolls and child sexbots.”

Good for him, I say. Think of sexbots as three-dimensional pornography. If watching two-dimensional porn is a major cause of divorce — and research seems to confirm that it is, one would think the three-dimensional variety would be even more damaging to marriages. Two-dimensional porn, however, involves images of real human beings. Sexbots are not human, but I would think users of them must, at least temporarily, believe they are. Will robot patrons declare a constitutional right to machine sex? Will an R be added to LGBTQ?

Taking a long view of all these phenomena, they amount to a further separation of the sex act from its primary purpose: reproduction. When the birth control pill started being used widely in the 1960s, it gave impetus to the sexual revolution. Sex outside of marriage lost its stigma and the results are obvious to anyone old enough to remember how it used to be. Conservatives tend to believe the results are disastrous. Liberals, however, are inclined to celebrate them as liberating.

Maybe it’s impossible to ever put the toothpaste back in the tube, but I choose to hold out hope. I don’t expect to see a turn-around in my lifetime; the nuclear family is on the ropes and being pummeled every day. The very terms “father” and “mother” are slowly being outlawed by the left. US passport applications now substitute “parent 1” and “parent 2” for those old, outdated, soon-to-be-obsolete words.

The rules of society have changed drastically over the past half-century, but Natural Law has not. It is my expectation that the latter will win out eventually, but not before we Americans experience considerably more societal suffering — and long after I’m dead.

Window On The Doors

Fifty years ago, I worked at the newly-built Holiday Inn at the intersection of Interstate 495 and Route 38 in Tewksbury, Massachusetts,  the town in which I grew up. I’d started in the summer of 1966 as a dishwasher, then a groundskeeper, and ultimately a porter carrying room service trays, vacuuming the lobby, setting up tables in function rooms, and emptying ashtrays. My father would often pick me up on his way home from work. I had my learner’s permit and he’d let me drive the rest of the way in our 1966 Chevrolet Biscayne.

Rock-and-roll groups like the Yardbirds, the Turtles, and others stayed there when playing concerts at the Commodore Ballroom in Lowell. One of my jobs was putting red plastic letters up on the marquee to welcome them. Sometimes my father couldn’t drive me home and I’d hitchhike. One such evening in 1967, a late-model Buick Riviera pulled over and I hopped in. Driving was the drummer of The Doors, John Densmore. I had never heard of The Doors or of Jim Morrison, who was crashed out and sprawled across the back seat. Though I’d just come from work, nobody told me The Doors were staying there because they weren’t that popular at the time. Nobody was excited enough to tell me they were in residence. Neither was I told to put up a greeting for them on the marquee.

Anyway, Densmore was miffed that he had picked up an American teenager who didn’t recognize him. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

Densmore and Morrison

“No,” I said.

“Ever hear of ‘Light My Fire’?”

“Umm… yeah, I think so,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. It sounded vaguely familiar but I wasn’t sure. He didn’t look like a typical guy from Tewksbury and nobody I knew drove a brand-new Riviera. His hair was longish, his clothing was different, and he was driving with bare feet. The guy in the back seat had bare feet too and a small tattoo on his ankle. I think it was a flower.

“Ever hear of ‘The Doors’?” he asked, getting more peeved.

Morrison crashed at performance in Amsterdam

“No,” I said. He seemed to sense my nervousness then and eased up. I turned to look behind me at the unconscious guy, and Densmore said something about him. I don’t remember exactly what, but it had a tone of disapproval, disgust even. By this time we’d gone about four miles and I was relieved to tell him he could stop at the next crossroad and let me out. He pulled over and I thanked him before closing the door. “You’re welcome,” he said.

Not long after, I heard “Light My Fire” on the radio and I liked it. So did millions of others and The Doors were invited to perform it on The Ed Sullivan Show. Morrison had been asked to modify the lyric “…girl we couldn’t get much higher,” as the audience might consider it a reference to using drugs, but he sang it anyway and was banned from further appearances.

After that encounter, I paid closer attention to stories about The Doors as Morrison was becoming notorious for his hedonistic lifestyle. He was convicted of exposing himself onstage to an audience of mostly junior high and high school girls in Florida when evidently very drunk. Densmore wrote later that Morrison had a serious alcohol problem and he died in Paris at twenty-seven, only four years after our short ride together. There was no autopsy so his cause of death can’t be known for sure, but many believe it was alcohol-related. 

During his four years of fame, Morrison became a symbol of sixties alienation, of rebellion, and of “the counterculture.” Though I liked his music, I was put off by his behavior and that of so many other counterculture figures too numerous to mention who also died of lifestyle-related causes. I liked much of their music as well and all were heroes to baby boomers. To me, however, they were reverse barometers — examples of how not to act. Some posthumously diagnosed Morrison as bipolar. Such people are often highly creative, highly intelligent, highly sexual, and highly prone to substance abuse. Add his Irish genes to that and what happened to him wasn’t inevitable, but understandable. 

One Morrison biography claims he knocked on Jack Kerouac’s door while he was in Lowell, but was turned away by Kerouac’s wife and told to “get a haircut.” Kerouac died of alcoholism two years later in 1969. While Morrison’s music still appeals to me, Kerouac’s books never did.

Doors Drummer John Densmore who picked me up half a century ago, said in an interview for Huffington Post recently: “Jim was one of those kamikazes who had creativity and self-destruction in the same package, dammit.”

A fitting symbol of his generation? Maybe. What do you think?

What Will The Next Chapter Be About?

Baby boomers now running our country, or seeking to run it, came of age during the hubris of the 1960s and 70s. That era shaped them for well or ill, and we’re seeing more evidence of the latter as this unprecedented campaign unfolds. Being a teenager and young adult at the time, I recall quite vividly that societal norms governing sexual behavior were thrown to the wind. The ethos of the age was such that religious and cultural strictures around sex were considered repressive and unnatural. They were shredded so we could be “liberated.” People should “do their own thing” regardless of millennia-old exemplars. The principle that sex is best confined to marriage sex produced children who were best raised in nuclear families was widely accepted Though violations were frequent, they were stigmatized. Since the sixties, however, we’ve been “defining deviancy down,” to borrow a phrase from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), and here we are, like it or not. Sex isn’t for procreation anymore. It’s recreation. Babies are more a problem than a blessing.

Anthony Weiner

Much of today’s media has been pornified, but remember that the sixties began with John F. Kennedy’s presidency. His White House promiscuity has become widely known but few knew at the time. Media knew but chose to ignore it. Public scandals were confined to politics: Watergate in the Nixon presidency and Iran-Contra in Reagan’s. Clinton’s scandals were sexual but Obama’s returned to the political. Now, however, Clinton’s sexual escapades have been resurrected by Trump after his own were widely publicized. And now, bizarrely, those of the former congressman with the unfortunate name are back in the news. Sex, especially its misuse, dominates America’s attention as we approach election day. The FBI is investigating former Democrat Congressman Anthony Weiner after he was caught for the third time sending unwanted pictures of his genitalia — this time to a 15-year-old girl. The probe turned up something unexpected which may determine who becomes our next president. Exactly what that is, we don’t yet know, but it’s evidently important enough to make its existence public at this critical time.

Sex has so dominated public discussion of the biggest election campaign in years that other issues get little attention. An hour before the first big Wikileaks email dump on Friday, October 7th, NBC released the now-famous Trump remarks on the bus in which he claimed women let him grope them because he was famous. Before that, he had been talking about world and national issues and cutting into Hillary’s lead. Some polls even showed him ahead, but he slid behind again after his prurient 2005 remarks went public. They consumed so much media oxygen that few Americans learned about Wikileaks emails showing that Hillary lied even more often, about even more things, than we already knew. Suddenly it was all about sex again.

Bill Clinton at 2nd debate as Trump fingered him

In their second debate two days later on October 9th, Trump turned the sexual focus back onto the Clintons, claiming he only talked about groping women while Bill Clinton actually did it. He brought several women into the debate hall who alleged President Clinton had groped or even raped them while he was Arkansas Attorney General, Governor, and president. Then, for days after, about a dozen women claimed that Trump had groped them over the last three decades. Trump’s denied their allegations, threatened to sue them, and continued his slide in the polls. Americans felt soiled by sordid charges thrown back and forth and looked forward to the election being over.

Trump finally went back to talking about issues and began creeping back up in the polls. Continued release of Wikileaks emails and FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) documents pried out of the State Department continued damaging Hillary. The biggest bombshell dropped last Friday when FBI Director James Comey notified Congress that he was reopening his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unsecured, classified emails. At least it didn’t involve sex, we thought. Only hours later, however, we learned that Comey’s investigatory turnaround was prompted by information found as the FBI gathered evidence on Weiner — the estranged husband of Hillary’s closest aid, Huma Abedin, who evidently left thousands of emails on his computer. It was back in the cesspool again for all of us.

This is the third presidential election during which I’ve been able to interview candidates — seven this year including Hillary Clinton. For me that makes the process more interesting, but this cycle has focused more Americans than any other. It’s forcing us to look at ourselves. Our votes — Democrat and Republican — gave us these candidates. Why, then, are we disgusted with them? To answer that, we have to look at the culture in which we’re swimming. Lying and sexual misdeeds don’t seem to matter much anymore. Everybody does it, right?

Next Tuesday we’ll know who will occupy the White House in January. We’d like it to, but it won’t be over next week, I’m afraid. It’ll just be the beginning of another chapter.

We're The Best

A few months ago, the Language Arts teacher in the next classroom asked the following question for a writing assignment: “Is the United States the best country in the world?” Only about 25% of our students thought so. We used to teach that to schoolchildren, but now they grow up hearing more about slavery and killing Indians than the ideals spelled out in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution with its Bill of Rights. It’s those documents that make us the best. We will remain so as long as we abide by them.

I asked the 75% who said the United States wasn’t the best, which country they thought was better. Although nobody could name one, they were certain it couldn’t possibly be us. For months I’ve been wondering why. There are several possible reasons, and most originated in the 1960s. My generation of baby boomers - the one most famous for rebelling against their parents generation as all generations do - never grew up. If it had, it would have realized that utopia is only a dream - that humans are imperfect and always will be this side of the grave.

I watched a PBS fundraiser last week with Pete Seeger and his fellow leftists performing sixties songs like “Blowing In The Wind” and “If I Had A Hammer.” They’re nice tunes and I still like them, but it occurred to me that my generation really believed it was possible to eliminate war forever.

Bob Dylan wrote and sang nice lyrics like:

“Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?”

and

“Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?”

Pete Seeger wrote and sang nice lyrics like:

“It's the hammer of justice
It's the bell of freedom
It's the song about love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land”

Yahoo Answers asked about the meaning of “If I Had A Hammer” and picked the following as the best explanation:

“It was recorded during the early '60s as a song of enlightenment. It tells about the injustice of our society at that time, which really hasn't changed much in 40-plus years. It speaks of the effort by the then baby boomer generation, to set the world straight about freedom and justice for all people regardless of race. We're still waiting!”

Indeed. The baby boomers are still waiting. Many still believe it’s possible to ban war and death and create justice and peace everywhere, and they’re running our universities. They control the mainstream media. A year ago, they took over the federal government. Now their savior, President Obama, goes around the world bowing to foreign leaders, apologizing for our country, and trying to redistribute our wealth.

At ninety-one, Pete Seeger is still a communist. President Obama’s good friend Bill Ayers claims he is a “small c” communist. He trains our public school teachers and writes textbooks about what they should teach. According to an article by Stanley Kurtz: “[Ayers] believes teacher education programs should serve as ‘sites of resistance’ to an oppressive system. The point, says Mr. Ayers in his ‘Teaching Toward Freedom,’ is to ‘teach against oppression,’ against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.”

Ayers and the University of Illinois are typical of professors and universities who train our teachers all over the country. Their “sites of resistance” are our public-school classrooms. It’s almost exclusively “American oppression” their teachers “teach against” rather than the communist variety, or the more recent Radical Muslim variety because that’s what was drilled into them. Far more students are taught about Japanese internment camps in the US, for example, than about the Americans who died in the Bataan Death March at the hands of the Japanese in the Philippines.

Although it goes against the multicultural shibboleths purporting that all cultures are equal, I would point to strong evidence that the United States is not only the best country in the world, it’s the best country in all of recorded history - a shining city on a hill, as John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan called us. The finest example would be our role in World War II. The war had been raging for years but we were reluctant to enter until attacked by the Japanese. Then we mobilized, fought on two fronts, and won against terrific odds. At war’s end, we possessed a huge military, were the only country with nuclear weapons, and the only country not damaged in battle. What did we do with that hegemony? Unique in all of history, the United States did not establish an American empire. Instead, we assisted other countries to rebuild - even our enemies - and did everything we could to preserve the autonomy in every country on earth large and small.

In the face of all that, petulant, leftist baby boomers still wring their hands and call the United States “imperialist.” I shouldn’t be surprised by the way my students see their country, but I can’t help being saddened and dismayed. Whenever I have the opportunity, I shall emphasize more strongly what is unique and wonderful about the United States. We remain, as Abraham Lincoln described us: “The last, best hope on earth.”

Another '60s Legacy

Again I assert that however baby boomers remember the sixties determines their view of the world today. If they believe changes in American life resulting from the sixties have been positive, they’re liberal. If they have a negative view, they’re conservatives.

One legacy of the early sixties - the civil rights movement for black Americans - is regarded almost universally as positive regardless of where one is on the political spectrum. Conservatives, however, don’t agree with liberals that civil rights should morph into a “constitutional right” for women to abort their babies, or into a “constitutional right” for homosexuals to sodomize each other as Supreme Court decisions since the sixties have asserted.

Having commented in two previous columns on the sixties legacy in the areas of drugs and then sex, marriage and family, I now turn to how that legacy has affected America’s view of its military. Sixties slogans such as “Make Love, Not War” or “Drop Acid, Not Bombs” or “What If They Gave A War And Nobody Came?” or the more recent derivative “War Is Not the Answer” are purported alternatives to military action. While many liberal boomers have thankfully stopped dropping acid, they still abhor the military.

Liberals have believed since the Johnson Administration that crime is caused by poverty, and if we can eliminate poverty we can eliminate crime. That Johnson’s $2 trillion “War on Poverty” was a failure and crime rates skyrocketed does not affect their belief system. They apply the same flawed rationale to war, believing firmly that our present conflict with Radical Islam results from “oppression” of poor Muslims by British and American oil companies in the Middle East. How many times have you heard someone insist that “It’s all about oil”?

Liberal boomers saw the Vietnam War as a struggle of poor peasants, championed by the communist National Liberation Front (the “Viet Cong” as our soldiers called them) against neo-colonial oppressors backed by the United States. Many like Jane Fonda openly cheered for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. Others like John Kerry depicted American soldiers as murderers and rapists in the tradition of Genghis Khan. I remember people insisting that oil had been discovered under the South China Sea and that’s why the United States was fighting.

Liberal boomers who comprise most of the mainstream media today believe they stopped the Vietnam War, and they’re not entirely wrong. They certainly undermined America’s confidence in its military and in itself. Many believe they can stop war forever. If only the Wall Street Warmongers would stop exploiting other countries, then poverty would be eliminated and there would be no reason to fight. Everybody would get along. Conservatives know it’s an impossible dream this side of heaven, but liberals believe it fervently.

That they sympathize with our current enemy, Radical Islam, puzzled me at first. Islamofascists stone adulterers and homosexuals to death. They degrade women. They impose sharia law - far harsher than any Republican get-tough policy ever was. They force conversions. All this is antithetical to social policies precious to liberals, so why support them? Then I realized: the ’60s mindset of today’s liberals holds that Islamofascists are victims of US imperialism. Their dogma of multiculturalism preaches that it’s heresy to criticize Radical Islam because all cultures are equal. All, that is, except for conservative American culture which is the root of all evil. Islamofascists call America the “Great Satan” and that fits the ’60s world view pretty well. Islamofascists may say they want to kill us all right now, but when they discover how nice and tolerant liberal boomers are, they’ll lighten up.

Point out that Bin Laden, Zawahiri, Atta, the eight British doctor/terrorists and many others are (were in the case of Atta) affluent Arab Muslims from privileged backgrounds and not poor or oppressed. It won’t change their minds.

Eliminate the military and you eliminate war, they think. They apply the same philosophy to guns - eliminate guns and you eliminate killing. Point out that cities with the highest murder rates are also the ones with the strictest gun control laws and it doesn’t sway their thinking, if you can call it thinking. Point out places like Maine and New Hampshire with the lowest murder rates and also the loosest gun control laws and that won’t sway them either.

Liberal boomer President Clinton “loathed” the military, remember? His supporters believed we have wars because we have a military, so he cut it back drastically. Al Qaeda blew up our embassies? Our ships? Exploded a truck bomb under the World Trade Center? Then shoot a few missiles at them but don’t send any troops. That’s what we did in Vietnam and look what happened. Good thing we pulled out of there, huh? Now we should pull out of Iraq too because “War Is Not The Answer.” Send UN Peacekeepers with blue helmets and talk about the problem. When we fight them we only create more terrorists.

That’s the mantra of the new Democrat majority in Congress and the Democrat presidential candidates for 2008. It’s also the predominant theme in Humanities departments on college campuses where ’60s liberals dominate faculties and write the multicultural history books used in our schools.

Islamofascists are aware of how America has changed since the sixties. They know we still have a powerful military, but they’re banking on our lack of will to use it. Bin Laden said as much when he declared war against us in 1996. Perhaps our enemies know us better than we know ourselves.

More '60s Historical Revisionism

As I wrote in a recent column, how baby boomers remember the sixties often determines how they view the world today. If they’re nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco’s Haight/Ashbury district and believe that changes in American culture resulting from the sixties have been largely positive, they probably consider themselves liberal and vote Democrat. If they have a generally negative view of those changes, they probably consider themselves conservative and vote Republican.

Most middle and high school textbooks offer a generally favorable view. No surprise because they tend to be written by boomers who are now liberal/left history professors. The following paragraph from Prentice Hall’s “American Nation” - the most widely used text in American middle schools - is a good example:

Many young Americans became involved in the counterculture movement. Like the Beat Generation of the 1950s, members of the counterculture rejected traditional customs and ideas. Young people protested against the lifestyle of their parents by trying to be different. They developed their own lifestyle. They liked to wear torn, faded jeans and simple work clothes. Women wore miniskirts. Men often wore beards and let their hair grow long. Many listened to new forms of rock music. Some experimented with illegal drugs. Members of the counterculture adopted new attitudes and values. They criticized competition and the drive for personal success. They questioned some aspects of traditional family life.

I already debunked the claim that “Some . . . experimented with illegal drugs” as historical revisionism. Drug use was in fact widespread, habitual, highly destructive of countless American lives, and has been ever since. (So did Ted Nugent in a piece yesterday) That the counterculture “questioned some aspects of traditional family life” is just as laughable. They did far more than “question some aspects.” They scorned and trashed nearly all of them.

It would be more accurate to say the counterculture staged a full-scale attack on the very institution of family that is the basic unit of any society, and that the results have been disastrous. Consider just one function of family common to almost all cultures everywhere - that of marriage. Every successful society has regulated it - most by encouraging monogamous, lifelong coupling between one male and one female which recognizes/sanctifies the basic life-creating function of human sexuality. Marriage creates the nuclear family which generates children, nurtures them, and thereby sustains the culture itself. The nuclear family is the best environment in which to raise those children while it also prolongs the life span and general health of mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers who remain faithful to it. Research studies prove it.

The counterculture’s “Sexual Revolution” has resulted in a divorce rate of more than fifty percent, and that figure doesn’t take into account cohabiting couples who join and split with dizzying frequency. An offshoot of the Sexual Revolution - the “Gay Rights” movement has further eroded traditional family life with its all-out push to redefine marriage itself - separating it completely from its primary procreating function.

The family has been so weakened that one in three children today are born to single mothers. Among blacks, it’s three out of four. The “Women’s Liberation” movement claimed “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” as if fathers were superfluous. The effect of fatherlessness is seen most tragically as increasingly violent crime among unsupervised young men. Without positive male role models in the form of fathers who protected and supported their wives and children, the young men (especially young black men) didn’t learn respect for women either. Their hip-hop subculture treats them as if they were sex slaves.

The biggest issue pushed by the Women’s Movement - another counterculture creation - has been abortion. Liberal women’s groups spend most of their political capital promoting abortion. Feminists, as they call themselves, seem to believe American women cannot lead fulfilling lives unless they’re able to abort their babies. More than forty million have been aborted since abortion was legalized - first in liberal states, then in the whole nation by 1973.

The counterculture’s assault on the American family occurred simultaneously with the Johnson Administration’s “War on Poverty” initiatives. Fatherless families were subsidized heavily and they proliferated for decades, pushing them further into poverty rather than lifting them out of it. The results have been nearly lethal for the “traditional family life” as the history books call it. The black family had been making steady gains for a hundred years before the Johnson Administration attempted to “fix” it. Now it’s in the roughest shape since before Emancipation.

The sixties counterculture arbitrarily tossed out lessons learned from millennia of human experience and “liberated” itself from all societal constraints as if that were a wonderful thing. Talk about hubris! Liberal Democrat baby boomers think all this has been terrific. History textbooks written so far seem to agree with them.

This history teacher, however, begs to differ.