"Yesterday, my 17-year-old niece left for Europe to go to college. And while she was packing, her mother, Amaryllis, my daughter-in-law, noticed that she had put a Bible in her suitcase."

"And Amaryllis was curious about it. And she asked her, and Zoe said to her, 'I want to live like Charlie Kirk.' There are millions and millions of kids around the country who he inspired who now want to live like Charlie Kirk and that's a great thing for our country."

Said RFK Jr., at The Prayer Vigil for Charlie Kirk at the Kennedy Center.

Watch the entire vigil here:

"Whether you are touching up the 'Mona Lisa,' 'reviewing' novels or doing logic puzzles" — using A.I. — "you are engaging in the very human drive to play."

"As I’ve watched people adopt these systems, what I’ve seen is mostly people playing with art and language. If you go through the history of these bots, you see poetry, fiction and all kinds of little genre experiments like this as a constantly recurring theme.... OpenAI also advertised one of its early models with an image produced by the prompt 'astronaut riding a horse.' The natural response to this image is to think, 'Cool!'...  We ought to think about A.I. as an entertainment-first system, before anything else. Would you replace all of primary education with 'Sesame Street'? Or decide government policy with SimCity? It’s not an insult to the beloved children’s program or computer game to say no. The lesson is simple: We might be taking A.I. too seriously."

Writes Leif Weatherby, director of the NYU Digital Theory Lab, in "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Fun With A.I" (NYT).

I like the name Leif Weatherby, and he probably didn't write his own headline, but its reference point — "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" — is a movie that ends with the destruction of all of humanity. So are we taking A.I. too seriously or not seriously enough?

One might interpret the movie title to mean the bomb is going to destroy us all before long so there's no use worrying. It's the world we're stuck in, so love the reality that exists. It's the old: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die.

Is that Dr. Weatherby's point?

***

Grok, what's the origin and history of the adage Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die?

The phrase draws heavily from two passages in the Bible: 

Ecclesiastes 8:15 (Old Testament, c. 3rd–2nd century BCE): In the King James Version, it reads, "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry." This verse, attributed to King Solomon, reflects on the futility of life and the value of enjoying simple pleasures amidst its uncertainties. 

Isaiah 22:13 (Old Testament, c. 8th century BCE): This passage states, "Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die." It appears in a context of rebuke, where the people of Jerusalem are criticized for indulging in revelry instead of repenting during a time of crisis.

"I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?"/"Uh............"/"You’re hesitating"/"Well, I don’t know. I would....... I would....."

"There’s so many questions implicit in this"/"Should the human race survive?"/"Yes.... but I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so............................"

It's Peter Thiel, responding to what one might think were easy questions from Ross Douthat, on the new episode of Douthat's podcast, here, at Podscribe.

Go to 00:37:32 to experience Thiel's freakishly long hesitation when Douthat has just asked if he'd like humanity to survive. And I love how he takes the concept of "trans" and runs with it.

Even though Thiel's cogitations wander into Christianity, he doesn't mention The Transfiguration, in Matthew 17. There, Jesus is "transfigured":

"Each morning, Shelly Shem Tov would enter her son’s empty bedroom and recite Chapter 20 from the biblical Book of Psalms, an ancient plea for deliverance."

"All the while she was unaware that her son, Omer Shem Tov, happened to be uttering the very same verses of Psalm 20 — 'May the Lord answer you on a day of distress.' He had adopted the same daily ritual about 130 feet underground, alone, in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza...."

From "Finding God, and Nietzsche, in the Hamas Tunnels of Gaza/How Omer Shem Tov, who was 20 years old and not particularly religious when taken hostage, survived 505 days in captivity" (NYT)(free-access link).

"A few days into his captivity, he said, he began to speak to God. He made vows. He began to bless whatever food he was given. And he had requests — some of which he believes were answered.... Some taken hostage said they found the will to go on in a motto they heard from Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage, before he was killed by his captors. It was a version of a quotation... from the atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and often echoed by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: 'He who has a why can bear with any how.'"

"Ambitious Democrats Have a New Game Plan: Yak It Up About Sports/Prominent leaders are flocking to sports radio shows and podcasts, an early sign of how the party is trying to reach apolitical young men...."

A NYT article that begins:

“I hate the Packers,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said of his state’s rival football team from Wisconsin....

He's trying to show his aptitude for national politics by insulting the people of a swing state. Genius! The "coach" has a "game plan."

“The Sixers suck right now,” declared Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, lamenting the decline of Philadelphia’s basketball team.

Yeah, at least insult your own team. 

The hot takes are flowing as a parade of ambitious Democrats talk sports, trying to accentuate their salt-of-the-earth credentials and forge stronger bonds with voters.

Count the metaphors:

"No, Trump Did Not Hold the Bible Upside Down at Lafayette Square."

That's a NYT headline from September 18, 2020.

Video and photographs clearly show that the Bible wasn’t upside down, as fact checkers at PolitiFact and Snopes have noted. But that hasn’t stopped the claim from spreading on social media, an example of how speculation on the internet can morph into a zombie claim that refuses to die.

But just now on CNN, as Trump entered the church, the historian chosen to provide depth and context— Timothy Naftali — repeated the longstanding and long-discredited misinformation.

"But is Zuckerberg’s claim that 'fact-checkers have just been too politically biased' correct?"

Asks Nate Silver, at Silver Bulletin:

In my view, it’s at least pointing in the right direction, in line with my Indigo Blob theory about how the lines between nonpartisan institutions and partisan actors have become blurred. In the B.T. days — Before Trump — journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship — a sharp contrast to edgier and less experienced journalists in the Trump era who would later claim to own the disinformation beat. Perhaps because demand for fact-checking was coming overwhelmingly from the left... the journalists who selected into the subfield tended to be especially left of center.... 

"Maybe God doesn't speak to us because we would (in our weakness) find Him boring."

That's the 4th prompt I gave to Grok just now. The first 3 were:

1. Summarize this article

I gave a link to the NYT article "Can God Speak to Us Through A.I.? Modern religious leaders are experimenting with A.I. just as earlier generations examined radio, television and the internet." 

2. Give me a one sentence answer to the question posed in the headline

3. So the article is incredibly boring compared to the headline

That reminds me. Soren Kierkegaard wrote: "Boredom is the root of all evil — the despairing refusal to be oneself." Blogged here in 2006.

Maybe you're one of those people who cue up "The Bible in a Year" podcast and listen to "Day 1: In the Beginning" on New Year's Day. If so, you've just listened to the story of creation and the interpretation that God "wasn't lonely":

"Some historians who follow the presidency say Biden has always shown flashes of anger when he feels underestimated."

"While they are far more fleeting than Trump’s brandishing of grievances, they have at times been unmistakable. 'There has always been this issue of resentment with Biden. He resented [former president Barack] Obama and crew for supplanting him in 2008 and for telling him not to run in [2016], and he has many other resentments,' said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian who recently published a book on the relationship between presidents and CEOs. 'But can you imagine how resentful he is of the shifting narratives and the way he’s been pushed aside and manipulated and not treated fairly. So yeah, I can see him being resentful.'"

From "Biden touts his legacy, but frustration seeps through/The president is observing the traditions of a peaceful transfer of power, but his regrets and misgivings are evident" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Lots to talk about there, but I want to focus on "brandishing" — Trump’s brandishing of grievances. This is an article about Biden, his resentfulness, but Trump must be inserted, and he must be worse. Biden has  fleeting flashes of well-founded anger, but Trump has grievances, and he brandishes them. So Biden briefly displays resentment but Trump waves his resentment around like a weapon. 

Just yesterday, I was talking about the journalistic deployment of the word "brandish." Discussing a NYT article — "In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump/It was a week of frenzied activity as Silicon Valley billionaires and their companies brandished checks and compliments for President-elect Trump"  — I wrote:

Is there any alternative interpretation I should consider?

pic.twitter.com/eYTt40ahVq

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 7, 2024

I'm assuming this clunky labeling is correct. But why would Musk want his effort to be represented by a dust storm and the bloated government to be represented by an orderly suburban neighborhood?

Musk seems to feel comfortable — and amused! — portraying his worldly efforts as divine retribution. 

I remember, "it is written, 'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,' says the Lord."

The dog is cute, so that takes the edge off, but Satan would take the edge off. Ha ha. So amusing. Destruction! 

At long last: marriage for Tim Scott.

Tonight, we promised to cherish and nourish each other and our marriage for the rest of our lives.

Mindy, you've made me the happiest man alive. I love you.

"So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."

Matthew 19:6 pic.twitter.com/tRjlffL0EE

— Tim Scott (@votetimscott) August 4, 2024

 

Watch Republicans pounce on whatever meanness or dubiousness or racism this elicits.

Easter cold open.

Meade's comment, on watching that with me: "You can tell from the audience's reaction that even though they want to be thought of as hating Trump, underneath they really... love Trump."

5 minutes later:

Me: "From the standpoint of not liking fruit."

Meade: "You forgot the raccoons."

"Donald Trump is presenting himself as the Man on the Cross, tortured for our sins."

"'I consider it a great badge of courage,' he tells crowds. 'I am being indicted for you.'... In January, he put up a video on Truth Social about how he is a messenger from God, 'a shepherd to mankind.'... 'All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many,' Trump barked. 'It’s my favorite book.' Maybe the Bible has replaced that Hitler book Trump’s ex-wife said he kept by his bed. But it’s all a scam. Running for president is about enriching himself....  If there is one thing Trump knows how to do, it’s exploit chaos he creates.... Declining faith in religion and rising faith in conspiracies create fertile ground for a faker like Trump...."

Maureen Dowd meowed, in "Donald Trump, Blasphemous Bible Thumper" (NYT).

If they hadn't leaned so hard into persecuting him, he wouldn't have the foundation to make the comparison to Jesus Christ.

And — to repurpose Dowd's phrase — if there is one thing Trump knows how to do, it’s to exploit the chaos his haters create for him. 

ADDED: Whatever you think of Donald Trump, should you use the term "Bible thumper"? Isn't it a looking down on people who follow religions worthy of respect? The OED designates the term "derogatory," and here's a discussion in the subreddit r/Christianity. Someone writes:

It's a trap, and they fall into it.

That's from Memeorandum's display of current headlines.

I say it's a trap — and they fell into it — because although Trump is raising some money — campaign merchandise — he's getting free PR from his antagonists. Not only are they raising awareness of this buyable item, they are displaying their own disgust — if not horror — at the sacred object.

Read more about Trump's Bible, here, at Axios. Oh! I see Trump isn't raising money: "None of the money garnered from the Bible will go toward Trump's presidential campaign, the website states."

Jawbone.

"One day Sampson was walking alone/He looked down on the ground and he saw an old jawbone/He lifted up that jawbone and he swung it over his head/And when he got to moving ten thousand was dead" — Peter, Paul & Mary.

"Oh, Jawbone, when did you first go wrong? Oh, Jawbone, where is it you belong?" — The Band.

From "Moral Suasion" (Wikipedia):

"Jawboning"... is the use of authority to persuade various entities to act in certain ways, which is sometimes underpinned by the implicit threat of future government regulation. In the United States, during the Democratic administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, officials tried to deal with the mounting inflationary pressures by direct government influence or jawboning.... 

From an amicus brief in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, one of 2 free-speech cases up for oral argument in the Supreme Court today:

"There has always been a certain ambivalence on the part of many liberals regarding the actual implementation of affirmative action."

"I thought that it would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories such as 'white' or 'Black,' and the impossibility of clearly defining who counts as 'Hispanic' or 'Asian.'"

Emailed lawprof Sanford V. Levinson to Thomas V. Edsall and quoted in Edsall's NYT column "The Liberal Agenda of the 1960s Has Reached a Fork in the Road."

The column is about "the strikingly different public responses to two recent Supreme Court rulings, one on abortion, the other on affirmative action." The idea of a "fork in the road" suggests a need to pick one or the other option, but liberals could forefront both issues. They're not mutually exclusive. They've simply chosen to use the abortion issue and forget about affirmative action, and the reason is obvious. Polls show that a big majority of Americans — including a big majority of Democrats — support what the Court did with affirmative action. 

I just wanted to pull out that Levinson quote, because I remember thinking — for a brief while, back in the 1990s — that affirmative action "would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories." But I couldn't seem to find other lawprofs who saw that problem. Applicants identified themselves by race, and we took their word for it. Then there's no "impossibility of clearly defining who counts" as what. It's completely clear: You are what you say you are. What could go wrong?

About that "fork" (if there is a fork):

And "Fork in the road" has a Wikipedia article. Excerpt:

"... when I was younger I had the ambition to read [the Bible] cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories..."

"... and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable ('The Lord is my shepherd'), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside. Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer...."

Writes Jonathan Franzen in "The Problem of Nature Writing/To succeed—to get people to care about preserving the world—it can’t be only about nature" (The New Yorker).

I've got exactly 2 TikToks to show you tonight.

1. "The Lord... maketh me to lie down in green pastures," it says in Psalm 23, but is it really a good idea to lie down in a pasture? I see a problem (or 2). But this lady lies down. She's got her idea. She wants to see what animal comes to her first.

2. Thoreau wrote: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." And here is that man, God bless him.

Here are 7 TikToks to amuse me — I mean you — on this Wednesday afternoon. Let me know what you like best.

1. Broadway Barbara has a new perfume.

2. The Martha and Mary story in the manner of the Kardashians.

3. Drunk-calling the police.

4. The secret life hack for thrifting at Goodwill.

5. Your friend who refuses to talk shit. 

6. Is this suggestion that he has a long face correct?  

7. The dulcet tones of the goat.

"We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty..."

"... religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice. We are conservatives because we see such virtues as essential to sustaining our civilization. We see such a restoration as the prerequisite for recovering and maintaining our freedom, security, and prosperity. We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe...."

 
That's from "National Conservatism: A Statement Of Principles/A world of independent nations is the only alternative to universalist ideologies seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe" by The Edmund Burke Foundation (published at The American Conservative). 

I found that through "Beware of ‘national conservatives’ who dispense with American ideals" by Henry Olsen, at The Washington Post. He begins...

There’s a lot to like about the burgeoning “national conservative” movement, which stands against the increasingly stale, pre-Trump intellectual orthodoxy on the right....

... but quickly switches to criticism. Trump is, of course, awful, so hooray for the alternatives that might lure conservatives away from Trumpism, but any alternative that works will swiftly become the new target.