artificial intelligence bests real intelligence

A computer program has beaten a master Go player 3-0 in a best-of-five competition, in what is seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence.

Google's AlphaGo program was playing against Lee Se-dol in Seoul, in South Korea.
Mr Lee had been confident he would win before the competition started.

And...

Does this mean AI is now smarter than us and will kill us mere humans? Certainly not. AlphaGo doesn't care if it wins or loses. It doesn't even care if it plays and it certainly couldn't make you a cup of tea after the game. Does it mean that AI will soon take your job? Possibly you should be more worried about that. 

the once and future news room

Had a chance to read this article in The Nation while sitting in the dentist's office today. It's pretty good and resonates, for me, with a sadness that is both personal and impersonal:

These Journalists Dedicated Their Lives to Telling Other People’s Stories. What Happens When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?

As newsrooms disappear, veteran reporters are being forced from the profession. That’s bad for journalism—and democracy.

luxuries

Harmony of the Seas, the world's largest cruise ship, has begun its first sea trial in western France.

Thousands of people gathered to watch in the port of Saint-Nazaire as the 70m (230ft) high vessel was guided out to sea by six tugs on Thursday.
The €1bn (£783m; $1.1bn) ship is being built for the Royal Caribbean International (RCI) cruise company.

Migrants try to get products from a truck at a makeshift camp on the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni, Greece March 10, 2016. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov

hawk reads the menu

At first I thought perhaps it was just one of those health glitches that insert themselves into the new normal of getting older. I was reading the paper on the porch when, in my peripheral vision, a shadow passed ... once, twice, three times. Maybe it was just a leaf on the warm breeze of the day.

But when it happened yet again, I stood up, opened the porch door and scanned the skies. And there, across the street, perched in a tree with an elegance of the Taj Mahal, was a red-tailed hawk. S/he took off, even as I looked, and proceeded to do a low-altitude cruise up and down my block. S/he was perhaps 10 feet above the roof tops, which is to say, something higher than 60 feet. Usually, the neighborhood hawks fly much higher over the nearby corn fields. What was it s/he was scouting at such a low level? "Lunch" was my bet, but what lunch?

And then I saw them at the end of the street -- the chickens of Valley Street. They were clustered together, three or four of them, and were pecking absently on a bit of lawn.  Would the hawk even challenge a chicken? A rat or mouse or mole is a manageable meal, but a chicken?

Slowly, the B-52 that was the hawk swam up and down the street. The chickens pecked in apparent unawareness. The hawk was beautiful and grand. The chickens are a constituency that helps to make my street a wonderful venue. Would the innocent fall victim to the hungry? The story line gained steam in my mind.

And then I had to run an errand and left the scene behind. When I returned, I looked at where the ladies of Valley Street had convened. There was no blood. There were no feathers. And the ambling chickens were no longer in place.

Gone too was the power and glory of the hawk.

Ah well ... another day, perhaps, and the story may finally write itself.

In the meantime, I am pleased to live in dramatic times.

"chicanery"

It has probably been done already (possibly in the Washington Post which used to run a fun contest of made-up words/definitions) but I awoke today with the word "chicanery."

"Chicanery," for those not initiated, is "the pretense that you know why the chicken crossed the road."

Go champion loses

In a landmark battle between man and artificial intelligence (AI), the world champion of the game Go was narrowly defeated by his computer opponent.

Google's DeepMind AlphaGo program beat South Korea's Lee Se-dol in the first of a series of games in Seoul.

all politics are local

And, in the category of all-politics-are-local, this arrived in email yesterday:

EMBDEN, Maine — A Maine town that spends hundreds of dollars annually to replace stolen street signs is again asking residents to consider renaming one of the frequent targets: Katie Crotch Road.
The Morning Sentinel reports a referendum to rename Katie Crotch Road to Cadie Road is being considered in Embden in Somerset County.
Residents are sorting out the matter with a vote Friday and a town meeting Saturday.
Board of Selectman Chairman Charles Taylor says the thefts occur so frequently that “you would think every dorm room in the state of Maine should have one by now.”
Katie Crotch Road sits off Route 16 connecting Embden and New Portland. It’s not clear how it got its name.
A previous motion to rename the street failed in 2012.

twins have different fathers

Hard empirical evidence seems a bit skimpy, but, taking things for what they are at the moment:

An extremely rare set of twins with different fathers has been born in Vietnam, according to a scientist in the country.
Prof Le Dinh Luong, president of the Genetic Association of Vietnam, said DNA testing at his Hanoi lab had confirmed the twins had different fathers, the first such case that he knows of in Vietnam. Only seven cases of bi-paternal twins had been reported in the world as of 2011....
Luong said bi-paternal twins could happen if two eggs from the same mother were fertilised by sperm from two different men between one and seven days apart in an ovulation period.

RIP Sir George Martin

“In a career that spanned seven decades he was recognised globally as one of music’s most creative talents and a gentleman to the end. The family ask that their privacy be respected at this time.”
Martin signed the Beatles in 1962 to his Parlophone label, where he had earned a reputation for comedy records by Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and a young Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller. The Goons connection quickly endeared him to the Beatles.

A sense of loss from where I sit.

"Respectfully, that's bullshit."

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose NSA revelations sparked a debate on mass surveillance, has waded into the arguments over the FBI’s attempt to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C of one of the San Bernardino shooters.
The FBI says that only Apple can deactivate certain passcode protections on the iPhone, which will allow law enforcement to guess the passcode by using brute-force.
Talking via video link from Moscow to the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference, Snowden said: “The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that’s bullshit.”

When one whistleblower can excite more credulity than the U.S. government and its well-manicured minions, it really is time to reconsider the clout attributed to caring manicures. What would the fallout be is someone simply told the truth? True, it might cut into a well-appointed funding trough, but that loss might be offset by the fact that energy could now be expended on items that don't necessarily feather your nest or, coincidentally, needlessly frighten that constituency you are claiming to protect... a win-win situation when it comes to husbanding assets.

Saudi Arabia in the red?

As proof-positive of my financial stupidities, there is a story today indicating that Saudi Arabia is $100 billion in the red and is sniffing around for a $6 billion to $8 billion loan.

Saudi Arabia in the red????????

I always thought Saudi Arabia had more money than God and, moreover, was one of the few countries that funneled a slice of the pie back to its inhabitants in the form of cars or free education or other perks. So what the hell are they doing borrowing money?

My ignorance, as usual, runneth over.

76 somethings

Chirp, whistle, chuckle -- even before the street lamps surrendered to the light of dawn today, there were birds this morning, the first of the year as best I recall. A warm, grey morning, smooth as a satin cravat ... too warm by half for a March morning and yet there it is. My 76th birthday.

Doing or arranging or even thinking 76 things strikes me as highly unlikely these days and yet, without any effort whatsoever, 76 somethings have come to pass. It doesn't exactly cast aspersions on all the planning and plotting and organizing that can go into other things, but it does seem to smile a small smile: Go ahead -- work your ass off: It happens anyway.

$100 billion in ghost spending

Passed along in email:

twerp tantrum

I awake accompanied by the delicious crankiness of the word "twerp." I am sick of twerps, of the slow-but-sure devolution of my country into mediocracy, of the mindless elevation of sincerity that drowns out any principled nourishment. Bah! When was the last time my country could lay claim to a worthy advance or breakthrough? The health care plan was at least an attempt, but elsewhere it's a world full of greedy twerps, flag-wavers, war mongers and weenies.

As with all such criticisms, you can't see it if you can't be it. OK, I'm a potential twerp too. And still I am sick of twerps. It's grating and galling and, like some Tea Party mediocrat, I want to holler, "Go fuck yourself!" I'm oh-so-sincere, dontcha know.

"Twerp" is defined by an Internet dictionary as "a silly, insignificant, or contemptible person." This cut-and-dried definition fails to transmit the pure silliness and fun of the word "twerp" as it occurs in my mind. Twerps are small people -- small physically, small mentally ... small, as in the alleged size of Donald Trump's penis. They are silly, small idiots ... right up to the moment when the morning dawns and the twerps are running the show.

My elevated vantage point collapses in the face of the fact that self-righteous posturing has won the day and twerps rule. $12.37-an-hour-insurance-company clerks tell cardiac surgeons how long a patient can and, more important, cannot stay in the hospital in the wake of major surgery. What the rule book says is what those ruled must adhere to ... because these are the rules and without the rules, we would all be worse off. The fiction is extended: Rules can in fact rule and -- you'd better believe it -- improve life. This is, of course, true, right up to the moment when it becomes patently false and the age of mediocracy advances... and the movie "V for Vendetta" takes on a burning, pungent accuracy.

Twerps.

Twerps are like Potter Stewart's Supreme Court observation about pornography: "I may not know what it is, but I know it when I see it," he said in essence.

But in order not to be too badly tarred by my own twerp-prone brush, it really is necessary to point out what is not quite so twerp-y. What is it that would bank my fires ... gimme an example. And, of course, the minute I do, I run the very real risk of being branded a twerp by the sincere twerps who are building this mediocracy.

So be it.

In Seoul, South Korea, Lee Se-dol, the world champion of Go/baduk, is scheduled to play a five-game tournament against Google's artificial intelligence program:

"I've been telling people that I was certain that I would be the winner of all five matches. But Google - which developed the programme - seems to be quite confident, too".
He is spooked by the idea that the computer can adapt its game as it learns its opponent's style - his mechanical opponent will adapt its style as it studies his.
This idea that a computer can learn how to ultimately beat a human has frightening possibilities if it were ever eventually translated into weapons, for example.

Consider the breadth and depth:

The number of permutations in a game of Go is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, according to the Nature science journal, "so it can't be solved by algorithms that search exhaustively for the best move"....

Playing against a machine is very different from an actual human opponent," the world's Number 1 told the BBC.

"Normally, you can sense your opponent's breathing, their energy. And lots of times you make decisions which are dependent on the physical reactions of the person you're playing against.
"With a machine, you can't do that."

Of course, it's just a game and any twerp can point out things that are more sincere and more compelling than games.

Donald Trump, for example.

PS. And then there's the apparent excellence of the discovery of a way to promote regeneration of the cataract-afflicted eye.

bequest

With a 76th birthday creeping up, there is a sense that where some things grow narrow, others grow more broad. Narrower, from the current vantage point, is the possibility of becoming a cowboy or astronaut or anything other than what has somehow come to pass. Broader is the way that leads to "joining the majority."

I wonder: Do others, as it seems I have, wake up one day vaguely surprised to find that habits and capacities have set themselves in a fairly simple array. Two or three things claim a focal presence and the rest is pretty much cotton candy. And there's no changing it now.

For example, my two or three things seem to be family, writing and what might vaguely be referred to as religion. It's not something I am especially proud or ashamed of, it's just what seems to have happened and now I'm stuck with a farm of my own devising. It's perfectly understandable, in one sense, but in another, it's sort of weird: How the hell did that happen? Those who attempt to answer this question with cause-and-effect or some other knee-jerk explanation give me the creeps. "Take your need to control someplace else," I am inclined to snap. Weird is weird and like most weird things, it's not really all that weird in the end.

And it is within this context that I suck on the hard-candy of the word "bequest." What is it that I will bequeath when I do in fact join the majority? Obituaries are laced with hobbies and jobs and good deeds (when, let's admit it, it is the naughty ones that make better reading) litter obituary paragraphs. Obituaries are for those left behind. But what of the one bequeathing -- what would s/he say or hope for the two or three things that have taken the helm?

How would I bequeath family or writing or religion? How would that be possible? And yet these are the items I count as central to this life. Something central ... and yet the first thing I notice is that there is no possibility of grasping such things. Grasping is the precursor to giving something away -- to bequeathing.

The important stuff cannot be grasped and hence cannot be bequeathed and yet what else do I have to offer from this broad way that points me to the world of the "majority?" I feel like a footprint in the wet beach sand as the tide advances and erasure is assured.

"Assured" is almost as weird as "bequest." Sure enough, things go away. That's on the one hand. But on the other hand, where could they possibly go?

Sure ... right ... OK -- there is the Butterfly Effect, the notion that a fart in Tierra del Fuego will inevitably alter the Great Wall of China. But does that make a bequest any less weird? A Ph.D. might say so, but I wouldn't.

The important two or three things -- the ones anyone might be curious as to the outcome or benevolence or unintended consequences or gifting ... maybe some things are just bound to be weird and not weird at all. Tough titty.

Americans for Trump

Passed along in email:

Sayonara Bernie

I sent the following to the newspaper several days ago. It is sloppy, but I thought they might use it. Now, it appears, they won't:

SAYONARA BERNIE

Before Bernie Sanders finally falls off the flat earth that is American politics, I for one would like to say a farewell thanks: He, at least, had the self-immolating nerve to raise issues that affect the country I live in.

Education, climate, disparity of wealth, jobs, and a host of other issues that play out quietly where the applause is stilled and individual voters secretly care -- these have been among his offerings. No klieg lights, no confetti -- just a realm in which the good of the country and its citizens comes first.

Of all the people who helped Hillary Clinton become the first woman president of the United States, I would say Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are first in line. Sanders held the bright torch that Clinton tried and failed to co-opt with sound bites. Trump's emotional appeal was another sort of national torch -- of anger and confusion and frustration with no clarity and no quarter.

Of course, who knows: Perhaps this implicit prediction is entirely wrong and Trump will gain the day: There is no explanation for the myth that lemmings jump off an equally mythological cliff and likewise American voters may have an inexplicable need to go "wheeeeeee!" as they anoint the acidic boisterousness of Donald Trump. "President Trump" may be the new normal.

Sanders' bright light held out hope for a nation less fractured. Clinton has a sound bite for that, but Sanders touched the quiet passion that unification can engender. As Trump's supporters can attest, passion can override particulars and Sanders supporters like me could feel a longing addressed in his cliff-bound travels.

As far as I can figure out, Sanders did fail in one particular: He never did get the electorate to look up the word "socialism" to find out what it meant when it wasn't busy being denigrated by those who likewise never looked it up.

But in the face of the other good things Sanders did, this failing is minor. Knowing what you are talking about has never been the strong suit in political jousts.

Before Sanders goes off the cliff ... well, I'd like to say thanks.

Live long and prosper, Bernie.

skewering the photographer

Photographer Greg Armfeld came in for a raft of often-snarky criticism after a photo surfaced showing him taking pictures of something other than the black rhinos he had set out to immortalize in Kenya. It seemed like a picture-perfect oops moment.

The trouble is, according to Armfeld, no one really did their homework. To hear him tell it, he had already shot a lot of pictures of the black rhinoceroses mating before he turned his camera elsewhere.

Black rhinos are not, apparently, known for premature ejaculation.  And not only are they in no rush to wrap up their sexual liaisons, they also are not known to practice the various imaginative and photogenic positions recommended by the Kama Sutra.

Bottom line: However rare catching black rhinos in the act of mating may be, still, after 45 minutes and the first hundred or so pictures, it gets pretty boring.

Sounds to me like a perfect moment in which to move on.

Clinton, Trump and tax plans

At the same time that Republican contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination sink lower and lower into schoolyard naughtiness and utterly irrelevant insult (spoiler Donald Trump felt compelled to defend the size of his penis Thursday in the face of a comment by Marco Rubio), still (I could barely believe it) there was a meat-and-potatoes comparison by the Tax Policy Center that distinguished Clinton's and Trump's tax proposals. A Thinkprogress article stated:

The heart of Clinton’s tax proposals center on increasing taxes on the wealthiest taxpayers, toughening corporate taxes, and increasing taxes on inheritances and gifts. She announced a “fair tax surcharge” of 4 percent on all income — from both salaries and investments — above $5 million in January, and she also proposes requiring people with incomes over $1 million to pay at least a 30 percent effective tax rate. She wants to raise the capital gains tax rate on investment income, which is currently lower than the rate on ordinary income, and end the loophole for carried interest and other deductions.
Taken together, an analysis from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center finds, “Nearly all of the tax increases would fall on the top 1 percent; the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers would see little or no change in their taxes.” Specifically, over the first decade nearly 80 percent of her tax increases would fall on the wealthiest 1 percent, while less than 2 percent would fall on the bottom three-fifths of the country. Someone in the 1 percent would owe nearly $120,000 more, while the poorest Americans would owe $6 more. (The Tax Policy Center’s report notes that the campaign has pledged tax cuts for low- and middle-income families that aren’t factored in given that the details haven’t been released.)
That stands in stark contrast to Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s plan. His proposal — which includes lowering the corporate tax rate and the capital gains rate, reducing the top tax rate paid by the highest income Americans, and ending taxes on inheritances altogether — would overwhelmingly help the rich. Over a decade, the top 1 percent would get more than $400,000 in tax relief, while the poorest would get just $209. The 1 percent captures nearly 40 percent of his tax benefits, while the bottom three-fifths get just 16.4 percent.
Trump’s giveaway to the rich would also be quite costly. The Tax Policy Center has estimated that it would cost the government $9.5 trillion in revenue over 10 years...

Yes, it's reading anyone might prefer not to do, but in the midst of a campaign era so boldly lacking in specifics, there is something positively refreshing when someone tries to disentangle who will get wooed and who will get screwed.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled genitalia ward....

PS. I can't resist the associative link I draw to actress Betty White who once cast doubt on a man's balls as a signifier of courage and strength and manliness. White pointed out that a man's balls were tender and delicate and that if anyone wanted a symbol of durability and strength, a woman's vagina would be a better example: "Now there is something," she said approximately, "that takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'."

don't take my fictions!

Those like me who are enmeshed in the fictions and symbology of a great white whale may find their preconceptions jostled by the recent sighting the real McCoy off the Mexico coast. Yes, Virginia, there is a great white whale and its name is not Moby Dick.

Nor yet is the Mexico wonderment a solo occurrence. The following sighting was recorded off Australia's shores last August:



There is a part of me that slaps the table in irritation: How the hell am I supposed to enjoy my fictions when the facts keep intruding?!

Think of all the people out there -- like me -- running around proclaiming the reality or truth of God or love or compassion or suffering or enlightenment or cruelty or anger or whatever all else and then suddenly it really is true. Just true. Plain as cardboard -- true. It is as if life assumed the guise of a patient and somewhat tart grandmother saying softly, "Of course it's true, dear."

Think of all the newly-created free time that might now be devoted to washing the dishes or doing some other useful chore.

Of course I'm irritated: Washing dishes is not my favorite pastime.

"existentialism"

Spent too much time today writing and then reading the following article about "existentialism." 

Think big, be free, have sex … 10 reasons to be an existentialist

a well-rounded insult

It's not every day that you hear an insult that is worth preserving, but today I was put in memory of the 1965 World's Fair, where I had a job working for the General Electric exhibition. I was one of a number of young people assembled to direct visitors and one of those coworkers was Mary Gizzy, a tart-tongued wit even at 25, or whatever age we were.

Mary and I were talking one day about a co-worker neither of us liked much and as usual Mary rendered her judgment with a take-no-prisoners assurance:

"She's ugly and her mother dresses her funny."

To this day, I wish I'd said that.

'unintended consequences'

An Australian author says she "fell off her chair" when she discovered an email about a $150,000 (A$207,000; £106,000) literary award was not a hoax.

Helen Garner initially dismissed the message from Yale University as a hoax.
"I thought what the hell is this? Somebody's having me on," Ms Garner told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
She was going to delete the email but thought to call her publisher, who informed her that the Windham-Campbell prize was in fact real....
She was not the only author to be taken aback by the surprise award, because the prizes have no submission process. "Writers are judged anonymously and unaware that they are in the running," Yale says on its website.

 A dream come true: Something -- and something yummy and unexpected -- happens as a result of doing something you had entirely other aims with. The sage and the serene stroke their beards and declaim smugly, "the law of unintended consequences." It is as if, by using that label, the unexpected could somehow be placed in thrall. And that's not to mention the lazy chatter boxes' saying things like, "everything happens for a reason." Or the lookit-me-Ma recitation of "the butterfly effect."

Nevertheless, despite all the control freaks, it does make you wonder about all the unintended consequences, whether yummy or not, that occur all the time without any notice or accolade at all. Spit on the sidewalk and the Great Wall of China gains or loses some ineffable grandeur.... that sort of thing.

"Trumped"

Passed along in email:

in the watery crosshairs

To assess a "resounding stupidity" in the family of man says more about the assessor than it does about the assessed. For all that, I am willing to be assessed as "resoundingly stupid" when it comes to the Mosul dam in Iraq.

Tribes and political factions and religious breast-beaters bicker and kill each other like school boys who have just discovered masturbation and meanwhile a potential one million people stand in danger of dying because no one can implement a fix on the decaying dam.

It is enough to leave Edvard Munch's "The Scream" in the shadows.

The engineers warned that potential loss of life from a sudden catastrophic collapse of the Mosul dam could be even greater than the 500,000 officially estimated, as they said many people could die in the resulting mass panic, with a 20-metre-high flood wave hitting the city of Mosul and then rolling on down the Tigris valley through Tikrit and Samarra to Baghdad.

True, it's "over there."

True, from the white man's unacknowledged aerie, it's just a bunch of brown people.

But the situation is like so many others elsewhere: If you're going to run around participating in yet another bloodbath -- one that is "right" and "true" and "virtuous" of course -- wouldn't it be nice to kill others in aid of gaining some worthwhile prize ... as for example a dam that worked and one that provided sustenance to those you hoped to enslave or liberate? Wouldn't it be smarter to fix the dam and then set about prosecuting a bloodbath? What's the point of winning when there's no longer anything left to win?

A million people ... stupid, stupider, stupidest ... that's me.

the explain game

On the one hand, if something can be explained, its benevolent or malevolent fallout comes under apparent control. Perhaps the good stuff can be repeated and the bad stuff avoided. So maybe that's a plus for the world of explanations.

On the other hand, isn't there something to be said for the moments (or perhaps years) before a particular event can fall credibly under the explanatory scalpel ... the time when what is simply is without any sage Post-its appended?

I'm not sure, but I think I think that examining a world without explanation is not better or worse, but rather deserves examination as something that cannot be dodged. Without some capacity not-to-explain, explaining takes on a frantic and self-serving quality that cannot stand up in the tight places.

Maybe it's like having five fingers: No need to obsess about it, but not to know and acknowledge would be stupider still.

India addresses military cheats

Hundreds of young men in India's Bihar state have been made to strip down to their underwear while appearing for an army recruitment test in an attempt to prevent cheating.

Super Tuesday

Around here, it's Super Tuesday, a time when a gaggle of states offer voters a chance to have a delegate-say in the upcoming presidential race of 2016.

I will vote for Bernie Sanders, the progressive 'socialist' who has managed like no other to convince the American electorate NOT to look up what the hell a socialist actually stands for.

I will vote for Bernie Sanders because I want Hillary Clinton -- the first woman president of the United States -- to get the message.

a bit of Donald Trump fluff

Snapped off the following bit of fluff a couple of evenings back and submitted it to The Guardian on a whim. Since, on reflection, the submission strikes me as highly unlikely, I thought I'd inflict the cotton candy on the more forgiving space here:

LIE TO ME WITH A BRITISH ACCENT

Americans can genuflect with the best of them when the mere mention of "Downton Abbey" or some other aristocratic tableau is brought to bear. There is something so soothing and elevating and downright dignified about all those well-scrubbed and well-heeled and well-controlled denizens of the social stratosphere.

And although I have sworn off the opiod of "Downton Abbey" in its latest seasonal incarnation, still I find myself longing for that sense of dignity when listening to the political hullabaloo here in the United States.

If there were ever a man better suited to everything the European aristocracy might look down upon, I can't think of one better than Donald Trump. Not only is he obscenely rich, but he manages to fold in a stupidity that is truly mesmerizing. Oh, and did I mention loud? Donald Trump is unabashedly loud in stark contrast to the almost-Japanese reticence of the upper-crust Brits or French.

The man is an embarrassment to the country I belong to. Somehow I imagine the French as being particularly catty and I can't say that I blame them. On the other hand, it was the French who managed to build the 500,000 square feet of Versailles with precisely zero toilets as we know them today. The smell was pretty potent, much as Donald Trump's brickbats are.

Where is the dignity and careful consideration that hunger and education and healthcare and employment and the endless munificence of war deserve in my wishful mind? I don't give a damn where anyone goes or doesn't go to church: Aren't there issues deserving of Lord Grantham's fictitious gravitas?

I think there are.

But I am also somewhat schizophrenic. On the one hand, a little suave certainty, delivered in measured tones, would go a long way to speaking to the whole nation as opposed to addressing some raucous constituency that is fed up with the Lord Grantham wannabes of the past. On the other hand, the ingrown blindness of a lineage that rarely sees beyond its cosseted being has a kind of stupidity that is likewise galling: Scratch the surface and reveal the incestuous politesse that rides roughshod over honest difficulties.

In the midst of the blitzkrieg that is Donald Trump, there is a part of me that loves "Cinderella" and other fairy tales that live happily ever after and have a certain quiet dignity and kindness to them. The tones and notes of the 'good ol' boys' in their good ol' ties calls out to me. And to remain aboveboard, yes, there still is a part of me that thinks anyone with a British accent is, ipso facto, smarter than I am. True, George Orwell, that pin-wielding gadfly in the balloon factory, is a hero of mind, yet even he knew the fine art of five-course silverware. How else could he be so effective?

Is there a middle ground in all of this -- some dignified person not given to bouts of mindless volume on the one hand or consumed by an underlying insistence that "l'état, c'est moi" on the other?

I considered suggesting we give the colonies back to the Brits, but that seems a harsh possibility. So perhaps the answer lies in borrowing someone like Michael Kitchen, an actor whose TV persona as Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle in "Foyle's War" was credible and quiet and firm ... and could think.

Yes, I think he would do quite nicely.

I just want someone to lie to me with a British accent.

leg- and ass-room

Yes, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton trounced Bernie Sanders in South Carolina Saturday. Yes, the wracking obscenity of human migration is unremitting even as the bombings abate in the Middle East. Yes, an Indian man fatally slit the throats of 14 family members.

Yes, there are a lot of serious stories out there.

And yet what caught my attention was the tale of Democrat Senator Charles Schumer who has vowed to try to pressure America's airlines and provide enough legroom/assroom on their flights.

The New York Democrat told The Associated Press the airlines have been slowly cutting down legroom and seat width....
Schumer said the average distance between rows of seats has dropped from 35 inches in the 1970s to a current average of about 16.5 inches. He argues that the requirement is needed to stop airlines from shrinking seats and seat pitch, the distance between rows of seats on airplanes, even further.

It's the small and practical stuff -- the lies allowed to go unchallenged -- that can stick in a disaffected craw. "Chocolate" cake that is barely chocolate ... that sort of thing. If no one can get the little and obvious stuff right, what hope is there for the big and complex matters?

It seems unlikely I will ever ride in a plane again, but I applaud Schumer in his quixotic quest. He will in all likelihood be shot down by airline donors (we paid for your political victory, now it's time for you to pay us back), but at least there is some passing nod to those for whom government was once confected ... you know ... the suckers.