So many AI-narrated videos feature fake British accents – why?

The tone is posh and often supercilious – why?

There’s monotony.

Many mispronunciations, like “desert” for “dessert” or vice versa. Or like “read” present tense for “read” past tense.

There’s the pause at the end of a line of text even if it’s in mid-sentence.

Some feature a little exhaled sigh – “ah” – in an effort to make the voice seem human. It’s an effort that fails utterly.

But most annoying of all is when AI narration uses the first person. Who is this “I” of whom you speak, kimosabe?

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Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson is in a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart — who is also his second cousin, according to a new report.

Jackson, 58, and Lana Pelletier share two adult sons and the same great-grandparents, according to Thursday’s report by independent journalist Steve Robinson, who notes that such relationships are both legal under state law and not uncommon in the rural North Maine Woods region, near the Canadian border.

While Jackson, a onetime logger and the former president of the Maine State Senate, has described Pelletier as his wife in the past, locals tell Robinson the couple has never been legally married.

Where to begin?

It used to be that people living in what used to quaintly be called “sin” – that is, in quasi-marriage outside of wedlock – were not especially politically viable. Those days are long gone, so that’s not the issue here. The issue is what I’d call the “ick factor” of being sexually involved with one’s second cousin.

But it’s not illegal anywhere in the US, nor is there much evidence that it’s harmful in the genetic sense unless there’s a known specific hereditary disease carried by both cousins. Here’s why:

he chance that a baby is born with a birth defect or disability is between 2-3%. So, if a hundred people have babies, we would expect that 2 or 3 to be born with some sort of problem. Which of course means that 97 or 98 are fine.

At 3.5%, the risk is slightly higher for second cousins. Still, 96 or 97 out of a hundred babies are born without any major problems.What this all means is that while there is increased risk, it doesn’t really qualify as a “high chance.” Even first cousins at 5% aren’t that big of a risk.

Keep in mind though that these are average numbers. Like people who are not related, your actual risk depends on the genes you and your spouse have.

Note that the article about Jackson mentions that such marriages are “not uncommon in the rural North Maine Woods region, near the Canadian border.” Well, it’s confession time: not only are such marriages “not uncommon” on the paternal side of my own family, but first cousin marriages were also “not uncommon” among that crew. In fact, they were very common.

And they didn’t live anywhere near the north of Maine, either. They lived in Belarus.

I didn’t know very much about my own heritage until I did some genealogical research on my family about seven years ago. I found out a great many fascinating things (see this for a previous post of mine on finding a long-lost maternal relation). One of those things was that my father’s family, even at the level of my grandfather’s generation – not one of whom I ever met, including my grandfather – tended to marry their first cousins. In fact, I found that the same three surnames occurred over and over and over, so much so that the families were intertwined in a way that made it difficult for my newly-found second cousins and I to determine just how closely we were related. Were we second cousins? Double second cousins? Double first-cousins once-removed?

We finally gave up on figuring it out, but got a great many chuckles about all of us being the product of some sort of vast network of first-cousin marriage. I finally figured out something about that, though: since the families were also very large (my paternal grandfather was one of between ten and sixteen children, the first born in the 1840s and my grandfather born in the late 1860s), and this was a typical family size back then, they probably had something like over a hundred first cousins.

That’s a mighty big pool from which to choose. If they lived in the same or neighboring villages and cities, it would be a pretty convenient pool, too. Why not marry a cousin and keep it in the family?

There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of insanity or any especially dramatic genetic diseases, as far as I can tell. Oddness yes, and eccentricity. But I’m not sure that wouldn’t have been the case even without the cousin marriage. There’s a marked tendency to be good at math, and that’s about it. We don’t look like each other, either. And below the level of my grandparents, I knew very few of these relatives, but found a whole host of them – really nice people, by the way – through genetic testing. We tried to piece together what had estranged the families, and decided it had to do with a business they were in together that precipitated a falling-out.

In recent years, there’s not been a whiff of cousin marriage or even second-cousin marriage in the group. But I guess that what I think of Jackson’s arrangement – I’m basically indifferent to it and certainly not especially shocked by it – has at least something to do with this family history of mine.

However, I can’t stand Jackson’s politics. But that’s a separate issue.

The post On cousin marriage appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve seen another Nolan film: Diunkirk. I watched it in a movie theater in 2017, and I reviewed it this post, the title of which is “The Dunkirk Din.”

That title says a lot. One thing it says is that the sound problems are consistent and we can safely conclude they are a choice (and an echo). Here are some excerpts from that post:

I thought “Dunkirk” was the sort of movie that would be good to see in one of those RPX movie theaters. But I took the precaution of taking some earplugs along with me to protect my sensitive ears.

I was tremendously glad I did. One of the first things I noticed about the movie was the assaultive, hideous sound, which even the earplugs couldn’t dull enough for me. I felt the need to push them in deeper with my fingers and kept covering my ears, too. And even then, the blasting percussive bass made the seats vibrate so forcefully that it almost felt as though those Spitfires were flying right over us.

I assume that was the point. Unfortunately, it seemed to be almost the only point of the movie, which concentratee on giving the audience the feeling that we are participants in Dunkirk, The Video Game.

The film is a real blockbuster and has been widely and highly praised. But I had so many quarrels with it that I left the theater almost angry.

Read the whole thing, if you’re interested.

I had been forewarned by reviews about the sound problem; that’s why I came to the experience prepared with the earplugs. But although the sound wasn’t the only problem, it certainly was a big problem. I’ll not subject myself to that again.

The question is, why does Nolan do this? Apparently he’s more interested in spectacle and visuals than in the lowly human interaction known as spoken communication. Now, movies are definitely a visual medium, and so that’s very important. But if people can’t follow the plot and are bombarded by almost-assaultive music, that’s pretty awful. However, Nolan is so highly praised that maybe most people don’t care, or agree with him that spoken human interaction isn’t particularly important.

In that post of mine on Dunkirk, there’s a quote from some veterans of the actual WWII Dunkirk who had attended the movie. They remarked that the film experience was louder than Dunkirk itself had been.

If you’re interested in the technical reasons given for the sound choices in Nolan’s films, see either or both of these two rather short videos:

[NOTE: I also saw the Nolan film Interstellar, but I didn’t review it here. Nevertheless, I distinctly recall being frustrated at not being able to understand quite a bit of the dialogue.]

The post That Christopher Nolan sound appeared first on The New Neo.

I haven’t been able to find a good replacement for the jacket, so I figured I’d just have a new zipper put in, because it’s so badly broken it can’t be fixed. I took it to the local place I’ve used for years for alterations, and they said it would cost eighty-two dollars to replace the zipper.

Eighty-two dollars.

That’s considerably more than the jacket originally cost. I could replace the entire jacket for much less than that, if I only could find one a lot like it. I’ve looked and looked but so far no dice.

So I set about to find someone else to do the alteration, and discovered that such people are hard to find. It’s like shoemakers. I guess repairing clothing is outdated, although it seems to me that there’s still a need. But the craftspeople just aren’t there any more. I called a host of them and for the most part their phone numbers no longer work.

I did manage to find one person who still does that sort of thing, but she’s off for the summer, and she added that she’s already booked up in September and much of October. She charges forty dollars for a zipper replacement. But again, the entire jacket originally cost something like that, and it’s not even that old.

For that matter, why do zippers break so often these days? Do they not make them like they used to?

And don’t tell me to do the zipper replacement myself. I haven’t a clue how, although I can sew. They taught us in grade school, and it was pretty intensive. I know how to do all sorts of fancy stitches, but not how to replace a large zipper in a jacket. I actually tried to do something similar with a sweatshirt, but gave up.

My guess is that schools don’t teach kids how to sew anymore, either.

I’m in a grousing mood.

The post Whither alterations? appeared first on The New Neo.

When I was about to start writing, the blog went down. Nor was it the usual “too many requests” problem. This time the glitch was at the level of the host’s server, and it affected quite a few sites. I don’t know how many, but when I phoned the server the agent told me that a whole tranche of their hosted sites were down, and that it would probably take “a few hours” to fix the issue. It seems to have taken close to three hours.

This sort of thing is frustrating. But it happens now and then with all hosts, as far as I can tell. A while back I looked into changing hosts, and there seemed to be many problems reported for all of them. So I’ve stuck with mine, for better or for worse.

Apologies to everyone who was trying to access the site this afternoon. But at least it wasn’t that something was wrong with this particular blog.

Meanwhile, I used part of the down time to work on a document in Word, and discovered that a recent update there had generated a bunch of automatic things that I don’t want. For instance, there were constant AI prompts trying to guess what I wanted to write next. I do not want that sort of “help.” But to figure out how to turn it off was not the easiest thing, although I finally accomplished it.

Technical stuff; gotta love it.

The post I’m baaaack appeared first on The New Neo.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the most prominent and powerful foreign policy hawk in Congress, died suddenly Saturday following reported chest pains and cardiac arrest. He was 71.

For more than two decades, Graham championed the peace through American strength abroad, advocating for military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq — and Iran.

Graham had a lot of enemies, including some on the right, and he had a lot of friends. He even had some enemies turned friends, such as President Trump, who grew close to him. Many tributes poured in, and of course much online hatred as well, in the manner of our present age.

I didn’t always agree with Graham, although I often did. I think his finest hour – certainly his most intense hour – was at the Kavanaugh hearings:

Recently, Graham had been busy flying to Ukraine, working on bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, and promoting the SAVE Act. I also just learned, from this article, that he hadn’t taken advantage of his position to amass enormous wealth, comparatively speaking:

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham ranked among the bottom half of Congress’ big earners despite more than three decades in office and a top role leading the GOP.

Graham, 71, died Saturday night with a net worth of nearly $1.5 million, leaving the senator, who had a modest upbringing in South Carolina, ranked at 294th in wealth among the 535 voting members of Congress, according to data from the Quiver Quantitative tracker. …

Despite a 31-year career in Congress that catapulted Graham to the center of power in the Senate, the South Carolina native has never strayed too far from his humble roots.

Graham grew up in a blue-collar family in the small town of Central, where his parents ran a restaurant and pool hall known as the Sanitary Cafe. A young Graham lived in the room right behind the family business.

The late senator previously credited his working-class upbringing — in which he helped his parents run their restaurant — with pushing him to be the first person in his family to go to college.

But while he was attending the University of South Carolina, both his parents died of illness just 15 months apart from each other, leaving Graham to legally adopt his then-13-year-old sister and get her through her education.

After earning his law degree, Graham joined the Air Force …

I saw Graham in person once, and I was extremely impressed, but not by what you’d imagine. It was at a large outdoor gathering during the 2015-2016 primary season, and he was running for president. He dropped out early in the game, but this was before that. There was a big crowd but not an enormous one, it was a beautiful day, and there were about ten speakers – all of them GOP candidates for the presidency. When it came Graham’s turn he spoke for about fifteen minutes.

I of course knew who he was, but he surprised me by being incredibly humorous. I mean really zany quips, one after the other, all of them sounding like ad libs, all of them incredibly witty. I hadn’t ever seen that side of him, and he was in rare form. Afterwards I somehow found myself speaking to a volunteer for his campaign, and I asked if this was unusual. She said he was constantly cracking them up with his humor.

RIP Lindsey Graham.

The post RIP Lindsey Graham appeared first on The New Neo.

Some of history’s greatest empires have devolved into genocidal lunacy—often with shocking compliance from their own people. What methods can create this madness?

In Manufacturing Delusion, acclaimed conservative commentator and former CIA officer Buck Sexton offers answers. Drawing on his intelligence experience, expertise in crowd psychology, knowledge of propaganda, and research into some of history’s darkest totalitarian chapters, he equips you to identify mind control tactics used to form compliant citizens. He explores the eight tactics of mass delusion through examining:

— How Stalin used Pavlovian mind games to establish absolute control
— How Chinese thought reform transformed opposition into terrorized pawns
— How Jihadist preachers replace shared humanity with weaponized fear

Using these examples and others, Sexton walks you through a history of controlling regimes and the methods they used to create passive citizens. More importantly, he shows you how some of the early stages of mass delusion have already occurred right here in the United States of America, on issues of public health, gender, and racial justice.

I heard about the book through this interview with the author. Although the book’s title only mentions the left, he says in the interview that he also sees it on the right (or the former right, or the pretend right – aka Carlson and Owens). However, that is still a fringe group on the right, whereas it’s a widespread and mainstreamed tool of the left.

Here’s the interview:

In the interview, Sexton also mentions a much older book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost A. M. Meerloo. It was first published in 1956 and this is from Amazon’s description:

In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective “truth” on their victims’ minds. In “The Rape of the Mind” he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized “rape of the mind.” He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The “Rape of the Mind” is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists. Contents: Part One: The Techniques of Individual Submission. 1. You Too Would Confess. 2. Pavlov’s Students as Circus Tamers. 3. Medication into Submission. 4. Why Do They Yield? The Psychodynamics of False Confession. Part Two: The Techniques of Mass Submission. 5. The Cold War against the Mind. 6. Totalitaria and its Dictatorship. 7. The Intrusion by Totalitarian Thinking. 8. Trial by Trial. 9. Fear as a Tool of Terror. Part Three: Unobtrusive Coercion. 10. The Child is Father to the Man. 11. Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion. 12. Technology Invades Our Minds. 13. Intrusion by the Administrative Mind. 14. The Turncoat in Each of Us. Part Four: In Search of Defenses. 15. Training Against Mental Torture. 16. Education for Discipline or Higher Morale. 17. From Old to New Courage. 18. Freedom — Our Mental Backbone

I think “our mental backbone” has gone rather squishy lately.

The reason I have highlighted the Meerloo book, though, is that – strangely enough – I read it when I was about ten years old. Did I understand it? Certainly not deeply. But the topic already interested me so much that I plowed through it.

How did it fall into my hands? My family had received a free and unsolicited catalogue in the mail from Marboro Books, which was (according to Google AI) “a notable discount book retailer and publisher founded in 1947, famous for selling remainders and overstock books at steep discounts through retail stores and mail-order catalogs, the chain was acquired by Barnes & Noble in 1979.” When the catalogue came, I pored over it, fascinated. It was the first time it occurred to me that I could order an adult book – and by “adult” I certainly don’t mean anything to do with sex.

My childhood interests were a portent of things to come as a blogger, because not only did I order that Meerloo book with my allowance, but I also ordered Charles MacKay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds. That one was first published in 1841:

The subjects of Mackay’s debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics.

I think I’m going to order the Sexton book. I seem to have lost the others along the way, although I had them for a long long time.

The post Writing the book on mass indoctrination appeared first on The New Neo.

They used to make a lot of patriotic movies, and I think it’s high time the genre got a revival. The title of the new film about Washington reminds me of the old chestnut Young Mr. Lincoln, one of my favorites from childhood when I saw it several times on TV. Here’s a scene; you’ll see they made up Henry Fonda to look a tiny bit more like Lincoln, whom he resembled not at all:

Speaking of Fonda and patriotic movies, here’s another one I saw on TV many many times as a child. This one is set in Revolutionary times, when the Mohawk Valley in New York was considered the western frontier: Drums Along the Mohawk. I notice now that both films not only starred Henry Fonda but they were both directed by John Ford and both were released in the magical year for movies, 1939. A busy time for both.

As a very young child I fell in love with Henry Fonda in these films. Do you think children can’t fall in love? I submit that they certainly can. At any rate, if you want to remember what a good actor Fonda was, watch this scene from Drums Along the Mohawk:

The post A revival of the patriotic film genre? appeared first on The New Neo.

I’m thinking that the country feels like it’s under internal siege. But you know, I’ve felt that way before. I write about the dangers often, and so I’m not going to write about them today. It’s a holiday, a big one.

Today I’m just going to note that I really do believe this is the greatest country on earth. Although threatened at times, our commitment to liberty is unmatched by that of any other country. The World Cup visitors from afar are surprised at our friendliness, our energy, our huge portions, our generosity.

I remember hearing from my son, when he lived in South America for quite a while, that although in some ways he could pass for a native, people always knew he was an American even before he opened up his mouth and demonstrated that he had an accent. Why? It was because of the way he walked. And I’ve heard other people say that Americans stride in a different way, a more open and free gait that identifies them.

America may just be the most beautiful country in the world in the sense of natural wonders, too. It’s certainly one of them, anyway. That’s partly because it’s so large and the terrain and climate and flora and fauna so varied. I recall learning in art history class that many of the early paintings of the American West – such as, for example, by Bierstadt – were designed to show Easterners and denizens of the Old World the wonders of the New. They could scarcely believe what they saw. And granted, it was a somewhat idealized version – but not that far off from reality:

I remember the 1976 Bicentennial vividly. But that was a long time ago. I was young, and now – well, let’s just say I’m not young anymore. But that star-spangled banner still waves o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Have a wonderful celebration!

The post Reflections on the 250th Fourth appeared first on The New Neo.

Homeowners are being forced to tear out air conditioning from their private properties under climate laws, despite rising temperatures.

Council planning officers ordered residents to remove air-con units over fears they produce too much carbon dioxide, stating they should only be used as a “last resort”.

The net zero clampdown is part of building regulations that state “active cooling” should only ever be allowed when all other means of “passive cooling”, such as opening windows or using fans, have been exhausted.

The Tories said Britain was being “kept in the dark ages” under a net zero mindset that denies people “modern conveniences that are completely normal in other countries”.

It’s not happening everywhere in Britain, but it’s happening. And it’s a reminder that the commitment to liberty in Britain and in much of Europe is lukewarm at best.

Of course, our own leftists are salivating at the chance to do the same here – to exercise more and more control over every aspect of people’s lives “for our own good.”

Plus, Europe has been experiencing a heat wave of major proportions:

Temperatures soared to record highs from Switzerland to the Czech Republic and Denmark on Saturday, as a heat wave that baked western European countries this week moved to central and eastern parts of the continent.

Unusually high temperatures were recorded even in the Nordic countries not known for sweltering summers. Denmark’s Meteorological Institute reported a record 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Ødum north of Aarhus — the warmest day since records there began in 1874. …

Germany’s famous Autobahn was overwhelmed, too, as temperatures were expected to hit 40 C (104 F). In two places outside Berlin, the concrete of the A2 burst due to the high temperatures and the highway had to be closed. …

The Czech Republic also saw its hottest day on record, with 40.8 C (105.4 F) in the northern town of Doksany. Forecasters said it may still rise.

That’s hot, all right. But in the US, not all that unusual. Even the New England states reach high levels at times, with record highs generally more in the 105-107 vicinity.

As a young child, I lived without air conditioning in New York, in a home that didn’t have much cross-ventilation. It was pretty brutal at times in the summer. I also remember that a lot of homes had awnings on the windows that went up in the summer, to create at least a slightly cooling effect. On very hot days, sometimes we’d go to the movies – thirty-five cents admission – because they were usually air conditioned. Ah, the relief!

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