Douglas Whaley

Yes, robots are taking over more and more jobs these days, and we—the luddites—mightily protest in vain.  But there are some tasks, important to us, where robots will do things much better than humans ever can, and for such tasks we should welcome the efficiency these mechanical helpers bring. Using AI to replace the job of baseball’s home plate umpire to call pitches as balls or strikes is an obvious example. I am a major baseball fan, watching close to a hundred games a year (almost all of them being my beloved Cubbies—see Related Posts below).   In recent years most televised games show us a graphic of the strike zone and whether, according to the computer, the pitched ball actually touched it or not.   The real life umpire cannot see this graphic and continues to call balls and strikes in the old fashioned way: giving his best estimate of whether the ball was actually in the strike zone.   Professional umpires are trained well an...

Climate change, of course, will deal the fatal blow, and no one who has looked into the data doubts it. Globally 110 million tons of man-made pollution are produced daily (something our planet hasn’t experienced since three million years ago when the earth was boiling).  In the recent bestseller “The Uninhabitable Earth---Life After Warming” author David Wallace-Wells walks the reader through all the horrors that are already building and leads us to the obvious and terrifying conclusion: civilization will collapse by 2100 and the humans that are left will be warring tribes.  All of this can be prevented only if the entire population of the earth, as a unity, takes major preventative steps in the next twenty years . After twenty years it will be too late to stop the coming nightmare.  The book is terrifying to read but it’s not dull: a real page turner listing how we got here and the horrors that are just over the hill.  Be warned that once you r...

When I heard that one of the many candidates running for president on the Democratic side was an openly gay man who was the mayor of a small Indiana city I dismissed him as a dreamer with no attachment to reality.  This dismissal was shored up on learning he’s only 37 and has an unpronounceable last name [Buttigieg].  But then I was startled to learn that polls have this man as number three in the huge pack of possible candidates (behind two elders: Biden and Sanders), and that he is climbing in the estimation of more or less everyone.  Hmm. Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg (yes, all of that), most commonly known as “Mayor Pete,” turns out to be a formidable candidate in spite of the supposed problems noted above.  He is reputed nationally as a “mayor’s mayor,” widely regarded as one of the finest municipal executives in the country, and much beloved by the people of South Bend, Indiana, who reelected him with 80% of the v...

It is estimated that over 700,000 people currently living in the United States have undergone some form of gay conversion therapy (about half were teenagers at the time) designed to change them from homosexual to heterosexual.   Many of the groups offering this miraculous transformation are religious in origin, the premier one in this country being “Love In Action,” now renamed “Restoration Path” and still going strong in 2019.   A leading organization having offshoots all over the world was “Exodus International,” which handled many thousands of such cases before folding in 2013 [see Related Posts below]. These gay conversion groups have many methods to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals.  In the recent movies “Boy Erased” and “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” (both available for viewing on the internet) the young people—a male in the first and a female in the second—are placed in an environment very like a summer camp and rigorously tra...