Uncomfortable Conversations for Your Holiday Dinner

Winter - Wk1: The Singularity is Near | Jesus the Generous Jew | Tennessee's Fastest Computer is Still Too Slow | It's Winter Solstice. Merry Mithras!

CRUELTY AT THE COSMIC BBQ: Mithras sacrifices the Primordial Bull to bring back the Sun — the Scorpion stings his huge Balls for the hell of it

MYTHOS — The Singularity is Near

Many experts believe that in the coming decades, thinking machines will surpass human cognition. If allowed to self-improve and evolve on their own, artificial intelligence could become all-knowing and all-powerful, at least from a Hominid perspective. Soon these gadgets will be too complex and unpredictable for our meat-based minds to comprehend.

Even better, they'll be sufficiently imitative and friendly to convince us they're actually conscious. Smash one to bits and the Mother Brain will guilt-trip you forever. Suck up to them, though, and the bots might tickle your neurons 'til you die. If you've ever met a smartphone-addicted toddler, you know where this is going.

Futurists call this theoretic event the Singularity—that brilliant culmination of Man's hubris, when creation outstrips creator.

Some lunatics are enthusiastic. Paranoid observers are horrified. In any case, many believe it's a cosmic inevitability, like the steady improvement of mouse-traps, or a catastrophic asteroid impact—or both wrapped into one.

The idea is that God does not exist... yet.

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ETHNOS — Jesus the Generous Jew

The nicest guy who ever lived was a Jewish vagrant. And you know—why not?

According the New Testament, Jesus was born of the Israelite bloodline, whose cliquish tendencies are legendary. By offering himself as a willing sacrifice on the cross, he granted the Jewish God's salvation to the entire world, hillbilly Gentiles and all.

The crucifixion reflects a harsh metaphysical system, to be sure, but when you consider the river of lamb's blood that poured down the Temple steps every Passover—or even worse, the Canaanite children thrown onto the sacrificial fires of Moloch—it's clear that you can't get a thing done in the higher realms without some serious violence.

With Jesus, though, it was one and done. As the Son of God (or rather, as God himself), Jesus was both the highest priest and the ultimate sacrifice—the proverbial Lamb of God—cutting his own throat on an altar in Heaven, according to brutal rules of his own devising (Heb 9:11-18).

Through him, the cruel standards of earthly existence—of beauty, rank, wealth, and power—are subverted by an even greater power. Repentant sinners are washed clean in his sacred blood. Squeamish souls may blanch at this arrangement, but if you know where cheeseburgers come from, you know that's just the way of the world.

For the authors of the Gospels—especially Matthew and Luke—it was important to emphasize Jesus's Hebrew genotype. The Gospel of Matthew opens with a long genealogy (1:1) that reads like the results of some old-school genetic test. Our hero is described as “Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

In the Gospel of Luke (3:23-38), Jesus's lineage is traced back to the original seed: “He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph...son of David...son of Abraham...son of Noah...son of Adam, son of God.”

That’s some VIP pedigree. In another life, he could've made a fortune as a sperm donor.

As if to spite the snooty priests of Jerusalem, who stood guard between the masses and the Holy of Holies, Jesus tore away the Temple curtain. He granted access to the lowest of the low, like some crazed open-borders roadie handing out backstage passes to any bum on the street. All they had to do was ask.

Today, you can find these unwashed masses rubbing elbows with the stars up in Heaven. In fact, if you wind up sharing a cloud with some uncouth loser—or if you're an uncouth loser yourself, clogging up the line at the Pearly Gates—you can thank Jesus for his generosity.

Anyone who prefers the company of snobs can go to Hell.

MACHINA — Tennessee’s Fastest Computer is Still Too Slow

People just assume that thoughts move slower down south. It must be the heat, they say, or maybe the cousin-lovin'.

But in 2021, the fastest supercomputer in the world—dubbed “Frontier”—is scheduled to go online at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. This electric brain will boast 1.5 exaflops of processing power. A tech-booster at The Verge explains:

“This is the next-generation of computing capacity, in which processing power is measured in exaflops, or quintillions of calculations per second. A quintillion is a one with a whopping eighteen zeros behind it: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.”

The hope is that Frontier will provide super-human analyses of climate change, nuclear reactions, and perhaps one day, an analysis of climate change caused by rogue nuclear reactions. Eventually, it’ll come to know the location and trajectory of every particle the universe, and if you dare to question its data-rich prophesies, you might be a redneck.

Once activated, this number-crunching titan will overshadow Tennessee's current speed-thinking champion, “Summit.” That badass recently made headlines for supposedly figuring out why COVID-19 turns some people's lungs into marmalade. Some even say it’s on its way to finding a cure for the ‘rona. Go Vols!

Last June, Summit was bumped down from the world's #1 spot by Japan's mighty Fugaku. In fact, this computational arms race has been going back and forth between Asia and Appalachia for years now, with China regularly taking the lead.

Two weeks ago, Live Science announced that Chinese developers have finally achieved “quantum supremacy,” which is sort of like white supremacy, only way smaller:

“Quantum computers can exploit the unusual mathematics governing the quantum world to outperform classical computers on certain tasks. … Where classical computers perform calculations using bits, which can have one of two states (typically represented by a 1 or a 0), quantum bits, or qubits, can exist in many states simultaneously. This allows them to solve problems more quickly than classical computers. ...

“To test [this satanic fucking contraption], the researchers assigned it a 'Gaussian boson sampling' (GBS) task, where the computer calculates the output of a complex circuit that uses light. That output is expressed as a list of numbers. (Light is made of particles known as photons, which belongs to a category of particles known as bosons.) …

“Its calculation time to produce the list of numbers for each experimental run was about 200 seconds, while the fastest Chinese supercomputer...would have taken 2.5 billion years to arrive at the same result. That suggests the quantum computer can do GBS 100 trillion times faster than a classical supercomputer.”

So there you have it. They really are better at math.

A lot of people don't know this, but my old alma mater—the University of Tennessee, Knoxville—once housed the sixth-fastest supercomputer on earth, which clocked in at 606 teraflops. It was named “the Kraken” after the mythical Greek monster. The Kraken was eventually deactivated, though, after rumors spread that it covertly manipulated impressionable fratboys to engage in a homoerotic drinking game known as “butt-chugging.”

The moral of the story: never let AI get access to social media. It will corrupt the Phi Kappa Alphas in ways that Socrates could only dream of.

RELIGARE — It’s Winter Solstice. Merry Mithras!

At the dawn of civilization, the planet's first astronomers guided the farmers' agricultural rhythms. These Big Ag experts could easily predict approaching seasons by tracking the Sun. The Sumerians called this deity Shamash, lord of light and justice, and it's said that the Babylonian king Hammurabi received the written Law from him.

By ancient reckoning, this solar king returns to power every year on the first day of winter—at the Solstice (Dec. 21)—when the Sun hits its lowest point in the southern sky. Day by day, you’ll see him circle to the heights of the blue dome, reclaiming his throne by early summer. Starting tomorrow, your tall-ass shadow will begin to shrink under his scorching rays.

(Fun Fact: If you go out and look up at the sky tonight—Dec. 21—you’ll see Jupiter in conjunction with Saturn. The two will merge into one bright light, coming closer than they have in 800 years. Then as always, the swole Olympian will overtake the deposed Titan in their sluggish race across the heavens.)

Of all the sky's lights, the Sun is the alpha dog, at least during the daytime. In ancient India they named him Surya. The Egyptians called him ‘Ra for short. The Romans called him Mithras—emphasis on the ra—and stuck-up patricians believed Mithras could grant elites the gift of eternal life. To maintain cosmic balance, though, somebody still had to die. The ancients really had their heads wrapped around the concept of trade-offs.

Lucky for the Roman patricians, an imitation Primordial Bull will do. Unfortunately for the bovine community, that meant a real bull got the knife.

In these Mithraic rites, the beast's life-giving blood would be spilled on the altar, reenacting the violent myth of the world's creation (as told by the Persian prophet, Zoroaster). Through these cultic rituals—whose mysteries were kept secret—an initiate could achieve spiritual immortality.

What about the poor bull? Like many before, he would become one with the Primordial Bull. As far as I can tell, that still leaves him dead as a ground beef patty, only now his corpse is magic.

It's curious that priests throughout history have insisted their followers offer up food for the gods, enticing them with virgins and sinless sons. To the managerial mind, this seems like a huge waste of time and resources. To the secular vegan, it all seems meaner than cheeseburgers.

To the Machiavellian cynic, however, bloody sacrifice is a traumatic means to motivate teamwork. Nothing like a cosmic barbecue to bring folks together.

It's long been noted that the Winter Solstice marks the birthday of Mithras, the sun god. Pagans really do love a Solstice.

The wild Saturnalia also took place this time of year, when wine would be guzzled and gifts exchanged. For one day, slaves could get hammered and talk shit to their masters—sort of like an office Christmas party where you can't get fired because they own you.

The Roman festival honored Saturn, whom the Greek poets called Kronos, or “Time.”

In the beginning, according to Hesiod, this bratty Titan cut the cock off his pops, Uranus, as the sky father went to penetrate the earth mother, Gaia. That accomplished, Saturn hurled the floppy paternal member into the sea, where it foamed and frothed, and out came Aphrodite, goddess of love.

That's why, every Christmas, fathers sit around scratching themselves while their kids play with sharp objects. It's a Western tradition.

For the last two millennia, Christians have spent the Solstice celebrating the birth of God's Son (or rather, God's physical incarnation), a god-king snuggled in a grimy horse-trough, surrounded by confused Persian sorcerers—a tragic avatar born under a strange astrological sign.

Many have claimed that this image of Jesus is just a rehash of Mithras, the solar god reborn. But I don't think so. One story is definitely more violent than the other. And if you're a plebeian, it's far more hopeful.