I have to admit it, there are things happening which don’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe I am just not smart enough to understand them. It could also be due to the hypocrisy of the acts or the misinterpretation of what is actually happening, but never the less they are very strange acts. We have all heard the talk about the Chinese being our enemy and have seen how we constantly send ships into the waters around China. We also know we have pledged to protect Taiwan. Add to this the fact we have complained about China developing a hypersonic craft, even though we are doing the same thing. We are being told the Chinese hacked the database containing the names of all Federal employees and were in it for over a year. The Chinese have said they are developing missiles capable of sinking American carriers. By now you are probably wondering what I am getting at? Let me say this, I bet you think China and the U.S. are at each other’s throats. I can’t blame you, it certainly looks that way until you look further. The first thing you have to look at is the fact China is holding trillions of dollars of our debt and if we were destroyed they would lose this money. Does this seem like the act of a country which wants to destroy us? Here is the real kicker, the U.S. and China have struck a deal to straighten ties and develop a more productive military relationship. China says the US will have to respect China’s South China Sea ambitions. Is this the reason the president didn’t come out and accuse China of the hack to the Federal Employees database, was he afraid to poison the defense deal with China? I am confused, how can we protect Taiwan and still be close militarily with China and why would China want to do this, are they protecting their investments?

We have key allies in the South China Sea and nearby it. One is Japan, another the Philippines, two of our closest allies in the region and maybe the world. Are we going to continue to protect them or have we decided to let the chips fall where they may in this region? Some islands in the area are disputed by different nations and it is said the Chinese have set up mobile artillery on the disputed Spratly Islands. As I said what is going on makes no sense to me. How can we be in league with the Chinese on one hand and against them on the other?

When the attacks of 9/11 took out the Pentagon computers which controlled the expenses and budget of the military it had been announced the day before by Donald Rumsfeld the Pentagon could not account for about two trillion dollars. The next day all the evidence had been blown up along with the people who worked on the budget. After all that wouldn’t you think the system of accounting for expenditures by the military would have been improved so this didn’t happen again or was this something which was wanted by some higher ups? A story has come out about just how bad some soldiers have it when they are trying to get paid what is owed them. One poor guy had was in his second month of physical and psychological reconstruction at Fort Bliss. He had suffered traumatic brain injury, nerve damage, a hip injury and psychological damage. When his pay was shorted by 1/3 from $3300 to about $2300 he complained, but the check for the next month was reduced to only $118.00. The military said he owed money, but couldn’t tell him what for. He was living with his girlfriend and sharing custody of two children with his former wife and his girlfriend’s daughter. They were reduced to having to beg for food from their church and food pantries.

The poor soldier had short and long term memory loss which made it hard for him to remember appointments and his physical injuries made it hard to travel to different offices to press his claim. It turned out the Defense Department was taking money from this man due to their accounting errors and putting him through hell. An investigation was made by Reuters and they found the agency responsible for paying this guy handles the payroll for 2.7 million active duty and reserve duty military and gets things wrong far too often. Why is the system for paying the military so screwed up and does this mean the system of payments to companies and such is still being mishandled? I bet it does and I also bet not all of the errors have been innocent ones.

Here is something else I don’t understand. A recent headline proclaimed, “Artificially Intelligent Computer Outperforms Humans on IQ Test.” You may wonder what there is to not understand, but this is how I feel about this. First of all the computer is running a program created by humans. Does this mean the programmers are smarter than the people the computer went up against? Second could it be the humans were not the smartest people to run the computer against? See where I am going with this? How can we say the computer outperforms humans when it was programmed by humans? The computer program was a compilation of the IQs of the programmers. Then there is the test itself. I remember when the U.S. Army would give IQ tests to determine what you might be best at. The first time I took one I had a certain score, but the second time my score increased by 22 points. This is not supposed to happen, it either means the tests are flawed, or you can increase you IQ which I doubt could happen in the space of a week, because I took the two IQ tests a week apart.

What I don’t understand is if we are worried about machines with artificial intelligence, why do we keep advancing them? A lot of famous people are saying they are worried about artificial intelligence. To give you an idea of who some of them are, there is Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, to name a few. I wonder about artificial intelligence being dangerous. Maybe it is the best thing for us if not used in weapons. When a weapon is created it has only one purpose and that is to kill. To do this the AI (artificial intelligence) has to be programmed to think this is okay. This may be a simplistic way to put it, but once the killer code is out there it is in the world. I believe we already have given certain devices the ability to kill people and these devices include drones and robots which are on the border of South Korea. This is merely a command to these devices right now, but if these devices ever attain sentience we will have told them it is okay to kill humans. Sentience may never happen, even if it seems it has, because programming can get so good it will be impossible to tell if a robot is sentient or not. On the other hand there is work being done on a new type of robot brain which is based on neurons which might make it possible for this to happen. We are using rat neurons right now, but who knows if we will get to the point where we use human ones? I believe this is where the real danger lies.