John Hart and Lon Chaney Jr. in The Last of the Mohicans

I was 5 years old when television first entered my home, and the big weekly event for me was Johnny Hart and Lon Chaney Jr. in the series The Last of the Mohicans. I loved the dynamic between Hawkeye and Chingachgook. They were blood brothers.  I spent several years of my childhood hoping that I too could have a blood brother. Instead, I had a baby brother. He wasn’t very good at playing with me. But a BLOOD brother seemed like a perfect idea.

In these later years, I rediscovered the series, first on VHS, then DVD and then on Youtube. I noticed several things almost immediately.  

1. Johnny Hart was a really handsome guy (at least in my opinion).

2. This 1950s CBC supported production filmed in Ontario more realistically portrayed frontier life of the mid-1700s than almost any Hollywood frontier series I have seen portrays the period in which it purports to be set.

3. Hart and Chaney play Hawkeye and Chingachgook as having a bond way beyond what I noticed as a child. Well, maybe I DID notice it at some level, but as an adult, it seems more apparent. Those guys LOVE each other in a deep and mature way that has no hint of sexuality, but obvious caring, respect and soul bonding. They seek to know everything about each other and to take full responsibility for each other. Each fully accepts the other at the point at which he is on his path, but each aims to help the other make the correct turn at the next intersection on that path.

Getting Them Back to Work

I don’t doubt that President Trump intends to coax the USA economy to provide a general prosperity, but I don’t think wishes make fishes. He doesn’t have the tools and resources he needs. At http://gordon-feil-history-observations.blogspot.ca/2017/01/filling-swamp.html I mentioned some of the problems in the mess he inherited.

I did not mention that there are close to 100 million Americans adults of working age that are not productively engaged in the provision or distribution of needed goods and services. Some jobs simply do not contribute to sustenance of the population. So, more than 40% of working age Americans are not contributing to what the country consumes. Who supports them?  Either their savings (unlikely), new debt, relatives and friends or the other somewhat less than 60% of the working age adults who are productively building or distributing what is worn, eaten, or used for such needs as shelter, transportation, health care or entertainment. 

How to get those people into a position where they can contribute…..that is Trump’s big challenge.  Turning them into hewers of wood and drawers of water is not the solution. He can talk about creating manufacturing jobs, but who wants to pay $100 for a T-shirt? I am being facetious of course, but making a point.

 

I that what is needed in the USA is the same as we need in Canada: a major and widespread upgrade in skills to provide what we can’t import cheaply. We can’t import plumbing services for example. How is a Chinese factory going to unplug your drain?

Cars That Drive Themselves

What do you think about self-driving cars?  The state of the technology is beyond someone designing sensors and navigation systems.  Now what is being developed are cars that have A.I. that will enable them to learn to drive themselves ---- cars that will learn from their errors.

I am not well acquainted with the issues attendant to self-driving cars, but I suspect that three of them are probably accident avoidance, driver boredom, and passenger nervousness.

Accident avoidance would be a marketing problem more than anything, I think. One car making one fatal mistake would set back that industry segment more than all the human accidents have hindered the wider auto industry. We will forgive manifold fatalities from unskilled human drivers when we won’t accept even one from a computerized driver.

Part of the fun of driving is…well….….DRIVING.  If I get into a car and operate it almost like an elevator, where is the driving pleasure?

While the car drives, I think I’d be on edge and ready to grab the controls. It might be more stressful that doing the actual driving myself.  Eventually, maybe I could just read a book or close my eyes and sleep, but that would take a great deal of automated driving to relax me that much.