Civility and the Firing Line

Italo Palesse was an Italian fascist saboteur who was executed by firing squad shortly after the end of World War II. He'd done a lot of bad things, but that's not the point.

Atrocities are chronicled in disappearing ink. But civility is remembered indelibly.

In his last moments, he was the coolest of dudes, as he nonchalantly chatted with the fellas who were about to plug him full of holes. You can catch a glimpse on YouTube. If he knew you were watching, he'd wink back at you.

He doffed his white shirt because he didn't fancy crimson stains on Milanese fabric. He looked less nervous than the average New Yorker descending subway stairs. Then he took some drags from a cigarette that was offered him as a traditional gesture of civility.

Life is so much more bearable with a touch of etiquette, even when it's over in seconds. It goes a long way in the U.S. too.

Inmates on death row, on the eve of the consummation of the People's retributive justice, can order their dream meal at no cost to them. Before the cheeseburger deluxe with onion rings can navigate their alimentary canal, the prisoner has been vaccinated against the continuing burden of existence.

Eventually, we all achieve the state of grace, whether we want to or not, when earthly civility can no longer mock and console us.

Make civility great again, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, in his impish homily to the travelling pre-Thanksgiving hordes. That's what's needed to restore the equanimity of our torn society. A simple formula, like Mrs. Reagan's panacea of just saying "no" to drugs.

Duffy yearns for a sequel to the "golden age of travel" when people dressed up for church, movies and lynchings.

He figures that wearing suits, ties, dresses, matching shoes and coordinated accessories are all that is needed to unify our nation in common culture and cause. Decorum, not music, soothes our savage breasts, and it cuts down on road rage, even in the air.

Spirit Airlines captures the spirit with their quaint, medieval-sounding phrase: "Contract of Carriage." It bans the boarding of passengers with "body art", "exposed buttocks or other private parts" or with "see-through clothing" and some less titillating prohibitions.

In emphasizing the salubrious silver bullet of mere appearances to fix things, Duffy joins Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who having determined that beards and lethality don't go together, has dispensed with facial hair. It's Pentagon triage: Groom for the battlefield, not the mirror.

Civility isn't all it's cracked up to be, but it can render strife more manageable by masking it. It can work as a perfect lubricant for our national slide into dystopia.

Onward and upward!

"Genesis Mission" is a frantic scrambling to advance scientific discovery by marrying artificial intelligence (AI) with the massive and monstrous mountain of federal databases. President Trump, who decreed it by presidential order, likened its "urgency and ambition" to the Manhattan Project of World War II, which led to the atomic bomb.

According to Scientific American, the abstracts from all science-dedicated government agencies will encompass "many billions of measurement, images and computer simulations about everything from the deep ocean to outer space to the human genome."

The Department of Energy has around 18 months to "catalog all the computer resources at its disposal, set out a plan for harnessing data from both federal sources and other resource institutes, and show its plan can make progress on at least one of the identified challenges." It was called "the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo program."

There is no published budget for Genesis Mission, whose abettors include Nvidia, Open AI, Microsoft, IMB, Google and Amazon. Its press release acknowledges the roles of the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, but curiously omits NASA.

Why are they being sidelined when space exploration is specifically cited as a priority?

Will Genesis Mission produce advances that will save the world from everything except itself? Will it prove a futuristic Pandora's Box whose contents will eventually be set free by the self-destructive glories of inquisitiveness, invention, and the accident-prone nimbleness of sometimes malicious human fingers?

Advancement is often falsely equated with progress. Artificial Intelligence will never be shackled. Humanity will be further degraded by its compulsion for boundless experimentation.

The Future of Life Institute, a non-profit research institute dedicated to the "reduction of existential risk, particularly from advanced artificial intelligence," was founded by cosmologist Stephen Hawking, a DeepMind research scientist, a co-founder of Skype, and others of comparable stature. In a recently published open letter, they urged a halt to further explorations of superintelligence until reliable safeguards are developed.

Among its 800 signatories is an eclectic cast of characters, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, National Security Advisor in the Obama administration Susan Rice, and the fringe freak Steve Bannon, who as a MAGA apologist has sometimes been a loose cannon backfiring into his own ajar mouth.

Max Bodach, of Foundation for America, a tech think tank, expects "to see more 'horseshoe' coalitions forming between center-left veterans of the 'tech-lash' fight, the new trustbusters, tech-skeptical social conservatives, and America First populists."

Voices calling for states' authority to regulate AI are being shouted down by defenders of overarching federal authority. President Trump will brook no dissent to his argument that American dominance of AI is critical to our foundational destiny.

Like nuclear energy and fire, the new technology may redeem or ruin us. Given out track record, dare we hedge our bets?

Let AI mature by baby steps, not leaps and bounds. Its promise is already being fulfilled, or shall we say carried out, in areas from medical diagnostics to border surveillance at international crossings and even local boundaries.

Bruce Blakeman, County Executive of Nassau County, vows to deploy facial recognition and presumably any other available state-of-the art robotics to monitor and keep at bay, what he expects will be a tsunami of opportunistic ne-er-do-wells, mayhem-mongers and sundry crooks, after mayor-elect Mamdani takes office.

Some critics dismiss his plan as "theatrics", but history has shown that theatrics can be the prelude to harsh measures.

There's no limit to what AI can accomplish or the precipices to which it may lead us. Entrepreneurs, visionaries, and species of leaders will conspire.

But there's one challenge they will never meet: driving down Con Edison's gas and electric rates, which both Trump and Mamdani agree are stubbornly through a cathedral roof, although given their own fuel costs have plummeted.

By 2028, electricity rates for their customers will jump around 10 percent and gas rates about 15 percent.

The Public Service Commission invariably approves Con Edison's request to jack up their charges, but first they play a little game of deception to placate consumers and make them feel empowered by the chimera of democratic participation.

They do this by posting Con Ed's original proposal, which Con Ed deliberately makes exorbitant and unrealistic. Then hearings are held in every borough, where communities complain and assume they're being heard.

Eventually the PSC approves a hike that appears to be a compromise but is still above the already ballooning cost of living, leaving the mirage of a corporation splitting the difference with their consumers.

It is a sleight of hand and charade between the PSC and Con-Ed. It's like when retailers grossly inflate their "list price" while offering a special "discount sale," making consumers grateful the rip-off was merely mesospheric rather than stratospheric.

AI will put many people out of work, but no doubt there will be training for new thresholds of subservience. Waiting for them on the firing line will be cartons of cigarettes, and perhaps a reusable blindfold, as testament to the new civility.