. . . starting with the best Twelve Days Of Christmas ever.
Enjoy!
You’ve seen Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Now streams the Bank of Dave, a true-ish story Capra would surely have loved.
Also of possible interest this time of year: Tim Alberta’s 60-second message to fellow Christians.
There was a low-budget film back in the mid-Fifties, whose name I can’t recall, where humanity is about to destroy itself in nuclear holocaust and all the world’s smartest thinkers have gathered to come up with a way out. They eventually throw up their hands and, as a last resort, feed the problem into one of those massive new machines called “a computer.”
After several minutes’ blinking and beeping, it spits out the 10-part solution, which one of the actors, grabbing the tape, reads aloud as the music gradually swells. “Thou shalt not kill,” it begins . . . and goes on from there.
In real life, of course, far from solving mankind’s most devastating conflicts, religion has caused many of them. Still, it’s a scene that has always stuck with me — brought to mind just now when I read this:
Google revealed in April that one of its quantum computers had solved a problem in seconds that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 47 years.
Twenty years ago, I wrote “Google is everything” and days later linked to Tom Friedman’s, Is Google God?
Well, hello: the singularity draws ever nearer.
And finally — because hunger and misery don’t stop for Christmas — Tom Friedman again: It’s Time for the U.S. to Give Israel Some Tough Love.