Beware of Men Bearing Poppets!

When I was a kid the puppets were quite popular on television. Burr Tillstrom's Kukla, Fran and Ollie may have been the first. I loved the "Howdy Doody Show."  

The Jack Paar show and Walter Cronkite's 1954 CBS "The Morning Show" had Bil Baird's company of singing and dancing puppets including Charlemane the Lion  interviewing people and talking with the hosts. (This stuck in Cronkite's craw and he quickly escaped the show to become CBS' legendary evening news anchor.) 

Shari Lewis

As Shari Lewis' show became popular I was losing interest in puppets but I found Shari very sexy. Shari Lewis was more than a puppeteer; she wrote the Star Trek episode "The Lights of Zetar." 

You don't see many puppets on TV these days. Mostly the art lives on in live shows. I remember taking my daughter to a few back in the early eighties and I felt rather creeped out by the puppet experience. I seem to recall my daughter was too. In fact, when I took her to Disneyworld when she was 6 or 7 she told me she felt very uncomfortable there. 

Disney's It's a Small World

Full Moon's Puppet Master movies show us that in popular culture puppets have become more scary than anything else. 

From Full Moon's Puppet Master II

Now we see another example of someone whose public religiosity cloaks a private life of debauched evil. Ronald William Brown, 57, of Largo, Florida is a public Christian and a  puppeteer who entertained the little ones during what must be the extremely boring services at Gulf Coast Church. He planned with an internet buddy comrade in crime, Michael Arnett,  to abduct and eat after roasting  a two year old girl.  
Puppets are often used as tools by black magicians, consciously or not.  If the FBI just checked out all the Christian puppeteers in the country they might stop a few crimes. It is interesting that it was Homeland Security that got this guy. At this link you can watch Ronnie in action. 

Update: Puppeteer Ronald Brown was convicted July 30, 2013

Order Out Of Chaos
Mundi exigere ordinem. 

“Children of the World Dream of Peace” diptych part 1 by Leo Tanguma, One of Those Cryptic Murals  at the Denver Airport

Now some of these cryptic murals at the mysterious Denver Airport are beginning to make sense.
This one is especially morbid and would be very much at home on the cover of some Death Metal band's record. The sheets of paper at the lower portion of the painting on the right contain these words:

I once was a little child who longed for other worlds
but I am no more a child for I have known fear
I have learned to hate how tragic, then, is youth
which lives with enemies, with gallows ropes.
Yet, I still believe I only sleep today. that I’ll wake up,
a child again, and start to laugh and play.
Hama Herchenberg, 14 years old..died December 18, 1943
Auschwitz Concentration camp”.

Painting and quotation Found at Mountain Weekly News, April 12, 2011  

The Happy Ending?

"Children of the World Dream of Peace" dipytch part 2 by Leo Tanguma

Interesting Addendum:
HNC, FICO, and Confabulation

Robert Holmes Jr., senior lead scientist at Fair Isaac, FICO

In an initial post about the Aurora, Colorado massacre, I noted that Robert Holmes Jr., the father of the killer, previously worked at what I called a "spooky place," HNC Software, formerly Hecht-Nielsen Neurocomputer Corporation. I termed the company "spooky" because of their long term contract with DARPA.  The company itself described the situation as follows in their own descriptive materials in 1999. "HNC is working on a long-term research project launched in 1998 that is jointly funded by HNC and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the U.S. Defense Department, to investigate ‘cortronic neural networks,’ a concept originally proposed by Robert Hecht-Nielsen, HNC’s co-founder and chief scientist."   What could be more spooky than that? I'm not saying evil, just spooky.

Robert Hecht-Nielsen with Zeus

While searching for information on Robert Hecht-Nielsen, co-founder of HNC Software and adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego,  I discovered that Robert Holmes still works for the ghost of HNC Software because HNC merged with his current employer, Fair Isaac Corporation, a credit score company now known as FICO for a tad over $800 billion in stock swaps in 2002, and Mr. Hecht-Nielsen had become FICO's vice-President of Research and Development. It's a complicated stock swap and I have read the transaction as a purchase by HNC of Fair Isaac and the other way around. We do know that it was a merger. Both Hecht-Nielsen and Holmes are still associated with FICO when all is said and done.

Here is the FICO website. 

This is his bio from the University of California at San Diego:

"Robert Hecht-Nielsen has been on the UCSD faculty since 1986. His popular ECE-270A/B/C year-long graduate course, Neurocomputing, provides an introduction to the neuroscience, and technological applications, of confabulation theory. Hecht-Nielsen is Director of the Confabulation Neuroscience Laboratory of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), a Member of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation; and an Adjunct Professor in the UCSD Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He serves on the Board of Governors of the International Neural Network Society (2007-2009). An IEEE Fellow, Hecht-Nielsen has been awarded the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Medal and the UCSD ECE Department’s Graduate Teaching Award. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Arizona State University in 1974."

Mr. Hecht-Nielsen specializes in the field of cognition, neurocomputing. He asks the question: how does thought work? Philosophers call this field of study epistemology. A thorough understanding of knowing how we know what we know would ultimately lead to true artificial intelligence. It is difficult to avoid strange loops when delving into neurocomputing  as much as it is difficult to ignore the lack of coherence in human thought by philosophers interested in epistemology.  Professor Hecht-Nielsen is Director of the Confabulation Neuroscience Laboratory in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology which gave us this 2008 press release, which I cognate may have come from Hecht-Nielsen himself. 
Here are some excerpts.

"Hecht-Nielsen believes the Outstanding Engineer award honors his presentation and publication last year of "Confabulation Theory" (Springer-Verlag 2007)-the culmination of a lifetime of work on the mechanism by which thinking is carried out in humans and animals. "For forty years my goal has been to understand the fundamental mechanism of thought," said the author. "This search led to a unified 'confabulation theory' of cognition that explains the mechanism of thought."
How thinking works has puzzled scientists for millennia -- from Aristotle's studies on human thought (published in 350 B.C.), to recent computational neuroscience research. Hecht-Nielsen's Confabulation Theory now presents the scientific and engineering communities with what he calls the "first comprehensive and complete theory of cognition," a theory that he believes can shed extensive light on the design of the brain. "Seeing the detailed process of thinking in action," said Hecht-Nielsen, "it is clear that thinking is starkly alien in comparison with past concepts in neuroscience, computer science, and so on."

Confabulation Theory seems to involve the fact that the human brain makes inferences from given information. Sherlock Holmes could be described as a master confabulator. And I must admit I infer things all the time. One might say this is intelligence. Perhaps it is intuition.
Artificial intelligence has traditionally had a big problem with putting together disparate pieces of information in novel ways. At this time computers are not structured to infer information like humans or animals. If confabulation technology could be combined with  gigantic computational power, it would be of  inestimable value to corporate and government interests. As our hero says, "What is most striking about this confabulation architecture is its extremely large quantity of knowledge and the effectiveness with which it exploits this knowledge to craft astonishingly intelligent outputs, all without any traditional 'software', 'rules', or 'algorithms'. This is how neurons think. This is how human and animal 'intelligence' arises. Establishing a complete understanding of this will require a huge new phalanx of research."

 Robert believes his work is leading humanity in a very Utopian direction. 

"Hecht-Nielsen envisions that by 2 100, human toil will have permanently ended; he argues that hundreds of billions of confabulation theory-based intelligent machines would do all work that humans choose not to do. "By 3 000, humans and their intelligent machines will have spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy," he said, forecasting that "by the year 20000, humans and their intelligent machines will be intervening to eliminate unnecessary lifeform suffering, strife and tragedy throughout the millions of billions of galaxies of the entire universe.""

I am a bit less optimistic about these things. I remember predictions similarly made in the 1950's about the way we would live at the arrival of the Twenty-First Century. I do believe Hecht-Nielsen is an extraordinary salesman.
And I am certain that Bob's excitement for the future is helping him land these long term contracts from the government.  
To tell the truth, I am skeptical of FICO's software simply by reflecting on recent history. 
Have you ever heard of the FICO score? You have one.  It is one of the prime tools used by banks to judge whether a customer is worthy of a mortgage. During the heyday of easy money in the oughts, before our economic bubble busted, banks were using FICO scores to give any Tom, Dick or Harriett a mortgage for which they could not make the payments. We are still feeling the effects today. 
Perhaps the banks ignored FICO scores in their rush to bundle and resell bad loans. 
But one must suspect  that FICO was riding the wave just like everyone else in those days.
Somehow I confabulate that this credit score company was handing out scores that reflected the optimism for the future of Mr. Hecht-Nielsen himself.  

More to come in future posts. 
 
 





 

Cinemark Holdings, Inc. 


Cinemark Holdings, Inc.  (NYSE:CNK) is the parent company of the Century 16 Theater (since 2006) where Little Jimmy Holmes went to relax and recreate. Cinemark owns 448 theaters with 5,096 screens and he (I use the personal pronoun because corporations are legally persons like you and me, but are they girls or boys or something else?) has a very lucrative presence in South America.

Cinemark was the first theater company to introduce stadium seating in their theaters (1997) which led to a long legal struggle with people confined to wheelchairs who were placed in an area close in front of the screen which forced these customers to look directly and uncomfortably up. They sued on the grounds of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Cinemark found a friendly Federal Judge in Cleveland who initially ruled in his favor, stating that the Act required that the handicapped merely  have a view of the screen, not a good view of the screen.  Cinemark finally settled with the Justice Department after seven years of struggle and he agreed to retrofit his cinemas to allow handicapped people to actually see the screen (2005). Click here for a link to the resolution of the case.

An ebullient Alan Stock visits the New York Stock Exchange last year.
 [I don't believe the place was named after him.]

Cinemark's recently retired (February of this year after 26 years with the company)  CEO, Alan Stock, (and what a golden parachute he has!) donated $9,999 in 2008 to the successful Proposition 8 in California, which banned and overturned gay marriage. COO Tim Warner, a sixteen year company man,  had these comforting words for us when he replaced Alan as CEO:

"Throughout our careers at Cinemark, Alan and I have worked closely to enhance the theatergoing experience while driving domestic and international growth. We thank Alan for his outstanding contributions to the company and for his initiatives to promote high standards across the industry and strong relations among its various constituents."

Alan's executive profile at Bloomberg is here.  
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Stock is a Mormon and a Romney supporter.
 He visited his alma mater last fall. 
Here is a glowing story written in 2008 and published by the Deseret News on young Alan's love of the cinema. 
In this story Alan says,   "I realized that while we don't make the movies, we can make sure the customers are comfortable and can see and hear well. So, we do absolutely everything possible to create a great entertainment experience."  It seems he had forgotten about Cinemark's  long effort, when he was Cinemark USA's president, to keep handicapped customers from seeing well.

Goldman Sachs rated Cinemark Holdings at "Neutral" yesterday in the wake of the shootings, but most of their concerns had to do with the shrinking attendance at theaters domestically. Goldman suggested that this was somewhat mitigated by his Latin American business.

There's a lot of snake charming going on.

Even though Chief "There is absolutely no question that this guy acted alone." Oates had this crime all figured out before twenty four hours had passed, a judge has sealed the case of Little Jimmy Holmes.

"A judge has sealed everything in the case, not allowing affidavits, court documents or photographs of the suspect. The official booking photo of Holmes will not be released for the time being.
A judge agreed with prosecutors request that the case be sealed, saying it would be contrary to the public interest to release any information at this point." CBS Denver Report

Aurora, goddess of dawn, Giovanni Bonazza, 1717, Summer Garden, St. Petersburg

Yes, you are right if you are thinking that the authorities are massaging the evidence and getting their story straight.