Showing results by author "Alan Sewell" in All Categories

What if pro-slavery Democrats kept their party united and won the election of 1860? What if Jefferson Davis became President of a pro-slavery Union, while Abraham Lincoln must decide whether to fight for a new birth of freedom outside it? In this alternate history, there will be no secession of the South. But what about the anti-slavery men in the North? Will the United States, now styled “The Confederate Union,” still be their country? “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that ...

Is generative AI really “approaching human levels of intelligence?” Did a computer program really tell somebody they should dump their partner so they can marry electrical pulses plying their way through silicon? Are these programs really collaborating to create their own secret language in a conspiracy to overthrow humanity? Or are these claims intentional misrepresentations of truth purposed to deceive the public into accepting government control of AI in collusion with a cartel of corporations? Or is it just an honest difference of perspective? This book explores the questions of ...

Abraham Lincoln began the morning of August 23, 1864 despairing of re-election: "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect (George McClellan, running on the Peace Platform), as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards." The Union was losing as many as 15,000 men killed, crippled, and dead from disease per week. Men up to the age of 45 were ...

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” So said Abraham Lincoln as he contemplated the great issues of containing slavery and preserving the Union. This book is written to show where we are, and whither we may be tending, by explaining our current political controversies in context of where we have been at similar crisis points in the past. It is written as a distilled essence of American history, explained in the words of the people who made it. It focuses narrowly but intensively on six periods of quantum ...