Kerby Anderson
After a mass shooting, one question rarely asked is whether there is any connection to psychiatric drugs. As I have explained in previous commentaries, there are many factors and explanations for young men who decide to shoot innocent citizens. There is no “one size fits all” explanation.
It’s worth a brief mention that many of these young men were on what are called SSRI drugs. That stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Correlation is not causation, but we can’t ignore that the significant increase in mass murders and suicides does correlate with the same increase in the use of these psychotropic drugs.
Just a casual search on the shooters surfaces a common pattern. So many of them were on one or more of these SSRI drugs. We have learned about the video games and movies the Columbine shooter watched but hear much less about the two drugs he was on. We have heard about the racist ideas of the young man who shot up the church in Charleston, but we have heard much less about the drug he was on.
I recently talked about the lost boys of America. We need a national conversation about why we are seeing so many mentally disturbed young men. Loneliness and isolation are an issue. Broken homes, bullying, violent video games, and several other factors contribute. But we need to add the possibility that these drugs are also a factor.
The Journal of Political Psychology put together a list of numerous mass shootings committed by young men on prescription drugs. At the least, there seems to be a correlation that is worthy of further research.
Lots of factors feed into these horrible mass shootings. Drug use by these shooters is another factor worth considering.

Penna Dexter
The prominent role played by drag queens in the opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympics, was created to display France’s inclusivity and showcase the French LGBTQ+ community. James Leperlier, president of a group called Inter-LGBT, says the transgender community “has difficulty being heard.”
He told ABC news, “we are far from what the ceremony showed. There’s much progress to do in society regarding transgender people.”
Is it progress to offend Christians all over the world who are watching the Olympics?
The program’s parody of the Last Supper featured 18 drag queens and dancers posing behind a long table with the Seine and Eiffel Tower in the background. It mocks a central event of Christianity. The Last Supper was Christ’s final meal with his 12 disciples, when He instituted holy communion.
The ceremonies’ director, Thomas Jolly, previewed the opening in an interview with British Vogue. Mr. Jolly, who is gay, said his measure for the production’s success is “if everyone feels represented by it.”
Everyone?
Not according to best-selling author and cultural commentator Rod Dreher. “Right,” he responded, “except for Christians, whose most sacred moments must be mocked for the sake of queer inclusion.”
American Catholic Bishop Robert Baron, founder of Word on Fire ministries, has lived in Paris. He wonders: “Would they ever have dared mock Islam in a similar way?”
Arsonists are burning down churches all over France. As Rod Dreher points out, “Mosques are going up in France at the same rate that churches are coming down.”
“And yet,” he writes, “the contemptible elites who rule France stage this kind of blasphemous spectacle, attacking the ancestral faith of France, and what Christians still remain there.”
Christianity is declining in the West. Normally, when LGBT interests are elevated, Christianity loses. It’s becoming apparent that Christians are no longer welcome in this culture.
Rod Dreher concludes, “The Enemy knows what time it is.”
Do we?

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday, I talked about robots and wanted to follow up with some perspective on how artificial intelligence represents independent thinking and autonomous actions. There are reasons to believe that AI and robots will be learning and thinking in ways we might not predict. Let me illustrate this with the game Go.
Go is an ancient East Asian game played on a nineteen-by-nineteen grid with black and white stones. The goal is to surround your opponent’s stones with yours. Once you do that, you take them off the board. It is more complex than chess. After a few moves, there are 200 quadrillion (2 x 1015) possible configurations.
When computers beat chess masters, they used a brute force method (where they merely crunch through all sorts of possible moves). That is not possible with Go. Therefore, engineers produced AlphaGo to learn by watching 150,000 games played by human experts. Then it played against copies of itself.
The engineers then organized a tournament in South Korea against the world champion of Go. AlphaGo won the first game, but it was the second game that had everyone talking. The machine made a series of moves that made no sense. Commentators explained to the people watching that it was “a strange move” and that AlphaGo had made “a mistake.”
But the world champion knew something wasn’t right. He took a very long time before he took his next move. Before long, it was obvious that AlphaGo had won again and Go strategy had been rewritten right before everyone’s eyes.
Later versions essentially dispensed with human knowledge and developed their own strategies and thinking. This illustrates the power and the peril of artificial intelligence.