Why The Techbros Back Trump And Vance Is Their Man In The White House

thebulletin  |  Since the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, scholars have speculated about the technology’s implications for the character, if not nature, of war. The promise of AI on battlefields and in war rooms has beguiled scholars. They characterize AI as “game-changing,” “revolutionary,” and “perilous,” especially given the potential of great power war involving the United States and China or Russia. In the context of great power war, where adversaries have parity of military capabilities, scholars claim that AI is the sine qua non, absolutely required for victory. This assessment is predicated on the presumed implications of AI for the “sensor-to-shooter” timeline, which refers to the interval of time between acquiring and prosecuting a target. By adopting AI, or so the argument goes, militaries can reduce the sensor-to-shooter timeline and maintain lethal overmatch against peer adversaries.

Although understandable, this line of reasoning may be misleading for military modernization, readiness, and operations. While experts caution that militaries are confronting a “eureka” or “Oppenheimer” moment, harkening back to the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, this characterization distorts the merits and limits of AI for warfighting. It encourages policymakers and defense officials to follow what can be called a “primrose path of AI-enabled warfare,” which is codified in the US military’s “third offset” strategy. This vision of AI-enabled warfare is fueled by gross prognostications and over-determination of emerging capabilities enhanced with some form of AI, rather than rigorous empirical analysis of its implications across all (tactical, operational, and strategic) levels of war.

The current debate on military AI is largely driven by “tech bros” and other entrepreneurs who stand to profit immensely from militaries’ uptake of AI-enabled capabilities. Despite their influence on the conversation, these tech industry figures have little to no operational experience, meaning they cannot draw from first-hand accounts of combat to further justify arguments that AI is changing the character, if not nature, of war. Rather, they capitalize on their impressive business successes to influence a new model of capability development through opinion pieces in high-profile journals, public addresses at acclaimed security conferences, and presentations at top-tier universities.

To the extent analysts do explore the implications of AI for warfighting, such as during the conflicts in Gaza, Libya, and Ukraine, they highlight limited—and debatable—examples of its use, embellish its impacts, conflate technology with organizational improvements provided by AI, and draw generalizations about future warfare. It is possible that AI-enabled technologies, such as lethal autonomous weapon systems or “killer robots,” will someday dramatically alter war. Yet the current debate for the implications of AI on warfighting discounts critical political, operational, and normative considerations that imply AI may not have the revolutionary impacts that its proponents claim, at least not now. As suggested by Israel and the United States’ use of AI-enabled decision-support systems in Gaza and Ukraine, there is a more reasonable alternative. In addition to enabling cognitive warfare, it is likely that AI will allow militaries to optimize workflows across warfighting functions, particularly intelligence and maneuver. This will enhance situational awareness; provide efficiencies, especially in terms of human resources; and shorten the course-of-action development timeline.

Militaries across the globe are at a moment or strategic inflection point in terms of preparing for future conflict. But this is not for the reasons scholars typically assume. Our research suggests that three related considerations have combined to shape the hype surrounding military AI, informing the primrose path of AI-enabled warfare. First, that primrose path is paved by the emergence of a new military industrial complex that is dependent on commercial service providers. Second, this new defense acquisition process is the cause and effect of a narrative suggesting a global AI arms race, which has encouraged scholars to discount the normative implications of AI-enabled warfare. Finally, while analysts assume that soldiers will trust AI, which is integral to human-machine teaming that facilitates AI-enabled warfare, trust is not guaranteed.

What AI is and isn’t. Automation, autonomy, and AI are often used interchangeably but erroneously. Automation refers to the routinization of tasks performed by machines, such as auto-order of depleted classes of military supplies, but with overall human oversight. Autonomy moderates the degree of human oversight of tasks performed by machines such that humans are on, in, or off the loop. When humans are on the loop, they exercise ultimate control of machines, as is the case for the current class of “conventional” drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper. When humans are in the loop, they pre-delegate certain decisions to machines, which scholars debate in terms of nuclear command and control. When humans are off the loop, they outsource control to machines leading to a new class of “killer robots” that can identify, track, and engage targets on their own. Thus, automation and autonomy are protocol-based functions that largely retain a degree of human oversight, which is often high given humans’ inherent skepticism of machines.

CIA Showed The House Speaker Its Pictures Of His Little Johnson.....,

davidstockman  |  What Johnson’s impending Waterloo means, therefore, is not merely the prospect of another wild and wooly succession battle, but actually that there is no point at all in the preservation of a Republican majority and GOP House Speaker. After all, the Washington GOP has become so infected with neocon warmongers and careerist pols who spend a lifetime basking in the imperial projects and pretensions of the world’s War Capital that apparently the best the House GOP caucus could do when it ejected the previous careerist deep stater from the Speaker’s chair was to tap the dim-witted nincompoop who currently occupies it.

The Republican party is thus truly beyond redemption. As JFK once said about the CIA, its needs to be splintered into a thousand pieces and swept into the dustbin of history.

Indeed, when you look at the calamitous fiscal trajectory embedded in the CBO’s latest 30-year fiscal outlook, you truly have to wonder about what miniature minds like Congressman Johnson’s are actually thinking. That is to say, the latest CBO report published in March presumes that there will never be another recession and no inflation flare-up, interest rate spike, global energy dislocation, prolonged Forever War or any other imaginable crisis ever again—just smooth economic sailing for the next 30 years.

And yet, and then. Even by the math of this Rosy Scenario on steroids the public debt will reach $140 trillion at minimum by 2054. In turn, that would cause interest payments on the public debt with rates no higher than those which prevailed between 1986 and 1997 to reach $10 trillion per year.

You simply don’t need paragraphs, pages and whole monographs worth of analysis and amplification to understand where that is going. The nation’s fisc is now on the cusp of descending into the maws of a doomsday machine. So how in the world do these elements of Johnson’s offering make even the remotest sense?

Speaker Johnson's Foreign Aid Boondoggle:

• Indo-Pacific aid: $8.1 billion.
• Israel: $26.4 billion.
• Ukraine: $60.8 billion.
• Total: $95.3 billion.

Apparently, it’s because Johnson and a good share of the Washington GOP have succumbed wholesale to neocon paranoia, stupidity, lies and hollow excuses for warmongering. For crying out loud, Putin has no interest in molesting the Poles, to say nothing of storming the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. He is certainly no Ghandi, but well more than smart enough to recognize that with Russia’s GDP of $2.2 trillion and war budget of $80 billion there would be no point in going to war with NATO’s $45 trillion of GDP and combined war budgets in excess of $1.2 trillion.

Likewise, China’s $50 trillion debt-ridden Ponzi would collapse in months if its $3.5 trillion flow of export earnings were disrupted after attempting to land its single modern aircraft carrier on the California coast. And Iran has no nukes, no intercontinental range missiles and a GDP equal to 130 hours of US annual output.

So, some Axis of evil!

Yet that’s exactly what the Speaker said this morning after going to too many Deep State briefings and apparently having his own johnson yanked once too often. The Swamp creatures surely see the lad’s naivete and blithering ignorance as a gift that doesn’t stop giving. That is to say, a “mark” who knows nothing at all about the world from sources not stamped, “Top Secret (lies)”.

Speaker Mike Johnson: “We’re going to stand for freedom and make sure that Putin doesn’t march through Europe… we’re the greatest Nation on the planet, and we have to act like it”,

This is a critical time right now, a critical time on the world stage. I can make a selfish decision and do something that’s different but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing. “I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important. I really do. I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we've gotten.

I believe Xi, Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil. I think they’re in coordination on it. “So I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.

To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys. My son is going to begin in the Naval Academy this fall. This is a live-fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. This is not a game, this is not a joke.

Needless to say, our dufus Speaker doesn’t know the “Baltics” from the “Balkans” where Serbia and other Russian friendlies are definitely not quaking in their boots about Putin.

In point of fact, however, it is not hard to see that the civil war and territorial dispute between Kiev and Moscow over the Donbas and rim of the Black Sea from Mariupol to Odessa is a one-off of Russian and regional history and Washington’s mindless push of NATO eastward to Russia’s very doorstep.

The light-yellow area of this 1897 map gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there was no doubt as to the paternity of the Donbas and the lands adjacent to the Azov Sea and the Black Sea. Already then, they were part of the 125 years-old New Russia, which had been assembled by purchase and conquest during the reign of Catherine the Great.

Indeed, it was only in 1922 that the yellow area—essentially demarcating the four provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which recently voted to rejoin Russia—was appended to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by the great humanitarian and map-maker, V. Lenin.

And yet Speaker Johnson now wants to crash the Republican Party on enforcing a map drawn by one of history’s bloodiest monsters. It’s come down to that.

DEI Handing Out A Formidable Ass-Whooping To Rich And Powerful Jews....,

dailycaller  |  “[DEI] is the main cause of anti-Semitism today. It divides students along racial and religious lines and creates a zero-sum game. If you’re in favor of one group you’re [against] another group,” Dershowitz told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow. “It is a real problem. It is anti-intellectual, it is dishonest in many ways. Look, it uses the word diversity, but only means racial diversity. Less than 3% of the faculty at Harvard identify as conservative. They say equity, which suggests equality, but equity is the exact opposite of equality. Indeed under equity, if you dare to quote Martin Luther King’s dream of a world where children are judged not by the color of their skin, but by content of their character, you have committed a microaggression. Inclusion, Larry Summers made it clear that inclusion has excluded Jews over the years.”

“So, it’s a fraudulent concept, a dangerous concept, but 700 of my colleagues at Harvard, professors have come out pandering to President Gay and calling for her to remain on,” Dershowitz continued. “They don’t want people like you and me, who are now outsiders to have any influence on Harvard but they refuse to answer the legitimate points made by people like Bill Ackerman, they just dismiss him out of hand because he’s a rich alumni.”

Gay issued a clarification in a statement posted on X Wednesday, a day after she was grilled by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York about antisemitic actions on the university’s campus.

“Schools are, colleges and universities are not only the current faculty, not only the current students but they are alumni and they are the future students, they are great institutions and DEI is destroying these institutions and President Gay is a product of DEI,” Dershowitz said. “She championed it. That’s how she became president. She is the symbol of DEI and the symbol has failed and she must also recognize her own failure and her role in that failure.”

 

Imagine Elise Stefanik Kwestioning Henry Kissinger...,

newrepublic  |  The question of Kissinger’s alleged antisemitism is a complicated one. Yes, he told a friend in the 1970s that Judaism “has no significance for me,” according to Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography, and is also quoted as having said in 1972, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.” Another gem from that year: “Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”

But to be fair, these views were not as uncommon among German Jews in the United States as one might wish them to have been. One can find similarly disturbing quotes in the private discussions of say, the great pundit and political philosopher Walter Lippmann and the longtime New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. When confronted with Richard Nixon’s frequently hysterical antisemitic rants about “dirty rotten Jews from New York” who dared to reveal the truth about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in the Times or some such thing, Kissinger usually tried to placate the president without explicitly agreeing or disagreeing. But when he felt Jews, whether American or Israeli, were refusing to cooperate with his plans, he was more than happy to join in, once complaining to Nixon that he had “never seen such cold-blooded playing with the American national interest” as when American Jewish leaders supported Israel’s position over that of the Nixon administration. The Israelis at various times were “as obnoxious as the Vietnamese,” “boastful,” “psychopathic,” “fools,” “a sick bunch,” and “the world’s worst shits.” As for American Jewish leaders, “They seek to prove their manhood by total acquiescence in whatever Jerusalem wants.”

Kissinger was a Jew who found other Jews exceptionally annoying—none more so than Israelis, with whom he frequently negotiated but failed to get to do things his way. The question is, was he worse about Jews and Israel than about anyone else who refused to genuflect before what he understood to be his genius? To be fair to someone who really doesn’t deserve it, Kissinger, like Nixon, would tend toward churlish, racist reactions when anyone rebuffed him. When, for instance, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi refused to go along with his plans for a secret opening to China, he informed the president that “well, the Indians are bastards anyway,” and Gandhi herself was “a bitch.”

But Kissinger also engaged in explicitly antisemitic actions himself. When, in September 1973, Nixon appointed him to be secretary of state, Kissinger thanked him for saying nothing about his “Jewish background.” And as he doled out jobs to his aides, he made certain to count the Jews to ensure there were not too many of them. He explained that while he knew that it required 10 Jews for a minyan (Jewish prayer service), he could not “have them all on the seventh floor.” Kissinger also once removed a counselor, good friend, and fellow German Jew, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, from a list of aides scheduled to accompany the president to Germany because he said, “I don’t think too many Jews should be around.” But here again, he was likely not acting out of personal anti-Jewish animus. Rather he was behaving cravenly in the face of what he judged to be the Jew-hatred of others, especially Nixon, who famously ordered an aide to count the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For the purpose of history, the most important aspects of Kissinger’s hostility to Jews and Israel can be seen in his conduct related to the 1973 “Yom Kippur War.” Kissinger apologists have consistently attempted to give him the credit that belongs almost entirely to Jimmy Carter for the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Martin Indyk, a longtime diplomat and Kissinger acolyte, actually published a 688-page book titled Master of the Game, making exactly this comical claim.

The truth is that Kissinger’s machinations were at least partially responsible for the fact of the war itself. Egypt’s visionary leader Anwar Sadat made clear to Kissinger and company that he was interested in a peace agreement with Israel (and moving his allegiance from the Russians to the Americans). The Israelis expressed interest at the time, but Kissinger instructed them that they were “wasting time” in taking Sadat seriously. To make certain the Israelis went along with his plans, he secretly bribed them with a promise of over 100 U.S. Phantom fighter jets. His overture rejected, Sadat eventually decided that another war to avenge the humiliation of 1967 was his only choice to lay the groundwork for an eventual deal. Even Indyk, who treats Kissinger’s famous “shuttle diplomacy” between Israel and Egypt after the war as one of the great achievements of American diplomatic history, admitted in his book that Kissinger “might have averted the Yom Kippur War” by taking Sadat seriously earlier.

Kissinger also helped ensure that Israel would be unprepared for the Egyptian attack. According to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s secret testimony before Israel’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry, just before the war began, Kissinger warned Israel that if it wanted any help from the United States in the event of hostilities, then it should not make a preemptive strike against Egypt or Syria or to mobilize the reserve army before the war actually started. These warnings were given after Kissinger insisted that all other Americans leave the room and no notes be taken. Dayan then canceled his air force’s preemptive operation and objected to Golda Meir’s plan to mobilize the reserves. Kissinger is not known to have given any similar warning to the Egyptians. Indeed, according to Sadat’s memoirs, Kissinger actually encouraged the attack, via secret messages, in order to improve Egypt’s negotiating position in the war’s aftermath. To my knowledge, Kissinger never addressed this.

Kissinger wanted Israel to suffer a significant setback before it finally won the war. He succeeded at this at an enormous cost in lost lives on both sides. As the Egyptian army marched toward Tel Aviv, he informed Sadat and company that the United States was doing merely the minimum to aid Israel that was possible under the circumstances. After eight days of fighting, however, Nixon insisted, over Kissinger’s objections, on implementing a massive emergency weapons airlift. He did this despite Kissinger’s warning that victory would make Israel “even more impossible to deal with than before.”

Kissinger came in for extremely harsh criticism from some American Jews in this period. Hans Morgenthau, a respected international relations scholar whom Kissinger personally revered, went so far as to compare the pressure he was applying to Israel to the way the West had treated Czechoslovakia in 1938 when it was threatened by Hitler. To try to disarm such critics, Kissinger undertook a series of off-the-record meetings with Jewish writers and intellectuals and another with leaders of Jewish organizations.

The former group spanned the political spectrum, from the democratic socialists Irving Howe and Michael Walzer to neoconservatives such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Norman Podhoretz. There was no room for disagreement between the two poles, however, because the only issue discussed was Israel’s security and how to best ensure it. Kissinger posed as Israel’s savior and warned of a noticeable turn against all-out support for Israel in Congress. (Actually, the opposite was true. Congress was far more pro-Israel than Kissinger was.) He pointed out that, given the “critical opposition” to Israel within the international community, the perfidy of the “European vultures,” and the likely success of the “extremely effective” OPEC oil embargo, which would give the Arab world more leverage over the West and turn consumers in both the U.S. and Europe against Israel. Israel was “in great danger.” What he needed, he explained, was for influential American Jews to “privately … make clear to the Israelis that you understand the situation.” The meeting broke up, according to the notes taken by an aide to Kissinger, “with warm expressions of gratitude.”

Apple And Google Laid The Foundations For A Dystopian Industry Which Should Not Exist

haaretz  |  We’re being monitored. It’s a universally acknowledged truth about this digital age. Technology firms and advertisers know almost everything about us: where we are, what we buy, which apps we download and how we use them, our search histories and past purchases, even our sexual orientation and what fetishes we’re into. There’s only one thing that advertisers don’t or aren’t supposed to have access to: our identity. The world of ads and the data behind them is meant to be anonymous.
We’ve all been there. We read the post of a friend who just got back from vacation, and a few hours later an ad for a hotel pops up on our screen, and similar ones hound us for days, following us across websites and social media – but few of us have any idea how or why this happens.

Whenever we open an application or a website on our phone, without our noticing, a rapid process of mass negotiation takes place, and a complex and aggressive market embodying the whole economy of the internet plays out: In a split second – a fraction of the moment that elapses until the page we want opens – an automatic bidding process occurs between hundreds of thousands of different advertisers. They are fighting to advertise exactly to us at this exact moment in time. The more accurate the information the advertisers have about us, the more segmented and targeted the data, the greater the chances that we’ll actually click – and thus the price of the ad increases.

But some have the ability to take advantage of that fraction of a second to perform a much more malicious mission: to send people a distinctive, seemingly innocent, ad that contains advanced spyware. Though the ad looks completely standard, it is in fact a cyberweapon that is capable of infiltrating our phone or computer. 

In the past, it was believed that only state intelligence organizations had this capacity. It exploits the world of digital advertising, which is supposed to be completely anonymous, to bypass the security mechanisms of Apple, Google and Microsoft and install advanced spyware on our devices.
“These capabilities can turn any ad into a kind of digital bullet,” says a source familiar with the technology.

The new technology has also begun to trickle out into the commercial defense market. An investigation by Haaretz Magazine and the paper’s National Security & Cyber digital investigation desk has discovered that in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic – when certain tools were developed and deployed to track the spread of the virus – a new and disturbing cyber and espionage industry has come into being in Israel. A number of Israeli firms have developed technologies that are capable of exploiting advertising to collect data and monitor citizens. Hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people can be monitored in this way.

The investigation, which is based on interviews with over 15 sources from Israel’s offensive cyber, security systems and defense industries, further reveals that a small group of elite companies have taken things a step further: They have created technology that use ads for offensive purposes and injecting spyware. As millions of ads compete for the right to penetrate our screens, Israeli firms are clandestinely selling technology that transforms these ads into tools of surveillance – or even into weapons that are capable of penetrating our computers or phones.

One of these companies is Insanet, whose existence is being made public here for the first time. As its name suggests, it possesses insane capabilities, according to sources in the industry. Founded by a number of well-known entrepreneurs in the fields of offensive cyber and digital intelligence, the company is owned by former ranking members of the defense establishment, including a past head of the National Security Council, Dani Arditi. The investigation reveals that the company has developed technology that exploits ads both for tracking and for infection. It’s not by chance that the company has named their product Sherlock.

America Has No Hypersonics Because IT Tools CANNOT Replace Math And Physics Knowledge, Skill, And Ability...,

 

cf2r.org  | We will start, if necessary, by reading this article [1] . He reports on Russian advances in this area and discusses the potential concerns of the Western world about its ability to follow them, with the United States in the lead. We are asking ourselves the question here not of a delay which would be due to later development, but what seems to us to be a real conceptual difficulty in making such machines work.

Since we are in the West, let us remember these words of Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in physics: “the goal of the physicist is to make the equations speak” .

Let us note then that at the end of the Cold War, we find ourselves in a rather strange situation at first glance. The West pushed electronics and computing much further than the Soviet Union. It did not occur to anyone that the latter had held up without this and we were content to think, here, that its equipment was obsolete and ineffective. The Ukrainian conflict demonstrated the opposite!

However, those who worked on equipment opposing the collapse of the Berlin Wall know very well that the “enemy” of the time had implemented treasures of thought to precisely make the equations speak and understand what was really in-game without having to go through computer calculations. This was the case, for example, with so-called “ionic” space propulsion engines.

Meanwhile, at home, we relied more and more on software. They constituted a black box over which we had no control and we “swallowed” the results, whatever they were, as if they were the naked truth coming out of the well.

An example is often better than a long speech. In 2013, I had a machine of my design tested in a digital wind tunnel. Contract was signed with the School of Mines which included one of its best students from the Polytechnico Milan. The aim of the study was to determine the drag and lift coefficients of my aircraft. I had made an estimate by hand which took me 10 minutes. After 6 months of effort, the super calculator produced a drag coefficient which was equal to mine to within 10%. If we stop the story here, you might think I was 10% wrong. Nay! Indeed, in essence, my concept had to have a non-zero lift coefficient. But the one who emerged from the “hellish” program was zero. It was therefore a clear error which showed that we could not have any confidence in the result concerning the drag. I will spare you the analysis that followed as well as its conclusions.

Today, engineering schools, in full agreement with companies, want people who are efficient in handling various IT tools: Catia, etc. If in fact the latter, at the time they were designed, brought great progress for those who were used to thinking, they only “Taylorized” the real profession by degrading it enormously, leading to the incremental improvement which tomorrow will be the prerogative of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, from my point of view, replacing the Soviet physicists and engineers of the time with AI would absolutely not be possible.

So this is where we are and until our scientists are able to make the equations speak, it seems very unlikely that the West will be able to make hypersonic missiles worthy of the name. What do I mean by that? Not rockets that go to Mach 5, which is the limit between supersonic and hypersonic, but that reach Mach 9 like the Zircon at sea level or 27 like the Avangard at high altitude, while remaining maneuverable .

To reach such a level, it is imperative to return to studies focusing on paper and pencil. Write the equations, try to solve them by hand and understand, when you make approximations, what they correspond to physically and if they are legitimate.

Let's take one more example. There are so-called phase change fluid loops for cooling parts of, for example, satellites. If we do not carry out, with ad hoc approximations, an expansion limited to order 4 of the Navier-Stokes system, we cannot conceive of such loops. A computer will never be able to achieve this, although excellent engineers in the past have been able to do so.

When we see the low level in mathematics and physics today throughout the Western school structure, we say to ourselves that the light will come from elsewhere. And this is what we are seeing.

Pharis Williams: Alternative Grand Unified Theory Physicist

observing the anomaly  | For many years now, the ultimate quest in physics has been the unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics. Dr. Williams discovered that both these theories can, in fact, be derived from the laws of thermodynamics. The resulting theory eliminates the singularity problems of the conventional theories and makes a variety of intriguing predictions.

In his 5-dimension manifold theory, Williams’ finds the equations of thermodynamics have (as special cases) the otherwise distinct equations of physics including: Newton’s Mechanics, Classical Thermodynamics, Einstein’s Special Relativity, Einstein’s General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Electrodynamics, The Nuclear Strong Force and Weak Force, Gravitational Force and a deeper view of Cosmic Red Shift.

Because his work fills gaps in the Standard Model of Physics from the unexpected starting point of the Laws of Thermodynamics, he has been blocked from publication in the premier science journals of our day. He has 2 books published on his work.
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3APharis+E.+Williams&s=relevancerank&text=Pharis+E.+Williams&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1

I found one of his books online for free.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160323184244/http://physicsandbeyond.com/DynamicTheory.html

Williams states, “In summary, the book presents detailed derivations of numerous applications of the classical thermodynamic laws with the result that phenomena currently covered by Newtonian, relativistic and quantum mechanics are predicted by these three laws. This is a significant reduction of the number of required fundamental assumptions in the description of these phenomena. Additionally, many new phenomena are predicted that lead to new views of the universe.”

Memorial and Thoughts of a Man with Great Ideas — Pharis Williams

The first thing I found in my research was a DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) document published in 2015 by James O. Shannon (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Warren R. Maines (Sandia National Laboratories), David Mathes (CEO and Founder of Spacelines),and Paul Murad (Morningstar Applied Physics, LLC) titled “Memorial and Thoughts of a Man with Great Ideas — Pharis Williams”
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1248828

Before I dig into the document I want to point out who the authors are. One is Oke Shannon who worked with Pharis Williams at Los Alamos Labs. Another is from Sandia Labs. Paul Murad of Morningstar states in his linkedin profile “has over 25 years of public service as a senior technology analyst for the Department of Defense looking at foreign advanced and game-changing technology as well as defining future U.S. satellite systems for the next twenty years.” David Mathes of Spacelines has a SPI profile that states “ongoing optical research involves Dirac, Majorna and Weyl models of the electron internals, zitterbewegung, Bohmian quantum mechanics, and transactional hypothesis.”

So what does the document about Williams by these authors say? Here is a quote from the abstract.

“By applying simplifying or restrictive assumptions to the main body of the theory, Pharis shows that the major fields of physics are contained within the extensions of this theory. In these extensions, new field quantities appear to become important for systems and technical disciplines. Thus, the Dynamic Theory that he created would unify the various branches of physics into one theoretical structure. Only the future can tell what will be the impact of Pharis’ dynamic theory contributions and how engineers and scientists can gain and find new insights.”

It then goes on to explain his theory and work in more detail. It mentions a “popcorn program” or a “popcorn project” that was apparently an embarrassment to the Navy where Williams reportedly proved that a bunch of nuclear weapons were not being stored properly and a catastrophic event could potentially take place. Apparently, it was the result of him calculating the fusion yields from the tests didn’t match the theory and this is what led to him eventually developing his unified theory. The paper also implies that this embarrassment may have hurt Williams in getting others to look at his work and that the reader should look into the subject further. It says that, “You may read about this program in the archives of the London Daily Mail” however I can’t seem to find anything. I did find a story about UK weapons that could potentially explode if impacted and cause a “popcorning event” which looks related.
https://www.robedwards.com/2008/06/nuclear-bombs-could-explode-like-popcorn.html

The paper states in the conclusion:

“This unique maverick easily walked in both science and engineering disciplines and in doing so, found practical and important applications in shock physics and environmentally clean, compact reactors. From extending The Dynamic Theory to develop what Pharis described as the experimentally proven phat photon to the practicalities of the phat photon laser, such was the breadth of his skill sets where Pharis would then go the extra mile and propose applications in the fields of communications, energy and transportation. The future of The Dynamic Theory is up to the scientists and engineers of tomorrow who not only think outside the box, but can think and work in five dimensions and beyond.”

There Are Hypersonic Weapons And There Are Hypersonic Weapons!

smoothiex  |  there are hyper-sonic weapons and there are hyper-sonic weapons. The United States is trying to come up with something like both Avangard (long-range) and Kinzhal (medium range) which are either ballistic or quasi-ballistic weapons which do fly either inside the atmosphere or bounce from its edge, such as those gliders akin to Avangard. Eventually, the United States will be able to come up with something like that and the US desperately wants something like Kinzhal (in effect an advanced airborne version of Iskander). These are weapons which have only a boost phase, after which they fly and maneuver without propulsion. Look also up project Kholod. 

Now, 3M22 Zircon is a whole other animal altogether because it has a propulsion which works till the very end and thus provides this missile with the atmospheric speed of M=10 and the range of 1000 kilometers, coming modification of GZUR and Zircon will have the range of 1500 km and speed in excess of M=12-13. These weapons can attack both moving targets (like ships) and, obviously, stationary objects. These are the real game changers in a real war. If strategic weapons such as Avangard are what the United States wants, those, like any other deterrent exists to... deter merely by the threat of their use in case shit hits the fan. Kinzhal with Zircon, however, are the weapons of battlefield, because their main task is to sink enemy's ships and blow up military facilities using non-nuclear ordnance, albeit these weapons too can carry nuclear warhead and can destroy a good size city. If Avangard was created to be uninterceptable  by dedicated weapons of (strategic) Anti-Missile Defense, both Kinzhal and Zircon cannot be intercepted by existing air-defense and anti-missile systems such as THAAD or SM3/SM6 variety integrated with the AEGIS.   

While Avangard, and Sarmat (especially Sarmat) render any anti-missile defense useless, Kinzhal and Zircon are the most impactful, because they change modern warfare radically and already made modern surface fleets obsolete even within non-nuclear paradigm. As I repeat ad nauseam about repeating this ad nauseam--this is a strategic catastrophe for NATO (and US) because everything what NATO's "fighting doctrine" was built around in the last 40-50 years has become simply useless. I will give some ASW math on that later, but a single Yasen-class (pr. 885) with 15-20 Zircons "parked" somewhere  in the Atlantic in 1000 kilometer range from D.C. is not only extremely hard to detect and will require enormous forces dedicated to this kind of ASW, but controls the movement of any US naval asset from Norfolk or any other base on the East Coast which in case of (God forbids) real war will not be able to deploy. Granted, of course, that Russia builds 10 of such subs, modernizes couple of pr. 949A to AMs (that is 72 cruise missiles, including God knows how many Zircons) and there you go. So, in other words, it is not going to be a single sub. 

In related news, Russia officially announced the increase of range of venerable X-35 (of Bal complex) to 500+ kilometer, after Russkies were scared shitless by great American "strategist", prognosticator, second coming of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu wrapped in one, really, the great heir to the intellectual prowess of Mahan and Zumwalt, David Axe who promised to starve Kaliningrad by Estonian 300 km range anti-shipping missiles. As you know,  Shoigu and Gerasimov start their every morning by going to Forbes site trying to learn if David Axe has come up with a new stratagem designed to defeat those pesky Russkies. So, they went, saw the article on Estonian missiles, got scared and decided that covering both Baltic and Black Seas with the salvos (each of them) capable to contain between 16 to 32 X-35s is a really bad news for any NATO forces there, especially mighty Estonian ones. I would love to explain to David Axe basic math behind Salvo Equations and distribution of probabilities, but I don't think he wants to lower himself to my primitive level, so I have to live with that and I am sure Shoigu and Gerasimov will continue visiting those "military" sites such as Forbes or The National Interests to partake in strategic and operational wisdom of their "experts".

President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin Addresses The Russian Federal Assembly

kremlin  |  President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon,

Members of the Federation Assembly – senators, State Duma deputies,

Citizens of Russia,

This Presidential Address comes, as we all know, at a difficult, watershed period for our country. This is a time of radical, irreversible change in the entire world, of crucial historical events that will determine the future of our country and our people, a time when every one of us bears a colossal responsibility.

One year ago, to protect the people in our historical lands, to ensure the security of our country and to eliminate the threat coming from the neo-Nazi regime that had taken hold in Ukraine after the 2014 coup, it was decided to begin the special military operation. Step by step, carefully and consistently we will deal with the tasks we have at hand.

Since 2014, Donbass has been fighting for the right to live in their land and to speak their native tongue. It fought and never gave up amid the blockade, constant shelling and the Kiev regime’s overt hatred. It hoped and waited that Russia would come to help.

In the meantime, as you know well, we were doing everything in our power to solve this problem by peaceful means, and patiently conducted talks on a peaceful solution to this devastating conflict.

This appalling method of deception has been tried and tested many times before. They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this shame. The concepts of honour, trust, and decency are not for them.

Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony, they got used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master. After all, they cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories about the search for peace, about adherence to the UN Security Council resolutions on Donbass. Indeed, the Western elites have become a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.

We firmly defend our interests as well as our belief that in today’s world there should be no division into so-called civilised countries and all the rest and that there is a need for an honest partnership that rejects any exclusivity, especially an aggressive one.

We were open and sincerely ready for a constructive dialogue with the West; we said and insisted that both Europe and the whole world needed an indivisible security system equal for all countries, and for many years we suggested that our partners discuss this idea together and work on its implementation. But in response, we received either an indistinct or hypocritical reaction, as far as words were concerned. But there were also actions: NATO’s expansion to our borders, the creation of new deployment areas for missile defence in Europe and Asia – they decided to take cover from us under an ‘umbrella’ – deployment of military contingents, and not just near Russia’s borders.

I would like to stress –in fact, this is well-known – that no other country has so many military bases abroad as the United States. There are hundreds of them – I want to emphasise this – hundreds of bases all over the world; the planet is covered with them, and one look at the map is enough to see this.

The whole world witnessed how they withdrew from fundamental agreements on weapons, including the treaty on intermediate and shorter-range missiles, unilaterally tearing up the fundamental agreements that maintain world peace. For some reason, they did it. They do not do anything without a reason, as we know.

Finally, in December 2021, we officially submitted draft agreements on security guarantees to the USA and NATO. In essence, all key, fundamental points were rejected. After that it finally became clear that the go-ahead for the implementation of aggressive plans had been given and they were not going to stop.

The threat was growing by the day. Judging by the information we received, there was no doubt that everything would be in place by February 2022 for launching yet another bloody punitive operation in Donbass. Let me remind you that back in 2014, the Kiev regime sent its artillery, tanks and warplanes to fight in Donbass.

Chosen Whiteness = Modernity: Jewish Arrogance Exceeded Only By Its Obnoxiousness

yasha |  To continue some thoughts on the politics of printed word technology… Evgenia and I went to a bar mitzvah for the twin sons of my old friend, a Soviet immigrant from Odessa. It was in a synagogue in Foster City. Sitting there in the pews watching the service — the rabbi and the rest of the congregation rocking back and forth as they read their prayers, the Torah paraded around the room in adoration, with people kissing it as it passed them by — we got a nice glimpse at one reason why the Jews, always a marginal religious group, have been so successful in the modern world: We the Jews have long been people of the book — obsessed with text. And the modern world is all about worshipping the written word. So “we” were ahead of the game.

The printed word today is maybe what the natural world was to pagans and animists — something bigger than us, something to read into and revere, something full of secret knowledge. Just look at the people on the street, glued to their devices. Or better yet look at my own journalistic work — obsessed as it is with digging up forgotten (textual) histories. The Jews were into text, studying it, venerating it long before it was cool.

Yeah, I know, it’s not a very original insight. There’s a great book (again that reverence for a text) by Yuri Slezkine called the The Jewish Century that expands on this in big and detailed way. It’s really is a sharp book, and I’ve referenced it before when writing about Jews in Ukraine — here and here. Its main thesis is that European Jews were basically the first modern people. He lays it out in his introduction.

The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century. Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.

Some peasants and princes have done better than others, but no one is better at being Jewish than the Jews themselves. In the age of capital, they are the most creative entrepreneurs; in the age of alienation, they are the most experienced exiles; and in the age of expertise, they are the most proficient professionals. Some of the oldest Jewish specialties—commerce, law, medicine, textual interpretation, and cultural mediation—have become the most fundamental (and the most Jewish) of all modern pursuits. It is by being exemplary ancients that the Jews have become model moderns. The principal religion of the Modern Age is nationalism, a faith that represents the new society as the old community and allows newly urbanized princes and peasants to feel at home abroad. Every state must be a tribe; every tribe must have a state. Every land is promised, every language Adamic, every capital Jerusalem, and every people chosen (and ancient). The Age of Nationalism, in other words, is about every nation becoming Jewish.

What Should Generative Design Do?

engineering |  Generative design, along with its closely allied technology, topology optimization, is a technology that has overpromised and under-delivered. A parade of parts from generative design providers is dismissed outright as unmanufacturable, impractical—or just goofy looking. Their one saving grace may be that the odd-looking parts save considerable weight compared to parts that engineers have designed but which cannot overcome the fact that they can only be 3D printed, or that their shape is optimized for one load case—and ignores all others. So many stringy “optimized” shapes can be a compressive load that would buckle the part. We could never put that stringy, strange shape in a car, plane or consumer product. We don’t want to be laughed at.

The design software industry, eager to push technology with such potential, acquired at great cost, sees the rejection of generative design as evidence of engineers who are stuck in their ways, content to work with familiar but outdated tools, in the dark and unable to see the light and realize the potential of a game-changing technology. Engineers, on the other hand, say they never asked for generative design—at least not in so many words. 

Like 3D printing, another technology desperate for engineering acceptance, generative design sees its “solutions” as perfect. One such solution was a generatively designed bracket. The odd-looking part was discussed as a modeling experiment by Kevin Quinn, GM’s director of Additive Design and Manufacturing, but with no promise of mass production. It was obviously fragile and relied on 3D printing for its manufacture, making it unmanufacturable at the quantity required. It may have withstood crash test loads, but reverse loading would have splintered it. Yet, the part was to appear in every publication (even ours ) and almost everywhere lauded as a victory for generative design if the saint of lightweighting, a pressing automotive industry priority.

Now more than ever, engineers find themselves leaning into hurricane winds of technology and a software industry that promised us solutions. We are trained to accept technology, to bend it to our will, to improve products we design, but the insistence that software has found a solution to our design problems with generative design puts us in an awkward thanks-but-no-thanks position. We find ourselves in what Gartner refers to as “the trough of disillusionment.”

That is a shame for a technology that, if it were to work and evolve, could be the “aided” in computer- aided design. (For the sake of argument, let’s say that computer-aided design as it exists now is no more than an accurate way to represent a design that an engineer or designer has a fuzzy picture of in their heads).

How much trouble would it be to add some of what we know—our insight—to generative design? After all, that is another technology the software industry is fond of pushing. Watching a topology optimization take shape can be about as painful as watching a roomful of monkeys banging randomly on a keyboard and hoping to write a Shakespeare play. If, by some miracle, they form “What light through yonder window breaks?” our only hope of the right answer would be to type it ourselves. Similarly, an optimization routine starts creating a stringy shape. Bam! Let’s make it a cable and move on. A smooth shape is forming? Jump ahead and make it a flat surface. See a gap forming? Make it a machinable slot. Know a frame will undergo torsion? Stop the madness and use a round tube. (The shapes made with already optimized elements can still be optimized by adjusting angles and lengths.)

The inclusion of AI is what is strangely absent in generative design to this day. We are reminded of a recent conference (pre-pandemic, of course) in which we saw a software vendor go around a generative designed shape, replacing it bit by bit with standard shape elements—a round rod here, a smooth surface there. Really? We should have to do that?

Classical optimization techniques are a separate technology. Like CAD and CAE, they are based on mathematics. Unlike CAD, they have their own language. Optimization borrows language and nomenclature from calculus (optimum, dy/dx = 0, etc.) and adds some of its own. While optimization can be applied to any phenomenon, its application to 3D shapes is most relevant to this discussion. Each iteration of a shape is validated with a numerical technique. For structural shapes, the validation is done with finite element analysis (FEA). For fluid flow optimization, the validation is done with computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Therefore, the application of generative design uses the language of simulation, with terminology like boundary conditions, degrees of freedom, forces and moments. It’s a language foreign to designers and forgotten by the typical product design engineer that runs counter to the democratization of generative design.

The best technology is one that just works, requires little learning, and may not even need an introduction. Think of AI implementations by Google, delivered to our delight, with no fanfare—not even an announcement. Here was Google correcting our spelling, answering our questions, even completing our thoughts and translating languages. Scholars skilled in adapting works from one language to another were startled to find Google equally skilled. Google held no press conference, issued no press release, or even blogged about the wondrous feat of AI. It just worked. And it required no learning.

By contrast, IBM trumpeted its AI technology, Watson, after digesting the sum of human knowledge, easily beating Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings. But when it came to health care, Watson bombed at the very task it was most heavily promoted for: helping doctors diagnose and cure cancer, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The point is quick success and acceptance will be had with technology that seamlessly integrates into how people already do things and provides delight and a happy surprise. As opposed to retraining, asking users to do things in a whole new way with a new, complicated application that requires them to learn a new language or terminology.

World War III Is A Conflict Of Anthropological Values

twitter |  Emmanuel Todd, one of the greatest French intellectuals today, claims that the "Third World War has started."

Small 🧵 translating the most important points in this fascinating interview.

Emmanuel Todd: «La Troisième Guerre mondiale a commencé» GRAND ENTRETIEN - Au-delà de l’affrontement militaire entre la Russie et l’Ukraine, l’anthropologue insiste sur la dimension idéologique et culturelle de cette guerre et sur l’opposition entre l’Occid… https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/monde/emmanuel-todd-la-troisieme-guerre-mondiale-a-commence-20230112#Echobox=1673601494-1

 

He says "it's obvious that the conflict, started as a limited territorial war and escalating to a global economic confrontation, between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war." 

 

He believes that "Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. [...] I think the Kremlin's calculation was that this decaying society... 

 

... would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope." 

 

He says he agrees with Mearsheimer's analysis of the conflict: "Mearsheimer tells us that Ukraine, whose army had been overtaken by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of the NATO, and that the Russians had... 

 

... announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. From their point of view, the Russians are therefore in a war that is defensive and preventive. Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because... 

 

...since this is an existential question for them, the harder it would be, the harder they would strike. The analysis seems to hold true." 

 

He however has some criticism for Mearsheimer:

"Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is basically only one 'game' of power among others. After Vietnam... 

 

...Iraq and Afghanistan, what's one more debacle? The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: 'We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us'. Nothing would be existential for America. 

 

Insufficient analysis which today leads Biden to proceed mindlessly. America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system towards the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the 'economic power'...

...of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.

If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained, backed by China, American monetary and financial controls of the world......would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. 

 

This is why we...... are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other." 

 

He firmly believes the US is in decline but sees it as bad news for the autonomy of vassal states:

"I have just read a book by S. Jaishankar, Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs (The India Way), published just before the war, who sees American weakness, who knows that the......confrontation between China and the US will have no winner but will give space to a country like India, and to many others. I add: but not to Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the US, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of......the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its hold on its initial protectorates. As the American system shrinks, it weighs ever more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I include all of Europe here). 

 

The first to lose all national autonomy...... will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The Internet has produced human interaction with the US in the Anglosphere of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so to speak, annexed. On the European continent we are somewhat...... protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is considerable, and rapid. Let's remember the Iraq war, when Chirac, Schröder and Putin held joint anti-war press conferences." 

 

He underlines the importance of skills and education: "The US is now twice as populated as Russia (2.2 times in student age groups). But in the US only 7% are studying engineering, while in Russia it is 25%. Which means that with 2.2 times fewer people studying, Russia trains......30% more engineers. The US fills the gap with foreign students, but they're mainly Indians and even more Chinese. This is not safe and is already decreasing. It is a dilemma of the American economy: it can only face competition from China by importing skilled Chinese labor." 

 

On the ideological and cultural aspects of the war: "When we see the Russian Duma pass even more repressive legislation on 'LGBT propaganda', we feel superior. I can feel that as an ordinary Westerner. But from a geopolitical point of view, if we think in terms of...... soft power, it is a mistake. On 75% of the planet, the kinship organization was patrilineal and one can sense a strong understanding of Russian attitudes. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism." 

 

He continues: "The USSR had a certain form of soft power [but] communism basically horrified the whole Muslim world by its atheism and inspired nothing particular in India, outside of West Bengal and Kerala. However, today, Russia which repositioned itself as the archetype......of the great power, not only anti-colonialist, but also patrilineal and conservative of traditional mores, can seduce much further. [For instance] it's obvious that Putin's Russia, having become morally conservative, has become sympathetic to the Saudis who I'm sure have a......bit of a hard time with American debates over access for transgender women in the ladies' room.

Western media are tragically funny, they keep saying, 'Russia is isolated, Russia is isolated'. But when we look at the votes at the UN, we see that 75% of the world does not......follow the West, which then seems very small.

With an anthropologist reading of this [divide between the West and the rest] we find that countries in the West often have a nuclear family structure with bilateral kinship systems, that is to say where male and female kinship......are equivalent in the definition of the social status of the child. [Within the rest], with the bulk of the Afro-Euro-Asian mass, we find community and patrilineal family organizations. We then see that this conflict, described by our media as a conflict of political......values, is at a deeper level a conflict of anthropological values. It is this unconscious aspect of the divide and this depth that make the confrontation dangerous."