Epochtimes | My home city of Nashville has been in a virtual non-stop uproar since the tragic murders of six people, three of them 9-year-old children, at The Covenant School on March 27.
liminal perspectives on consensus reality...,
Epochtimes | My home city of Nashville has been in a virtual non-stop uproar since the tragic murders of six people, three of them 9-year-old children, at The Covenant School on March 27.
By CNu at April 11, 2023 0 comments
brownstone | On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics.
Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model.
I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on mainstream venues? Sadly, that seems to be where we headed. In big and small ways, and throughout the culture and the whole world, we are bit by bit being trained to forget and hence not learn and thus repeat the whole thing.
This makes no sense since nearly every public issue in play today traces to those fateful days and the fallout thereof, including censorship, the entrenchment of industry-government oligarchs, the corruption of media and tech, the educational upheaval, the abuse of courts and law, and the developing financial and banking crisis.
And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is too upsetting. There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being memoryholed in ways of which they all approve.
For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery. This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political parties and third parties.
Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns, mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission.
So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just
want the whole subject to go away. We find ourselves in an odd position,
having experienced the biggest trauma in our lives and in many
generations and yet there is precious little open talk about it.
Brownstone was established to fill this void but we’ve become a target
as a result.
By CNu at April 11, 2023 0 comments
Labels: Elite Narrative Hegemony , governance , Livestock Management , Mis.DisMal , Panic-demic
Consciousness reflects–and goes towards further influencing–the material underpinnings of the system in which it is situated. U$A is rapidly trending in a sharply authoritarian direction because the structural contradictions of capitalism can only be effectively addressed by the 1% via domestic austerity, increased repression (suppression of information, outright dismantling of supposed rule-of-law mechanisms, etc.), and accelerating militarism and war.
We are not approaching a crisis–we are in one. It was remarked to me years ago, there is a death wish at the core of capitalism. It’s 50/50 whether it’s more insane or evil, but both characterizations fit increasingly generalized events like the expulsion of legislators in Tennessee, the outright bribery of Supreme Court “justices,” and as always, the ability of the biggest banks to wallow outright in their corruption.
We live in interesting times. To the extent it is a spectator sport, we can only expect this plunge to continue and intensify. There is no “technical fix” to a system that is irrational and self-destructive–as someone remarked long ago, we will be its undertakers or ourselves be interred by its collapse.
From ChatGPT: Propaganda methods are techniques used to manipulate information, ideas, and opinions to influence and control people’s behavior. Here are some common propaganda methods:
By CNu at April 10, 2023 0 comments
Labels: 4th Reich , accountability , American Original , corporatism , Dystopian Now , egregores
racket | Earlier this afternoon, I learned Substack links were being blocked on Twitter. Since being able to share my articles is a primary reason I use Twitter, I was alarmed and asked what was going on.
.@elonmusk, you know that thing where the left eats its own? We mustn’t let that happen to the emerging western-values/free-speech coalition. Many of us who have backed your Twitter play and taken substantial heat for it are thrown by this move. The public square isn’t a monopoly https://t.co/qe1Gn6P6H6
— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) April 7, 2023
It turns out Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes feature, which they see as a hostile rival. When I asked how I was supposed to market my work, I was given the option of posting my articles on Twitter instead of Substack.
Not much suspense there; I’m staying at Substack. You’ve all been great to me, as has the management of this company. Beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter, a decision that apparently will come with a price as far as any future Twitter Files reports are concerned. It was absolutely worth it and I’ll always be grateful to those who gave me the chance to work on that story, but man is this a crazy planet.
By CNu at April 10, 2023 0 comments
Labels: Mis.DisMal
neuburger | To answer that question seriously, consider the following premises. I think the first four accurately describe the thinking of mainstream Democratic leaders since the humiliating presidential loss of 2016:
Modern Republicans (leaders, media, and crucially, their voters as well) represent the worst threat to the American Republic since the Civil War.
Or possibly since the Founding. Southern Confederates didn’t wish to institute Hitlerian reforms that would eliminate democracy from the governance of the state.
Any act by any individual or organization that advances the overall Republican Project, inadvertently or not, is as dangerous as the Project itself.
Because the Republican Project is evil, its supporters are evil — or in the most generous cases, deeply stupid.
Stopping the Republican Project means stopping all supporters and adherents, be they willing or not.
(Taibbi addendum 1) Matt Taibbi is a supporter, willingly or not, and therefore must be stopped.
(Taibbi addendum 2) Because his support is probably not inadvertent — Seder’s hosts and the Democratic committee members are certain his motive is money, a sell-out to advance Elon Musk — destruction of his entire career is a reasonable response. After all, the whole of American democracy is at risk; literally all.
I don’t think any of those statements, stark as they are, misrepresent the Democratic Party position. Everything I’ve observed since November 2016 confirms them all.
Statement 1 could well be true. I believe it myself, though about the leadership only. (I have other thoughts about Republican voters.)
But does the rest follow from that? Does it justify the destruction of free speech, to take one example, in order to preserve it? (If you doubt that’s what’s on offer, click the link.)
And even if it does, even if the means are justified by the end, the problem is that this Democratic Party response — this hate-Republicans-at-all-costs messaging (while party leaders themselves cut deals with them) — is not going to work. It won't blast them past their electoral opponents at near the speed it ought to, given their opponent's obvious and fatal flaws.
Mainstream Democrats run roughly even with Republicans except in protected districts. They certainly ran roughly even with Donald Trump in the only venue that counts, the Electoral College. And Democratic leaders are the reason that this is so. Will all this vitriol make them more attractive, or less?
If you don’t like the status quo, you have no one to vote for, just people to vote against.
What do you think would happen if Democrats ran a candidate of Real Rebellion, a Bernie Sanders, say, à la 2016, against the candidate of Pretending to Care what happens to suffering voters? Would real rebellion against predatory rule by the rich “trump” fake rebellion financed by the rich?
Of course it would. Sanders would have beaten Trump soundly, had he had the chance, in the 2016 race. All the momentum was his, and he won almost every head-to-head primary contest in states with open, same-day primary voting.
But Democrats, the other party of the rich, won’t take that course. Which leaves them only one pitch. In Taibbi’s language from the start of this piece:
It’s always “Vote for us or you’re a right-wing insurrectionist Putin-lover,” which is the opposite of persuasive.
This is the Democrats’ constant closing argument, and the worst they could advance. It makes them, not just wrong, but ugly as well, the “opposite of persuasive.” Yet this is all they have, if they can’t themselves attack the people’s real enemy, and this time actually mean it. Sad for us. Sad for them as well.
By CNu at April 09, 2023 0 comments
Labels: 4th Reich , corporate governmentalism , Elite Narrative Hegemony , Resistance , What Elites Disdain Is "Divisive"
racket | I’m going to be interviewed on MSNBC today by Mehdi Hasan, the author of a book called Win Every Argument. I’m looking forward to it as one would a root canal or a rectal.
I accepted the invitation because it would have been wrong to refuse, on the off chance he was planning a good-faith discussion. If you’re reading this, things have gone another way.
I last appeared on MSNBC six years ago, on January 13, 2017, to talk with Chris Hayes and of all people Malcolm Nance, about the then-burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal.
The Trump-Russia story was white-hot and still in its infancy. That same day, news leaked from Israel that Americans warned the Mossad not to share information with the incoming administration, because Russia had “leverages of pressure” on Trump. Asked by Chris about the scandal generally, I made what I thought was a boring-but-true observation, that we in the media didn’t “have any hard evidence” of a conspiracy, just not a lot to go on. This was the TV equivalent of a shrug.
Nance jumped on this in a way I remember feeling was unexpected and oddly personal. “Matt’s a journalist. I’m an intelligence officer,” he snapped. “There is no such thing as coincidence in my world.” Chris jumped in to note reporters have different standards, and I agreed, saying, “We haven’t seen anything that allows us to say unequivocally that x and y happened last year.”
“Unequivocally” seemed to trigger Nance. With regard to the DNC hack, he said, “That evidence is unequivocal. It’s on the Internet.” As for “these links possibly with the Trump team,” he proclaimed, “You’re probably never going to see the CIA’s report.” Nance went on to answer “no” to a question from Chris about whether leaks “were coming from the intelligence community,” Chris wrapped up with a sensible suggestion that we all not rely on a parade of “leaks and counter-leaks,” and the segment was done.
To this day I get hit probably a hundred times a day with the question, “What happened to you, man?” What happened? That segment happened, but to MSNBC, not me.
That exchange between Nance and me was symbolic of a choice the network faced. They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.
We know how that worked out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.
By CNu at April 09, 2023 0 comments
Labels: Censorship , Elite Narrative Hegemony , propaganda , Resistance
NC | But all of that changed when AMLO came to power in late 2018. For the first time in 30 years Mexico had a government that was not only determined to halt the privatisation and liberalisation of Mexico’s energy market but to begin dialling it back. Allegations of corrupt practices and price gouging by Iberdrola and other energy companies became a popular talking point at AMLO’s morning press conferences. The juicy contracts began drying up. Instead, a range of obstacles began forming, from disconnections to nonrenewal of permits and fines for price gouging.
The times of plenty had come to an end. And not a moment too soon.
At the rate things were going, the CFE would be generating just 15% of Mexico’s electricity by the end of this decade, says Ángel Barreras Puga, a professor of engineering at the University of Queretero; the rest would be generated exclusively by private, foreign companies.
“Who was going to control prices in the market? Foreign companies, with all that entails. Behind the foreign companies are their national governments. And we have seen how the US government, the US Ambassador and US legislators came to Mexico to try to pressure AMLO to change his policies. Ultimately, they are all lobbyists of private companies.”
There are few better examples of this than US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar, as Ken Hackbarth reported for Jacobin at the time of Sakazar’s appointment in 2021:
Upon leaving (the US Interior Department] in 2013, Salazar went through the revolving door to work for WilmerHale, a law and lobbying firm with close ties to the Trump family, whose roster drilling- and mining-related clients included none other than — you guessed it — BP. From his lucrative new perch in the private sector, Salazar used his clout to support the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Protocol (TPP), whose “investor-state” provisions would let corporations challenge environmental regulations in private tribunals; fought against ballot initiatives that would limit fracking and distance oil wells from buildings and bodies of water; opposed climate lawsuits against the fossil fuel sector; and, in a highly questionable skirting of ethics rules, provided legal counsel to the same company, Anadarko Petroleum, that benefitted on multiple occasions from his stint in government…
The fact of sending an oil and gas lobbyist to lecture Mexico on renewable energy — one, moreover, representing an administration that just opened 80 million acres for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and is approving drilling permits on public lands at a faster rate than Trump — would be comical if it were not so revealing of the ugly underbelly of US-Mexico relations.
More to Come?
The AMLO-Iberdrola deal has raised concerns in business circles that other foreign energy companies could face a similar fate as the Spanish utility, as AMLO government pushes to expand the state’s role in the energy sector. Bloomberg describes it as a warning shot for international energy companies.
“The choice of words and messages is deliberate,” said John Padilla, managing director of energy consultancy IPD Latin America, adding that such moves could be intentionally sending a warning to foreign companies amid protracted trade disputes with the USA on energy policy. “The main message for private sector investors, at least on the electricity side, is certainly not a good one.”
Mexico’s nationalist energy policies have already stoked the ire of its North American trade partners, Canada and the US, which argue that they violate the USMCA regional trade agreement by discriminating against Canadian and US companies. As Reuters reported a week ago, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is considering making a “final offer” to Mexico negotiators to open its markets and agree to some increased oversight.
Failing that, USTR will initiate a dispute settlement against its southern neighbour. If the panel rules against Mexico and the Mexican government refuses to rectify its behaviour, Washington and Ottawa could impose billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs on Mexican goods.
By CNu at April 08, 2023 0 comments
Labels: 4th Reich , AMLO , corporate governmentalism , mexico
undrr | Shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck the southern USA, 200 Mexican
troops crossed the US border outside Laredo, Texas, and made their way
towards San Antonio. It was the first time a Mexican army contingent had
entered Texas since the Battle of the Alamo in 1836.
In 2005, the Mexican soldiers were on a relief mission to feed tens of
thousands of homeless and hungry Americans displaced by Hurricane
Katrina. They stayed 20 days at the former Kelly Air Force Base in
Texas, one of the first American states in the USA to rescue thousands
of hurricane Katrina refugees.
“We served more than 170,000 meals and distributed more than 184,000
tons of supplies including medical supplies,” recalled Colonel Ignacio
Murillo Rodriguez of the Mexican Ministry of Defense SEDENA.
“We came with a big tractor trailer that we immediately converted into a
huge field kitchen. At the time, thousands of hurricane survivors had
moved to Texas and were living in a very precarious situation with no
job and no revenues, and we were able to help them serving meals, and
water and generally assist them. It was quite an incredible experience
that really made our reputation abroad. Our food trucks are very well
known by now and today constitute a major element of our emergency
capacities ” said Colonel Rodriquez.
Created in 1966, the Mexican Plan to Aid Civilian Disaster known as
DN-III-E is a series of measures to be implemented primarily by the
Mexican Army and the Mexican Air Force, organized as a body under the
name of Support Force for Disaster. It operates mostly in disaster
emergency situations occurring in Mexico but not exclusively.
“We have now trained many troops in Spain, Belize, Venezuela, and
Ecuador and our force has acquired a very established reputation in
terms of capacity building,” says Captain Alejandro Velasquez
Valdicisco.
The DN-III-E has three main roles: prevention, protection and recovery
and it is part of the Federal Response Master Plan dealing with major
contingencies and emergencies in Mexico.
The prevention plan better known as the MX Plan coordinates and
articulates the response in all national instances when an emergency
happens. It embraces the Navy Plan and the Civilian Population Support
Plan of the Federal Police, as well as the plans of government agencies
and public entities such as PEMEX, the Federal Electricity Commission
and CONAGUA ( water agency).
"We have the responsibility to rescue people, to manage shelters, to
make recommendations to populations at risk and to guarantee the safety
and security of affected disaster areas. Every soldier or person working
for the Mexican army receives a special training to protect civilians.
We actually do not have a special unit to deal with emergency situations
as armed forces are all trained to protect civilians when disasters
happen,” said Captain Alejandro Velasquez Valdicisco.
Mexicans remember the role played by the Ministry of Defense when
Volcano Colima erupted in October 2016 forcing hundreds of people to
evacuate. They worked long hours with the Civil Protection and were able
to relocate hundreds of people at risk.
The same happened during the 2007 floods that affected more than 1
million people in the south-eastern Mexican state of Tabasco. More than
13,000 soldiers were deployed in the flooding areas to help evacuating
populations from 13 municipalities.
The Ministry of Defense is also involved in the surveillance of the
Popocatépetl volcano and plays a direct early warning role to alert and
protect the main communities of Puebla, Morelos, State of México,
Tlaxcala and Mexico City when volcano activities increase.
By CNu at April 08, 2023 0 comments
Labels: Living Memory , mexico , People Centric Leadership , What IT DO Shawty...
qz | With AMLO's purchase of 13 Spanish-owned power plants, the majority of Mexico's electricity production is now state-controlled.
The Mexican government agreed to purchase 13 power plants from the Spanish energy company Iberdrola for $6 billion on Tuesday (April 4), giving its state-owned power company, Commission Federal de Electricidad (CFE), majority control over the country’s electricity market.
Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopes Obrador (AMLO) called the decision part of a “new nationalization” of some of the country’s major industries, including mineral and oil production, according to Reuters.
The acquisition of the power plants will give CFE control of more than 56% of Mexico’s total production—up from approximately 40%, and surpassing AMLO’s previously stated goal of 54%.
The
US and Canada have strongly opposed AMLO’s actions, and have threatened
a trade war if Mexico continues to roll back access for international
corporations in Mexico’s power and oil markets.
Iberdrola said the power plants would be taken over by CFE within five months as it looks to reduce its operations in Mexican energy markets. The company’s CEO, Ignacio Galan, said that the deal was a win-win.
“That
energy policy has moved us to look for a situation that’s good for the
people of Mexico, and at the same time, that complies with the interests
of our shareholders,” Galan said after a joint appearance with AMLO announcing the deal.
AMLO has repeatedly compared Iberdola’s power over Mexican resources to Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century, even threatening to pause diplomatic relations with Spain over perceived neo-colonial actions by foreign energy firms.
Less than a month ago, more than 500,000 people flooded Mexico City to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the nationalization of the oil industry by president Lázaro Cárdenas del Río in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.
AMLO addressed the crowd, promising to carry on Cárdenas’s legacy, specifically highlighting his decision to nationalize the country’s energy and mining sectors, including Mexico’s burgeoning lithium reserves in the Sonora desert.
By CNu at April 07, 2023 0 comments
Labels: AMLO , mexico , People Centric Leadership , What IT DO Shawty...
theguardian | Mexico’s president has written to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, urging him to help control shipments of fentanyl, while also complaining of “rude” US pressure to curb the drug trade.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has previously said that fentanyl is the US’s problem and is caused by “a lack of hugs” in US families. On Tuesday he read out the letter to Xi dated 22 March in which he defended efforts to curb supply of the deadly drug, while rounding on US critics.
López Obrador complained about calls in the US to designate Mexican drug gangs as terrorist organisations. Some Republicans have said they favour using the US military to crack down on Mexican cartels.
“Unjustly, they are blaming us for problems that in large measure have to do with their loss of values, their welfare crisis,” López Obrador wrote to Xi in the letter.
“These positions are in themselves a lack of respect and a threat to our sovereignty, and moreover they are based on an absurd, manipulative, propagandistic and demagogic attitude.”
Only after several paragraphs of venting, López Obrador brings up China’s exports of fentanyl precursors, and asked him to help stop shipments of chemicals that Mexican cartels import from China.
“I write to you, President Xi Jinping, not to ask your help on these rude threats, but to ask you for humanitarian reasons to help us by controlling the shipments of fentanyl,” the Mexican president wrote.
China has taken some steps to limit fentanyl exports, but mislabelled or harder-to-detect precursor chemicals continue to pour out of Chinese factories.
It was not immediately clear if Xi had received the letter or if he had responded to it. López Obrador has a history of writing confrontational letters to world leaders without getting a response.
López Obrador has angrily denied that fentanyl is produced in Mexico. However, his own administration has acknowledged finding dozens of labs where it is produced, mainly in the northern state of Sinaloa.
By CNu at April 07, 2023 0 comments
Labels: AMLO , mexico , narcoterror , The Straight and Narrow
kremlin.ru | Another basic area is the training of qualified engineers, technicians and workers. We have been short of these people for many years and we need to make cardinal changes and achieve tangible results in this respect. The goals facing the industry and the economy as a whole will not be achieved by themselves. They are achieved by the people, the specialists working at the companies.
By and large, we have determined the areas for developing vocational education. We must update academic programmes and the material, technical and laboratory facilities of universities, colleges, technical and vocational schools. I have just discussed this with Mr Levitin. Obviously, we must double-check their departmental affiliation. We need to find out whether everything meets the latest requirements and if the regions are able to run college education effectively in certain areas. Possibly, we should consider a vertical organisational structure for this – in the framework of certain production sectors – as we did in the past.
Industry badly needs highly qualified workers now. They study at secondary special education institutions, which are the responsibility of the regions, as I have said. I think we should return to the discussion of departmental affiliation. We have already developed good practices in this respect. I would like to ask the regional governors to share their experience, monitor these issues and resolve them in close contact with the relevant departments and ministries.
I know that at yesterday’s seminar you discussed in detail, with Government representatives, the measures I mentioned and the
regional governors’ initiatives, and mapped out specific proposals and steps. Let us analyse all of these again. I would like to ask you to tell me about the course of your discussions and the proposals and ideas that you came up with in the process.
Mr Dyomin, you have the floor, please.....
.....And the fifth question, which you also touched upon, and of course, it is also the main one, is personnel. The shortage of engineering personnel arises due to various reasons - we all know them.
There are not enough applicants who enter technical universities. The nature of these problems begins at school. The reason lies both in the shortage of teachers of mathematics and physics in schools - this is a problem that can be solved, as well as in the fear of the students themselves to fill up this subject at the Unified State Examination. Because when a student gets attached to mathematics and physics and starts preparing for the Unified State Examination, [he] perfectly understands that it is easier to pass this exam in the humanities and moves on to the humanities.
Vladimir Putin: It happens in different ways.
Alexander Dyumin: As a result, the number of applicants who can become engineers is significantly reduced. There are statistics, Vladimir Vladimirovich.
Vladimir Putin: Clearly, yes. I understand.
Andrei Dyumin: Even at school, students choose the humanities instead of specialized mathematics and physics. This problem must be solved comprehensively: to strengthen the training of teachers of these subjects, to motivate schoolchildren with interesting curricula.
One of the proposals that is being discussed within the framework of the commission - this issue was discussed yesterday, I just want to draw attention, if not, then some other option - one of the proposals: to give the right to universities that train students in technical specialties, accept children not only for the Unified State Examination, but also for entrance exams in their specialized disciplines. If not, then in a different way.
Vladimir Putin: You can, Alexei Gennadyevich.
I met with entrepreneurs, they saw, probably, they also said that it is easier to pass in the humanities, especially for girls, but in the natural sciences, in mathematics it is more difficult. It depends on how to interest the person.
I'll tell you later, I know a girl who graduated from a higher educational institution in the humanities, studying foreign languages as well. Then she became interested in other disciplines and defended her Ph.D. thesis in higher mathematics. It depends on how the person is motivated.
Alexei Dyumin: This is an asterisk.
Vladimir Putin: These "stars" are created by teachers and those people who work on a person's professional orientation.
Alexei Dyumin: Mr Putin, the tasks you have set require not stars, but starfall.
Vladimir Putin: All right, all right.
Alexei Dyumin: Mr Putin, and another important issue, which is understandable, is housing, which is relevant in every industry. An effective mechanism, which was adopted by the Government of Russia, was preferential mortgages for the IT sector.
It is proposed to consider: let's consider the possibility of extending this measure to the industry and, of course, primarily to the rocket industry. We can talk about both federal and regional backbone enterprises. And of course, we are well aware that this is a serious additional incentive for our young people to choose the profession and follow the profession that is in demand and necessary for the state. I ask the Government to instruct to study this issue and pay attention to it.
Vladimir Vladimirovich, and, of course, after all that has been said - perhaps even some kind of irony, but this is not irony - while communicating and being at his post in a developed industrial region: chemistry, metallurgy, defense industry, engineers, designers, technologists, even teachers of technical universities, flagship universities - everyone is asking to return drafting to school. This is the beginning of the basics of engineering knowledge.
It is clear that now there is a lot of software that draws, rotates, creates and so on in 3D, but this is not my opinion - this is what designers, young engineers, technologists from all areas of all industries say: please return drawing to school education. I would like to ask you to consider this issue at a high level and make an appropriate decision.
Vladimir Vladimirovich, thank you for your attention. The report is finished.
Vladimir Putin: Thank you very much.
By CNu at April 06, 2023 0 comments
Labels: Autarky , Ecce Homo , edumackation , What Now?
phys.org | People have more efficient conversations, use more positive language and perceive each other more positively when using an artificial intelligence-enabled chat tool, a group of Cornell researchers has found.
Postdoctoral researcher Jess Hohenstein is lead author of "Artificial Intelligence in Communication Impacts Language and Social Relationships," published in Scientific Reports.
Co-authors include Malte Jung, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS), and Rene Kizilcec, assistant professor of information science (Cornell Bowers CIS).
Generative AI is poised to impact all aspects of society, communication and work. Every day brings new evidence of the technical capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4, but the social consequences of integrating these technologies into our daily lives are still poorly understood.
AI tools have potential to improve efficiency, but they may have negative social side effects. Hohenstein and colleagues examined how the use of AI in conversations impacts the way that people express themselves and view each other.
"Technology companies tend to emphasize the utility of AI tools to accomplish tasks faster and better, but they ignore the social dimension," Jung said. "We do not live and work in isolation, and the systems we use impact our interactions with others."
In addition to greater efficiency and positivity, the group found that when participants think their partner is using more AI-suggested responses, they perceive that partner as less cooperative, and feel less affiliation toward them.
"I was surprised to find that people tend to evaluate you more negatively simply because they suspect that you're using AI to help you compose text, regardless of whether you actually are," Hohenstein said. "This illustrates the persistent overall suspicion that people seem to have around AI."
For their first experiment, co-author Dominic DiFranzo, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Cornell Robots and Groups Lab and now an assistant professor at Lehigh University, developed a smart-reply platform the group called "Moshi" (Japanese for "hello"), patterned after the now-defunct Google "Allo" (French for "hello"), the first smart-reply platform, unveiled in 2016. Smart replies are generated from LLMs to predict plausible next responses in chat-based interactions.
A total of 219 pairs of participants were asked to talk about a policy issue and assigned to one of three conditions: both participants can use smart replies; only one participant can use smart replies; or neither participant can use smart replies.
The researchers found that using smart replies increased communication efficiency, positive emotional language and positive evaluations by communication partners. On average, smart replies accounted for 14.3% of sent messages (1 in 7).
But participants who their partners suspected of responding with smart replies were evaluated more negatively than those who were thought to have typed their own responses, consistent with common assumptions about the negative implications of AI.
By CNu at April 06, 2023 0 comments
Labels: AI , Cain't Truss It
amidwesterndoctor | Much like the vaccine industry, the psychiatric industry will always try to absolve their dangerous medications of responsibility and will aggressively gaslight their victims. Despite these criticisms,there are three facts can be consistently found throughout the literature on akathisia homicides which Gøtzsche argues irrefutably implicate psychiatric medications as the cause of violent homicides:
• These violent events occur in people of all ages, who by all objective and subjective measures were completely normal before the act and where no precipitating factors besides the psychiatric medication could be identified.
• The events were preceded by clear symptoms of akathisia.
• The violent offenders returned to their normal personality when they came off the antidepressant.
Numerous cases where this has happened are summarized within this article from the Palm Beach Post. In most of those cases, a common trend of these spontaneous acts of violence emerges: the act of violence was immediately preceded by a significant change in the psychiatric medications used by the individual. In one case, shortly before committing one of these murders, one of the perpetrators also wrote on a blog that, while taking Prozac, he felt as if he was observing himself "from above."
Individuals with a mutation in the gene that metabolizes psychiatric drugs are much more vulnerable to developing excessive levels of these drugs and triggering severe symptoms such as akathisia and psychosis. There is a good case to be made that individuals with this gene are responsible for many of the horrific acts of iatrogenic (medically induced) violence that occur, however to my knowledge, this is never considered when psychiatric medications are prescribed. Gøtzsche summarized a peer-reviewed forensic investigation of 10 cases where this happened (all but one of these involved an SSRI or an SNRI):
Note: This original version
of this article (which has been revised and updated) was published a
year ago, but sadly is just as pertinent now as it was then. Each time
one of these shootings happen, I watch people get up in arms over what
needs to be done to stop murdering our children, but at the same time
this, the elephant in the room, the clear and irrefutable evidence linking psychiatric medications to homicidal violence is never discussed (which I believe is due their sales making approximately 40 billion dollars a year).
Many
of the stories in here are quite heart wrenching, and I humbly request
that you make the effort to bear witness to these tragic events.
Prior
to the Covid vaccinations, psychiatric medications were the
mass-prescribed medication that had the worst risk-to-benefit ratio on
the market. In addition to rarely providing benefits to patients, there
is a wide range of severe complications that commonly result from
psychiatric medications. Likewise, I and many colleagues believe the
widespread adoption of psychotropic drugs has distorted the cognition of
the demographic of the country which frequently utilizes them (which to
some extent stratifies by political orientation) and has created a wide
range of detrimental shifts in our society.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have a similar primary mechanism of action to cocaine. SSRIs block the reuptake of Serotonin, SNRIs, also commonly prescribed block the reuptake of Serotonin and Norepinephrine (henceforth “SSRI refers to both SSRI and SNRI), and Cocaine blocks the reuptake of Serotonin, Norepinephrine, and Dopamine. SSRIs (and SNRIs) were originally used as anti-depressants, then gradually had their use marketed into other areas and along the way have amassed a massive body count.
Once the first SSRI entered the market in 1988, Prozac quickly distinguished itself as a particularly dangerous medication and after nine years, the FDA received 39,000 adverse event reports for Prozac, a number far greater than for any other drug. This included hundreds of suicides, atrocious violent crimes, hostility and aggression, psychosis, confusion, distorted thinking, convulsions, amnesia, and sexual dysfunction (long-term or permanent sexual dysfunction is one of the most commonly reported side effects from anti-depressants, which is ironic given that the medication is supposed to make you less, not more depressed).
SSRI homicides are common, and a website exists that has compiled thousands upon thousands of documented occurrences. As far as I know (there are most likely a few exceptions), in all cases where a mass school shooting has happened, and it was possible to know the medical history of the shooter, the shooter was taking a psychiatric medication that was known for causing these behavioral changes. After each mass shooting, memes illustrating this topic typically circulate online, and the recent events in Texas [this article was written shortly after the shooting last year] are no exception. I found one of these and made an updates version of it (the one I originally used contained some inaccuracies)
Oftentimes, “SSRIs cause mass shootings” is treated as just another crazy conspiracy theory. However, much in the same way the claim “COVID Vaccines are NOT safe and effective” is typically written off as a conspiracy theory, if you go past these labels and dig into the actual data, an abundantly clear and highly concerning picture emerges.
There are many serious issues with psychiatric medications. For brevity, this article will exclusively focus on their tendency to cause horrific violent crimes. This was known long before they entered the market by both the drug companies and the FDA. While there is a large amount of evidence for this correlation, it is the one topic that is never up for debate when a mass shooting occurs. I have a lot of flexibility to discuss highly controversial topics with my colleagues, but this topic is met with so much hostility that I can never bring it up. It is, for this reason, I am immensely grateful to have an anonymous forum I can use.
By CNu at April 05, 2023 0 comments
Labels: Big Pharma , DISC , SSRI
pierrekory | One of the pharmaceutical executives directly involved in obtaining the approval for the original SSRI antidepressant, Prozac, developed a great deal of guilt for what he was complicit in once a large number of SSRI-linked deaths occurred. John Virapen, along with Peter Rost are the only pharmaceutical executives I know of who have become whistleblowers and shared the intimate details of how these companies actually operate. Although the events Virapen alleged seem hard to believe, other whistleblowers have also made similar observations to Virapen (the accounts of the Pfizer whistleblowers can be found in this article and this article).
John Virapen chronicled the events in which he was complicit in “Side Effects: Death—Confessions of a Pharma Insider.”
These included outrageous acts of bribery to get his drugs approved,
and photographing physicians with prostitutes provided by Eli Lilly so
that they could be blackmailed into serving Eli Lilly. For those
interested, this is a brief talk that Virapen gave about his
experiences. I greatly appreciate the fact he used candid language
rather than euphemisms like almost everyone else does:
At the start of the saga, Lilly was in dire financial straits and the company’s survival hinged on the approval of Prozac. Prozac had initially been proposed as a treatment for weight loss (as this side effect of Prozac had been observed in treatment subjects), but Lilly subsequently concluded it would be easier to get approval for treating depression and then get a post-marketing approval for the treatment of weight loss.
As Prozac took off, it became clear that depression was a much better market, and the obesity aspect was forgotten. Lilly then used a common industry tactic and worked tirelessly to expand the definition of depression so that everyone could become eligible for the drug and aggressively marketed this need for happiness to the public, before long, transforming depression from a rare to a common condition. For those wishing to learn more, Peter Gøtzsche has extensively documented how this fraud transpired and both this brief documentary and this article show how depression became popularized in Japan so that treatments for it could be sold.
Unfortunately, while the marketing machine had no difficulties creating a demand for Prozac, the initial data made it abundantly clear that the first SSRI, Prozac, was dangerous and ineffective. Lilly settled on the strategy of obtaining regulatory approval in Sweden, and using this approval as a precedent to obtain approval in other countries. Virapen was assigned to this task and told by his superiors that if he failed, his career was over. Virapen, unfortunately, discovered that whenever he provided Lilly’s clinical trial data to experts, they had trouble believing he was actually seeking regulatory approval, as Prozac’s trial data was just that bad.
Sweden (following their regulatory procedures) elected to allow an outside independent expert to make the final determination on whether Prozac should be approved or not. The identity of this expert witness was concealed, but Virapen was able to determine that it was Anders Forsman, a forensic psychiatrist and member of the legal council on the Swedish National Board of Health. After meeting with Virapen, Forsman proposed an untraceable bribe. Then, upon receiving payment, wrote a glowing letter in support of Prozac, fully reversing his position on Prozac (he had ridiculed it two weeks before) and guided Virapen through re-writing the trial to conceal the 5 attempted (4 of which were successful) SSRI suicides in Lilly’s trial.
Forsman’s expert opinion resulted in Prozac being partially approved and formally priced for reinbursement in Sweden, which was used as a precedent to market it around the world at that same lucrative price. Virapen noted that during this time, German drug regulators who had clearly and unambiguously stated that Prozac was “totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression” suddenly reversed their position, leading Virapen to suspect that similar under-the-table activity must have occurred in Germany. David Healey, a doctor and director of the North Wales School of psychological medicine, likewise concluded that the German approval was due to “unorthodox lobbying methods exercised on independent members of the regulatory authorities.”
Not long after saving Eli Lilly, Virapen was fired. Virapen believes he was fired because he was a man of color in an otherwise Caucasian company (he was told this by his supervisor). Gøtzsche, a leading expert in pharmaceutical research fraud and meta-analyses, on the other hand, attributed this to typical organized crime tactics where Lilly sought to conceal their illegal activity by firing Virapen and his two assistants to bribe Forsman (because immediately afterwards, none of them were permitted to access their offices, and thus could not obtain any of the files that proved that this bribery occurred). Fortunately, as happened with Peter Rost, this unjust firing eventually motivated Virapen to become an invaluable whistleblower.
By CNu at April 05, 2023 0 comments
Labels: Big Pharma , SSRI
Word on the street, and what I've witnessed with my very own lying eyes, information technology CHUDS and medical students alike have been crying like little bishes about the market failure to keep them supplied with their longtime legal drugs of dependency.
Bloomberg | Patients diagnosed with conditions like anxiety and sleep disorders have become caught in the crosshairs of America’s opioid crisis, as secret policies mandated by a national opioid settlement have turned filling legitimate prescriptions into a major headache.
In July, limits went into effect that flag and
sometimes block pharmacies’ orders of controlled substances such as
Adderall and Xanax when they exceed a certain threshold. The requirement
stems from a 2021 settlement with the US’s three largest drug
distributors — AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp.
But pharmacists said it curtails their ability to fill prescriptions
for many different types of controlled substances — not just opioids.
Independent
pharmacists said the rules force them come up with creative
workarounds. Sometimes, they must send patients on frustrating journeys
to find pharmacies that haven’t yet exceeded their caps in order to buy
prescribed medicines.
“I understand the intention of this policy
is to have control of controlled substances so they don’t get abused,
but it’s not working,” said Richard Glotzer, an independent pharmacist
in Millwood, New York. “There’s no reason I should be cut off from
ordering these products to dispense to my legitimate patients that need
it.”
It's unclear how the thresholds are impacting major chain
pharmacies. CVS Health Corp. didn’t provide comment. A spokesperson for
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. said its pharmacists “work to resolve any
specific issues when possible, in coordination with our distributors.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration regulates the manufacturing,
distribution and sale of controlled substances, which can be dangerous
when used improperly. Drugmakers and wholesalers were always supposed to
keep an eye out for suspicious purchases and have long had systems to
catch, report and halt these orders. The prescription opioid crisis,
enabled by irresponsible drug company marketing and prescribing, led to a
slew of lawsuits and tighter regulations on many parts of the health
system, including monitoring of suspicious orders. One major settlement
required the three largest distributors to set thresholds on orders of
controlled substances starting last July.
The
“suspicious order” terminology is a bit of a misnomer, pharmacists
said. The orders themselves aren't suspicious, it's just that the
pharmacy has exceeded its limit for a specific drug over a certain time
period. Any order that puts the pharmacy over its limit can be stopped.
As a result, patients with legitimate prescriptions get caught up in the
dragnet.
Adding to the confusion, the limits themselves are
secret. Drug wholesalers are barred by the settlement agreement from
telling pharmacists what the thresholds are, how they’re determined or
when the pharmacy is getting close to hitting them.
By CNu at April 05, 2023 0 comments
Labels: addiction , Big Pharma , comedy gold , Medical Industrial Complex , po thang...
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:58 Physics from computation
00:11:30 Generalizing Turing machines
00:17:34 Dark matter as Indicating "atoms of space"
00:22:13 Energy as density of space itself
00:30:30 Entanglement limit of all possible computations
00:34:53 What persists across the universe are "concepts"
00:40:09 How does ChatGPT work?
00:41:41 Irreducible computation, ChatGPT, and AI
00:49:20 Recovering general relativity from the ruliad (Wolfram Physics Project)
00:58:38 Coming up: David Chalmers, Ben Goertzel, and more Wolfram
By CNu at April 04, 2023 0 comments
Labels: AI , complexity , Possibilities
theguardian | “And so for me,” he concluded, “a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind – something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities. And I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool – very early stages – and we’ve come only a very short distance, and it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes, [but] that’s nothing to what’s coming in the next 100 years.”
Well, that was 1990 and here we are, three decades later, with a mighty powerful bicycle. Quite how powerful it is becomes clear when one inspects how the technology (not just ChatGPT) tackles particular tasks that humans find difficult.
Writing computer programs, for instance.
Last week, Steve Yegge, a renowned software engineer who – like all uber-geeks – uses the ultra-programmable Emacs text editor, conducted an instructive experiment. He typed the following prompt into ChatGPT: “Write an interactive Emacs Lisp function that pops to a new buffer, prints out the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, and changes all words with ‘i’ in them red. Just print the code without explanation.”
ChatGPT did its stuff and spat out the code. Yegge copied and pasted it into his Emacs session and published a screenshot of the result. “In one shot,” he writes, “ChatGPT has produced completely working code from a sloppy English description! With voice input wired up, I could have written this program by asking my computer to do it. And not only does it work correctly, the code that it wrote is actually pretty decent Emacs Lisp code. It’s not complicated, sure. But it’s good code.”
Ponder the significance of this for a moment, as tech investors such as Paul Kedrosky are already doing. He likens tools such as ChatGPT to “a missile aimed, however unintentionally, directly at software production itself. Sure, chat AIs can perform swimmingly at producing undergraduate essays, or spinning up marketing materials and blog posts (like we need more of either), but such technologies are terrific to the point of dark magic at producing, debugging, and accelerating software production quickly and almost costlessly.”
Since, ultimately, our networked world runs on software, suddenly having tools that can write it – and that could be available to anyone, not just geeks – marks an important moment. Programmers have always seemed like magicians: they can make an inanimate object do something useful. I once wrote that they must sometimes feel like Napoleon – who was able to order legions, at a stroke, to do his bidding. After all, computers – like troops – obey orders. But to become masters of their virtual universe, programmers had to possess arcane knowledge, and learn specialist languages to converse with their electronic servants. For most people, that was a pretty high threshold to cross. ChatGPT and its ilk have just lowered it.
By CNu at April 04, 2023 0 comments
Labels: AI , complexity , Exponential Upside
quantamagazine | Recent investigations like the one Dyer worked on have revealed that LLMs can produce hundreds of “emergent” abilities — tasks that big models can complete that smaller models can’t, many of which seem to have little to do with analyzing text. They range from multiplication to generating executable computer code to, apparently, decoding movies based on emojis. New analyses suggest that for some tasks and some models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets. (They also suggest a dark flip side: As they increase in complexity, some models reveal new biases and inaccuracies in their responses.)
“That language models can do these sort of things was never discussed in any literature that I’m aware of,” said Rishi Bommasani, a computer scientist at Stanford University. Last year, he helped compile a list of dozens of emergent behaviors, including several identified in Dyer’s project. That list continues to grow.
Now, researchers are racing not only to identify additional emergent abilities but also to figure out why and how they occur at all — in essence, to try to predict unpredictability. Understanding emergence could reveal answers to deep questions around AI and machine learning in general, like whether complex models are truly doing something new or just getting really good at statistics. It could also help researchers harness potential benefits and curtail emergent risks.
“We don’t know how to tell in which sort of application is the capability of harm going to arise, either smoothly or unpredictably,” said Deep Ganguli, a computer scientist at the AI startup Anthropic.
Biologists, physicists, ecologists and other scientists use the term “emergent” to describe self-organizing, collective behaviors that appear when a large collection of things acts as one. Combinations of lifeless atoms give rise to living cells; water molecules create waves; murmurations of starlings swoop through the sky in changing but identifiable patterns; cells make muscles move and hearts beat. Critically, emergent abilities show up in systems that involve lots of individual parts. But researchers have only recently been able to document these abilities in LLMs as those models have grown to enormous sizes.
Language models have been around for decades. Until about five years ago, the most powerful were based on what’s called a recurrent neural network. These essentially take a string of text and predict what the next word will be. What makes a model “recurrent” is that it learns from its own output: Its predictions feed back into the network to improve future performance.
In 2017, researchers at Google Brain introduced a new kind of architecture called a transformer. While a recurrent network analyzes a sentence word by word, the transformer processes all the words at the same time. This means transformers can process big bodies of text in parallel.
Transformers enabled a rapid scaling up of the complexity of language models by increasing the number of parameters in the model, as well as other factors. The parameters can be thought of as connections between words, and models improve by adjusting these connections as they churn through text during training. The more parameters in a model, the more accurately it can make connections, and the closer it comes to passably mimicking human language. As expected, a 2020 analysis by OpenAI researchers found that models improve in accuracy and ability as they scale up.
But the debut of LLMs also brought something truly unexpected. Lots of somethings. With the advent of models like GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters — or Google’s PaLM, which can be scaled up to 540 billion — users began describing more and more emergent behaviors. One DeepMind engineer even reported being able to convince ChatGPT that it was a Linux terminal and getting it to run some simple mathematical code to compute the first 10 prime numbers. Remarkably, it could finish the task faster than the same code running on a real Linux machine.
As with the movie emoji task, researchers had no reason to think that a language model built to predict text would convincingly imitate a computer terminal. Many of these emergent behaviors illustrate “zero-shot” or “few-shot” learning, which describes an LLM’s ability to solve problems it has never — or rarely — seen before. This has been a long-time goal in artificial intelligence research, Ganguli said. Showing that GPT-3 could solve problems without any explicit training data in a zero-shot setting, he said, “led me to drop what I was doing and get more involved.”
He wasn’t alone. A raft of researchers, detecting the first hints that LLMs could reach beyond the constraints of their training data, are striving for a better grasp of what emergence looks like and how it happens. The first step was to thoroughly document it.
By CNu at April 03, 2023 0 comments
Labels: AI , complexity , Exponential Upside
nbcnewyork | An unsealed federal indictment revealed criminal charges against Sean "Diddy" Combs on Tuesday, a day after th...