NYPost | The solar system that humanity calls home may have once been
inhabited by an extinct species of spacefaring aliens, a top scientist
has suggested.
A space scientist has suggested ancient extraterrestrials could have
lived on Mars, Venus or even Earth before disappearing without a trace.
“I think cultures are kinds of virtual realities where whole populations of people become imprisoned inside a structure which is linguistic and value-based.”
“Now, if we’re gonna become a planetary being, we can’t have the luxury of an unconscious mind, that’s something that goes along with the monkey-stage of human culture. And so comes then the prosthesis of technology, that all our memories and all our sciences and our projective planning abilities can be downloaded into a technological artifact which is almost our child or our friend or our companion in the historical adventure.”
counterpunch | US authorities are reported to have prepared
charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This
overreach of US government toward a publisher, whose principle is aligned with
the U.S. Constitution, is another sign of a crumbling façade of
democracy. The Justice Department in the Obama administration could not
prosecute WikiLeaks for publishing documents pertaining to the US
government, because they struggled to determine
whether the First Amendment protection applied in this case. Now, the
torch of Obama’s war on whistleblowers seems to have been passed on to
Trump, who had shown disdain toward free speech and even called the U.S. media as “enemies of the people”.
Earlier this month, CIA Director Mike Pompeo vowed
to end WikiLeaks, accusing the whistleblowing site as being a
“non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors
like Russia”. He also once called
Edward Snowden a traitor and claimed that he should be executed. This
declaration of war against WikiLeaks may bring a reminiscence of George
W. Bush’s speech in the aftermath of 9-11, where he said,
‘either you are with us or against us’, and urged the nation to side
with the government in his call to fight global ‘war on terror’.
In a recent interview on DemocracyNow!, journalist at The Intercept,
Glenn Greenwald put this persecution of WikiLeaks in the context of a
government assault on basic freedom. He spelled out
their tactics, noting how the government first chooses a target group
that is hated and lacks popular support, for they know attacking an idea
or a group that is popular would meet resistance. He explained:
“…. they pick somebody who they know is hated in society
or who expresses an idea that most people find repellent, and they try
and abridge freedom of speech in that case, so that most people will let
their hatred for the person being targeted override the principle
involved, and they will sanction or at least acquiesce to the attack on
freedom because they hate the person being attacked”.
Demonizing and scapegoating of a particular group or organization is
an alarming tendency toward an authoritarian state. At a news conference
last Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions also chimed in
to emphasize how Assange’s arrest is a priority. This targeting of
WikiLeaks is a threat to press freedom and could be seen a slippery
slope toward fascism.
downwithtyrrany | [Update: It's been suggested in comments (initially here)
that Clinton's "we" in her answer to Blankfein's question was a
reference to China's policy, not our own. I'm doubtful that's true, but
it's an interpretation worth considering. Even so, the U.S. and Chinese
policies toward the two Koreas are certainly aligned, and, as Clinton
says, "for the obvious economic and political reasons." (That argument
was also expressed in comments here.) I therefore think the thrust of the piece below is valid under either interpretation of Clinton's use of "we." –GP]
"We don't want a unified Korean peninsula ... We [also] don't want
the North Koreans to cause more trouble than the system can absorb."
Our policy toward North Korea is not what most people think it is. We
don't want the North Koreans to go away. In fact, we like them doing
what they're doing; we just want less of it than they've been doing
lately. If this sounds confusing, it's because this policy is unlike
what the public has been led to assume. Thanks to something uncovered by
WikiLeaks, the American public has a chance to be unconfused about
what's really going on with respect to our policies in Korea.
This piece isn't intended to criticize that policy; it may be an excellent one. I just want to help us understand it better.
Our source for the U.S. government's actual Korean policy — going back
decades really — is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She
resigned that position in February 2013,
and on June 4, 2013 she gave a speech at Goldman Sachs with Lloyd
Blankfein present (perhaps on stage with her) in which she discussed in
what sounds like a very frank manner, among many other things, the U.S.
policy toward the two Korea and the relationship of that policy to
China.
That speech and two others were sent by Tony Carrk
of the Clinton campaign to a number of others in the campaign,
including John Podesta. WikiLeaks subsequently released that email as
part of its release of other Podesta emails (source email with
attachments here).
In that speech, Clinton spoke confidentially and, I believe, honestly.
What she said in that speech, I take her as meaning truthfully. There's
certainly no reason for her to lie to her peers, and in some cases her
betters, at Goldman Sachs. The entire speech reads like elites talking
with elites in a space reserved just for them.
counterpunch | It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse than
anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that
to this day dominates North Korea’s relations with the United States and
drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.
General Curtis Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had
firebombed Tokyo in March 1945 saying it was “about time we stopped
swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile.” It was he who later
said that the US “ought to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age.”
Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North Korea he said “We
burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.” Lemay was by
no means exaggerating.
On November 27, 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops suddenly
crossed the border into North Korea completely overwhelming US forces.
Acheson said this was the “worst defeat of American forces since Bull
Run.” One famous incident was the battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where
50,000 US marines were surrounded. As they escaped their enclosure they
said they were “advancing to the rear” but in fact all American forces
were being routed.
Panic took hold in Washington. Truman now said use of A-bombs was
under “active consideration.” MacArthur demanded the bombs… As he put it
in his memoirs:
I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic
bombs…strung across the neck of Manchuria…and spread behind us – from
the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has
an active life of between 60 and 120 years.
Cobalt it should be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.
He also expressed a desire for chemicals and gas.
It is well known that MacArthur was fired for insubordination for
publically announcing his desire to use nukes. Actually, Truman himself
put the nukes at ready and threatened to use them if China launched air
raids against American forces. But he did not want to put them under
MacArthur’s command because he feared MacArthur would conduct a
preemptive strike against China anyway.
By June 1951, one year after the beginning of the war, the communists
had pushed UN forces back across the 38th parallel. Chinese ground
forces might have been able to push the entire UN force off the
peninsula entirely but that would not have negated US naval and air
forces, and would have probably resulted in nuclear strikes against the
Chinese mainland and that brought the real risk of Soviet entry and all
out nuclear exchanges. So from this point on the war became one of
attrition, much like the trench warfare of World War I. casualties
continued to be high on both sides for the duration of the war which
lasted until 1953 when an armistice without reunification was signed.
Of course the victims suffering worst were the civilians. In 1951 the
U.S. initiated “Operation Strangle” which officialls estimated killed
at least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the
figure is probably closer to 4 million. We do not know how many Chinese
died – either solders or civilians killed in cross border bombings.
The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare has been
raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. The North accused
the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera, anthrax, plague, and
encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up among
soldiers and civilians in the north. Some American prisoners of war
confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of
torture by North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who
did confess and were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press. A
number of investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly
western countries. One of the most prominent concluded the charges were
true. At this time the US was engaged in top secret germ-warfare
research with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also
experimenting with Sarin, despite its ban by the Geneva Convention.
Washington accused the communists of introducing germ warfare.
space |Space.com: So, intelligence can be considered on a planetary scale?
Grinspoon: The basic ability to not wipe oneself out,
to endure, to use your technological interaction with the world in such a
way that has the possibility of the likelihood of lasting and not being
temporary — that seems like a pretty good definition of intelligence. I
talk about true intelligence, planetary intelligence. It's part and
parcel of this notion of thinking of us as an element of a planet. And
when we think in that way, then you can discriminate between one type of
interaction with the planet that we would have that would not be
sustainable, that would mark us as a temporary kind of entity, and
another type in which we use our knowledge to integrate into planetary
systems [in]some kind of long-term graceful way. That distinction seems
to me a worthwhile definition of a kind of intelligence
Especially then going back to the SETI [search for extraterrestrial
intelligence] question, because longevity is so important in the logic
and the math of SETI. There may be a bifurcation or subshell [of life]
that don't make this leap to this type of intelligence. The ones that do
make that leap have a very long lifetime. And they're the ones that in
my view are intelligent. Using your knowledge of the universe to prolong
your lifetime seems like an obviously reasonable criterion [of
intelligence]. If you use that criteria, then it's not obvious that we
have intelligence on Earth yet, but we can certainly glimpse it.
Space.com: You also wrote that sustainable alien populations could be harder to detect. What would that mean?
Grinspoon: One possible answer to the Fermi Paradox,
which asks "Where are they?" is that they're all over the place, but
they're not obviously detectable in ways that we imagine they would be.
Truly intelligent life may not be wasteful and profligate and highly
physical. Arthur C. Clarke said that the best technology would be
indistinguishable from magic. What if really highly advanced technology
is indistinguishable from nature? Or is hard to distinguish.
There's the set of assumptions embedded in [the search for extraterrestrial intelligence] that the more advanced a civilization is the more energy they'll use, the more they'll expand.
It's funny to think about that and realize that we're talking about
this while realizing things about our own future, that there is no
future in this thoughtless, cancerous expansion of material energy use.
That's a dead end. So why would an advanced civilization value that? You
can understand why a primitive organization would value that — there's a
biological imperative that makes sense for Darwinian purposes for us to
multiply as much as possible, that's how you avoid becoming extinct.
But in a finite container, that's a trap. I assume that truly
intelligent species would not be bound by that primitive biological
imperative. Maybe intelligent life actually questions its value and
realizes that quality is more important than quantity.
I'm not claiming to know that this is true about advanced aliens
because I don't think anybody can know anything about advanced aliens,
but I think it's an interesting possibility. That could be why the
universe isn't full of obviously advanced civilizations: there's
something in their nature that makes them not obvious.
nautil.us | I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of
scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé’s is
probably the best known. He was trying to arrive at the configuration of
the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep
in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a
hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke
exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a
ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since
the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not
understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer
Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” To
which our scientist might respond: “Okay. Got it. Thanks.”
Why
the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why
the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.
A
logical place to begin would be to define what the unconscious is in
the first place. To do this we have to set aside the jargon of modern
psychology and get back to biology. The unconscious is a biological
system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and
as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal.
All
animals have an unconscious. If they didnt they would be plants. We may
sometimes credit ours with duties it doesnt actually perform. Systems
at a certain level of necessity may require their own mechanics of
governance. Breathing, for instance, is not controlled by the
unconscious but by the pons and the medulla oblongata, two systems
located in the brainstem. Except of course in the case of cetaceans, who
have to breathe when they come up for air. An autonomous system wouldnt
work here. The first dolphin anesthetized on an operating table simply
died. (How do they sleep? With half of their brain alternately.) But the
duties of the unconscious are beyond counting. Everything from
scratching an itch to solving math problems.
theminskys |Part 1 of this article
made a case that macroeconomic data does not suggest that there is
rapid automation occurring broadly in the economy nor in large
industries or sectors. Other indicators, like slack in the labor market,
support that assertion. It pointed to periods of rapid automation in
the past as well, and found these were times with generally low
unemployment and healthy job growth.
Regardless
of the data past or present, there are still claims that society is on a
precipice, facing mass unemployment due to wide-scale automation. Many
say that the technology in the near future is different than
developments that occurred in the past, and that instead of slow or
moderate change that the economy can adapt to, the rate of change will
be so profound that suddenly millions will be out-of-work.
There
are good reasons to be suspicious of this narrative. First, it is very
difficult to predict how technology will develop and affect the world,
and if it will be viable or even necessary in the first place. Second,
adopting new technology — for example, automating a process and
replacing workers — and more importantly, the threat
of adopting new technology, gives power to employers and capital
instead of workers. This weaponization of technology needs to be
credible in order to be taken seriously; hence, it relies on the broader
narrative that rapid automation is happening. The first point will be
considered now; the second, in Part 3.
slantmarketing | If you’re curious about the story of modern humanity, you’ll find few
things more fascinating than the shapeshifting ways of our markets and
industries, over many years and decades. These shifts reflect our whole
society, our inspiration, our impulses, and our shortcomings. These
shifts are us, as we make history, step by step, dollar by dollar, in
good ways and in bad.
cnn | Stores are closing at an epic pace. In fact, the retail industry could suffer far more store closures this year than ever.
Brokerage firm Credit Suisse said in a research report released earlier
this month that it's possible more than 8,600 brick-and-mortar stores
will close their doors in 2017.
For comparison, the report says
2,056 stores closed down in 2016 and 5,077 were shuttered in 2015. The
worst year on record is 2008, when 6,163 stores shut down.
"Barely a quarter into 2017, year-to-date retail store closings have already surpassed those of 2008," the report says.
If stores do close at the rate Credit Suisse is projecting, it could
mean America will lose more than 147 million square feet of retail space
this year.
Physical store fronts have been eclipsed by ecommerce masters like
Amazon. The toll it's taken can be seen in emptying malls and shopping
centers across the country.
Among the casualties announced so far this year: Bebe said it's closing all of its retails spaces, JCPenney(JCP) announced plans to shutter 138 stores by July, Payless ShoeSource is closing hundreds of stores, and Macy's(M) said it's shutting down 68 locations.
And onetime retail powerhouse Sears -- which also owns Kmart -- said in March that the company has "substantial doubt" that it can survive.
rawstory | The ‘Atlas Shrugged’ author made selfishness heroic and caring about others weakness.
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its
immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous
and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society….To
justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only
immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961
Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more
caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe
(1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane
nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century
later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of
the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian
society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where
young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be
discharged in bankruptcy.
Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible
tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have
shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of
what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,”
Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists,
which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the
Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.
In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, “Am an admirer of
Ayn Rand.” Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him
to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged
his “foundation book.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major
influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger
fan. A short list of other Rand fans includes Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange
Commission in George W. Bush’s second administration; and former South
Carolina governor Mark Sanford.
But Rand’s impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.
visualcapitalist | The fact is many people have less money in their pockets – and
understandably, this has motivated people to take action against the
status quo.
And while the collapse of the middle class and income inequality are
issues that receive a fair share of discussion, we thought that this
particular animation from Metrocosm helped to put things in perspective.
The following animation shows the change in income distribution in 20 major U.S. cities between 1970 and 2015:
The differences between 1970 and 2015 are intense. At first, each
distribution is more bell-shaped, with the majority of people in a
middle income bracket – and by 2015, those people are “pushed” out
towards the extremes as they either get richer or poorer.
A Broader Look at Income Inequality
This phenomenon is not limited to major cities, either.
Here’s another look at the change in income distribution using smaller brackets and the whole U.S. adult population:
It’s a multi-faceted challenge, because while a significant portion
of middle class households are being shifted into lower income
territory, there are also many households that are doing the opposite.
According to Pew Research, the percentage of households in the upper income bracket has grown from 14% to 21% between 1971 and 2015.
The end result? With people being pushed to both ends of the spectrum, the middle class has decreased
considerably in size. In 1971, the middle class made up 61% of the
adult population, and by 2014 it accounted for less than 50%.
As this “core” of society shrinks, it aggravates the aforementioned
problems. People and governments borrow more money to make up for a lack
of middle class wealth, while backlashes against globalism, free trade,
and open borders are fueled
wired |The master wears an amulet
with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the
candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The
year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.
The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and
orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands.
The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.
The candidate is told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to
improve. The master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a cloth and orders
preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair of tweezers
from the table. The other members in attendance raise their candles.
The master starts plucking hairs from the candidate’s eyebrow. This
is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But these are “symbolic
actions out of which none are without meaning,” the master assures the
candidate. The candidate places his hand on the master’s amulet. Try
reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with another.
This page is filled with handwritten text. Congratulations, brother, the
members say. Now you can see.
For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of
this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript,
one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th
centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations,
most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents,
from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as
fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once
served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where
freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the
rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive,
authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so
secretive, little is known about most of these organizations.
Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many
of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by
historians as impenetrable novelties.
It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic
“sight-restoring” ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game
between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in
disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history.
Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden
within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how
esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion
spread underground. At least that’s what experts believe. The only way
to know for sure is to break the codes.
In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany.
Thirteen years later, in January 2011,
Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics.
Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. She preferred musty
books to new technologies and didn’t even have an Internet connection at
home. But this lecture was different. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight,
a University of Southern California specialist in machine
translation—the use of algorithms to automatically translate one
language into another. With his stylish rectangular glasses, mop of
prematurely white hair, and wiry surfer’s build, he didn’t look like a
typical quant. Knight spoke in a near whisper yet with intensity and
passion. His projects were endearingly quirky too. He built an algorithm
that would translate Dante’s Inferno based on the user’s
choice of meter and rhyme scheme. Soon he hoped to cook up software that
could understand the meaning of poems and even generate verses of its
own.
Knight was part of an extremely small group of machine-translation
researchers who treated foreign languages like ciphers—as if Russian,
for example, were just a series of cryptological symbols representing
English words. In code-breaking, he explained, the central job is to
figure out the set of rules for turning the cipher’s text into plain
words: which letters should be swapped, when to turn a phrase on its
head, when to ignore a word altogether. Establishing that type of rule
set, or “key,” is the main goal of machine translators too. Except that
the key for translating Russian into English is far more complex. Words
have multiple meanings, depending on context. Grammar varies widely from
language to language. And there are billions of possible word
combinations.
npr | It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And on the show today, ideas about a new industrial revolution.
JEREMY HOWARD: I mean, it's not just a new phase of the Industrial Revolution. It's a - it's an entirely new revolution.
RAZ: This is data scientist Jeremy Howard.
HOWARD: So we went through the process of replacing hunting and gathering with domestication. We went through the process of replacing animal energy with mechanical energy. We're now going through the process of replacing human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
RAZ: So for the past 25 years, Jeremy has been working on a technology called deep learning, and it's based on the way the human brain and nervous system work.
HOWARD: Deep learning relies on a particular kind of function called a neural network. It is heavily inspired by neuroscience and can actually compute anything.
RAZ: Anything because these machines can learn and perceive. They can see, hear, read, write. They can make decisions all while being able to process billions of data points.
HOWARD: It's creepy.
RAZ: Yeah.
HOWARD: And it's possibly about to get creepier.
RAZ: (Laughter) Oh, no. But before we get to the creepy part, we should point out we're already using these neural networks for a lot of pretty cool things.
HOWARD: So today, we have a thousand-layer neural networks doing things like Skype translation. I don't know if you've tried that.
nature | Understanding the brain basis of consciousness remains one of the
outstanding challenges in modern science. While rigorous definitions are
still mainly lacking, consciousness can be defined rather broadly as
that which “vanishes every night when we fall into dreamless sleep” and
returns the next morning when we wake up1.
Equally, when we are conscious, our conscious experiences are populated
by a variety of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that collectively
form an integrated conscious scene. These observations lead to an
intuitive distinction between conscious level (how conscious one is) and
conscious content (what one is conscious of, when one is conscious).
The large majority of recent neuroscientific research into consciousness
has treated these dimensions separately2,3,4,5.
Investigations of conscious level typically contrast global changes in
brain activity among different states including wakeful awareness,
various sleep stages, and different forms of anaesthesia. Many of these
studies attempt to isolate neural changes that accompany alterations of
conscious level independently of changes in general physiological
arousal. Studies of conscious content have focused primarily on
uncovering differences in brain activity between closely matched
conscious and unconscious perception, while conscious level is
maintained constant6.
Recently, following early suggestions that increased conscious level may be related to an increased range of conscious contents3,7, there has been growing interest in characterising how conscious level and conscious content may relate2,5.
One empirical approach to this question is to apply emerging measures
of conscious level to experimental manipulations that primarily affect
conscious content. Here, we capitalise on the profound effects on
conscious phenomenology elicited by psychedelic compounds, specifically
LSD, psilocybin, and subanesthetic doses of ketamine. These drugs
normally have profound and widespread effects on conscious experiences
of self and world. More specifically, they appear to “broaden” the scope
of conscious contents, vivifying imagination8 and positively modulating the flexibility of cognition9,10.
At the same time, the states they induce are not accompanied by a
global loss of consciousness or the marked changes in physiological
arousal as seen in sleep or anaesthesia. These observations raise the
question of whether theoretically-grounded measures of conscious level
would be changed in the psychedelic state.
Empirical measures of
conscious level have reached a new benchmark with the development of the
perturbational complexity index, PCI11.
The PCI quantifies the diversity across channels and observations of
the EEG response to a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulse and
has been shown to robustly index levels of consciousness6, ranging from anaesthesia induced by various substances11,12, sleep stages11 and graded disorders of consciousness such as (emergence from) the minimally conscious state11,13. Notably, all these comparisons resulted in lower PCI values compared to a baseline state of wakeful awareness. Fist tap Big Don.
nautil.us | The Integrated Information Theory of consciousness derives a
mathematical calculus and gives rise to something known as a
consciousness meter, which a variety of clinical groups are now testing.
If you have an anesthetized patient, or a patient who’s been in a
really bad traffic accident, you don’t really know if this person is
minimally conscious or in a vegetative state; you treat them as if
they’re conscious, but they don’t respond in any meaningful way.
How can you be sure they’re conscious?
You’re
never really sure. So you want a brain-based test that tells you if
this person is capable of some experience. People have developed that
based on this integrated information series. That’s big progress. The
current state of my brain influences what happens in my brain the next
second, and the past state of my brain influences what my brain does
right now. Any system that has this cause-effect power upon itself is
conscious. It derives from a mathematical measure. It could be a number
that’s zero, which means a system with no cause-effect power upon
itself. It’s not conscious. Or you have systems that are “Phi,”
different from zero. The Phi measures, in some sense, the maximum
capacity of the system to experience something. The higher the number,
the more conscious the system.
So you could assign a number to
everything that might have some degree of consciousness—whether it’s an
ant, a lizard, bacteria, or a vegetative human being?
Yes, you or me, the Dalai Lama or Albert Einstein.
The higher the number, the more conscious?
The
number by itself doesn’t tell you it’s now thinking, or is conscious of
an image or a smell. But it tells you the capacity of the system to
have a conscious experience. In some deep philosophical sense, the
number tells you how much it exists. The higher the number, the more the
system exists for itself. There isn’t a Turing Test for consciousness.
You have to look at the way the system is built. You have to look at the
circuitry, not its behavior, whether it’s a computer or a biological
brain. This has now been tested and validated in many patients,
including locked-in patients who are fully conscious, people under
anesthesia who are not conscious, people in deep sleep, and those in
vegetative states or minimal-conscious states. So the question now is
whether this can be turned into something practical that can be used at
every clinic in the country or the world to test patients who’ve just
been in a bad traffic accident.
Obviously, there are huge implications. Do you turn off the life-support machines?
First,
does the patient suffer or is nobody home anymore? In the famous case
of Terri Schiavo, we could tell the brain stem was still functioning but
there wasn’t anybody home. Her consciousness had disappeared 15 years
earlier.
Review Hillary Clinton's 1969 Wellesley College thesis titled: “there is only the fight” published on line in pdf format, where
the key insights can be found that Mrs. Clinton understood that Saul
Alinsky’s “political faith” along with that of his fellow thinkers, MLK,
Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman was simply “democracy”.
In the last chapter of her thesis, she rejects the “ideal” of democracy for herself and points out that
Alinksy’s solution of new deal style mass projects like the TVA to
provide jobs might work in some other countries but not here in this
country. She affirms that sentiment with the mocking cartoon appended to the end of her thesis.
consortiumnews | An early insider account of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, entitled Shattered,
reveals a paranoid presidential candidate who couldn’t articulate why
she wanted to be President and who oversaw an overconfident and
dysfunctional operation that failed to project a positive message or
appeal to key voting groups.
Okay, I realize that people who have been watching Rachel Maddow
and other MSNBC programs – as well as reading The New York Times and
The Washington Post for the past four months – “know” that Clinton ran a
brilliant campaign that was only derailed because of “Russian
meddling.” But this insider account from reporters Jonathan Allen and
Annie Parnes describes something else.
As The Wall Street Journal review
notes, the book “narrates the petty bickering, foolish reasoning and
sheer arrogance of a campaign that was never the sure thing that its
leader and top staffers assumed. … Mr. Allen and Ms. Parnes stress two
essential failures of the campaign, the first structural, the second
political. The campaign’s structure, the authors write, was an ‘unholy
mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, and no
sense of greater purpose.’”
The book portrays Hillary Clinton as distant from her campaign staff,
accessible primarily through her close aide, Huma Abedin, and thus
creating warring factions within her bloated operation.
According to the Journal’s review by Barton Swaim, the book’s authors
suggest that this chaos resulted from “the fact that Mrs. Clinton
didn’t know why she wanted to be president. At one point no fewer than
10 senior aides were working on her campaign announcement speech, not
one had a clear understanding of why Americans should cast their vote
for Mrs. Clinton and not someone else. The speech, when she finally
delivered it, was a flop – aimless, boring, devoid of much beyond
bromides.”
The book cites a second reason for Clinton’s dismal performance – her
team’s reliance on analytics rather than on reaching out to real voters
and their concerns.
There is also an interesting tidbit regarding Clinton’s attitude
toward the privacy of her staff’s emails. “After losing to Mr. Obama in
the protracted 2008 primary,” the Journal’s review says, Clinton “was
convinced that she had lost because some staffers – she wasn’t sure who –
had been disloyal. So she ‘instructed a trusted aide to access the
campaign’s server and download the [email] messages sent and received by
top staffers.’”
Lie-started and Orwellian-illegal Wars of Aggression is
all the evidence necessary for US military to refuse all war orders
(there are no lawful orders for unlawful war), and for officers to
arrest those who issue them. This argument extends to all in US law
enforcement agencies for war-related crimes of treason, murders and
injuries to US military lied-into illegal Wars of Aggression, and .01% military looting last reported at $6.5 trillion.
Rather than “drain the swamp” and focus US resources on US upgrades,
President Trump joins our opponents with violating war law from two US
treaties that armed attack is only lawful if, and only if, the US is
under attack by another nation’s government.
Waiting for military honor
The ordinary US military are the used/abused pawns of the .01%
psychopathic class. They enlist from economic need, desire to serve
ideals within our Declaration of Independence and US Constitution, or
from attraction to ideals within this profession. Although they’re
trained to recognize unlawful orders within military duty, they are not trained to recognize unlawful Wars of Aggression. Of course, there are no lawful orders for unlawful war. Their Oaths of Enlistment
swear them to protect and defend the US Constitution against all
enemies, foreign and domestic. There is no greater domestic enemy than
.01% “leaders” who lie them into unlawful Wars of Aggression.
Because US military are the ones applying War Crimes onto the world,
with all risk and suffering at their immediate experience, one would
imagine growing factions refusing to obey lying “leaders” and
dishonorable illegal armed attacks.
One would imagine, except We the People see no evidence.
consortiumnews | the major U.S. news outlets, such as The New York Times and The
Washington Post, apparently believe there is only one side to a story,
the one espoused by the U.S. government or more generically the
Establishment.
Any other interpretation of a set of facts gets dismissed as “fringe”
or “fake news” even if there are obvious holes in the official story
and a lack of verifiable proof to support the mainstream groupthink.
Very quickly, alternative explanations are cast aside while ridicule is
heaped on those who disagree.
So, for instance, The New York Times will no longer allow any doubt
to creep in about its certainty that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
intentionally dropped a sarin bomb on the remote rebel-held town of Khan
Sheikhoun in Idlib province in northern Syria on April 4.
A mocking article
by the Times’ Jim Rutenberg on Monday displayed the Times’ rejection of
any intellectual curiosity regarding the U.S. government’s claims that
were cited by President Trump as justification for his April 6 missile
strike against a Syrian military airbase. The attack killed several
soldiers and nine civilians including four children, according to Syrian press reports.
Rutenberg traveled to Moscow with the clear intention of mocking the
Russian news media for its “fake news” in contrast to The New York
Times, which holds itself out as the world’s premier guardian of “the
truth.” Rather than deal with the difficulty of assessing what happened
in Khan Sheikhoun, which is controlled by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate
and where information therefore should be regarded as highly suspect,
Rutenberg simply assessed that the conventional wisdom in the West must
be correct.
To discredit any doubters, Rutenberg associated them with one of the
wackier conspiracy theories of radio personality Alex Jones, another
version of the Times’ recent troubling reliance on McCarthyistic logical
fallacies, not only applying guilt by association but refuting
reasonable skepticism by tying it to someone who in an entirely
different context expressed unreasonable skepticism.
Rutenberg wrote: “As soon as I turned on a television here I wondered
if I had arrived through an alt-right wormhole. Back in the States, the
prevailing notion in the news was that Mr. Assad had indeed been
responsible for the chemical strike. There was some ‘reportage’
from sources like the conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones —
best known for suggesting that the Sandy Hook school massacre was staged
— that the chemical attack was a ‘false flag’ operation by terrorist
rebel groups to goad the United States into attacking Mr. Assad. But
that was a view from the [U.S.] fringe. Here in Russia, it was the
dominant theme throughout the overwhelmingly state-controlled mainstream
media.”
Don't forget I told you cats about the NSA creep-tip two years ago, and gave you a concrete specific recommendation for shoring up your end-point game to protect at least a little something...,
FP | Weaver believes that when the Shadow Brokers published a broad list
of the tools in their possession in January, hoping to auction them off,
the NSA moved quickly.
The NSA “did clearly, quietly tell Microsoft,” Weaver said, allowing
the company to repair the holes before script kiddies and criminal
hackers started figuring out the specifics of the exploits.
Microsoft published a massive patch exactly a month before the Shadow Brokers unleashed its trove.
Neither Microsoft nor the NSA immediately responded to a request for comment.
Before Microsoft revealed it had patched most of the holes, the
Shadow Brokers’ release reignited the debate about when government
agencies should be required to disclose vulnerabilities it finds in such
major products as devices and browsers.
The White House’s Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which determines
whether those flaws should be shared with the company in order to be
repaired, or taken advantage of by intelligence agencies, was
reinvigorated in 2014. The process involves several major agencies,
which consider the likelihood that other nation states or criminal
actors would come across the same flaws.
It’s unclear, however, which agencies are involved in the process and how those decisions are made. The agencies are not required
to disclose vulnerabilities purchased or researched through government
sponsorship. If the NSA told Microsoft about the tools, it was because
the agency knew or suspected the vulnerabilities had been compromised.
Intelligence officials see the latest Shadow Brokers release as part
of a larger erosion of capabilities that has been going on since 2013,
when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden gave journalists internal NSA
documents. Snowden’s leak kicked off a chain of damaging exposures that,
while sparking an important worldwide debate about privacy, severely
damaged U.S. intelligence capabilities, the former intelligence official
argued.
One former TAO employee who spoke with Foreign Policy
believes the release is “a bit dated,” because hacking tools to access
more current Windows projects and other browsers weren’t included.
“It is a significant leak. … It gets harder to develop tools as
defenses improve,” the former TAO employee said. “But it’s still
entirely possible. There are many bugs to be found.”
But the intelligence community’s ability to keep those bugs secret
for any amount of time continues to be questioned. In this latest leak,
detailed NSA notes and work product were included in addition to
technical details about the hacking tools — likely indicating deep-level
access to TAO troves. “This should be on an NSA computer only,” Weaver
told Foreign Policy.
The details the Shadow Brokers revealed are “scary,” the former
cyberintelligence employee said, details that must be from internal
emails, chat logs, or insider knowledge.
Only a handful of countries could have pilfered such sensitive
material from the NSA remotely, the former TAO employee wrote, Russia
and Israel the mostly likely among them.
“If it was an inside job like an operator [typically military]
walking out with a thumb drive, then who knows,” the former TAO source
wrote.
In recent years, the intelligence community has largely failed to
detect insider threats and stem leaks from contractors. Thousands of
private companies and their employees make up a massive percentage of
the intelligence community’s workforce. As of a decade ago, about 70
percent of the intelligence community’s budget was spent on contracts,
according to the Congressional Research Service.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
