Dallas Cowboys Off This Week...,

Counterpunch  |  Jerry Lewis starred in his condescending telethon parade of children with disabilities in what came to be known as “Jerry’s Kids” (though he disinherited five of his own biological kids).  All this has now taken on a whole new meaning with “Jerry’s Kids,” Jerry’s (very-obedient-don’t-talk-back-or-bat-an-eye) Cowboys.

Owner Jerry Jones has now finally and unwittingly tripped himself up, unmasking the Dallas Cowboys in particular, and the NFL in general, for what they are.  He did so by embroiling himself in something that is revelatory now but will be discussed for years, and not for his benefit or that of the NFL.  The latter is openly desperate in admitting every day that their role in society is to unify everyone, when there is no basis for unity and cannot be, unless it is a contrived and ephemeral one for the NFL’s profit.

As the nationally syndicated, well-known (native Texan), and inimitable columnist Molly Ivins once observed, “it is possible to strike up a conversation with anyone at all—CEOs, shoeshine boys, or the barkeep—by inquiring, ‘How about those ‘Pokes?’” as a lingua franca in Texas.  Her point was keen.

In a similar vein, the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht stated that the invisible walls [such as those between the aforesaid CEOs, shoeshine boys, barkeeps, or other contrivances] should be made visible.  Pertinent to our situation, the walls of poverty, racism, police brutality, etc., need to be kept visible, hence the kneeling by football players.  Keep in mind as well that the anthem’s third stanza refers to the killing of slaves, and most were unaware of that before Kaepernick.

Trump wants to keep those and other walls invisible.  As former Bears coach Mike Ditka himself added recently, there has been “no oppression in the last 100 years.”  They coerce this on us by dint of their money and microphones.

Unsurprisingly, Trump called Jones four times before a game, obviously to make sure Jones got what Trump said.  It all came down to an awkward scene with the entire team and Jones kneeling before the anthem and then standing for the anthem. Jones is true to form now in saying anyone kneeling during the anthem will not play.  News accounts say that Trump again spoke with him.   That’s a lot of talk between the two.  Even the NFL Commissioner is caving in to Bush after all.  Trump wants them to be on the same page, his.

Parenthetically, both Jones and coach Garrett were directly or obliquely critical of Kaepernick months ago.  That is not new.

No doubt Trump reminded Jones of how (the media-concocted) “America’s Team” would fare during protests, and that the team is the most monetarily valued.  This is an oddity, given that the team so far has not even been to the Super Bowl in some 23 years.  It comes as no surprise that Jones does not wipe the smirk off his face except for one minute in any one of the past years, namely when he realizes that they’re not Super Bowl-bound.  It is easy to imagine, though, that come February Trump would be grinning ear to ear if the Pokes won that championship.

You see, the Cowboys and the NFL are in tandem with the violence in our society, making the Las Vegas killings rather unremarkable a week after they happened.  Vegas said keep on gambling; Bush said go shopping after 9-11.

unfair play..., (REDUX - Originally Posted 3/30/14)

NYTimes | IN his provocative, passionate, important and disturbing book — part memoir, part history, part journalism — William C. Rhoden, a sports columnist for The New York Times, builds a historical framework that both accounts for the varieties of African-American athletic experience in the past and continues to explain them today.

First, he wants to recast black sports history, transforming it from “the inspirational reel” featuring Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe and the later Muhammad Ali into “a more complicated tale of continuous struggle, a narrative of victory and defeat.” His alternative narrative focuses on the stories of successful African-American athletes who so wanted to be accepted by white society that they failed “to anticipate, plan and organize,” maintained their “wholesale dependence on a racist white power structure,” and showed “surprise and consternation when the money and support” were withdrawn. Even black athletic institutions like Negro league baseball in the 1940’s and historically black colleges in the 1960’s complacently, and fatally, assumed that segregation would assure them a steady supply of athletes.

Second, Rhoden argues convincingly that integration posed relatively few problems for the white sports world, which quickly gained access to a huge pool of cheap talent, but that it precipitated a disaster for a “black industry, practically eliminating every black person involved in sports — coaches, owners, trainers, accountants, lawyers, secretaries and so on — except the precious on-the-field talent.”

Consequently, most black athletes lost their connection to a “sense of mission . . . of being part of a larger cause.” Young athletes, in particular, “dropped the thread that joins them to that struggle” and became, instead, a “lost tribe,” adrift in the world of white coaches, boosters, agents, club officials, network executives — those profiting from black muscle and skill. 

Finally, Rhoden insists on the importance of black athletes and entrepreneurs gaining organizational and business power in college and professional sports: the path toward the “redemption” of his subtitle. His vision here is a little murky, but he knows too much history to feel sanguine about the one black-owned franchise in the N.B.A., Robert Johnson’s (and now also Michael Jordan’s) Charlotte Bobcats.

Denise Young Smith: Google "Stepping and Fetching and Shucking and Jiving"

quartz |  When asked whether she would be focusing on any group of people, such as black women, in her efforts to create a more inclusive and diverse Apple, Young Smith says, “I focus on everyone.” She added: “Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.” Her answer was met with a round of applause at the session.

Young Smith went on to add that “there can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.” The issue, Young Smith explains, “is representation and mix.” She is keen to work to bring all voices into the room that “can contribute to the outcome of any situation.”

theverge |   Apple shareholders rejected a proposal yesterday that would have required the company to improve the diversity of its top ranks. This is the second year in a row that Apple shareholders have shot down the proposal, with just over 95 percent of the vote opposing it this time around — slightly more than last year.

The proposal, submitted by shareholders Tony Maldonado and Zevin Asset Management, asked Apple to “adopt an accelerated recruitment policy ... to increase the diversity of senior management and its board of directors." Maldonado and Zevin had argued that Apple’s upper ranks were responding too slowly to the company’s own diversity initiatives and that it would ultimately come back to bite them, be it through missing talent or new opportunities.

Does Apple Need to Replace Diversify Its Leadership?

seekingalpha | Summary:

• Under Tim Cook, Apple became the most valuable, most profitable, and most well-known company in the world.
• But Tim Cook simply inherited the success created by Steve Jobs, who left him with the iPhone, iPad, iMac, and the whole Apple ecosystem.
• Assessment of the new products and projects unveiled under Tim Cook reflects a lack of vision and innovation required by a successful tech company CEO.

Tim Cook in many ways is identical to Steve Ballmer, and for the same reasons should be replaced.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), is one of the more controversial CEOs in the world. On one hand, people praise him for the financial successes that Apple accomplished under his tenure. On the other hand, there are those who believe that Tim Cook is not the visionary CEO that a world-class company needs. The following presentation will provide a brief yet thorough analysis of Tim Cook's track record in terms of product and innovation and will conclude that, despite the successes he oversaw, he must be replaced.

markstcyr |   Why I posit the above is for this reason:

Back in May of 2014 I penned the article: “Did Apple Just Become Microsoft?” In it I made the following points. To wit:

“However since the passing of Jobs, quite rightly, there has been an intense spotlight focused squarely on the Apple tradition going forward. Just what new products or changes to existing lines would be forth coming, and how will they be packaged for sale to an ever-increasing market.

Everyone (and I mean everyone) understood that the new management structure at Apple would both need to pay homage to the ever-present shadow of Jobs while also needing to blaze or create new trails free of the ominous Jobs overhang. i.e., Something Jobs would say, “Wow, I never thought of that!” as compared with nothing more than a refinement to an already Jobs inspired creation.

However, it would seem we not only have the latter taking place, but is veering way off the path Apple has been so skillful in avoiding: Buying an also ran business. e.g., The Beats™ headphone line. Some say it’s for it’s streaming music service or some other thing but if that is the case, not putting the money into a true revamp of iTunes seems even more as an un-Jobs move.”

And here we are nearly 4 years later (or 4 product cycles, if you will) and what has been the result of this once “fantastic” partnership? When was the last time you heard anything or any buzz about Beats®? ____________ (insert crickets here.)

Oh, but wait you say, “What about iTunes? It was updated as to allow easier downloading of apps and such for mobile.”

Yes, yes it was. An update that most users will only encounter when they go to update or purchase something, then, find out they can’t do it the way they’ve been doing for-e-ver. i.e., “Oh, wait, I have to do this on my phone now, and not my computer? Wait, how do I…? Wait…what…I mean…WTF!”

I believe this to be a blatant design faux pa. Why? Because if you look at the iTunes of today, it looks no different that it did years, and years ago. The only difference? The “Apps” option is no longer there. This is to “reduce clutter” via Apple’s thinking.

But the same old, tired, antiquated looking and seemingly lifeless iTunes of old? It’s still there, but now with less clutter – so you can see more clearly how lame it has become due to design atrophy.

Culture of Compliance: Every Single One of These Peasants Deserves to be a Slave...,

Counterpunch |  For instance, 20 years ago, I took up a sexual harassment lawsuit on behalf of a young woman—a state employee—who claimed that her boss, a politically powerful man, had arranged for her to meet him in a hotel room, where he then allegedly dropped his pants, propositioned her and invited her to perform oral sex on him.

Despite the fact that this man had a well-known reputation for womanizing and this woman was merely one in a long line of women who had accused the man of groping, propositioning, and pressuring them for sexual favors in the workplace, she was denounced as white trash and subjected to a massive smear campaign by the man’s wife, friends and colleagues (including the leading women’s rights organizations of the day), while he was given lucrative book deals and paid lavish sums for speaking engagements.

William Jefferson Clinton eventually agreed to settle the case and pay Paula Jones $850,000.

Here we are 20 years later and not much has changed.

 

Suffice it to say that it’s the same old story all over again: man rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.

From what I’ve read, this was Hollywood’s worst-kept secret.

In other words, everyone who was anyone knew about it. They were either complicit in allowing the abuses to take place, turning a blind eye to them, or helping to cover them up.

It’s not just happening in Hollywood, however.

NBC News Sitting On Ronan Farrow's Weinstein Story IS A Scandal

thedailybeast |  By the time Farrow pitched New Yorker Editor in Chief David Remnick in August, according to multiple sources, he and NBC News investigative unit producer Rich McHugh, among others, had been pursuing Weinstein’s alleged serial groping—and worse—of young actresses and female staffers since the previous December.

Over the course of several months, scripts were prepared and vetted, and Farrow’s and McHugh’s reporting was subjected to various layers of both fact-checking and legal reviews, insiders said, and at one point a senior producer on NBC News’ Friday night show Dateline carefully re-interviewed many of their sources and witnesses, and concluded they were solid.

The vetting process lasted weeks and weeks, through much of the summer, but ended shortly after Kimberley D. Harris, executive vice president and general counsel of NBC Universal, subjected the material to her own review. Since Harris oversees the in-house lawyering of all the company divisions, an NBC source said it would not be unusual for her to review news division material for potential exposure to litigation. And although Harris reports to NBC Universal Chief Executive Steve Burke, a source insisted Burke wasn’t involved in the decision to spike the Weinstein story.

Indeed, according to this account, Harris never formally weighed in, because NBC News had already pulled the plug by the time she finished examining Farrow’s work.

With two such wildly contradictory versions of why and how NBC News spiked Farrow’s Weinstein story, it’s difficult to determine what objectively occurred.

But author and New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta, who has been covering Weinstein for decades and is among the legions of journalists who’ve tried and failed to document his casting-couch behavior, also sat for an NBC interview; at one point, according to witnesses, he turned to the camera and declared: “This evidence is so overwhelming that if NBC News sits on it, that will be a scandal.”

Meet NBCUniversal Counsel and Former Obama Deputy Counsel Kimberly D. Harris

comcast |  Harris provides legal advice to the NBCUniversal senior management team and supervises the legal function, which handles legal matters for all of NBCUniversal’s business units. She also coordinates NBCUniversal’s global regulatory and legislative agenda.

Harris joined NBCUniversal in 2013 from Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she was a partner in the litigation department.

From 2010 to 2012, Harris served in the White House Counsel’s Office, and became the principal Deputy Counsel and Deputy Assistant to the President in 2011. At the White House, she advised senior Executive Branch officials on congressional investigations and executive privilege issues. In addition, Harris developed and implemented the White House response to congressional investigations, and managed litigation matters relating to the President.

From 2009 to 2010, she was Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division.

Harris first joined Davis Polk & Wardwell as an associate in 1997 and was named a litigation partner in 2007. From 1996 to 1997, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Charles S. Haight, Jr., U.S. District Court, S.D. New York.

She serves on the boards of directors for Advocates for Children of New York, an organization that provides legal and advocacy services to at-risk students in the New York City school system, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Harris is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law.

Harris graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, and holds a law degree from Yale Law School. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband and three sons.

Trump Trains Elite Monkey Brains How to Perform and Mainstream Dominance

theintercept |  As the controversy over protests during the national anthem grew, President Donald Trump denounced NFL owners as being “afraid of the players,” a state of affairs that he called “disgraceful”. The lament fits a pattern in Trump’s war with the NFL, which has routinely been characterized as the president attacking African-American athletes, when, in fact, Trump’s immediate target is one much closer to him: the class and race traitors who make up the owners of the NFL.

One of the most haunting aspects of Trump’s battle with the players has been his consistent refusal to talk directly to or with them. His complaint, that they are refusing to stand during the national anthem, has been directed at the owners, a way to offer up an extra level of disrespect to the players. That refusal continued this week, as Trump spoke directly to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, reminding him of NFL rules he said applied to players around the anthem.

When Trump sparked the national debate, he did so by going right over the heads of the players. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump bellowed at a rally in Alabama in September.

Trump went on: “You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it, they’ll be the most popular person in this country.” 

For Trump, it comes back to being popular — with the right audience. But if that carrot isn’t enough, he has the stick of tax and antitrust policy to wield at the owners. 

Like everything else with Trump, his war with the NFL is layered with motivations ranging from the base to the financial to the personal. It hints at his own history with the NFL, his particular vision of rule, and ultimately, a sense of betrayal that has set the league on a collision course with not just Trump, but his supporters as well. 

Trump has commodified a vision of ownership that demands that bosses project complete dominance lest they become traitors to both their class and their nation — and, to the extent that Trump sees himself embodying the national spirit, they are at war with him personally. Through his so-called populist campaign and his TV show “The Apprentice,” he’s democratized that vision, transforming many of his supporters not into would-be apprentices hoping to learn from the great man, but mini-moguls with their own innate, incontrovertible knowledge about who should be “fired” and under what circumstances. Every viewer a king.

Trans-Turing Trains Silly Monkey Brains

hackernoon  |  At the heart of digesting online information is the evolutionary propensity to mine all input as social cues or signals. In the case of the “trending news,” Facebook was presenting a manufactured image of the social world which more closely resembles a world which the curators would approve of, than it does the actual world we live in. This manufactured world is then presented as social reality. No matter what side you come down on, this is no trivial thing.

We humans are built to use attention as a cue for status. We then use status as a signal of mastery for which we are constantly on the lookout to apprentice under. Joseph Henrich and Francisco J. Gil-White, while at the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania respectively, describe a theory of “information goods.” They show that humans, unlike chimpanzees, use “relative prestige” to assign status, and then use that status as a signal of what to believe and emulate.

The challenge is that this evolutionary mechanism was developed long before mass media. It developed through direct observation. The hunter getting the most attention is likely the fellow who most often comes back with the biggest kills. Thus, trusting the attention of others to point you in the right way was adaptively useful. The Internet is particularly adept at scrambling these signals. We are built to believe that seeing others give their attention to somebody, or something, signals the ability for that someone to teach you something useful. Therefore we implicitly connect attention with prestige and prestige with expertise.

Granny Goodness President Trump, who has an objectively terrible track record with the truth, provides one example of this. A giant swath of the nation, I assume mostly reasonable and well-adjusted people, describe her him as trustworthy, despite what the other half, which I assume are also mostly reasonable and well-adjusted people, feel is obvious and damning evidence to the contrary. Her His supporters are surrounded, physically or digitally, by others who are paying attention to her him. Therefore, some basic, even primordial, part of their brain signals to them that this is someone who deserves attention, emulation, and trust. They believe in him, at least in part, because of his ability to attract attention signals of trustworthiness. When each of President Trump’s tweets, to his 40 million followers, and now to the whole world, receives hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets, we shouldn’t be surprised that he didn’t need to actually do anything to earn that trust. He just needed to attract attention to himself, and then claim that he deserves the trust. The attention supports claim.

Western Elites Dominated By Filthy-Rich Moral Degenerates

bostonglobe |  While most of us were ignoring the long anti-elite crusade that began as a cynical attempt to paint opposing politicians as arrogant East Coast dilettantes, it morphed into a far more dangerous jihad against expertise at any level of government. To put it in Gilligan’s Island terms, they have taken the Professor and repackaged him as Thurston Howell III.

That helps explain Trump’s response to Vladimir Putin’s expulsion this summer of hundreds of American diplomats and embassy staff from Russia. Bizarrely, the American president thanked the Russian dictator, saying these professionals aren’t needed anyway and the expulsion will save the United States money. (Wrong on both counts. Career foreign-service officers are entitled by law to reassignment.) Yet somehow Trump faced absolutely no blowback from a Republican Party that historically viewed Russia as America’s most dangerous foe. Maybe the diplomats don’t like cheeseburgers.

Of course, the establishment elites are not blameless. Over the years, many of them made confident predictions, about everything from free trade agreements to Middle East strategy, that turned out to be disastrously wrong. After all, it wasn’t just Trump who brilliantly tapped into anti-elite sentiment in the 2016 campaign and turned it into electoral success. So did Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist who managed to win 23 primaries and caucuses and 13.2 million votes. 

Still, we have reached a dangerous point when an administration whose party controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and two-thirds of the state legislatures can scapegoat thousands of highly experienced government scientists, diplomats, and intelligence specialists, tossing them all into a basket of deplored elites.

It’s time to wage a new war in defense of expertise in government. And if it’s too late to prevent the word elite from being used as a weapon, it’s time to embrace it and redefine it as something good.

Because He Stopped Making Money Or Because He Raped The Wrong Peasant?

charleshughsmith |  If you want to understand why the status quo is unraveling, start by examining the feudal structure of our society, politics and economy.

The revelations coming to light about Hollywood Oligarch Harvey Weinstein perfectly capture the true nature of our status quo: a rotten-to-the-core, predatory, exploitive oligarchy of dirty secrets and dirty lies protected by an army of self-serving sycophants, servile toadies on the make and well-paid legal mercenaries. Predators aren't an aberration of the Establishment; they are the perfection of the Establishment, which protects abusive, exploitive predator-oligarchs lest the feudal injustices of life in America be revealed for all to see.

The predators reckon their aristocratic status in Hollywood/D.C. grants them a feudal-era droit du seigneur (rights of the lord) to take whatever gratifications they desire from any female who has the grave misfortune to enter their malefic orbit.

Anyone who protests or makes efforts to go public is threatened by the oligarch's thugs and discredited/smeared by the oligarch's take-no-prisoners legal mercenaries. (Recall the Clintons' Crisis Management Team tasked with crushing any Bimbo Eruptions, i.e. any eruptions of the truth about Bill's well-known-to-insiders predation of the peasantry.)

Should the worst happen and some sliver of the truth emerge despite the best efforts of the thugs, corporate media, legal mercenaries and PR handlers, then the playbook follows the script of any well-managed Communist dictatorship:the oligarch predator is thrown to the wolves to protect the oligarchs' systemic predation and exploitation of the peasantry/debt-serfs.

Just as in a one-party Communist dictatorship, an occasional sacrificial offering is made to support the propaganda that the predators are outliers rather than the only possible output of a predatory, exploitive feudal status quo comprised of a small elite of super-wealthy and powerful oligarchs at the top and all the powerless debt-serfs at the bottom who must do their bidding in bed, in the boardroom, in the corridors of political power, and in the private quarters of their yachts and island hideaways.

Media reports suggest that the real reason Mr. Weinstein has been fired is not his alleged conduct over the past 27 years but his loss of the golden touch in generating movie-magic loot for the oh-so-liberal and politically correct Hollywood gang that was pleased to protect Mr. Weinstein when he was busy enriching them.

U.S. Justice System Ignores Elite Criminality

libertyblitzkrieg  |  Two very important articles published in recent days serve to once again highlight America’s metastasizing elite criminality problem. A problem which our justice system simply refuses to address.

This corrupt two-tier justice system is something I’ve been focused on from the very beginning of my writings, and I continue to see it as a civilization-level threat for this country if not aggressively addressed and confronted in the very near future.

The two articles in question focus on different aspects of untouchable elite culture in America.

The first relates to the continued fraud pervasive in America’s largest financial institution, while the second covers a thirty year history of predatory sexual behavior by one of Hollywood’s biggest moguls, Harvey Weinstein. 

In both cases, countless people have known and reported on repeated abuses perpetrated by both the institution and the man, yet the U.S. justice system and the vast majority of “elite” culture happily help shield them from justice. Predators are predators, and elite predators are far more dangerous to society that your average street crook, so why does our justice situation deal with it in the exact opposite way?

Let’s start with the blockbuster article published in The Nation by the always informative David Dayen. The article is titled, How America’s Biggest Bank Paid Its Fine for the 2008 Mortgage Crisis—With Phony Mortgages!

Here’s just brief excerpt:

Harvey Weinstein: Give Me A Second Chance To Get It Up Again Together...,

HuffPo  | The situation surrounding Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment allegations has only continued to worsen.

A desperate email from the film executive surfaced on Monday afternoon, courtesy of Janice Min, a strategist at Eldridge Industries and part owner of The Hollywood Reporter. Min tweeted out a transcribed iteration of an email she claims was read to her “by a disgusted (male) recipient.” She also noted that the email was sent to Hollywood “CEOs, moguls” mere hours before Weinstein was fired from his role at The Weinstein Company.

“My board is thinking of firing me,” the letter reads. “All I’m asking, is let me take a leave of absence and get into heavy therapy and counseling. Whether it be in a facility or somewhere else, allow me to resurrect myself with a second chance.”

Black Identity Extremist Stripper Blows Up Miami Dolphins Offensive Line...,

NYPost |  The model behind the release of the video featuring offensive line coach Chris Foerster snorting a white powder before a meeting leaked the damning clip in response to the intense political climate, according to recent Facebook posts.

In a since-deleted comment, Las Vegas-based Kijuana Nige said coaches should take responsibility for their actions as players who protest during the national anthem are chastised over their decisions on whether to stand.

“I have plenty of white friends so I’m not making this a race issue. People are missing the point. My point is everyone has to be held accountable for their decisions they roast players over anthems while the coaches be high as s–t and probably can’t sing along,” she wrote, per Obnoxious Boston Fan.

The 33-year-old model also spoke out Monday on social media.

“The white people mad at me like I forced blow down this mans nose and like I recorded it on tha low,” Nige shared on Facebook. “No those are his habits and he recorded himself and sent it to me professing his love.

“So quick to make excuses for him but will roast a minority player over an athem [sic], dog fight, weed, domestic issues etc. But y’all keep saying ALL LIVES MATTER STFU!!” she continued.

The relationship between Foerster and Nige is not clear. In the video, he said he misses her.

Less than 12 hours after the recording surfaced, Foerster announced his resignation Monday following one season and four games with the Miami Dolphins.

Love or Mathematical Precision: Do You Know What's Real?

Guardian  |  Where most sci-fi movies quickly date, Blade Runner has improved with age. Of course, it was always a fantastic ride, superbly detailed and steeped in neo-noir atmospherics, but its deep, troubling ideas about technology, humanity and identity chimed with postmodern and cyberpunk theory, and launched a thousand PhD theses. One of the few student lectures I can remember was about the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, orders of simulacra, and how nothing is really real any more. In a down-with-the-kids gesture, the lecturer stood behind a TV monitor playing a muted video of Blade Runner. “You’ll probably get more out of watching this than you will by listening to me,” she said. She was right. Deciphering Baudrillard’s arcane prose is like wading through treacle; Blade Runner is a ride you don’t want to get off. And, against all odds, its belated follow-up, Blade Runner 2049, carries the baton brilliantly, both in terms of visual spectacle and finishing the debates the first movie began.

Between the two movies and Philip K Dick’s source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner serves as a record of how our dystopian fears have evolved over the past half-century. When Dick wrote the story, in 1968, he was thinking of the dehumanising process of nazism. His “replicants” (artificially engineered humans with a four-year lifespan) were “essentially less-than-human entities”, Dick stated. They were “deplorable because they are heartless, they are completely self-centred, they don’t care about what happens to other creatures”.

Ridley Scott’s film turned it around, somewhat. Far from being a deplorable, heartless machine, Rutger Hauer’s chief replicant, supposedly the baddie, develops empathy for the cop trying to kill him. Replicants were the superior beings. “More human than human,” as their manufacturer, Eldon Tyrell, puts it. Apart from the four-year lifespan, what was the difference? This was the part Baudrillard and co were so keen to engage with: what was “real” when the copy was better than the original? “The real is not only what can be reproduced but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper-real,” wrote Baudrillard. Human status was no longer a matter of biological or genetic fact. You couldn’t trust your memories either – they could just be implants. So how do any of us know we are human?

How Can You Harness Machine Intelligence If Cognitive Elites Struggle to Understand It?

Booz-Allen  |  On Thursday, July 20, China’s State Council released the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan. Numbering nearly 40 pages, the plan lays out China’s aspirations in impressive detail. It introduces massive investment that aims to position China at the forefront of technological achievement by cultivating the governmental, economic, and academic ecosystems to drive breakthroughs in machine intelligence. To achieve these goals, the Council aims to harness the data produced by more the internet-connected devices of more than a billion Chinese citizens, a vast web of “intelligent things.”

The plan also details the strategic situation precipitating the need for a bold new vision: “Machine intelligence [is] the strategic technology that will lead in the future; the world’s major developed countries are taking the development of AI as a major strategy… [We] must, looking at the world, take the initiative to plan [and] firmly seize the [technology] in this new stage of international competition.[i]”

The China State Council’s plan evokes a document that marked the beginning of the defining global technological competition of the last century—the space race. In August 1958, ten months after watching the Soviet Union launch Sputnik 1, President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration released the U.S. Policy on Outer Space. In it, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) urged massive investment to cultivate the talent and technology base necessary to exceed the Soviet Union’s achievements in space.

The United States is now at the precipice of another defining moment in history.

The NSC included an urgent mandate to act, declaring, “The starkest facts which confront the United States in the immediate and foreseeable future are [that] the USSR has surpassed the U.S. and the Free World in scientific and technological accomplishments in outer space, [and] if it maintains its present superiority…will be able to use [it] as a means of undermining the prestige and leadership of the United States.”[ii]

The United States is now at the precipice of another defining moment in history. The world’s greatest powers are entering a technological contest that will parallel or exceed the space race in the magnitude of its economic, geopolitical, and cultural consequences. Maintaining our role as a global superpower requires us to achieve parity, and ideally dominance, in the race to a future powered by intelligent machines. Moreover, we must develop a comprehensive national strategy for maintaining this technological advantage while also advancing our economy, preserving our social norms and values, and protecting our citizens’ dignity, privacy, and equality.

Smartphone Dystopia

Guardian  |  He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button in the first place. 

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”

Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”

But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it.

Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

Emotional Sentience and the Nature of Phenomenal Experience

emotionalsentience |  When phenomenal experience is examined through the lens of physics, several conundrums come to light including: Specificity of mindebody interactions, feelings of free will in a deterministic universe, and the relativity of subjective perception. The new biology of “emotion” can shed direct light upon these issues, via a broadened categorical definition that includes both affective feelings and their coupled (yet often subconscious) hedonic motivations. In this new view, evaluative (good/bad) feelings that trigger approach/avoid behaviors emerged with life itself, a crude stimulus-response information loop between organism and its environment, a semiotic signaling system embodying the first crude form of “mind”.
 

Emotion serves the ancient function of sensory-motor self-regulation and affords organisms e at every level of complexity e an active, adaptive, role in evolution. A careful examination of the biophysics involved in emotional “self-regulatory” signaling, however, acknowledges constituents that are incompatible with classical physics. This requires a further investigation, proposed herein, of the fundamental nature of “the self” as the subjective observer central to the measurement process in quantum mechanics, and ultimately as an active, unified, self-awareness with a centrally creative role in “self-organizing” processes and physical forces of the classical world. In this deeper investigation, a new phenomenological dualism is proposed: The flow of complex human experience is instantiated by both a classically embodied mind and a deeper form of quantum consciousness that is inherent in the universe itself, implying much deeper e more Whiteheadian e interpretations of the “self-regulatory” and “self-relevant” nature of emotional stimulus. A broad stroke, speculative, intuitive sketch of this new territory is then set forth, loosely mapped to several theoretical models of consciousness, potentially relevant mathematical devices and pertinent philosophical themes, in an attempt to acknowledge the myriad questions e and limitations e implicit in the quest to understand “sentience” in any ontologically pansentient universe.

Some Will Be Human, Others Will Just Do What The "Machine" Suggests...,

bloombergview |  "Politics" might even be the wrong word for it. As Bishop describes it in his book (and Andrew Sullivan does in a new essay in New York magazine), the divide is really more about identities, or tribes. Policy disputes aren't what separates us so much as differences in attitude and language. Which is why Donald Trump, despite his New York County address and all-over-the-political-map statements on the campaign trail, seems to be mainly just deepening the divide. Attitude and language -- and loyalty -- are what he cares about most, so those are the buttons that he keeps pushing.

How do we counter this growing tribalism, and growing conviction that those outside our tribes are motivated by Satanic impulses? I don't know! If I did, I would have told you already. Still, as a starting place, I recommend this: Just assume that those who disagree with you politically are really, really stupid.

If the Collective Hates It When People Walk Away - They Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!!!

alt-market |  Despite the vicious measures of interference, reports suggest that the vote was still successful, with 90% of the citizenry in support of independence. What happens now is unclear, but I can tell you two things are relatively certain.

First, a 90% vote in favor will result in a militarized response from the Spanish government. If the vote was less overwhelming, the government might attempt to pit one side of the population against the other, causing internal strife and disrupting secession. This strategy is unrealistic given the mass movement for independence. So, the only other option for the government is full blown martial law.

Second, such a crackdown will result in a violent counter-response. This happened in the 1970s in Catalonia and I see no reason why it would not happen again. When you have almost an entire population in agreement on separation and you use force to stop them from attaining it, they will become violent. Civil war is inevitable if martial law is declared.

It is vital that we examine the root ideological catalyst in this scenario.

The most rational solution would be for the Spanish government to accept the Catalan vote (if they believe in "democracy" as they claim, then they have to accept it, otherwise they appear extraordinarily hypocritical). This could result in a more harmonious economic relationship and less drastic damage to Spain's fiscal structure. However, this is not going to happen. Instead, Spain is going to use the age old collectivist tactics of intimidation and carnage to oppress the Catalan's and subsume their economic production (as socialist governments always do).  When civil war erupts, and it will, production in Catalonia will grind to a standstill and Spain STILL loses 20% of its GDP.

You see, this is a lose/lose scenario for Spain, all because the collectivist doctrine demands a jackbooted reaction to any movement for decentralization. Collectivist systems are parasitic in nature; they see the citizenry as food, as units of production for the state that cannot be allowed to leave, for the "greater good of the greater number." Collectivists rationalize their behavior as essential to the well being of the society at large, but this is dishonest, for their behavior more often harms society by crushing individual innovation and instigating wars that might not have ever happened in the first place.

There is at the same time the matter of sovereignty movements across Europe. The only people who benefit from stopping these movements are globalists/collectivists. They may also benefit by sabotaging these movements after the fact, making an example of them and holding them up to the rest of the world as symbols of the "failures of populism."