Fake It Till You Make It Incompetents Need To Return The Oxygen They Stole In Memphis...,

tri-statedefender  |   Sharing their experiences with crime reduction, The Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime wrapped up a two-day conference at the Hyatt Centric Beale Street Memphis on Thursday, March 28.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young hosted Black leaders from 18 U.S. cities during the meeting that began Wednesday, March 27. 

“People want the short-term solution. They want to figure out how we are going to stop crime today. And then, we want to figure out how to stop crime in the future. In order to do that, there has to be an intense dialogue,” said Young.

In addition to Washington D.C., they came from several states with large African-American populations, like Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and California. 

“We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,” Mayor Tishaura Jones told Action News 5 after the conference. “So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring down crime? (We’re also finding that ) some of the things that we’re already doing, we’re finding that other mayors are doing as well.”

Strategies were front and center in the discussion. They included Operation GOOD in Jackson, Miss. and Operation Scarlett in Charlotte, N.C. According to proponents, both have paid dividends in their respective communities.

Operation GOOD is a nonprofit with ambitious goals to curb recidivism, reduce violence and tackling blight, for example. Operation Scarlett is an ongoing anti-luxury car theft operation that was expanded to 11 states and 152 law enforcement agencies. So far, 132 vehicles have been retrieved.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris and Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis also appeared at the event.

Russ Wiggington, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, moderated the conversation. 

The Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank devoted to criminal justice policy, began the conference with a keynote presentation.

To allow attendants to speak freely, no media were invited to the event. However, Young has suggested future meetings could be open to the public and virtual. It’s a sentiment matched by Mayor Chokwe Lumumba Jr. of Jackson, Miss.

“We’re ensuring amongst ourselves that this will not be the last engagement, but that we will continue to lean in,” Lumumba said at a post-conference press event.

Latest Crime Stats

Although crime rates in Memphis has dropped recently, they are still above pre-pandemic levels.

Overall, the Memphis-Shelby County Crime Commission statistics reflect a 6.4% drop in fourth quarter of 2023, over 2022’s final period. This includes murder, burglary, robbery, theft, weapons and drug charges. Property crimes fell 10.1% too.

However, violent crime in Memphis bucked the trend. In addition to 398 homicides in 2023 – breaking the 2021 record – the major violent crime rate rose 7.4% in Memphis. Shelby County saw inflated numbers too, with a 6.3% jump over 2022.

To date, there have been over 80 homicides in 2024. Memphis has the highest number of all the cities represented during he meetings. Most have seen a decrease.

The Black Mayors Coalition on Crime is the latest in a series of conversations Young has recently held to address crime early in his first term.

Now That The Spectacular Dr. Chelsea Clinton Is On The Case - I'm All In!!!

stanford  |  In a special episode recorded in front of a live audience, Dean Lloyd Minor welcomes Chelsea Clinton, a bestselling author and an advocate for public health and early childhood education. They discuss the importance of accountability for scaling global health initiatives, and the power of storytelling to counter misinformation in science and health. They also talk about finding motivation through conscious optimism and rebuilding public trust through support of individuals, families, and communities. Along the way, they share memories of Chelsea’s time as a Stanford undergraduate and their overlapping memories of their home state of Arkansas.

Chelsea Clinton is vice chair of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, working to improve lives, inspire emerging leaders, and increase awareness around public health issues. At the foundation, she is active in the early child initiative Too Small to Fail, which supports families with resources to promote early brain and language development; and the Clinton Global Initiative University, a global program that empowers student leaders to turn their ideas into action. A longtime public health advocate, Chelsea uses her platform at the Clinton Health Access Initiative to address vaccine hesitancy, childhood obesity, and health equity. In addition to her foundation work, Chelsea also teaches at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and has written several books for young readers, including the #1 New York Times bestseller She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World. She is also the co-author of The Book of Gutsy Women and Grandma’s Gardens with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and of Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? with Devi Sridhar. Chelsea’s podcast, In Fact with Chelsea Clinton, premiered in 2021, and she is a co-founder of HiddenLight Productions. Chelsea holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford, a master of public health degree from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, and both a master of philosophy degree and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University. 

Deathstar Ukraine The Largest Operation In CIA History

humanevents  |   Jack Posobiec hosted guest Mike Benz on Human Events Daily Thursday to hear his take on the New York Times article that detailed the CIA's involvement in Ukraine prior to the Russia invasion, which Benz said will reveal itself to be "the largest operation in CIA history."

The pair unpacked the reasoning behind the New York Times releasing their story which essentially agreed with what conservative commentators such as Posobiec have been saying since the war began.

"This is actually such a shocking moment in American journalist history," Benz stated. "These are highly highly, highly classified operations."

He said that "It's my contention that when the dust settles on this, the Ukraine skirmish in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan coup is going to ultimately be the largest operation in CIA history."

Compared to the CIA's Syrian operation under Barack Obama, which was revealed to be the most expensive operation up to this point, Ukraine will blow it out of the water once all said and done, Benz said.

Posobiec clarified that Benz was implying the NYT article was a "limited hangout" when "an operation becomes so compromised, or public knowledge or public interest becomes so obvious around something," that the CIA begins to unveil pieces of the big picture, like an "onion."

When the US involved itself in Ukraine in the Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Brennan era, "We were riding high and riding dirty. And that's what this was, we thought we were unstoppable and we could just coup anyone we wanted, there'd never be any repercussions, and no one would ever stand up for themselves, and Russia would never actually backstop it," Benz said.

This, however, was a "serious miscalculation."

"And when it turned out that their own population didn't support these dirty tricks, either in the form of the rise of a populace presidential candidate like Donald Trump who was running on putting America first in domestic priorities over foreign policy," he explained, "then all hell broke loose."

This Is Why MTG Needs To Slap The Taste Out Of Chuck Schumer's Mouth

 

I hope everyone appreciates what this means. The CIA disclosed highly classified intelligence to hand-picked journos in order to fight a PR war against Republicans in Congress who want to scale back Ukraine war funding.

The CIA is literally unleashed on Republicans in Congress. https://t.co/bt9DzmajQA

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 28, 2024

The Times Article Was Authorized By The CIA

scheerpost  |  The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present.  The story, “The Spy War: How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” is one of initial bilateral distrust, but a mutual fear and hatred of Russia, that progresses to a relationship so intimate that Ukraine is now one of the CIA’s closest intelligence partners in the world.  

At the same time, the Times’ publication of the piece, which reporters claimed relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US, and “several European countries,” raises multiple questions:  Why did the CIA not object to the article’s publication, especially with it being in one of the Agency’s preferred outlets?  When the CIA approaches a newspaper to complain about the classified information it contains, the piece is almost always killed or severely edited.  Newspaper publishers are patriots, after all.  Right?  

Was the article published because the CIA wanted the news out there?  Perhaps more important was the point of the article to influence the Congressional budget deliberations on aid to Ukraine?  After all, was the article really just meant to brag about how great the CIA is?  Or was it to warn Congressional appropriators, “Look how much we’ve accomplished to confront the Russian bear.  You wouldn’t really let it all go to waste, would you?”

The Times’ article has all the hallmarks of a deep, inside look at a sensitive—possibly classified—subject.  It goes into depth on one of the intelligence community’s Holy of Holies, an intelligence liaison relationship, something that no intelligence officer is ever supposed to discuss.  But in the end, it really isn’t so sensitive.  It doesn’t tell us anything that every American hasn’t already assumed.  Maybe we hadn’t had it spelled out in print before, but we all believed that the CIA was helping Ukraine fight the Russians.  We had already seen reporting that the CIA had “boots on the ground” in Ukraine and that the U.S. government was training Ukrainian special forces and Ukrainian pilots, so there’s nothing new there.  

The article goes a little further in detail, although, again, without providing anything that might endanger sources and methods.  For example, it tells us that:

• There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian border, one of 12 “secret” bases the US maintains there.  One or more of these posts helped to prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.  That’s great.  But the revelation exposes no secrets and tells us nothing new.
• Ukrainian intelligence officials helped the Americans “go after” the Russian operatives “who meddled in the 2016 US presidential election.”  I have a news flash for the New York Times: The Mueller report found that there was no meaningful Russian meddling in the 2016 election.  And what does “go after” mean?
• Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an “elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems.”  This is exactly what the CIA is supposed to do.  Honestly, if the CIA hadn’t been doing this, I would have suggested a class action lawsuit for the American people to get their tax money back.  Besides, the CIA has been doing things like this for decades.  The CIA was able to obtain important components of Soviet tactical weapons from ostensibly pro-Soviet Romania in the 1970s.
• Ukraine has turned into an intelligence-gathering hub that has intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kiev could initially handle.  Again, I would expect nothing less.  After all, that’s where the war is.  So of course, communications will be intercepted there.  As to the CIA station being overwhelmed, the Times never tells us if that is because the station was a one-man operation at the time or whether it had thousands of employees and was still overwhelmed.  It’s all about scale.
• And lest you think that the CIA and the U.S. government were on the offensive in Ukraine, the article makes clear that, “Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic.  The CIA didn’t push its way into Ukraine.  U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.”

It’s at this point in the article that the Times reveals what I believe to be the buried lead: “Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines.  And they are increasingly at risk: “If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kiev, the CIA may have to scale back.”  (Emphasis mine.)

Chuck Schumer Laments The Global Disdain For Zionist Apartheid

epochtimes  |  Mr. Schumer warned that the rise in anti-Semitism is "a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished." This comes amid the latest conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, which started on Oct. 7 when Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 in Israel, the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were killed.

He lamented anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the United States ranging from protests on college campuses to coverage in the media to boycotting and vandalism of Jewish businesses. He also cited examples of Jews being persecuted throughout history, from the Crusades to pogroms to expulsions from countries including England and Spain.

In the United States, there was a 388 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents between Oct. 7 and Oct. 23, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Additionally, Jews are the leading target for religious-related hate crimes in the United States, according to the FBI.

Mr. Schumer emphasized that there is a difference between criticizing Israeli government policies and demonizing Israel.

"This speech is not an attempt to label most criticism of Israel and the Israeli government, generally, as anti-Semitic," he said. "I don't believe that criticism is."

Double Standard Applied to Jews

He also criticized double standards regarding Israel compared with other countries, such as people celebrating when a new country is founded but being against the formation of the Jewish state, which occurred in 1948. He even referenced the 1947 United Nations partition plan that would have created a Jewish state and an Arab state in what was the British mandate of Palestine—which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected.

 

"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.

"The double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world treats Israel differently than anybody else."

"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.

"The double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world treats Israel differently than anybody else."

"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.

"The double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world treats Israel differently than anybody else."                  

 

 

 

 

Depopulation Is America's Top Foreign Policy Priority For Africa

You’re Lying If You Say You Care About America – But You Send $100 Billion To Other Countries

There aren't that many influential voices who are steadfastly denouncing the massive amounts of resources that are constantly being sent by Washington to other countries to fuel their wars, when there are so many pathologies/struggles Americans face.

I'm glad there are some: https://t.co/VS17VzRe4i

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 27, 2023

 

Preznit Biden Says "American Leadership Is What Holds The World Together"

adamtooze  |  American leadership is what holds the world together. 

The President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of speeches from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that extraordinary line.

It reflects deeply held views on the part of Washington. Back in February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:

The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.

This idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circles. 

As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”. America itself is hardly in one piece.

It isn’t true that the world doesn’t organize itself without top down leadership from a power sitting in America’s “place”. Indeed, what would it mean for America’s “place” to be vacant and free for another power to fill, the specter conjured by Blinken? Does America disappear from the map when it elects Donald Trump President? The United States is always present in one form or another, even as an absence in international discussions - as was the case, for instance in the 1920s.

America’s power - potential or realized - is a force that world politics has been built around for just over a century. In the book Deluge I argued that 1916 was the moment that this became indisputably true. The Presidential election of that year was the first followed by the world in the way that the world will follow the 2024 election.

Whoever governs America, dysfunctionally or not, speculating about a post-American world, is a waste of time. And there a few key areas of global affairs in which American institutions today play a crucial organizational role. I have written often in this newsletter about the dollar system and its resilience. The dollar continues to be the basis for global finance. Though it dare not speak its name, the Fed acts as a global central bank.

It is also true that American leadership and military spending does hold structures like NATO together. But that is not “the world”. It is an exclusive military alliance.

For the most part, to make sense of the sort of thing that Biden and Blinken say, you have to realize that they are talking not to the world or about the world, but to Americans about America. Above all, Biden and Blinken’s rhetoric is directed against Trump, who conjured up a scenario in which America was, as Biden and Blinken see it, a chaotic, disruptive and untrustworthy force. This shames their self-understanding as a liberal elite. With a tight election in 2024 those fears will overshadow all America’s interactions with the world, whoever actually sits in the Oval Office.

American democracy, the system that produces the leadership that Biden and Blinken so self-confidently evoke, is clearly broken. Pervasive and well-merited skepticism about America’s system of government, is now a massive reality in world affairs.

 

NYTimes Still Out'Chere Peddling Utterly Discredited Russiagate Burraschidt...,

Mary Katharine Ham tries to cure Bill Maher and Sam Harris from their Trump derangement syndrome. pic.twitter.com/J51lcATOxO

— Turncoat Don (@TurncoatD) October 1, 2023

NYTimes  | Russia’s strategy to win the war in Ukraine is to outlast the West.

But how does Vladimir Putin plan to do that?

American officials said they are convinced that Mr. Putin intends to try to end U.S. and European support for Ukraine by using his spy agencies to push propaganda supporting pro-Russian political parties and by stoking conspiracy theories with new technologies.

The Russia disinformation aims to increase support for candidates opposing Ukraine aid with the ultimate goal of stopping international military assistance to Kyiv.

Russia has been frustrated that the United States and Europe have largely remained united on continued military and economic support for Ukraine, American officials said.

That military aid has kept Ukraine in the fight, put Russia’s original goals of taking Kyiv and Odesa out of reach and even halted its more modest objective to control all of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

But Mr. Putin believes he can influence American politics to weaken support for Ukraine and potentially restore his battlefield advantage, U.S. officials said.

Mr. Putin, the officials said, appears to be closely watching U.S. political debates over Ukraine assistance. Republican opposition to sending more money to Kyiv forced congressional leaders to pass a stopgap spending bill on Saturday that did not include additional aid for the country.

Moscow is also likely to try to boost pro-Russian candidates in Europe, seeing potential fertile ground with recent results. A pro-Russian candidate won Slovakia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday. In addition to national elections, Russia could seek to influence the European parliamentary vote next year, officials said.

Russia has long used its intelligence services to influence democratic politics around the world.

U.S. intelligence assessments in 2017 and 2021 concluded that Russia had tried to influence elections in favor of Donald J. Trump. In 2016, Russia hacked and leaked Democratic National Committee emails that hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and pushed divisive messages on social media. In 2020, Russia sought to spread information denigrating Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Though many Republicans in Congress argued Russia’s goal was to intensify political fights, not support Mr. Trump.)

Bill Gates: People Don’t Realize What’s Coming

medium  |  Gates is now talking about artificial intelligence, and how it’s the most important innovation of our time. Are you ready for what’s coming?

Bill Gates doesn’t think so.

In fact, he’s sounding the alarm on a future that many of us don’t realize is just around the corner. He thinks AI is going to shake things up in a big way:

“Soon Job demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.”

“In the past, labors went off and did other jobs, but now there will be a lot of angst about the fact that AI is targeting white-collar work.”

“The job disruption from AI will be massive, and we need to prepare for it”

Think you’re safe from the job-killing effects of AI?

Think again.

BIG CHANGES are coming to the job market that people and governments aren’t prepared for.

I’m not here to scare you, I am here to jolt you out of your comfort zone.

The job market is in for some serious shaking and baking, and unfortunately, it seems like nobody’s got the right recipe to handle it.

Open Your Eyes and You Will See
“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious, you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
― Lao Tzu

Imagine waking up one day and realizing that the job you’ve held for years is no longer needed by the company.

Not because you screwed up, but simply because your company found a better alternative (AI) and it is no more a job that only you can do.

You have been working at the same company for over a decade, and suddenly, you are told that your services are no longer needed.

Won’t you feel lost, confused, and worried about how you will support yourself and your family?

It’s a scary thought, but the truth is, it’s already happening in many industries.

We’ve already seen the merciless termination of thousands of employees at tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, and that’s before AI even began flexing its muscles.

It’s only a matter of time before the job market starts feeling the full impact of this unstoppable force.
Sure, some of them may adapt, but where will you fit the rest of the workforce when the need for labor itself will decrease?

AI is inevitably going to reduce the demand for jobs, particularly those on the lower end of the skills spectrum.

Of course, companies will get the benefit of cost-cutting and spurring innovation.

But that’s likely to come at a cost — joblessness and economic inequality.

Our ever-changing world demands a moment of pause, a chance to contemplate what the future holds.

For it is in this stillness that we may gain a deep understanding of the challenges that lay ahead, and thus, prepare ourselves with the necessary tools to navigate them successfully.

The industrial revolution was fueled by the invention of machines. It enabled companies to increase productivity and reduce costs.

The whole education system was designed to serve the needs of the industrial revolution.

It trained people to become cogs in a machine. Perform repetitive tasks without questioning the status quo.

The focus was on efficiency and standardization, rather than creativity and individuality.

Companies relied on humans as a form of labor only because it was cheap (and reliable).

In the past, a single machine replaced the work of a hundred men, and all it needed was one operator.

The game we’ve been playing for years, well, it’s not the same anymore.

The future is here, and it’s not pretty.

In the coming age, one person will command an army of software agents.

They will build things at a breakneck speed, replacing tens or even hundreds of operators in the blink of an eye.

It’s a brave new world where the traditional constraints of human labor are no longer a limiting factor.
The repercussions of that will soon be felt in all sectors, and tech won’t be an exception.

The software industry, born from the industrial revolution, has undergone two productivity revolutions:
The creation of higher-level programming languages and the ascent of open source.

DoD Fitna Scrutinize You To Protect You In Ways You Didn't Even Know You Need!

CTH  | The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has contracted New York-based Accrete AI to deploy software that detects “real time” disinformation threats on social media.

The company’s Argus anomaly detection AI software analyzes social media data, accurately capturing “emerging narratives” and generating intelligence reports for military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats.

“Synthetic media, including AI-generated viral narratives, deep fakes, and other harmful social media-based applications of AI, pose a serious threat to US national security and civil society,” Accrete founder and CEO Prashant Bhuyan said.

“Social media is widely recognized as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behavior through the intentional spread of disinformation.

“USSOCOM is at the tip of the spear in recognizing the critical need to identify and analytically predict social media narratives at an embryonic stage before those narratives evolve and gain traction. Accrete is proud to support USSOCOM’s mission.”

But wait… It gets worse!

[PRIVATE SECTOR VERSION] – The company also revealed that it will launch an enterprise version of Argus Social for disinformation detection later this year.

The AI software will provide protection for “urgent customer pain points” against AI-generated synthetic media, such as viral disinformation and deep fakes.

Providing this protection requires AI that can automatically “learn” what is most important to an enterprise and predict the likely social media narratives that will emerge before they influence behavior. (read more)

Now, take a deep breath…. Let me explain.

The goal is the “PRIVATE SECTOR VERSION.”  USSOCOM is the mechanical funding mechanism for deployment, because the system itself is too costly for a private sector launch.   The Defense Dept budget is used to contract an Artificial Intelligence system, the Argus anomaly detection AI, to monitor social media under the auspices of national security.

Once the DoD funded system is created, the “Argus detection protocol” – the name given to the AI monitoring and control system, will then be made available to the public sector.  “Enterprise Argus” is then the commercial product, created by the DoD, which allows the U.S. based tech sectors to deploy.

The DoD cannot independently contract for the launch of an operation against a U.S. internet network, because of constitutional limits via The Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States.  However, the DoD can fund the creation of the system under the auspices of national defense, and then allow the private sector to launch for the same intents and purposes.   See how that works? 

RESOURCES:

Using AI for Content Moderation

Facebook / META / Tech joining with DHS

Zoom will allow Content Scraping by AI 

AI going into The Cloud

U.S. Govt Going into The Cloud With AI

Pentagon activates 175 Million IP’s 👀**ahem**

Big Names to Attend Political AI Forum

FBI Data On Active Shootings Is Inaccurate And Political

realclearwire  | Americans are constantly debating policing and gun control. But to discuss these issues, we have to depend on government crime data. Unfortunately, politics has infected the data handling of agencies such as the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control.

Last year, the CDC became the center of controversy when it removed its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website at the request of gun control organizations. For nearly a decade the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report showing that the annual number of people using guns to stop crime ranged from about 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website listed the upper figure at 2.5 million.

Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive, wrote to CDC officials after a meeting last year that the 2.5 million number “has been used so often to stop [gun control] legislation.” The CDC’s estimates were subsequently taken down and now lists no numbers.

The FBI is also susceptible to political pressure. Up until January of 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I showed the bureau that many cases were missing and that others had been misidentified. Yet, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to carry, the rate is eleven times higher.

The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit. 

To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.

It isn’t surprising that people will miss cases or occasionally misidentify them when using news stories, but the FBI was unwilling to fix its errors when I pointed them out. My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. Back in 2015, I published a list of missed cases in a criminology publication.

Fiona Hill: Coming Around To The Realization She Got Played For A Fool?

err.ee  |  "Whataboutism" is not just a feature of Russian rhetoric. The U.S. invasion of Iraq universally undercut U.S. credibility and continues to do so. For many critics of the United States, Iraq was the most recent in a series of American sins stretching back to Vietnam and the precursor of current events. Even though a tiny handful of states have sided with Russia in successive UN resolutions in the General Assembly, significant abstentions, including by China and India, signal displeasure with the United States. As a result, the vital twin tasks of restoring the prohibition against war and the use of force as the critical cornerstone of the United Nations and international system, and of defending Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, get lost in a morass of skepticism and suspicions about the United States. 

In the so-called "Global South," and what I am loosely referring to as the "Rest" (of the world), there is no sense of the U.S. as a virtuous state. Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are widespread. Trust in the international system(s) that the U.S. helped invent and has presided over since World War II is long gone.  Elites and populations in many of these countries believe that the system was imposed on them at a time of weakness when they were only just securing their independence. Even if elites and populations have generally benefitted from pax Americana, they believe the United States and its bloc of countries in the collective West have benefitted far more. For them, this war is about protecting the West's benefits and hegemony, not defending Ukraine. 

Russian false narratives about its invasion of Ukraine and about the U.S. resonate and take root globally because they fall on this fertile soil. Russia's disinformation seems more like information—it comports with "the facts" as others seem them. Non-Western elites share the same belief as some Western analysts that Russia was provoked or pushed into war by the United States and NATO expansion. They resent the power of the U.S. dollar and Washington's frequent punitive use of financial sanctions. They were not consulted by the U.S. on this round of sanctions against Russia. They see Western sanctions constraining their energy and food supplies and pushing up prices. They blame Russia's Black Sea blockade and deliberate disruption of global grain exports on the United States—not on the actual perpetrator, Vladimir Putin. They point out that no-one pushed to sanction the United States when it invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, even though they were opposed to U.S. intervention, so why should they step up now?

Countries in the Global South's resistance to U.S. and European appeals for solidarity on Ukraine are an open rebellion. This is a mutiny against what they see as the collective West dominating the international discourse and foisting its problems on everyone else, while brushing aside their priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and debt relief. The Rest feel constantly marginalized in world affairs. Why in fact are they labeled (as I am reflecting here in this speech) the "Global South," having previously been called the Third World or the Developing World? Why are they even the "Rest" of the world? They are the world, representing 6.5 billion people. Our terminology reeks of colonialism.

The Cold War era non-aligned movement has reemerged if it ever went away. At present, this is less a cohesive movement than a desire for distance, to be left out of the European mess around Ukraine. But it is also a very clear negative reaction to the American propensity for defining the global order and forcing countries to take sides.  As one Indian interlocutor recently exclaimed about Ukraine: "this is your conflict! … We have other pressing matters, our own issues … We are in our own lands on our own sides … Where are you when things go wrong for us?"

Most countries—including many in Europe—reject the current U.S. framing of a new "Great Power Competition"—a geopolitical tug-of-war between the United States and China. States and elites bristle at the U.S. idea that "you are either with us or against us," or you are "on the right or wrong side of history" in an epic struggle of democracies versus autocracies. Few outside Europe accept this definition of the war in Ukraine or the geopolitical stakes. They don't want to be assigned to new blocs that are artificially imposed, and no-one wants to be caught in a titanic clash between the United States and China. In contrast to the U.S., as well as others like Japan, South Korea and India, most countries do not see China as a direct military or security threat. They may have serious qualms about China's rough economic and political behavior and its blatant abuse of human rights, but they still see China's value as a trading and investment partner for their future development. The United States and the European Union don't offer sufficient alternatives for countries to turn away from China, including in the security realm—and even within Europe the sense of how much is at stake for individual countries in the larger international system and in relations with China varies.

Outside Europe, the interest in new regional orders is more pronounced. In this context, the BRICS—which, for its members offers an alternative to the G7 and the G20—is now attractive to others. Nineteen countries, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, purportedly showed interested in joining the organization ahead of its recent April 2023 summit. Countries see the BRICS (and other similar entities like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO) as offering flexible diplomatic arrangements and possible new strategic alliances as well as different trade opportunities beyond the United States and Europe. BRICS members and aspirants, however, have very disparate interests. We need to consider these as we look ahead to finding a resolution to the war in Ukraine and as we consider the kinds of structures and networks we will have to deal with in the future.

I am going to run through some of the factors that are most relevant to thinking about Ukraine in the BRICS context.

Fiona Hill: Credulous Replacement Negroe Weaponized Against Donald Trump

pbs  |   Judy Woodruff: Ultimately, what was your assessment of Donald Trump as a person and as a president?

Fiona Hill: Well, as a person, he was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president.

And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism. So, on a personal level, that was also a pretty dangerous flaw.

When you're the president of the United States, it becomes a fatal flaw, because President Trump couldn't disassociate or disentangle himself from many of the issues that were the critical ones to address. So, when people were concerned about Russian influence in the United States election, he only thought about how that affected him, for example.

When people talked about the changes in the U.S. economic structure, he would always think, first of all, about how that might affect him and about how that might affect how people would vote for him. So, as a president, he was uniquely preoccupied with himself, not with the country.

And that, of course, made all of the problems of intelligence risks even higher, because the Russians or others from the outside could also manipulate those tendencies.

Judy Woodruff: So, if you can answer this, is the world safer or is it more dangerous because of his presidency?

Fiona Hill: Well, I think it's become more dangerous, because he was also extremely divisive, because President Trump was very focused on getting reelected, and he wasn't going to do that by appealing to all Americans.

He wanted to appeal to a particular base of people who were attracted by his personality or attracted by the things that he said he was going to do for them. And, of course, that's on different parts of the economic scale and the socioeconomic lower levels. It's the people — he said he was going to find them a job. He was going to fix the economy, so they would have jobs.

At the top end, among millionaires and billionaires, it was that he was going to protect their fortunes, from — being from those circles himself.

Judy Woodruff: What I find so striking is that you weren't so concerned about Donald Trump being controlled by Vladimir Putin, being influenced by Vladimir Putin, as you were concerned about the United States following on the same political path that you see Russia follow under Vladimir Putin.

Fiona Hill: That's absolutely right, because Russia went through a similar wrenching economic period and political periods in the 1990s.

So, Russia had its equivalent of a kind of the Great Recession, and, at the end of that decade, President Putin comes in and says, I'm going to fix everything. I'm going to make America great again, which, of course, is what President Trump said in 2016. And what Putin did was basically tie himself up into all of these politics.

He, of course, has extended his terms in office through amending the Constitution. He can essentially be president until 2036. And Donald Trump has also said that he wants to be president in perpetuity. He wouldn't accept that he had lost the 2020 election. He's saying he's going to come back, that he has a right to come back because he was never kicked out of office in the first place.

And he's been spreading lies about essentially his own role in all the events that we have seen over the last years, January 6, for example, and the storming of the Capitol.

Judy Woodruff: Do you believe our democracy is in danger as a result of this?

Fiona Hill: I do.

And I think that danger is increasing by the day, because we're constantly seeing other political figures trying to emulate Trump. We're now in a situation where lies and deceit have become the coin of governance.

Judy Woodruff: It's a disturbing conclusion in this book.

Fiona Hill, thank you very much.

Teixeira Has A Face Made For A Bud Lite Can....,

NYPost  |  Accused Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira could not have acted alone — suggesting the 21-year-old is merely the patsy in a much wider intelligence breach, according to one of former-President Trump’s top national security aides.

Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar.

That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.

And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.

Ask yourself who is the real enemy?

A young low level national guardsmen?

Or the…

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 13, 2023

“It’s just not possible” for a low-level Air National Guard information technology specialist like Teixeira to have access to the trove of highly sensitive US intelligence he allegedly revealed, according to Kash Patel, Trump’s former deputy director of national intelligence.

“You can be the biggest IT person in [the Department of Defense], and you are still compartmented off of the actual information,” Patel told Breitbart News Saturday.

“Almost never does an IT person need to know, as we say, the substance of the intelligence,” Patel, a onetime Pentagon chief of staff, told the conservative outlet. “Their job is to provide the secure information systems around it to protect any disclosures.”

“This is crazy sensitive stuff,” he said of the detailed data about Ukraine’s military planning that Teixeira is accused of posting online. “Ninety-nine percent of people who have a Top Secret/SCI clearance don’t have access to this information.”

Patel said he does not believe “for a single second” that “this guy — a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman — ran his operation alone.”

Instead, he said, the explosive revelations are likely part of “an Assange-style operation” — referring to the WikiLeaks founder who faces espionage charges for helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files.

“The way it was produced, the way it was put out there — pages, printed photographs taken, published online — that is a methodical way of releasing classified information illegally,” Patel said.

“I think he’s definitely working with other people in DOD or the intel space to get this information out,” he added — calling Teixiera’s Thursday arrest “an extensive cover-up.”

 

The Social Cost Of Using AI In Human Conversation

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.

Unaccountable Algorithmic Tyranny

alt-market |  In this article I want to stress the issue of AI governance and how it might be made to appeal to the masses. In order to achieve the dystopian future the globalists want, they still have to convince a large percentage of the population to applaud it and embrace it.

The comfort of having a system that makes difficult decisions for us is an obvious factor, as mentioned above. But, AI governance is not just about removing choice, it’s also about removing the information we might need to be educated enough to make choices. We saw this recently with the covid pandemic restrictions and the collusion between governments, corporate media and social media. Algorithms were widely used by web media conglomerates from Facebook to YouTube to disrupt the flow of information that might run contrary to the official narrative.

In some cases the censorship targeted people merely asking pertinent questions or fielding alternative theories. In other cases, the censorship outright targeted provably factual data that was contrary to government policies. A multitude of government claims on covid origins, masking, lockdowns and vaccines have been proven false over the past few years, and yet millions of people still blindly believe the original narrative because they were bombarded with it nonstop by the algorithms. They were never exposed to the conflicting information, so they were never able to come to their own conclusions.

Luckily, unlike bots, human intelligence is filled with anomalies – People who act on intuition and skepticism in order to question preconceived or fabricated assertions. The lack of contrary information immediately causes suspicion for many, and this is what authoritarian governments often refuse to grasp.

The great promise globalists hold up in the name of AI is the idea of a purely objective state; a social and governmental system without biases and without emotional content. It’s the notion that society can be run by machine thinking in order to “save human beings from themselves” and their own frailties. It is a false promise, because there will never be such a thing as objective AI, nor any AI that understand the complexities of human psychological development.

Furthermore, the globalist dream of AI is driven not by adventure, but by fear. It’s about the fear of responsibility, the fear of merit, the fear of inferiority, the fear of struggle and the fear of freedom. The greatest accomplishments of mankind are admirable because they are achieved with emotional content, not in spite of it. It is that content that inspires us to delve into the unknown and overcome our fears. AI governance and an AI integrated society would be nothing more than a desperate action to deny the necessity of struggle and the will to overcome.

Globalists are more than happy to offer a way out of the struggle, and they will do it with AI as the face of their benevolence. All you will have to do is trade your freedoms and perhaps your soul in exchange for never having to face the sheer terror of your own quiet thoughts. Some people, sadly, believe this is a fair trade.

The elites will present AI as the great adjudicator, the pure and logical intercessor of the correct path; not just for nations and for populations at large but for each individual life. With the algorithm falsely accepted as infallible and purely unbiased, the elites can then rule the world through their faceless creation without any oversight – For they can then claim that it’s not them making decisions, it’s the AI.  How does one question or even punish an AI for being wrong, or causing disaster? And, if the AI happens to make all its decisions in favor of the globalist agenda, well, that will be treated as merely coincidental.

Disingenuously Shaping The Narrative Around Large Language Model Computing

vice  |  More than 30,000 people—including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, politician Andrew Yang, and a few leading AI researchers—have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. 

The letter immediately caused a furor as signatories walked back their positions, some notable signatories turned out to be fake, and many more AI researchers and experts vocally disagreed with the letter’s proposal and approach. 

The letter was penned by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization with the stated mission to “reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies.” It is also host to some of the biggest proponents of longtermism, a kind of secular religion boosted by many members of the Silicon Valley tech elite since it preaches seeking massive wealth to direct towards problems facing humans in the far future. One notable recent adherent to this idea is disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. 

Specifically, the institute focuses on mitigating long-term "existential" risks to humanity such as superintelligent AI. Musk, who has expressed longtermist beliefs, donated $10 million to the institute in 2015.  

“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the letter states. “AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.”

“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities,” the letter clarifies, referring to the arms race between big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, who in the past year have released a number of new AI products. 

Other notable signatories include Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari, and Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. There are also a number of people who work for the companies participating in the AI arms race who have signed, including Google DeepMind and Microsoft. All signatories were confirmed to Motherboard by the Future of Life Institute to be “independently verified through direct communication.” No one from OpenAI, which develops and commercializes the GPT series of AI models, has signed the letter. 

Despite this verification process, the letter started out with a number of false signatories, including people impersonating OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, Yann LeCun, before the institute cleaned the list up and paused the appearance of signatures on the letter as they verify each one. 

The letter has been scrutinized by many AI researchers and even its own signatories since it was published on Tuesday. Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, who told Reuters “the letter isn’t perfect, but the spirit is right.” Similarly, Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability.AI, who has pitted his firm against OpenAI as a truly "open" AI company, tweeted, “So yeah I don't think a six month pause is the best idea or agree with everything but there are some interesting things in that letter.” 

AI experts criticize the letter as furthering the “AI hype” cycle, rather than listing or calling for concrete action on harms that exist today. Some argued that it promotes a longtermist perspective, which is a worldview that has been criticized as harmful and anti-democratic because it valorizes the uber-wealthy and allows for morally dubious actions under certain justifications.

Emily M. Bender, a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and the co-author of the first paper the letter cites, tweeted that this open letter is “dripping with #Aihype” and that the letter misuses her research. The letter says, “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research,” but Bender counters that her research specifically points to current large language models and their use within oppressive systems—which is much more concrete and pressing than hypothetical future AI. 

“We wrote a whole paper in late 2020 (Stochastic Parrots, published in 2021) pointing out that this head-long rush to ever larger language models without considering risks was a bad thing. But the risks and harms have never been about ‘too powerful AI’,” she tweeted. “Instead: They're about concentration of power in the hands of people, about reproducing systems of oppression, about damage to the information ecosystem, and about damage to the natural ecosystem (through profligate use of energy resources).” 

“It's essentially misdirection: bringing everyone's attention to hypothetical powers and harms of LLMs and proposing a (very vague and ineffective) way of addressing them, instead of looking at the harms here and now and addressing those—for instance, requiring more transparency when it comes to the training data and capabilities of LLMs, or legislation regarding where and when they can be used,” Sasha Luccioni, a Research Scientist and Climate Lead at Hugging Face, told Motherboard.

In 2018 Saletan Watched Watson Die On The Race And IQ Hill And Chose The Better Part Of Valor

Slate |  The race-and-IQ debate is back. The latest round started a few weeks ago when Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of race as a biological fact. The piece resurfaced Sam Harris’ year-old Waking Up podcast interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and launched a Twitter debate between Harris and Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein then responded to Harris and Reich in Vox, Harris fired back, and Andrew Sullivan went after Klein. Two weeks ago, Klein and Harris released a two-hour podcast in which they fruitlessly continued their dispute.

I’ve watched this debate for more than a decade. It’s the same wreck, over and over. A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic. He writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it’s substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he’s just defending science against political correctness.

I know what it’s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person. I saw a comment from Nobel laureate James Watson about the black-white IQ gap, read some journal articles about it, and bought in. That was a mistake. Having made that mistake, I’m in no position to throw stones at Sullivan, Harris, or anyone else. But I am in a position to speak to these people as someone who understands where they’re coming from. I believe I can change their thinking, because I’ve changed mine, and I’m here to make that case to them. And I hope those of you who find this whole subject vile will bear with me as I do.

Here’s my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames.

I’m not asking anyone to deny science. What I’m asking for is clarity. The genetics of race and the genetics of intelligence are two different fields of research. In his piece in the Times, Reich wrote about prostate cancer risk, a context in which there’s clear evidence of a genetic pattern related to ancestry. (Black men with African ancestry in a specific DNA region have a higher prostate cancer risk than do black men with European ancestry in that region.) Reich steered around intelligence where, despite racial and ethnic gaps in test scores, no such pattern has been established.

It’s also fine to discuss the genetics of IQ—there’s a serious line of scientific inquiry around that subject—and whether intelligence, in any population, is an inherited social advantage. We tend to worry that talk of heritability will lead to eugenics. But it’s also worth noting that, to the extent that IQ, like wealth, is inherited and concentrated through assortative mating, it can stratify society and undermine cohesion. That’s what much of The Bell Curve was about.

The trouble starts when people who write or talk about the heritability of intelligence extend this idea to comparisons between racial and ethnic groups. Some people do this maliciously; others don’t. You can call the latter group naïve, credulous, or obtuse to prejudice. But they might be open to persuasion, and that’s my aim here. For them, the chain of thought might go something like this: Intelligence is partly genetic, and race is partly genetic. So maybe racial differences on intelligence tests can be explained, in part, by genetics.