If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen.
However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other.
The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.
This is exactly what’s happening in America today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask.
The real question you need to be asking yourselves is who’s shaking the jar ... and why?
Wake Up!
Stop thinking about parties,and start thinking about movements.
If you are in an ideological battle with your neighbor, then you are disengaged from your true enemy.
Start the education movement. First, educate yourself. Then, work to help others around you to wake up and see who is taking EVERYTHING from you.
Hint: it isn't the bum on the corner, or the Karen across the street. They are victims and tools, and they can be constructively engaged with.
Your true enemy is never seen walking round the neighborhood, and would never stoop so low as to acknowledge - much less engage - a lowly serf on some dirty street like you.
He has almost everything YOU ever worked for, but he wants it ALL.
Once he has it, you will be tilled under as fertilizer on his robotically controlled farm. It is already happening today, and it is rapidly progressing.
Either humans will wake up to what is going on, or, they will largely perish - and soon.
guardian |By now, the world has witnessed white rioters seize the Capitol building in Washington DC. After hearing Donald Trump
encourage them to reject the presidential election’s outcome, thousands
reportedly pushed through cops to storm ongoing congressional debates
and reign supreme over politicians who fearfully scurried out of the
halls of power. Draped in American, Confederate, and Trump flags, the
raiders invaded the House floor, occupied representative offices, and
filled balconies and scaffolds that line the windows. Joe Biden took to a
podium to respond, cautioning the country that “our democracy is under
unprecedented assault”.
On television, I
saw paramedics rush a stretcher in the pandemonium. The woman bearing a
bloodied face laying on top startled me, the anchor, and the cameraman.
Please God, don’t let that woman be dead,I prayed, though her
eyes lacked an animating essence. When I saw the video of the Proud
Boys burn a Black Lives Matter banner a few weeks ago, I knew there
would be more violent acts of desperation because they need a cause to
feel empowered. Envying the resistance of the oppressed, Trump
supporters want reasons to march and chant, so they create enemies and
feign vulnerability as their cause grows lost. They sacrificed their
lives to save white supremacy, even though it threatens them, too,
materially and morally. And Black lives may never matter to people, like
the woman, who will risk their own white lives during a pandemic to
attack the nation’s capital to protect Donald Trump.
A
senior Capitol police officer reportedly shot and killed her. But even
the police shooting of the Trump supporter did not immediately catalyze
significant law enforcement action to stop the conservative Caucasian
invasion. Later, I watched a group of unmasked white men and women chase
down a Black law enforcement agent who wielded only a stick in return. I
was angry. Not because I felt bad for the cop, but because in that
moment, I watched him realize that he was Black, outnumbered, and per
the Dred Scott supreme court decision, “had no rights which the white
man was bound to respect.”
Wednesday was a reminder of one difference between white rebellion to
feigned oppression and Black resistance to actual oppression: where
there is radical Black resistance, there is state repression. Where there is white rebellion for conservative causes, there is collusion with the state. Even when the white cops are outnumbered, like the McKinney, Texas, cops who assaulted Dajerria Becton
in her swimsuit, they escalate; he just pulled the gun out on Black
teens who came to her rescue. Police have stomped, beat, shot,
teargassed, and arrested protesters who organize, march, pray and sing
for our multi-racial liberation movements. Including me. Yet on
Wednesday, activists and bystanders knew damn well that if the election
refusers who raided the Capitol were Black, then the same politicians
who kneeled for George Floyd and painted yellow “Black lives matter” letters onto the streets would have sent the full force of the law to stop it.
From an operational security perspective, consider that any one of the people who "invaded" the capital building yesterday could have been a foreign agent. They would have had the greatest opportunity to plant listening devices, radiological,chemical or biological weapons.
It would have been a great time to just scatter some ricin on the carpets or upholstery. While I was watching one of the big three networks yesterday doing live coverage I heard one of the reporters state that it would take a long time to sweep the building to make sure it was secure before they could let congress back in and that the earliest would be sometime the next day before they could resume.
Yet just 2 hours after the protesters were kicked out, the Senate was back in session.
Now from an IT security perspective alone, it would take at least 24 hours to do a basic tempest security sweep of every single computer, printer, ethernet port, electrical outlet, telephone, etc., not including taking these devices apart and doing a visual inspection to ensure nothing untoward had been plugged in or surreptitiously added to the device.
No security officer would EVER allow congress to get back in session that quickly - not if the breach was real.
theamericanconservative | Writing in the journal Palladium, Richard Hanania has produced the first must-read essay of 2021.
A research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War
and Peace Studies, Hanania is part of an emerging generation of young
scholars who reject the increasingly dubious verities of the Cold War
and post-Cold War eras. Their arrival comes not a moment too soon.
The title of Hanania’s piece is “China’s Real Threat is to America’s Ruling Ideology.” In this context, ideology
refers not only to a belief system—liberal democratic capitalism, in
our case—but also to a theory of history. Hanania’s real subject is
delusion: Washington’s insistence despite abundant evidence to the
contrary that the American way of life defines the ultimate destiny of
humankind.
Hanania’s essay deserves to be read in its entirety. But a brief
synopsis of his argument goes like this: despite the alarmism of
official Washington in depicting China as the “national security issue
of our time,” the PRC’s emergence as a great power “in no way harms the
prosperity or security of most Americans.”
Ordinary Americans have
no reason to fear the People’s Republic, Hanania writes. True, the
Chinese people enjoy only limited freedom. True also, the Chinese
government persecutes and even brutalizes domestic minorities. Yet what
should matter to the United States is that Beijing “is not on a mission
to fundamentally remake the world.” President Xi Jinping is not engaged
in subverting the American Bill of Rights. He has his hands full running
China.
Xi’s
not-unreasonable strategic purpose is to promote Chinese prosperity
while maintaining China’s territorial integrity and insulating itself
from threats abroad—a purpose not unlike our own before policymakers in
Washington succumbed to fantasies of a world remade in America’s
self-image through the assertion of American military might.
In
sum, China wants to be very wealthy and very safe—wealthier than any
other nation on the planet and so safe as to be immune to outside
coercion. And for members of the American policy establishment, therein
lies the rub. From Washington’s perspective, “the real problem with
Beijing is not that it wants to dominate the world” but that its upward
trajectory “might stop the U.S. from doing so in a unipolar manner.”
Post-Cold War expectations of a unipolar international order
cultivated by the U.S. policy elite have assumed that the universal
embrace of democratic liberalism is an inevitability. This is what being
“on the right side of history”—a hallucinatory incantation that
pervades contemporary American political speech—signifies.
To the extent that China demonstrates the feasibility of creating a stable, prosperous, and flourishing society while flouting liberal
democratic precepts, then claims that history has a single right side
become untenable. “If universal democratization is not the ultimate
endpoint of history,” Hanania pointedly asks, “how can the American role
in the world be justified?”
nakedcapitalism |Ross What do you think was revealed in 2020 that we all intuitively knew but couldn’t actually see because it hadn’t crystallized?
Michael Hudson Well, it’s obvious that the economy
never recovered from the Obama depression after he bailed out the banks,
not the economy. So the question is, how long can the economy limp
along without recovery?
Well, it’s obvious now that the debts can’t be paid, but the
coronavirus only catalyzed that. It’s made it even clearer. So in a
sense, the Biden administration is going to be picking up just where the
Obama administration left off, namely with huge evictions. Obama
evicted about 10 million families. Most of them were black and Hispanic,
lower income families who were the victims of the chump mortgages.
Biden’s going to start his administration by kicking out probably
another five million families. Again, black and Hispanic families are
going to be the big losers because they were the people who had the
highest coronavirus or were the first to be laid off. So it’s going to
begin with a large eviction.
This reverses the trend in homeownership going up to 2008. It’s been
going down, and this is going to continue now. People somehow imagined
that there was going to be a recovery, that somehow we could recover
from the post 2008 breakdown. But now it’s obvious we can’t recover.
You’re going to have the polarization of the economy that has been
occurring for the last 12 years. It will simply accelerate.
Ross What do you think are the megatrends that we
should be looking at in 2021? What do you think is the direction of
travel, if you like, for so-called developed economies?
Michael Hudson Well, the big trend in any economy is
the growth of debt, because the debt grows exponentially. The economy
has painted itself into a debt corner. We can see that in real estate.
We can see that for small business. There’s also almost no way to
recover. The Federal Reserve has been printing quantitative easing to
keep stock and bonds high. But for the real economy, the trend is
polarization and lower employment.
The trend also is that state and local finances are broke, especially
in the biggest cities, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
They’re not getting income tax revenue from the unemployed or closed
businesses. They’re not getting the real estate tax with so many
defaults and mortgage arrears. In New York City there’s talk of cutting
back the subways by 70 percent. People will be afraid to take the
subways when they’re overcrowded with people with the virus. So you’re
having a breakdown not only in state and local finances, but of public
services that are state run – public transportation services, health
services, education is being downsized. Everything that is funded out of
state and local budgets is going to suffer.
And living standards are going to be very sharply downward as people
realize how many services they got are dependent on public
infrastructure.
Ross Which, of course, opens the door for vulture
funds and predatory capital, whether it be private equity, VCs or
whatever else to come in and do public infrastructure deals?
Michael Hudson Well, you’ll have privatizations. The
American economy will be privatized because the states can’t support
their transportation system and other systems. The pressure to privatize
subway and transport system, schools are going to be more privatized,
as jails have been in the United States. So you’re going to have a huge
privatization trend.
whitehotharlots | The “2020 UGGGHH” discourse is insufferable. It boggles my mind that so
many people think an arbitrary temporal distinction is the cause of our
nation’s collapse. They believe, in all earnestness, that 2021 is going
to be better simply by virtue of it being different.
There’s a
very good chance–better than 50/50–that 2020 is going to be the best of
our remaining years, that every year and month and day from now until
the sun explodes is going to be progressively worse than the one that
preceded it.
I had a sad, drunk epiphany last night about
neoliberal management strategies during our collapse. The general
consensus is that people like Mitch McConnell and Larry Summers are evil
and stupid. But what if they’re actually evil and competent? They know
that mass displacement is coming, probably very soon, and they
intentionally want to immiserate most people beforehand so that we won’t
have the resources or will to mount any consequential protest as the
cities start to flood and burn and trains start herding us into camps.
You
might have heard of The Great Reset. Like all other reflections of our
horrific future, the political media recently began referring to it as a “conspiracy theory.” Indeed, it has been badly misunderstood by paranoid right wingers. But it’s real. There was a Davos conference that was literally called “The Great Reset.” Transcripts
and videos of conference proceedings can be found with a 10 second
Google search. These people put their ideology out in the open for
everyone to digest, and now simply re-posting the things they said on
record makes you a conspiracy theorist.
These types of Rich People
Gatherings–Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, etc–should not be regarded
as a meeting of soothsayers. They’re not even really prognosticators.
They are, instead, the collected mewlings of the modern clarisy. Their
declarations are meant to placate the hyper elite, convince them that
their destructive behaviors are moral and the current system is totally
sustainable even though the ground is clearly caving in beneath their
feet.
You can think of the visions set for at these conferences as sort of what the rich think the best case scenario might be.
The
Great Reset’s best case scenario is terrifying indeed: one of the very
first slides announces that by 2030 upwards of a billion people will be
displaced by climate change. We won’t eat meat anymore (okay, fine,
whatever). Oh, also, our economy will be entirely rentier-based. You
don’t have any possessions. You rent everything you use. You don’t draw a
steady paycheck. Everyone is a gig worker. There is no retirement,
either; you work until you can’t, and then you die.
This is the world both of our wretched political parties want to build. To the people who control our fate, this is idealism.
The
weirdest omission is that they all seem to think that the masses are
just going to go along with it. India and Pakistan will not exchange
nuclear weapons: each side will merely accept that their countries are
no longer inhabitable and instead of fighting for water or territory
they will simply sit tight and wait for immolation. Eritreans will
humbly march themselves into the sea. American homeowners will simply
shrug their shoulders and consent to signing all of their earthly
possessions over to Citibank in exchange for a weekly allowance of 4
cans of Spam.
Is this naivety, or do they know something we don’t?
Are they stupid enough to simply believe that no one will fight back,
or are they planning some type of mechanisms for the supression of
unrest?
ghionjournal | It is a sad sight to see; it’s like we are revisiting the slave trade
where neighbors sell their own neighbors down the river for the sake of
money.
Malcolm X identified them a long time ago, he realized the lethality of the boule society,
the few who have attained success yet refuse to reach back and lift up
others behind them. I was once in this cloaked society, a man of Omega Psi Phi,
I too used to pretend that I cared about justice while dabbling in the
very orders that impoverish the majority. It says in the bible that man
cannot serve God and mammon concurrently; now I understand the wisdom of
these words:
“No one can serve two masters: Either he will
hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the
one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” ~
Matthew 6:24
Sure enough, I learned the hard way that one cannot be in two places
at the same time—either we choose one side or the other. For far too
long, I chose ego over God only to feel the fires that come with empty
pride and emptier affiliations. Look I’m really not trying to be preachy
over here; even though it is the day of Sabbath, my aim is not to
convert you into my line of thinking. I am just telling my truth as best
as I can and then letting the chips fall where they may.
The truth is this: the boule society have become a bullet upon the
temples of the African-American communities. Rooted in Masonic
traditions, the “Divine 9”—as they call themselves haughtily—have made
it their purpose to rise above their station and dismissively thumb
their noses at those with lesser opportunities. It’s like Orwell’s
“Animal Farm”, where all are equal except those who walk in
two Weitzman and Guccis are more equal.
There is no need to be coy here, the people I’m referring to are
those in “black” Greek fraternities and sororities—AKAs, Deltas, Betas
Ques, Kappas, Sigmas, Alphas, Zetas and Iotas—who wear letters and throw
up demonic signs and symbols paying homages to Luciferian societies.
Most of them have zero idea what they are doing; they are blinded by
ideologies and bonded by ignorance to respect that which disrespects
them thoroughly. The vast majority are branded either outwardly or
inwardly, they bow before Satan without understanding who they are
pledging their lives to.
charleshughsmith |Unbeknownst to most Americans, many core systems are already in the first stages of collapse.
No corporate sector does a better job of masking dysfunction and profiteering than healthcare,
and so the collapse of healthcare systems will surprise everyone who swallowed the sector's
glossy PR.
Though 2020 is widely perceived as "the worst year ever," it was only a snack. The real banquet
of consequences will be served in 2021. The reason 2020 was only a snack is that systems
didn't break down in 2020. The reason 2021 is the main course is that systems
will break down, and once broken, they cannot be restored. Systems have numerous sources of potential fragility:
1. Systems can be tightly bound to other
fragile systems, setting up the potential for a domino-like cascading collapse that starts
with one system failure that then brings down every connected, interdependent system.
2. Systems can be hollowed out by self-interested insiders who mistakenly believe the system
can survive endless looting.
3. Systems can be weakened by perverse incentives that provide strong incentives to
under-invest in core functions and divert revenues to profiteering and extraction (stock buybacks,
bonuses to managers, etc.)
4. Systems can appear robust to casual observers because insiders cloak the decay of function,
accountability and transparency.
5. The decline of functionality / results can be hidden by bureaucratic obscurity (accounting
statements in which all the important information is buried in footnotes starting on page 217, etc.)
and by complexity thickets that reduce accountability to near-zero: no one is responsible
for the decay of function, accountability and transparency.
6. Process replaces results as the Prime Directive of the system. Devoting resources
to following processes rather than to getting results generates an illusion of functionality
even as the ability to evolve and adapt is lost.
7. Buffers that enabled effective responses to crisis are stripped to the bone as
redundancy and resilience are discounted as "hurting profits" or "needless expenses."
8. Insiders and the public / customers wrongly assume money can solve all of these systemic
frailties. But money cannot buy trust, competence, institutional depth, productive incentives
or anything else that is essential to robust, anti-fragile systems.
Americans are unprepared for the collapse of core systems. The secular faith holds
that corporate ownership of core systems, centralized state control and the relentless
pursuit of infinite greed will magically manifest the best of all possible worlds because
self-enrichment by any means available is what perfects systems.
off-guardian | The World Health Organization has changed the
definition of “herd immunity” on the Covid section of their website,
inserting the claim that it is a “concept used in vaccination”, and
requires a vaccine to be achieved.
Both of these statements are total falsehoods, which is demonstrated
by the WHO’s own website back in June, and every dictionary definition
of “herd immunity” you can find.
To quote the WHO’s own original definition:
Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an
infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either
through vaccination or a natural immunity developed through previous
infection.
This definition was posted on the WHO’s website on June 9th of this year, and conforms with the general usage of the term for generations.
‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a
concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected
from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.
No explanation is offered for the change, in fact note of the change is made on the website at all.
The typical dosing for humans is 200 micrograms per kilogram of body mass- but can be safely upped to 600 micrograms per kilogram of body mass for prophylactic use against covid.
Any reservations about using veterinary ivermectin and veterinary medications in general? (true confession, I keep a large supply of veterinary antibiotics and other medications because they are easily obtained over the counter, exponentially less expensive than the same molecule packaged for humans, and are identical to those requiring a prescription for human consumption
Based on the type of animal, they are often in different media that may not work as well in humans. Also, the dosing may be different for
a cow or horse and again, the amount of medication in the pills is formulated to dissolve in that specific animal intestine.
Veterinary Ivermectin is not problematic, though you can run into problems with other medications. People in rural America know they can afford animal meds but not human meds and take the chance. Post reset, there will be a LOT MORE rural uhmurkans.
Because this is a real thing in our society, I encourage you to hollar at your veterinarian connected homies. Potentially have your veterinary meds evaluated for safety. That is unfortunately the world we live in - so man-up and get used to it.
The safety issues with Ivermectin in humans seem to be concentrated on transplant drugs like tacrolimus and cyclosporin, on HIV drugs, on antifungal drugs and on some types of antibiotics.
The Eastern Virginia Medical Center Covid treatment protocol is straight fire. They have been updating this
protocol since the beginning. They use evidence based medicine. They are basically the entire Department of Medicine – primary care, critical care, infectious disease. They have been way out over the curve
on this epidemic from the beginning. They instantly update this protocol with new findings. In my opinion, they are doing a much better public service than any of your Great Reset sock-puppeted politicians or health aligned agencies.
You can see where they are using Ivermectin – and it is being done more and more by smart physicians all over the world. Because of the very good safety profile, it would be great if more information was made available about this drug. It would be preferable to having folks self-medicate with literal horse pills.
This is the air powered costume an employee wore in the Emergency Dept.of Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center Xmas day to spread cheer. Turns out employee unknowingly had covid , now 43 employees have covid .Kaiser investigating if costume blower helped spread the virus. pic.twitter.com/DLLi8z5e2T
LATimes | An employee working the Christmas shift at Kaiser Permanente San Jose
Medical Center has died after falling ill with COVID-19. The worker was
one of at least 43 staff members
who tested positive for the coronavirus in recent days, an outbreak
possibly linked to a staff member who wore an inflatable holiday costume
to lift spirits.
The staff member who appeared briefly in the
emergency department Christmas Day wore an air-powered, holiday-themed
costume, according to a hospital executive. KNTV-TV, the San Jose NBC station that first reported the outbreak, reported that the costume was an inflatable Christmas tree.
Inflatable
costumes are typically battery-powered and use a fan to keep the
costume puffed up. But such a fan can also cause virus particles to
travel much farther in a room.
KNTV-TV reported that the person who died was a woman who worked as a registration clerk in the emergency department.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with those affected by this terrible
loss. We are providing support to our employees during this difficult
time,” said a statement issued by the hospital late Sunday.
In a
statement Saturday, Irene Chavez, senior vice president and area manager
of Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center, said officials were
investigating whether the costume contributed to the outbreak.
“Any
exposure, if it occurred, would have been completely innocent, and
quite accidental, as the individual [wearing the costume] had no COVID
symptoms and only sought to lift the spirits of those around them during
what is a very stressful time,” Chavez said.
What Is the Great Reset? Part I: Reduced Expectations and Bio-techno-feudalism - “the Great Reset” is but a coordinated propaganda campaign shrouded
under a cloak of inevitability. Rather than a mere conspiracy theory, as
the New York Times has suggested,9 the Great Reset is an attempt at a conspiracy, or the “wishful thinking”10 of socioeconomic planners to have corporate “stakeholders”11 and governments adopt the desiderata of the WEF.
In order to sell this package, the WEF mobilizes the warmed-over
rhetoric of “economic equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “a shared
destiny,” among other euphemisms.12 Together,
such phrases represent the collectivist, socialist political and
ideological component of the envisioned corporate socialism13 (since economic socialism can never be enacted, it is always only political and ideological).
I’ll examine the prospects for the Great Reset in future
installments. But suffice it to say for now that the WEF envisions a
bio-techno-feudalist global order, with socioeconomic planners and
corporate “stakeholders” at the helm and the greater part of humanity in
their thrall.
The Great Reset, Part II: Corporate Socialism - Nevertheless, the aims of the WEF are not to plan every aspect of
production and thus to direct all individual activity. Rather, the goal
is to limit the possibilities for individual activity, including the
activity of consumers—by dint of squeezing out industries and producers
within industries from the economy. “Every country, from the United
States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas
to tech, must be transformed.”6
As Hayek noted, “when the medieval guild system was at its height,
and when restrictions to commerce were most extensive, they were not
used as a means actually to direct individual activity.”7
Likewise, the Great Reset aims not at a strictly collectivist planning
of the economy so much as recommends and demands neofeudalistic
restrictions that would go further than anything since the medieval
period—other than under state socialism itself, that is. In 1935, Hayek
noted the extent to which economic restrictions had already led to
distortions of the market:
How much further, then, the Great Reset would take us toward the kinds
of restrictions imposed under feudalism, including the economic stasis
that feudalism entailed!
The Great Reset, Part III: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics - The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in
the West, only in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political elite began
with a socialist-communist political system and implemented “capitalism”
later, the elite in the West began with “capitalism” and is aiming to
implement a socialist-communist political system now. It’s as if the
Western oligarchy looked to the “socialism” on display in China, and
said, “yes, we want it.”
This explains many otherwise seeming contradictions, not the least of
which is the leftist authoritarianism of Big Tech. Big Tech, and in
particular Big Digital, is the ideological communications apparatus for
the advancement of corporate socialism, or capitalism with Chinese
characteristics.
The Chinese characteristics that the Great Reset aims to reproduce in
connection with Western capitalism would resemble the totalitarianism
of the CCP. It would require a great abridgement of individual
rights—including property rights, free expression, freedom of movement,
freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the free enterprise
system as we understand it.
The Great Reset would implement the political system in much the same
way as China has done—with 5G-enabled smart city surveillance, the
equivalent of social credit scores, medical passports, political
imprisonment, and other means of social and political repression and
control.
In the end, socialism with Chinese characteristics and capitalism with Chinese characteristics would amount to the same thing.
technologyreview | The first thing to understand here is that neural networks are
fundamentally function approximators. (Say what?) When they’re training
on a data set of paired inputs and outputs, they’re actually calculating
the function, or series of math operations, that will transpose one
into the other. Think about building a cat detector. You’re training the
neural network by feeding it lots of images of cats and things that are
not cats (the inputs) and labeling each group with a 1 or 0,
respectively (the outputs). The neural network then looks for the best
function that can convert each image of a cat into a 1 and each image of
everything else into a 0. That’s how it can look at a new image and
tell you whether or not it’s a cat. It’s using the function it found to
calculate its answer—and if its training was good, it’ll get it right
most of the time.
Conveniently, this function approximation
process is what we need to solve a PDE. We’re ultimately trying to find a
function that best describes, say, the motion of air particles over
physical space and time.
Now here’s the crux of the paper.
Neural networks are usually trained to approximate functions between
inputs and outputs defined in Euclidean space, your classic graph with
x, y, and z axes. But this time, the researchers decided to define the
inputs and outputs in Fourier space, which is a special type of graph
for plotting wave frequencies. The intuition that they drew upon from
work in other fields is that something like the motion of air can
actually be described as a combination of wave frequencies, says Anima
Anandkumar, a Caltech professor who oversaw the research alongside her
colleagues, professors Andrew Stuart and Kaushik Bhattacharya. The
general direction of the wind at a macro level is like a low frequency
with very long, lethargic waves, while the little eddies that form at
the micro level are like high frequencies with very short and rapid
ones.
Why does this matter? Because it’s far easier to
approximate a Fourier function in Fourier space than to wrangle with
PDEs in Euclidean space, which greatly simplifies the neural network’s
job. Cue major accuracy and efficiency gains: in addition to its huge
speed advantage over traditional methods, their technique achieves a 30%
lower error rate when solving Navier-Stokes than previous deep-learning
methods.
The whole thing is extremely clever, and also makes
the method more generalizable. Previous deep-learning methods had to be
trained separately for every type of fluid, whereas this one only needs
to be trained once to handle all of them, as confirmed by the
researchers’ experiments. Though they haven’t yet tried extending this
to other examples, it should also be able to handle every earth
composition when solving PDEs related to seismic activity, or every
material type when solving PDEs related to thermal conductivity.
And to be 💯% honest, it was hard during this to be targeted+marred as some sellout-enemy of the people over a late tactical disagreement over 1 floor vote.
Also a bummer to see figures excuse comments like “f- her and f- anyone who protects her.” That’s not tone,that’s violence
One of the 1st votes I ever cast broke w/ my party over House rules that strangled transformative legislation for working people + climate. It was honestly terrifying.
cbslocal | The new year brought a disturbing discovery at the San Francisco home
of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, where, early
Friday morning, vandals spray-painted her house and left a severed pig’s
head in front of her garage.
The graffiti says “Cancel rent” and “We want everything” —
possibly referencing coronavirus stimulus checks. There was also a
severed pig’s head in a pool of red paint left in front of the garage
door.
San Francisco police say they first got the call about the incident
around 2:00 a.m. on Friday. Speaker Pelosi was not home as she is
currently in Washington D.C.
Neighbors say while they understand the frustration over politics on
Capitol Hill and they say this type of vandalism doesn’t help resolve
anything.
“I don’t think that this is a useful way to go about it and it’s a
terrible start to this new year, when we are hoping for less anger and
hatred than we’ve had to deal with for the last year,” said Audrey
Carlson, a neighbor of Speaker Pelosi.
KPIX reached out to Speaker Pelosi’s office for comment on the incident but has not heard back.
San Francisco police have not released any information about suspects
in the case. Also, no one has come forward claiming responsibility for
the vandalism. Some of the graffiti mentions UBI (universal basic
income) and “cancel rent,” so it is possible the culprit is someone
associated with those movements.
Other messages were spray painted along the front porch, but the rest of
McConnell's home appeared to be untouched. As of Saturday morning,
Louisville Metro Police said it does not know who is responsible for the
damage.
"I’ve spent my career fighting for the First Amendment and defending
peaceful protest. I appreciate every Kentuckian who has engaged in the
democratic process whether they agree with me or not," McConnell said in
a statement responding to the vandalism. "This is different. Vandalism
and the politics of fear have no place in our society. My wife and I
have never been intimidated by this toxic playbook. We just hope our
neighbors in Louisville aren’t too inconvenienced by this radical
tantrum."
wsws | Since the late 1960s, the efforts to racialize scholarly work,
against which Genovese rightly polemicized, have assumed such vast
proportions that they cannot be adequately described as merely “inane.”
Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race
theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open
for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity
has replaced social class and related economic processes as the
principal and essential analytic category.
Whiteness” theory, the
latest rage, is now utilized to deny historical progress, reject
objective truth, and interpret all events and facets of culture through
the prism of alleged racial self-interest. On this basis, the sheerest
nonsense can be spouted with the guarantee that all objections grounded
on facts and science will be dismissed as a manifestation of “white
fragility” or some other form of hidden racism. In this degraded
environment, Ibram X. Kendi can write the following absurd passage,
without fear of contradiction, in his Stamped from the Beginning:
For
Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a
double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand
years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of
insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light.
Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore
Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society
eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. … Enlightenment ideas
gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection
between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between
darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. [19]
This
is a ridiculous concoction that attributes to the word “Enlightenment” a
racial significance that has absolutely no foundation in etymology, let
alone history. The word employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in
1784 to describe this period of scientific advance was Aufklärung,
which may be translated from the German as “clarification” or “clearing
up,” connoting an intellectual awakening. The English translation of Aufklärung as Enlightenment
dates from 1865, seventy-five years after the death of Benjamin
Franklin, whom Kendi references in support of his racial argument. [20]
Another
term used by English speaking people to describe the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries has been “The Age of Reason,” which was employed by
Tom Paine in his scathing assault on religion and all forms of
superstition. Kendi’s attempt to root Enlightenment in a white racist
impulse is based on nothing but empty juggling with words. In point of
fact, modern racism is connected historically and intellectually to the
Anti-Enlightenment, whose most significant nineteenth century
representative, Count Gobineau, wrote The Inequality of the Human Races.
But actual history plays no role in the formulation of Kendi’s
pseudo-intellectual fabrications. His work is stamped with ignorance.
istory
is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an
essay titled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Professor Philip
A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, “I posit that there
exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and
institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white
racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music
theory.” [21]
This degradation of music theory divests the
discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The
complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality,
consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived,
Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering
in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a
passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from
“whiteness” and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the
1930s and 1940s to liberate music from “Jewishness.” The Nazis denounced
Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious
manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar
fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely “above average as a
composer,” and that he “occupies the place he does because he has been
propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years.” [22]
Academic
journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with
ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the
onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda
Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New
Hampshire, proclaims that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes
in physics,” and introduces the concept of “white empiricism”
(italics in the original), which “comes to dominate empirical discourse
in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters
of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena.” [23]
Prescod-Weinstein
asserts that “knowledge production in physics is contingent on the
ascribed identities of the physicists,” the racial and gender background
of scientists affects the way scientific research is conducted, and,
therefore, the observations and experiments conducted by
African-American and female physicists will produce results different
than those conducted by white males. Prescod-Weinstein identifies with
the contingentists who “challenge any assumption that scientific
decision making is purely objective.” [24]
uchicago | In this article I take on the question of how the exclusion of Black
American women from physics impacts physics epistemologies, and I
highlight the dynamic relationship between this exclusion and the
struggle for women to reconcile “Black woman” with “physicist.” I
describe the phenomenon where white epistemic claims about science—which
are not rooted in empirical evidence—receive more credence and
attention than Black women’s epistemic claims about their own lives. To
develop this idea, I apply an intersectional analysis to Joseph Martin’s
concept of prestige asymmetry in physics, developing the concept of white empiricism
to discuss the impact that Black women’s exclusion has had on physics
epistemology. By considering the essentialization of racism and sexism
alongside the social construction of ascribed identities, I assess the
way Black women physicists self-construct as scientists and the
subsequent impact of epistemic outcomes on the science itself.
Who is allowed to be an observer in physics, and who is fundamentally
denied the possibility? In this article, I propose that race and
ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics, despite the universality
of the laws that undergird physics, and I introduce the concept of white empiricism
to provide one explanation for why. White empiricism is the phenomenon
through which only white people (particularly white men) are read has
having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and Black people
(particularly Black women) are produced as an ontological other. This
phenomenon is stabilized through the production and retention of what
Joseph Martin calls prestige asymmetry, which explains how social
resources in physics are distributed based on prestige. In American
society, Black women are on the losing end of an ontic prestige
asymmetry whereby different scientists “garner unequal public
approbation” in their everyday lives due to ascribed identities such as
gender and race (Martin 2017,
475). White empiricism is one of the mechanisms by which this asymmetry
follows Black women physicists into their professional lives. Because
white empiricism contravenes core tenets of modern physics (e.g.,
covariance and relativity), it negatively impacts scientific outcomes
and harms the people who are othered.
White empiricism comes to
dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully
shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical
and social phenomena. Based primarily on their own experiences, white
men, who are the dominant demographic in physics, construct the figure
of the observer to exclude anyone who does not share the attending
social and intellectual identities and beliefs. These beliefs can limit
investigations of what constitutes a reasonable physical theory, whether
the scientific method should be brought to bear on this physical
theory, and the capacity to understand how incidents of racism disrupt
the potential for objective discourse. Essentially, white empiricism
involves a predominantly white, predominantly male professional
community selectively failing to apply the scientific method to
themselves while using “scientific” evaluation to strengthen the
barriers to Black women’s entry into physics. White empiricism is
therefore a form of antiempiricism masquerading as an empirical approach
to the natural world. By denying agency to Black women in discussions
of racism, white empiricism predetermines the experiences of Black women
in physics.
To provide an example of the role that white
empiricism plays in physics, I discuss the current debate in string
theory about postempiricism, motivated in part by a question: why are
string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to
racial hegemony? I believe the answer is that knowledge production in
physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists.
Contingentists focus on top-down social forces, or the contingency
associated with laboratory instrumentation; in this way, they challenge
any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.1
Scientists are also typically monists—believers in the idea that there
is only one science—who, rather than feeling burdened to prove there is
only one science, expect contingentists to prove that there can be more
than one (Soler 2015b). This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
