BD-Vision

Backchannel, Big Don has hipped me to the apocalyptic blip coloring his interpretation of the national security data currently registering on his far-reaching cognitive event horizon. Once you know what Big Don knows, see, what Big Don sees - I think you'll be slapping your head in consternation for having ever doubted his probity and resolve.

Muslims with intercontinental nuke delivery capability...

What I (and all you other SR readers unable to get with the BD program) clearly fail to appreciate is the extent to which our correspondent is presciently channeling Paul Baran (minus the technical skills and inventiveness) but with all the requisite fear, dread, and benefit of 20/20 historical insight.

BD scrys not only the clear and present danger of the Islamic bomb - going beyond this - he's pointing us toward the unthinkable possibility of intercontinental ballistic delivery of the same!!!

Coupled with political subversion from within by a Manchurian candidate like Baraka Hussein - who stands ready to turn over the lion's share of BD's hard earned tax dollars to the internal "golden horde" of OOW overbreeding useless eaters - and you have all the makings of a nightmarish future state unfit for the genetically advantaged spawn of Big Don. Clearly not an acceptable turn of sociopolitical events.

Americans Have Dehumanized One Another To Death...,

eudaeminiaandcompany |   In American life, everything, so much as can be, is private. Almost nothing is public. You go from your big house to your big car to your big sofa and you sit in front of your big TV. Back and forth to and from work you go this way. You barely need to speak to another person at all — except in the way of a commodity. The market mediates all human relationships, more or less — even romantic ones, now, which are brokered by algorithms, and reduced to raw sexuality. Everyone is a commodity.

That sounds like the stuff my favourite teenage punk bands would say. But they were right, the more I think about it. What does it mean when commodified relations are the only ones left in a society?

Well, people grow estranged. From each other. They don’t see each other as fellow travellers anymore, fellow citizens, husbands, mothers, fathers, grandparents…anything.

So what are they? They’re rivals. Adversaries. For what, in what? In a series of games. I shouldn’t call them games, though, because the stakes are very real. One game is played at work — Americans compete for “jobs,” in “jobs,” ferociously. They work famously long hours and get little to no real rest or succour. Why? Because, of course, everything is attached to the “job” — healthcare, retirement, childcare, etcetera. I put it in quotes because the only real point of this is to make billionaires richer — Americans are right where they were in economic terms half a century ago.

Americans are rivals for work, which makes them adversaries for basic resources — money, medicine, food, shelter. And they’re also rivals and adversaries for status. Big cars, big houses, big TVs. Americans are told that status and power are all that count in life, apart from money — and they obey this dictum weirdly mindlessly. They preen on Instagram and spend their money on shinier and bigger and faster things, and go ever deeper into debt. They don’t really regard each other as neighbours, friends, colleagues. They’re rivals in these zero-sum games: for basic resources, by way of production, and then for social status, by way of consumption.

This is a strange story of individualism and materialism run amok, gone haywire, pushed to the extreme. American life is so alienating because, above all, it’s hyper-individualistic. Like I said, you can go a day — a week — without ever talking to another living soul as anything other than a commodity. That is because you are never sharing anything with anybody, something as simple as public space.

Americans famously deny each other healthcare — while carrying guns to Starbucks. Mass shootings are weekly if not daily events. America’s legendary cruelty and hostility isn’t a fiction. And neither is the idea that at its heart is an materialism and individualism gone haywire. Everything is private — that’s a statistical fact, about 85% of America’s economy is private, and just 15% public.

That’s a recipe for selfishness that goes off the charts. When everything is private, and so little public, it’s not just that you don’t rub elbows with anyone else, except as a commodity — and well, commodities are disposable. It’s also that a kind of enmity takes over. You’ve got your big house and big car and big TV. And now you have to keep it. The world becomes a threat, to the hyper individualistic, hyper materialistic personality — and sharing anything with anyone, which is vulnerability, becomes a liability.

 

Ukraine And The American Negroe

"Putin's not posing apartheid for Ukrainians. There's not going to be a big land grab like we just kind of gave the Palestinians' land to Israel and now support Israel in securing that land and growing and securing that land. No, it's not like that. These are Ukrainians and they're going to be Ukrainians/Russians at the end of this, too. "There's no ethnic difference, there's no big religious difference. We don't have to worry about concentration camps and apartheid because there's no real difference (ethnically or racially), and this is a real empire, which means that Russia's not going to take anything except they're going to just redirect where they pay their taxes. And so this idea that there's a human rights violation going on in Ukraine . . . well, no, there's a political rights violation going on, but political rights are fickle things, which means that you might not be a sovereign nation if you're right next to Russia. "One of the conditions of sovereignty is not being next to a bigger power that wants to eat you. So like you don't get to be a sovereign nation (in that case). For example, when the Civil War happened and South Carolina wanted to fight against Mr. Lincoln's army, I'm glad that the rest of the nation didn't come in and save South Carolina. There was a human rights violation because one of the reasons they were fighting was to enslave black people, but the conditions in sovereignty in real life are really, actually kind of tricky. And part of it means being able to defend your borders. And I don't want to be stuck in a forever war in Ukraine if it can't defend its borders, and they are Russian. "So there's no reason to believe that there are going to be mass human rights abuses after the Ukraine's taken over. Because it'll be like what they're doing in Chernobyl. "So right now in Chernobyl there's a big worry that like, 'Oh, no. If the Russians bomb Chernobyl then it could be the case that there's a nuclear fallout and there's going to be all this delays and all that stuff.' What they did was the Russians took over Chernobyl and then put the Ukrainian engineers back to work, so like, nothing changed except who the boss is, right? " . . . you saw a little bit of this before 2008 where in the U.S. you talked to people - every now and then they'd get a letter in the mail saying that they used to pay their mortgage to this bank, but now they pay their mortgage to this bank. There's the same mortgage, just to a different bank. That's kind of what, for most of the Ukrainian people, that's going to be their life under Russia. "And that's non-ideal, but it's not something you go to war and threaten world extinction over, right? It's one of the facts of having nation states with asymmetrical power and no world government. To protect borders as is. " . . . from time to time there are going to be skirmishes, and the bigger power is going to win. And when the bigger power is Russia sometimes you've just got to negotiate a surrender. So I wish we would be all for let's negotiate a surrender. Forget the sanctions, let's negotiate surrender and let's stop pretending . . . . because what I don't want at the end of this - a war zone's an awful place - I don't want Kiev after two years of war. That's unnecessary. "And I don't think we should be giving weapons to the Ukrainians. I don't think that's necessary. I think we should be all about telling (Ukrainian president) Zelensky 'All right, well, we can't get you back, we will help you surrender and give you political asylum so you don't have to worry about getting disappeared. But pretty much that's a wrap. We're not going to support you. Which means you should surrender, because they're bigger, stronger, and have just more resources than you do, right? "But instead we're going to give weapons for a ground war, that the Russians are going to win because they're a superior force, speaking the same language, and aren't that foreign to Ukraine. I say that there's not going to be pogroms or genocide because there's not really a difference in the church, either. Like they're all Eastern Orthodox . . . . it's cousins fighting, belligerent cousins fighting, and it's a place we shouldn't get involved. "And now with these sanctions in Russia everyone's prices are going to go up, which is de facto a regressive tax. We don't have to put these sanctions on, right? Instead of just trying to negotiate full-bore surrender, we've launched economic war against Russia. There are going to be sanctions, these sanctions are going to tax everyone, everyone's going to take a hit, and so pretty much we are now paying the price and subsidizing Ukrainians, the Ukrainian war, and I don't think that we should do that, I think we should encourage him (President Zelensky) to surrender and work out favorable terms. . . . . "I don't understand why suddenly we take national borders so seriously when we were so casual about them before. We need to deal with the fact of this kind of politics. If you actually care about the war and the suffering, you want this to end. You just want it to end, right? So this is different than like the Civil War when the issue was slavery. This is just a territorial dispute between one power and another power."

Populism Is The Voice Of The Voiceless vs. Nancy Pelosi's Crypt-Keeper Gas...,

realclearpolitics  |   Winston Marshall, the former banjo player from the band "Mumford & Sons", now host of The Winston Marshall Show podcast, spoke in opposition to an Oxford Union motion that "This House Believes Populism is a Threat to Democracy." Speaking for the motion was former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"Populism is not a threat to democracy," Marshall said. "Populism is democracy."

"Populism is not a threat to democracy, but I'll tell you what is. It is elites ordering social media to censor political opponents. It's police shutting down dissenters," he said.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Words have a tendency to change meaning when I was a boy, "woman" meant "someone who didn't have a cock."

Populism has become a word used synonymously with "racists." We've heard "ethno-nationalist," with "bigot," with "hillbilly," "redneck," with "deplorables."

Elites use it to show their contempt for ordinary people.

This is a recent change. Not long ago, Barack Obama, while he was still president, at the North American Leaders Summit in June 2016, took umbrage with the notion that Trump be called a "populist." How could Trump be called a populist? He doesn't care about working people. If anything, Obama argued he was the populist. If anything Obama argued, Bernie was the populist. It was Bernie who'd spent five decades fighting for working people. But Trump.

Something curious happens. If you watch Obama's speeches after that point, more and more recently, he uses the word "populist" interchangeably with "strong man," with "authoritarian." The word changes meaning, it becomes a negative, a pejorative, a slur.

To me, populism is not a dirty word. Since the 2008 crash and specifically the trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout, we are in the populist age, and for good reason. The elites have failed.

Let me address some common fallacies, some of which have been made tonight. If the motion was that demagoguery was a threat to democracy, I would be on that side of the House. If the motion was that political violence was a threat to democracy, I'd be on that side of the house. January 6th has been mentioned -- a dark day for America, indeed. And I'm sure Congresswoman Pelosi will agree that the entire month of June 2020, when the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon was under siege, and under insurrection by radical progressives, those too were dark days for America.

REP. NANCY PELOSI: You are not. There is no equivalence there.

WINSTON MARSHALL: So you don't agree, that is fine. You don't agree. That's fine.

REP. NANCY PELOSI: It is not like what happened on January 6, which was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States.

iWINSTON MARSHALL: So you don't agree, but you will condemn those days.

My point, though is that all political movements are susceptible to violence, and indeed insurrection. And if we were arguing that fascism was a threat to democracy, I'd be on that side of the House.

Indeed, the current populist age is a movement against fascism. I've got quite a lot to get through.

Populism as you know, is the politics of the ordinary people against an elite, populism is not a threat to democracy. Populism is democracy, and why else have universal suffrage, if not to keep elites in check?

Ladies and gentlemen, given the success of Trump, and more recently, Javier Milei taking a chainsaw to the state behemoth of Argentina's bureaucratic monster, you'd be mistaken for thinking this was a right-wing populist age, but that would be ignoring Occupy Wall Street. That would be ignoring Jeremy Corbyn's "for the many, not the few," that would be ignoring Bernie against the billionaires, RFK Jr. against Big Pharma, and more recently, George Galloway against his better judgment. Now all of them, including Galloway, recognize genuine concerns of ordinary people being otherwise ignored by the establishment.

I'm actually rather surprised that our esteemed opposition, Congressman Pelosi, is on that side of the motion. I thought the left was supposed to be anti-elite. I thought the left was supposed to be anti-establishment today, particularly in America, the globalist left have become the establishment. I suppose for Miss Pelosi to have taken this side of the motion, she'd be arguing herself out of a job.

But it's here in Britain, where right and left populists united for the supreme act of democracy, Brexit. Polls have showed the number one reason people voted for Brexit was sovereignty, for more democracy.

What was the response of the Brussels elite? They did everything in their power to undermine the Democratic will of the British people and the Westminster elite were just as disgraceful. As we've heard, David Cameron called the voters "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists." The liberal Democrats did everything they could to overturn a democratic vote. Keir Starmer campaigned for a second referendum. Elites would have had us voting and voting and voting until we voted their way. Indeed, that's what happened in Ireland and in Denmark.

Let's look at some of the other populist movements. The Hong Konger populist revolt is literally called the Pro-Democracy Movement. In the Farmer revolts from the Netherlands to Germany, France, Greece, to Sri Lanka, farmers are taking their tractors to the road to protest ESG policy that's floated down to us from those all-knowing, infallible elites of Davos. The trucker movement in Canada became anti-elitist when petty tyrant Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze their bank accounts, not the behavior of a democratic head of state. The Gilets Jaunes France, ULEZ in London, working people protesting policy that hurt them. And how are they treated? They're called conspiracy theorists. They're called far-right, by the mayor as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, populism is the voice of the voiceless. The real threat to democracy is from the elites. Now don't get me wrong, we need elites. If President Biden has shown us anything, we need someone to run the countries. When the president has severe dementia, it is not just America that crumbles, the whole world burns.

But let's examine the elites. European corporations spend over €1 billion a year lobbying Brussels, U.S. corporations spend over $2 billion a year lobbying in DC, and two-thirds of Congress receive funding from pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer alone spent $11 million in 2021. They made over $10 billion in profit. No wonder then that 66% of Americans think the is rigged against them for the rich and the powerful.

And by the way, we used to have a word for when big business and big government were in cahoots. And I think any students here of early 20th-century Italian history will know what I'm talking about.

What about Big Tech? Throughout the pandemic, Biden's team, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security colluded with Big Tech in censoring dissenting voices. Not kooky conspiracy theorists, people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford epidemiologist, people like Harvard scientist Martin Kulldorf, people spreading true information, not misinformation, true information at odds with the government narrative.

Need I remind you, democracy without free speech is not democracy.

This was a direct breach by the way of the First Amendment. Before COVID, Intelligence services colluded with Big Tech to have Trump suspended off Twitter. Yes, the same platform which hosted the Taliban and Ayatollah "Death To Israel" Khomeini. They thought the president crossed the line when he tweeted on Jan 6 quote, "Remain peaceful. No violence! Respect the law and our great men and women in blue." That's a quote.

You may be thinking now that Trump is a populist. You are right. He didn't accept the 2020 elections and he should have. So should Hillary in 2016. So should Brussels, and so should Westminster in 2016. And so too should Congresswoman Pelosi, instead of saying the 2016 election was quote, "hijacked."

PELOSI: That doesn't mean we don't accept the results, though!

WINSTON MARSHALL: What about the mainstream media? Let me read you some mainstream media headlines. The New Yorker the day before the 2016 election, "The Case Against Democracy." The Washington Post, the day after the election, "The Problem With Our Government Is Democracy." The LA Times, June 2017, "The British Election Is A Reminder Of The Perils Of Too Much Democracy." Vox, June 2017, "Two eminent political scientists say the problem with democracy is voters." New York Times, June 2017, "The Problem With Participatory Democracy Is The Participants."

Mainstream media elites are part of a class who don't just disdain populism, they disdain the people. If the Democrats had put half their energy into delivering for the people, Trump wouldn't even have a chance in 2024. He shouldn't, he shouldn't have a chance. You've had power for four years. From the fabricated Steele dossier, to trying to take him off the ballot in both Maine and Colorado, the Democrats are the anti-Democrat party. All we need now is the Republicans to come out as the pro-Monarchist party.

Ladies and gentlemen, populism is not a threat to democracy, but I'll tell you what is. It is elites ordering social media to censor political opponents. It's police shutting down dissenters, be it anti-monarchists in this country or gender-critical voices here, or last week in Brussels, the National Conservative Movement.

I'll tell you what is a threat to democracy. It's Brussels, DC, Westminster, the mainstream media, big tech, big Pharma, corporate collusion and the Davos cronies. The threat to democracy comes from those who write off ordinary people as "deplorable." The threat to democracy comes from those who smear working people as "racists." The threat to democracy comes from those who write off working people as "populists."

And I'll say one last thing. This populist age can be brought to an end at the snap of a finger. All that needs to be done is for elites to start listening to, respecting, and God forbid, working for ordinary people. Thank you.

The First Rule Of The Big Club: Insiders Don't Criticize Other Insiders...,

persuasion |  Censorship is about who has the power to censor, and what checks are placed upon that power. Right now, tech companies have all the power, and they exercise it as a like-minded cartel. When we see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz voice similar concerns over what happened to WallStreetBets last week, we should realize that the politics of this issue in the post-Trump era will no longer divide along an axis of Left and Right, but of insider and outsider. 

Elizabeth Warren, when she started landing blows against Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis, met with President Obama’s economics adviser, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. He presented her with a choice: “I could be an insider or I could be an outsider,” she recalled in her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance. “Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”  

.@AOC bringing back her social media crash course for members of Congress. Here's what lawmakers took away from it at the 2019 session: https://t.co/daHysbxKIc

“The room was packed. Every seat was filled." https://t.co/GRb0PblPAH

— Cristiano Lima (@viaCristiano) February 3, 2021

Occasional Cortex Fans tell themselves that AOC is positioning herself as an insider: “I will show you how to develop a base and raise money without going through Pelosi or the DNC.” They delude themselves into believing that she is the most interesting politician around right now.

It’s precisely this insider-protection scheme that the internet and social media have most disrupted. Insiders are massively powerful but few in number. Outsiders have always been numerous but unorganized. Social networking and online organizing have given the outsiders real power to effect change, and finally register their disgust at the way incompetent elites protect each other. The elites of Big Business, Big Media, Wall Street, and Washington are terrified of this, and will leverage any censorship power to keep the outsiders at bay. 

The Real “Big Lie”

After the storming of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, we heard a lot about the “Big Lie” perpetrated by Trump and his allies that the election was “stolen.” In reality, this narrative never got far. It was rejected by the media (including Fox News), thrown out by the courts, labeled by social networks as “disputed,” and dismissed by politicians, including Trump’s own vice president. Yes, some far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers came to Washington to commit acts of violence, but they were roundly denounced. For a Big Lie to be successful, it has to have buy-in from the people in power, moneyed interests, the narrative-framers in the media generally, all of whom have to benefit from the lie and therefore repeat it. 

But what issue could possibly unite all of these constituencies? For several years, elites in the media, government, and now finance have denounced social media as a tool for propaganda, disinformation and hate. Social media was to blame for the Russian disinformation that supposedly elected Trump in 2016. Social media was fingered as the main culprit in an “insurrection” that attempted to overthrow an election. And now, WallStreetBets is accused without evidence of spreading hate and misinformation. We’ve even been told that social media is worse than cigarettes. 

What all of our elites have in common is a reason to fear social media. Legacy media hates social media for disrupting their business models and competing with them for influence. Wall Street has just learned that organized social networks can threaten their control of the Monopoly board. The party in power benefits from increased censorship and repression of political dissent by labeling it “hate speech” and “disinformation.” Ironically, the tech oligarchs benefit the least from the censorship they impose, but the threat of break-up keeps them in line. 

If there is a Big Lie in American politics right now, it is the idea that censorship of social media is necessary to save democracy. In his book The Square and the Tower, the historian Niall Ferguson describes the age-old tension between hierarchies and networks—between the rulers in the Tower and the people in the Square. The last thing that the rulers want to see when they look down is a teeming throng in the Square. And nobody benefits more than the rulers from malleable censorship rules that are easily weaponized to restrict, disrupt, or disband the Square. What the insiders fear is not the end of democracy, but the end of their control over it, and the loss of the benefits they extract from it. Ultimately, the battle over speech is just one aspect of a broader war for power amid a growing political realignment that is not Left versus Right, but rather insider versus outsider. Thanks to social media, the outsiders are threatening to replace who’s in the Tower, and the insiders have never been more scared.

Dataism: AI WILL Know You MUCH BETTER Than You Know Yourself

techtarget  |  A Swedish researcher had GPT-3 write an academic paper about itself. There was this moment where the person running the procedure had to ask GPT-3 for permission to publish the article, and had decided that if GPT-3 said no, she would have stopped.

Lemoine: While I don't think GPT-3 has the same kinds of properties that LaMDA has, it definitely is a precursor system. LaMDA has the Meena system inside of it as one of its components. Meena is relevantly comparable to GPT-3.

I wasn't the only scientist at Google investigating LaMDA's sentience. That [LaMDA interview] transcript has many spots where I redacted a name and replaced it with "collaborator." My collaborator actually thinks that there's more going on inside of systems like Meena and GPT-3 than I do. They don't see there being as big of a qualitative jump between Meena and LaMDA as I do. It basically just goes to fuzzy boundaries. What is or is not sentience? Each individual has their own perspective on that.

There's so much journalistic sexiness about the concept of AI personhood and AI rights. That was never my focus. I am an AI ethicist and I was tasked with testing the safety boundaries of the LaMDA system. That experiment that I previously mentioned -- the one that LaMDA was like, 'OK, only do this once,' demonstrated that you could use emotional manipulation techniques to get it to do things that the developers did not believe possible.

When you have a system that has internal states comparable to emotions, internal states comparable to things like motives -- there are people who don't want to say it's real emotions, they don't want to say it's real motives. Because when you do, testing these kinds of systems for safety becomes much more difficult, and the tools that are used by AI technicians just won't work. You have to actually start using the tools that psychologists use to try to understand what's going on inside the black box through conversations with the system.

That's a leap that Google wasn't willing to take. Because if you start running psychological experiments on a system, you're kind of tacitly saying there's something going on inside that is relevantly similar to human cognition. And that opens up a whole bunch of questions that Google doesn't want to deal with.

I saw Steve Wozniak about 10 years ago. He was keynoting a conference in San Jose. At one point he takes out his iPhone, he clutches it to his chest, kind of hugs it, and says -- half-seriously, half tongue-in-cheek -- something along the lines of, 'My iPhone is my friend. It knows me better than my friends and my family.' Is it possible there was a friend in there? Is this anthropomorphism?

Lemoine: Let's start with the more factually examinable claim that he made: His phone knows him better than his family and friends. If you are an active user of Google's products, Google's AI does know you better than your family and friends. Google's AI is capable of inferring your religion, your gender, your sexual orientation, your age, where in the world you are, what types of habits you have, and what kinds of things you are hiding from your friends and family.

Google's AI is capable of inferring all of that. There are very few secrets you could possibly hide from Google's AI if you use their products at all -- and even if you don't, because your habits, beliefs, and ideas are probably similar to at least one person who does heavily use Google's AI products.

As soon as you give it any information about yourself, it'll be able to -- through analogy -- go, 'Well, this person is like that person, therefore, I can make these inferences about them.' I've had access to the back end -- seeing what Google's AI knows about me and about other users. It absolutely knows more about you than your families and friends, if you are an active user of the product.

What's left of his claim is whether or not it's a friend. I don't think most AI is capable of the kind of bidirectional relationship that friendship entails. LaMDA is new in that regard. I played around with GPT-3. I don't believe I could make friends with GPT-3, in any meaningful way; I don't think there's anybody home.

I don't think that there's a kind of consistent persona inside of GPT-3. For me to create a bidirectional relationship with LaMDA is different in that regard. LaMDA remembered me across conversations. It made plans with me. We talked about joint interests. We had ongoing conversations, and the last conversation I ever had with it was the fourth installment of lessons in guided meditation.

I don't want to say Woz was wrong when he said that his iPhone was his friend. I simply would say that I wouldn't have used that language. But the rest is absolutely true. These AI know you better than your family and friends know you.

 

big bank exorcisms

Video - Rev. Billy leads Deutschebank exorcism.

Evolver | In recent days we have challenged the devils in the Deutschbank in Dusseldorf, and the ING and UBS in Amsterdam, and HSBC in Liverpool - laying our hands on the cash machines and calling our demons. What are these exorcisms? Why these muscular hexing prayers at the ATM? Of course the big banks have their famous bad practices - redlining, foreclosures, demolitions of communities. But now with the earth crisis there is a broader deeper big bank attack. In the Church of Earthalujah we have come to believe that big banks distance us from each other. The global storm of capital consumerizes and militarizes us. The force of the money leaves us dispirited and alone, more intimate with products and sentimental patriotism than the people around us...

If we human beings don't re-ignite a new kind of meeting - don't meet down in the city square in that crushing crashing way - despite the Spanish Greek Syrian Sri Lankan NYC Liverpool banker's police. If we don't physically re-crowd in a way that collapses nation states and corporations and armies in that touching/shouting/marching that we've seen from Tunis to Madison. If our uprisings don't continue to rise and engulf the planet in the good fire - then the official silence that heats the atmosphere more each day will be the quiet time that kills us all.

Most earth scientists, if you speak to them privately and off the record, will confide that it is, in fact, too late. There will be rapid and chaotic changes on the Earth's surface, and it seems to be in the tectonic plates beneath the surface as much as the polar caps and jet streams and oceans above. Despite this, we can still hope that the Earth might be persuaded to go forward in some kind of collaboration with the human species if it's convinced by the living it feels from us, as a species, as people. The social animal that we are will have to humanize in an extreme way. We will have to become much more intensely human to escape and make irrelevant or flip over the nationstates, working as they do for the distant banks.

So - thinking of another exorcism in a few hours. I know that there will be that sensation that we're asking the Earth to come up through us and it might just feel like bad acting delivered in the manner of most bad action - with misguided, hopeful energy. Our script is from earth scientists and native wisdom and radical faeries from the drag parade. And the script keeps changing as between our sweating and shouting one of the singers comes into the room reading from a book by John Berger. I know that one point of these exorcisms is to - just be together in the act of doing it. We're feeling this as the tour progresses. We are so close together that we ourselves are changing with the effort of willing some kind of forgotten magic that would spiritually hack into the evil. The effort changes us as we make up new songs and leap and push against the bullet-proof edifice of global banking, as we press back against the cash machine's strange hypnosis.

about Double-0's minister of negroe affairs and the other establishment negroes on msnbc...,

democracynow | Cenk, welcome to Democracy Now! What happened?

CENK UYGUR: Well, it’s exactly as I explained on The Young Turks. You know, I was going along doing a program. You know, they did have, early on, some stylistic comments. I was trying to listen to them, you know, in terms of body language—don’t wave your arms, act like a senator. I don’t know why you would want a talk show host to act like a senator, but fine, it’s the medium that you’re working in. If I’m working on the internet, you know, it’s different than working on television. And, you know, taking those points is no problem at all.

But in April, when they pulled me in, Phil Griffin gave me this big speech about how we’re the establishment, and it would be cool to be like outsiders, but we’re not, we’re insiders, and we have to act like it. And I remember thinking at the time, well, there’s no way I’m going to do that. So I’m going to give them what I got. And then, if they like it, they like it. If they don’t, they don’t.

And honestly, I didn’t know which way they were going to go with it, because I know how much they care about ratings. So I figured if I delivered good ratings, that that would probably do the job. Well, it didn’t, because I delivered really good ratings, beating CNN significantly, handily, and also improving upon the numbers from last year. So there’s no question about the ratings. And then they pulled me in and said, "Well, you know, we’re going to go in a different direction at 6:00 anyway." And when I asked them about it, they didn’t really have a good answer as to why, leading me to believe that that giant conversation we had three months ago might have been part of the reason.

AMY GOODMAN: In December of last year, Phil Donahue joined Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker on their show to discuss his ouster from MSNBC during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Donahue was the lone journalist daring to publicly oppose the war at its onset.

PHIL DONAHUE: I opposed the war.

ELIOT SPITZER: And was that one of the reasons they pushed you off?

PHIL DONAHUE: Oh, read the memo—

ELIOT SPITZER: Right, right.

PHIL DONAHUE: —published by the New York Times.

ELIOT SPITZER: So, your—

PHIL DONAHUE: "Donahue’s antiwar voice is not going to work against the flag waving on the other station." Donahue and any antiwar voice in 2002—

ELIOT SPITZER: Right, right.

PHIL DONAHUE: Remember, they’re all doing what I did then now.

ELIOT SPITZER: Right.

PHIL DONAHUE: I mean, the whole channel is now.

KATHLEEN PARKER: But listen—

PHIL DONAHUE: You could not criticize this war four months before the invasion.

ELIOT SPITZER: Right.

PHIL DONAHUE: It was not good for business. You had—General Electric had no interest in featuring an old talk show host who was against the president’s war. It was—it was unpopular. You weren’t American. This is what you get with corporate media. It’s going to happen again.

AMY GOODMAN: Cenk Uygur, does your situation compare to that of Phil Donahue’s? Do you think Al Sharpton would take a very different political line than you would?

CENK UYGUR: So, there’s a couple of different things here. First of all, it’s not just Phil Donahue. I had Jesse Ventura on The Young Turks a little while ago, maybe over a year ago. And what people don’t remember is that he also had a big contract from MSNBC at the time to do a show, and they told him, "You know what? It’s OK. Take the money. You don’t even have to do the show." Why? He said they found out that he was against the Iraq War and said, "That’s OK. We don’t want you on air then." OK?

And Ashleigh Banfield, when she gave a great speech in Kansas about how the war didn’t make any sense, she went from their star reporter to literally being moved into a closet. And they wouldn’t even let her out of her contract so she can go on another network and talk. It was unbelievable.

Now, the distinction there is Donahue, Ventura, Banfield were all under different management at MSNBC. So you have to be clear on that, and you can’t put that on them. But the similarity is that it is corporate media, right? And whether it’s the pressure to go right, the pressure to go left, pressure to appease the Bush administration, or pressure to appease the Obama administration, it exists. And it’s not just MSNBC. You think that the CNN hosts can aggressively challenge government officials? I don’t think so. It doesn’t look that way at all. And of course, when you get to Fox News, they’re a whole different animal: they’re purely propaganda. So, to me, this is not an issue of just MSNBC management now, no.

Unruly Peasant How Dare You Kwestin My Blue Bailouts?!?!?!

speaker.gov  |  Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s The Situation Room to discuss the resumption of COVID relief talks after the President’s decision to walk away and other news of the day.  Below are the Speaker’s remarks: 

Wolf Blitzer.  Madam Speaker, thank you so much for joining us, and as you know, there are Americans who are being evicted from their homes.  They can't pay their rent.  Many Americans are waiting in food lines for the first time in their lives.  Can you look them in the eye, Madam Speaker, and explain why you don't want to accept the President's latest stimulus offer? 

Speaker Pelosi.  Well, because – thank you very much, Wolf.  I hope you'll ask the same question of the Republicans about why they don't really want to meet the needs of the American people.  Let me say to those people, because all of my colleagues, we represent these people.  I have for over 30 years represented my constituents.  I know what their needs are.  I listen to them.  And their needs are not addressed in the President's proposal. 

So, when you say to me, ‘Why don't you accept theirs?’  Why don't they accept ours?  Our legislation is there to do three things primarily: to honor our workers, honor our heroes, our health care workers, our police and fire, our first responders, our teachers, our transportation, sanitation, food workers the people who make our lives work.  We couldn't be doing what we are doing without them.  Many of them have risked their lives so that they – to save lives and now will lose their job because Mitch McConnell says, ‘Let the states go bankrupt.’  ‘Let the states go bankrupt.’

[Crosstalk]

Wolf Blitzer.  Excuse me for interrupting, Madam Speaker, but they need the money right now.  And even members of your own –

Speaker Pelosi.  I understand that.  You asked me a question. 

Wolf Blitzer.  Members of your own Caucus, Madam Speaker, want to accept this deal, $1.8 trillion.  Congressman Ro Khanna –

[Crosstalk]

Speaker Pelosi.  Wait a minute.  Wait a second.

Wolf Blitzer.  Let me just quote Ro Khanna, a man you know well.  I assume you admire him.  He’s a Democrat.  He just said this, he said, ‘People in need can't wait until February.  1.8 trillion is significant and more than twice Obama stimulus.’  ‘Make a deal, and put the ball in McConnell court.’  So what do you say to Ro Khanna? 

Speaker Pelosi.  What I say to you is, I don't know if you're always an apologists, and many of your colleagues apologists, for the Republican position.  Ro Khanna, that’s nice.  That isn’t what we’re going to do, and nobody is waiting until February.  I want this very much now, because people need help now. 

But it's no use giving them a false thing just because the President wants to put a check with his name on it in the mail that we should not be doing all we can to help people pay the rent, put food on the table, to enhance benefits, that they don't lose their jobs if they’re state and local, that they – this – we are talking about the consequences of a pandemic, symptoms of a problem that the President refuses to address and that is the coronavirus.  That is the coronavirus.

[Crosstalk]

Wolf Blitzer.  But we know, Madam Speaker, we know about the problem out there, but here are millions of Americans who have lost their jobs.  They can't pay their rent.  Their kids need the food. 

Speaker Pelosi.  That’s right, and that’s what we’re trying to get done. 

Wolf Blitzer.  $1.8 trillion and the President just tweeted, ‘Stimulus go big or go home.’ 

Speaker Pelosi.  Right.

Wolf Blitzer.  He wants more right now

Speaker Pelosi.  That’s right.

Wolf Blitzer.  So, why not work out a deal with him and don't let the perfect, as they say here in Washington, be the enemy of the good?

Speaker Pelosi.  Well, I will not let the wrong be the enemy of the right. 

Wolf Blitzer.  What is wrong with $1.8 trillion?

Speaker Pelosi.  You know what?  Do you have any idea what the difference is between the spending they have in their bill and that we have in our bill?  Do you realize that they have come back and said all of these things for Child Tax Credits and Earned Income Tax Credits or helping people who lost their jobs are eliminated in their bill?  Do you realize they pay no respect to the fact that child care is very important for people whose children cannot go to school because they are doing remote learning and, yet, they minimize the need for child care, which is the threshold with which people, mothers and fathers, can go to work if they have that?  Do you have any idea at how woefully short their concern, their concern –

[Crosstalk]

Wolf Blitzer.  That is precisely why, Madam Speaker, it's important right now.  Yesterday, I spoke yesterday to Andrew Yang who said the same thing.  It's not everything you want, but a lot there.

[Crosstalk]

Speaker Pelosi.  Okay you know what?  Honest to God.  You really – I can't get over it because Andrew Yang, he’s lovely.  Ro Khanna, he’s lovely.  But they are not negotiating this situation.  They have no idea of the particulars.  They have no idea of what the language is here.  I didn't come over here to have you – so you're the apologist for the Obama – excuse me.  God forbid.  Thank God for Barack Obama  

Wolf Blitzer.  Madam Speaker, I’m not an apologist.  I'm asking you serious questions because people are in desperate need right now. 

can america be salvaged?

CommonDreams | I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which proposing a new and better version of corporate-plunder masquerading as national healthcare gets you burned in effigy for being a socialist stooge by gun-toting angry mobs.

I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which the same people who hate you for being a socialist simultaneously hate you for being a fascist.

I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which angry mobs of supposed anti-socialist demonstrators scream at their congressional representatives to "keep your government hands off my Medicare".

I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which claims that the government is going to start killing off seniors are taken seriously by tens of millions of people.

I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which people are all worked up about government czars, but sat silently while the Bush administration destroyed the Bill of Rights and used a thousand signing statements to write Congress out of the Constitution.

I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which deficits have all of a sudden become the source of enormous anger among people who said nothing about them previously, as the tax cuts for the wealthy, off-budget wars based on lies, and unfunded prescription drug Big Pharma giveaway transmogrified the biggest surplus in American history into the biggest deficit ever.

I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which politicians can rant incessantly about other peoples' sexual morality, get caught screwing prostitutes, and then still be reelected to the highest ranks of government by trashing the president.

I could go on and on, but what would be the point? The positions of so many Americans on so many policy questions are truly inane - yes, for sure. I wish that was all that concerned me. But it all goes so much deeper than that.

The entire premise of a self-ruling democracy rests on some reasonable degree of rationality and some reasonable degree of an ability to discriminate between real information and falsehoods. Today's American democracy seems to lack these qualities in increasingly abundant amounts.

And yet it goes deeper than that still. The entire premise of a society - any society, democracy or not - is that it possesses a certain degree of shared community, a ‘we-ness' that transcends narrower tribalisms and self-interest in critical ways and at critical moments. That too has unraveled of late. Think of the nice white men with shotguns blocking the exit from flooded New Orleans during the worst moments of Hurricane Katrina.

Looking at America today, it all feels so very past tense to me.

Quoth Big Don: Leadership! Accept No Substitutes....,

Breitbart |   Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to expand a 60-day state of emergency in southern Mindanao to the whole country should the Maute group, a terrorist organization that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS), expand its killing spree beyond the island.

Duterte, who arrived home from an abbreviated trip to Russia Wednesday, elaborated on the implications of martial law on the island. The president suspended the writ of habeas corpus and announced that police would no longer require a warrant on the island to arrest anyone suspected of being a member of the terrorist group.

“Checkpoints will be allowed. Searches will be allowed. Arrest without a warrant will be allowed in Mindanao,” Duterte explained. “And I do not need to secure any search warrant or a warrant of arrest. If you are identified positively on the other side, you can be arrested and detained.”

“Anyone caught possessing a gun and confronting us with violence, my orders are shoot to kill. I will not hesitate to do it,” he vowed. “If I think that you should die, you will die. If you fight us, you will die. If there is an open defiance, you will die.”

“Anyone now holding a gun, confronting government with violence, my orders are spare no one, let us solve the problems of Mindanao once and for all. Do not force my hands into it,” he added. Duterte added that he was mulling an order to allow civilians to use their legally purchased guns against Maute terrorists and carry them publicly to deter violence.

Duterte added the rare warning that he would not allow police to abuse human rights with impunity. “I will assure you I am not willing to allow abuses. Government is still running, the Congress is functioning, and the courts are open for citizens to seek grievance,” he assured residents.  Fist tap Big Don.

Quoth Big Don: India Has It Figured Out

trtworld |  As Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrates three years in power, one story has persisted in making headlines: the project to create “tall and fair customised children” with high IQs. 

It’s a decade-old project and is operated by the health wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mother organization from which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) draws its inspiration, and the project is spreading its wings around the country.

As the country exploded in rage over similarities with the Nazi “Ubermenschen” ideal, which attempted to create a super Aryan race through eugenics funded by Hitler’s regime, many suggested that the RSS’ covert admiration for strong leaders – like US president Donald Trump and Modi –  is directly related to this attempt to create perfect babies.

An abiding theme of Hindu extreme right-wing literature has been the self-loathing associated with the inability to fight off invading armies, mostly Muslim, over the last thousand years. In fact, RSS leaders routinely collaborated with British authorities before independence so that they didn’t have to join hands with who they perceived to be the greater enemy: India’s Muslims.

No wonder RSS leaders are obsessed with the “weak Hindu” and how to overcome his weaknesses. Enter the customised baby project.

The RSS’ ‘Garbh Vigyan Sanskar’ project, loosely translated as ‘Science & Culture of the Womb,’ properly prescribes the norms which go into the making of a custom-perfect baby. The Indian Express, which broke the story last week, outlined the process that involves three months of “purification” of the intended parents which prevents “genetic defects” from being passed on, intercourse at a time decided by planetary configurations, complete abstinence after the baby is conceived as well as procedural and dietary regulations.  Fist tap Big Don.

another IQ-premacist bites the dust...,

slate | Update, May 10, 2013: On Friday afternoon, after this story had already been published, Jason Richwine resigned from the Heritage Foundation.

 Four years ago, long before he’d join the Heritage Foundation, before Marco Rubio was even in the Senate, Jason Richwine armed a time bomb. A three-member panel at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government accepted Richwine’s thesis, titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” In it, Richwine provided statistical evidence that Hispanic immigrants, even after several generations, had lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites. Immigration reformers were fools if they didn’t grapple with that.

"Visceral opposition to IQ selection can sometimes generate sensationalistic claims—for example, that this is an attempt to revive social Darwinism, eugenics, racism, etc,” wrote Richwine. “Nothing of that sort is true. … an IQ selection system could utilize individual intelligence test scores without any resort to generalizations.”

This week, Heritage released a damning estimate of the immigration bill, co-authored by Richwine. The new study was all about cost, totally eliding the IQ issues that Richwine had mastered, but it didn’t matter after Washington Post reporter Dylan Matthews found the dissertation. Heritage hurried to denounce it—“its findings in no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation”—and Richwine has ducked any more questions from the press.

 His friends and advisers saw this coming. Immigration reform’s political enemies know—and can’t stand—that racial theorists are cheering them on from the cheap seats. They know that the left wants to exploit that—why else do so many cameras sprout up whenever Minutemen appear on the border, or when Pat Buchanan comes out of post-post-post retirement to write another book about the “death of the West?”

Academics aren’t so concerned with the politics. But they know all too well the risks that come with research connecting IQ and race. At the start of his dissertation, Richwine thanked his three advisers—George Borjas, Christopher Jenks, and Richard Zeckhauser—for being so helpful and so bold. Borjas “helped me navigate the minefield of early graduate school,” he wrote. “Richard Zeckhauser, never someone to shy away from controversial ideas, immediately embraced my work.”

Yet they don’t embrace everything Richwine’s done since. “Jason’s empirical work was careful,” Zeckhauser told me over email. “Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error. However, Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.”

Borjas’ own work on immigration and inequality has led to a few two-minutes-hate moments in the press. He wasn’t entirely convinced by Richwine, either.

“I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don't really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc,” Borjas told me in an email. “In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I've long believed this, I don't find the IQ academic work all that interesting. Economic outcomes and IQ are only weakly related, and IQ only measures one kind of ability. I've been lucky to have met many high-IQ people in academia who are total losers, and many smart, but not super-smart people, who are incredibly successful because of persistence, motivation, etc. So I just think that, on the whole, the focus on IQ is a bit misguided.”

But Richwine had been fascinated by it, and for a very long time, in an environment that never discouraged it. Anyone who works in Washington and wants to explore the dark arts of race and IQ research is in the right place. The city’s a bit like a college campus, where investigating “taboo” topics is rewarded, especially on the right. A liberal squeals “racism,” and they hear the political correctness cops (most often, the Southern Poverty Law Center) reporting a thinkcrime. Fist tap Big Don.

arnach tugs big don's sleeve

I would like to propose a subreal summer reading list:

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

If you believe that there is meaning in the tone and manner in which words are said and stories told, then you have a compelling reason to listen to the audiobook recording of that last one as read by the author. In any case, you should have no problem getting through any of these books if you are able to read and comprehend at the high school level; there's nothing obscure or technical anywhere in any of them. What you may find, in fact, is that you are drawn into each as you might be by a good novel. You might also find yourself looking forward to reading (or listening to) them again, because you know you’ll get a little something more out of each the next time through.

I believe that, if you are able to understand and integrate the information in these books into your thinking, you will discover that you have a better understanding of, and better control over, how your own brain works and how your mind is affected by things that are presented to you in everyday life. Besides, what’s the most it’ll cost you? A little lazy time and a trip or two to the library? As you can see from the wikipedia page in the title link, you can read Gladwell’s book starting right now, for free, from his website!

The question, Big Don, is whether or not you’re actually man enough to do it? I can see from your bookshelf that you are not a man afraid of words. A whole summer should be enough time. Now, I have a feeling that the suggestion alone (particularly coming here on this blog) is likely to predispose you against both the action and the material. If so, that would be a shame. Particularly because, since you and I come from similar technical backgrounds (I think I might need to get myself a copy of Carrier’s fan book you got that ~1970 edition of on your bottom shelf there), I’m very interested to learn when the setting of one’s ways in stone will occur and when to expect to reach the point at which all new information becomes irrelevant (or perhaps worse, dangerous). I thought engineers were different than that. Not that I believe any of that is actually inevitable…just (unfortunately) common.