medialens | The truth of corporate journalism, and the great irony of its
obsession with 'fake news', is that it is itself utterly fake. What
could be more obviously fake than the idea that Truth can be sold by billionaire-owned media dependent on billionaire-owned advertisers for maximised profit?
The 'mainstream' worldview is anything but – it is extreme, weird, a
product of corporate conformity and deference to power. As Norman Mailer
observed:
'There is an odour to any Press Headquarters that is unmistakeable...
The unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the
service of a machine.' (Mailer, 'The Time Of Our Time', Little Brown,
1998, p.457)
A prime example of 'mainstream' extremism is the way the UK's illegal
wars destroying whole countries are not an issue for corporate
moralists. Physicians for Global Responsibility estimate
that 1.3 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan alone. And yet it is simply understood that UK wars will not be
a theme during general elections (See here and here). By contrast, other kinds of 'inappropriate behaviour' are subject to intense scrutiny.
Consider the recent resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon
and his replacement by Prime Minister Theresa May's Chief Whip, Gavin
Williamson. Fallon resigned after it was revealed that he had 'repeatedly touched the broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer's knee at a dinner in 2002'.
Fallon was damaged further by revelations that he had lunged at journalist Jane Merrick:
'This was not a farewell peck on the cheek, but a direct lunge at my lips.'
The Commons leader Andrea Leadsom also disclosed that she had complained about 'lewd remarks' Fallon had made to her.
Sexual harassment is a serious issue, despite the scoffing of some male commentators. In the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens shamefully dismissed women's complaints as mere 'squawking'.
But it is strange indeed that, while harassment is rightly deemed a
resigning offence, other 'inappropriate behaviour' leaves 'mainstream'
commentators completely unmoved.
medialens | If the human species survives long enough, future historians might well marvel at what passed for 'mainstream' media and politics in the early 21st century.
They will see that a UK Defence Secretary had to resign because of
serious allegations of sexual misconduct; or, as he put it
euphemistically, because he had 'fallen short'. But he did not have to resign because of the immense misery he had helped to inflict upon Yemen. Nor was he made to resign when he told MPs to stop criticising Saudi Arabia because that would be 'unhelpful'
while the UK government was trying to sell the human rights-abusing
extremist regime in Riyadh more fighter jets and weapons. After all, the
amount sold in the first half of 2017 was a mere £1.1 billion. (See our
recent media alert for more on this.) Right now, the UK is complicit
in a Saudi blockade of Yemen's ports and airspace, preventing the
delivery of vital medicine and food aid. 7.3 million Yemenis are already
on the brink of famine, and the World Food Programme has warned of the deaths of 150,000 malnourished children in the next few months.
Meanwhile, Robert Peston, ITV political editor, and Laura Kuenssberg,
BBC News political editor, have seemingly never questioned the British
Prime Minister Theresa May about the UK's shameful role in arming and
supporting Yemen's cruel tormentor. Nor have they responded when challenged about their own silence.
Future historians will also note that British newspapers, notably The Times and the 'left-leaning' Guardian,
published several sycophantic PR pieces for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman, 'a risk-taker with a zeal for reform'. 'Is he taking on too
much too fast?', asked a swooning Patrick Wintour, the Guardian's diplomatic editor. Martin Chulov, the paper's Middle East correspondent, waxed lyrical
about the Crown Prince's 'bold move' in arresting senior royals, a
prominent Saudi billionaire and scores of former ministers as part of a
'corruption purge'. The dramatic action was designed to 'consolidate
power' while bin Salman 'attempts to reform [the] kingdom's economy and
society'. As Adam Johnson noted in a media analysis piece for Fairness in Accuracy And Reporting, the Guardian's coverage was akin to a 'breathless press release.' A follow-up article
by Chulov, observed Johnson, 'took flattering coverage to new
extremes'. The 'rush to reform' was presented uncritically by the paper,
painting the Crown Prince as a kind of populist hero; 'a curious
framing that reeks more of PR than journalism.'
theatlantic | In flight from machismo, we have largely given up on adult male
self-mastery. But isn’t it also true that, allowed at last to be
confused about masculinity, we no longer accept men like Wayne as
heroes? Schoenberger herself alludes, perceptively, to “functional
masculinity,” and if I read her right, this is the core of her
provocative argument. Masculinity as puerile male bonding, as toxic
overcompensation and status jockeying—this is what’s unleashed when
masculinity no longer has an obvious function. Divorced from social
purpose, “being a man” becomes merely symbolic. So, for example, robots
in factories and drones on the battlefield will only make gun ownership
and mixed martial arts more popular. To push the thesis further, as men
become less socially relevant, they become recognition-starved; and it
is here that “being a man” expresses itself most primitively, as
violence.
The invention of John Wayne—is there a more primal scene of masculinity
being stripped of utility and endowed with dubious political karma? If
it was his idol’s cruelty, more than anything, that converted the
beautiful boy in buckskins, with the wavy pile of hair and not a line of
experience written on his face, into a Cold War icon, then we would do
well to understand that cruelty. Henry Fonda, who made eight pictures
with Ford, said of him: “Pappy was full of bullshit, but it was a
delightful sort of bullshit.” He pretended that he wanted only to be a
stuntman and was given the director job because he could yell; he
pretended that he hired actors based only on their skill at cards. His
whole persona was shot through with nostalgia for something he never
knew. He altered his dress, head to toe, because “he was trying to be a
native Irishman,” as one colleague noted, wearing his collar raised and
the brim of his hat down, so the Irish rain would run off it, and
rolling up the legs of his pants, as if he’d been stepping through the
Erin dew.
You may not be shocked to discover that it was Ford who had the
effeminate walk. His grandson said that Ford was “aware of his own
sensitivity and almost ashamed of it,” that he “surrounded himself with
John Wayne, Ward Bond, and those people because they represented the way
he wanted to be.” Ford’s biographer put it this way: “Without question
he preferred the company of men, and male bonding reached inordinate
proportions.” (Inordinate! Oh my.) It was left to Maureen O’Hara, one of Ford’s favorite actresses, to be more direct. In her 2004 memoir,
she speculates that Ford was gay. (She claims she walked in on the
director kissing a leading man.) It is painful to read, now, about men
who struggled as Ford apparently did; about how he would get so drunk
that he would soil himself; about how between shoots he let himself go,
watching TV in bed, wearing pajamas all day, his hair and fingernails
allowed to lengthen; about how ominously remote his marriage was.
medium | I’ve
received a sudden deluge of comments from men informing me that I
mustn’t write essays about rape culture anymore, so here’s another essay
about rape culture.
One of the most common recurring themes I’ve seen in the criticisms of my last couple of articles
on this subject is the claim that I only believe rape culture is a
thing because I’ve had a uniquely bad set of experiences with men, which
distorts my ability to provide a clear analysis of the subject. But
that’s just the thing — my experiences aren’t unique. Virtually all women have had extensive bad experiences with rape, sexual harassment and sexual abuse.
All in all I’ve actually had exceptionally good
experiences with men; I have an amazing father, an amazing husband, and
an amazing son. If I thought men were just evil rape monsters I
wouldn’t write about the various ways rape culture is becoming conscious
and how we can explore this as a society. We’ve had a long, chaotic
march into the present moment as a species, and much of that march has
included the commodification of women as essentially the property of a
male partner who was entitled to sex whenever he wanted it. This has
left many vestigial relics in our culture that have yet to move into
consciousness, but we’re getting there. Here are four things that I
would like to use my little platform here to say to every woman about
this journey:
Reason, says Professor Caputo, “is a white male Euro-Christian
construction.” Since reason is white, reason is not neutral. It implies
that what is not white is not rational. “So white is philosophically
relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued.”
Professor Caputo ties into University of California professor Sara
Giordano who defines science as a “colonial and racialized form of
power” that “must be replaced with an anti-science, antiracist, feminist
approach to knowledge production.” https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10021
I can’t say that this would be all bad. This way we wouldn’t have
nuclear weapons and the frustrating digital age. But before I vote for
it, I want to know what feminist science is. I have a disturbing
feeling that it brings with it the genocide of the white heterosexual
male. After all, if white heterosexual males are responsible for all
the evil and ills of the world, how can we tolerate their existence?
Journalists seem to agree with the Oregon students. The European
Federation of Journalists is leading a “Media against Hate” campaign
against hate speech and stereotyping of illegal immigrants. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11214/europe-journalists-free-speech In other words, any European who protests his/her country being overrun by foreign invaders must be shut up. The scenario in The Camp of the Saints is now happening before our eyes.
dailybeast | Liberals have clucked their tongues at Judge Roy Moore, the “family
values” conservative now dodging accusations of sexual contact with a
minor. But Moore’s not a hypocrite; he’s an exemplar of the morality he
preaches.
Moore, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama,
has been accused of making unwanted sexual advances on three teenage
girls in 1979 when he was a single man in his thirties. Two of the girls
were of legal age, 16, but one was 14. She says he drove her home, took
off her shirt, touched her bra and underwear, and guided her hand to
his pants.
Moore has denied
the incident with the 14-year-old, but has not denied dating teenagers
when he was a thirty-something district attorney – “always with the
permission of their parents,” he said.
But
a big reason conservatives are running from Moore is to make him into a
scapegoat, which is why he has so often been described not as someone
accused of statutory rape but with terms like rape, pedophile, sexual
predator and child molester.
On Sunday, for example, Marc Short, the White House Director of Legislative Affairs, told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that “there’s a special place in hell” for pedophiles like Roy Moore. “There’s no Senate seat more important than the issue of child pedophilia,” he said.
unz |Reminiscences of harassment have no value, even if true. If the woman did not act on the spot, forget it.
Otherwise,
soon the US will have no normal men politicians left; only women and
effeminate men. And then the disease will spread all over Europe, until
the Old World and North America will be ready for its repopulation by
virile Africans.
Russia
remains a safe zone for males. Though many American trends come to
Moscow, emasculation is not one of them. When, a few years ago, Russians
banned same-sex propaganda for minors, they broke with emasculating
trend. Actually, Russian women prefer things done Russian way, too. Men
pay for dinners, keep doors open, help with putting a coat, in short,
they keep doing what the American and European gentlemen did some fifty
years ago.
Russia has had its #MeToo campaign a year ago (#янебоюсьсказать
, I dare to tell, in Russian), and a lot of women recited or invented
stories of their harassment. But it remained in the Facebook, for the
law did not allow to complain years after the alleged crime occurred.
Moreover,
the Russians consider sex between men and women as a normal thing. They
have no horror of sex between a teacher and a student, or between a
boss and his assistant. Reports on severe punishment American judges
meted on female teacher having sex with teenage boys are met with
bewilderment and disbelief. Out of fifty recent stories
of this kind probably not even one of them would be punished in Russia.
I wouldn’t understand, either, what is the harm for a 17 year old
student to be seduced by his 23-year old teacher. The kid should be
envied, if anything. This traditional attitude toward sex is the main
reason for the current mass media attack on Russia, not the mythical
“Russian hackers”.
It
is very difficult to defend Weinstein, with his Holocaust obsession and
his desire of taking revenge upon blondes. However, his case had opened
the gates of Hell. Let us shut them up before the Yin and Yang,
male-female balance of the universe collapse.
Why
has the US been hit by this strange trouble? I would explain it as an
undoing of the 1968 revolution, including the Sexual Revolution. For us,
for children of 1960s, the living was easy, and sex was free and
plentiful – in California, Crimea, Côte d’Azur. We had a lot of it,
wonderful unprotected sex, often with strangers. That was Communism.
Fear of free and available sex is the fear of Communism.
The
rich guys and gals who came to power afterwards turned everything into
money, and with that purpose on their minds they created scarcity, even
scarcity of sex, a sex counter-revolution. Harassment complainants are
the soldiers of the Sexual Counter-Revolution as they increase scarcity
in order to monetize their charms. They will be the losers, poor things;
hopefully they won’t ruin the world before they understand it.
NewYorker | Weinstein’s employees were, and are, bound by confidentiality agreements
included in their employment contracts with Miramax and the Weinstein
Company. While nondisclosure agreements are a standard feature of
employment contracts, the clauses in Weinstein’s included a special
provision about information “concerning the personal, social or business
activities” of “the co-Chairmen”—namely, Harvey and Bob Weinstein.
Estreicher, the expert on employment law, told me that the nondisclosure
clause regarding the personal lives of both Weinstein brothers was
unusual.
“That’s not generally found, the personal conduct of an
individual being part of a contract like that.”
Many
employees I spoke with said that these contractual provisions made
it impossible to talk about suspicious behavior they witnessed at the
company. Irwin Reiter, who worked for Weinstein for nearly three decades
and is currently the Weinstein Company’s executive vice president for
accounting and financial reporting, had previously declined requests to
participate in stories.
“I hope there’s no reprisal,” he told me, referring to legal action
against employees. He said that he was nevertheless going public because
he
felt the culture of silence at the company deserved further scrutiny.
Weinstein, he told me, “was so dominant that I think a lot of people
were afraid of him, afraid to confront him, or question him, and that
was the environment.” Reiter also raised doubts about the fairness of
lifetime nondisclosure agreements. “A forever N.D.A. should not be
legal,” he told me. “People should not be made to live with that. He’s
created so many victims that have been burdened for so many years, and
it’s just not right.”
These contractual constraints are perfectly legal. Allred, the
victim’s-rights attorney, said that courts usually enforce them and view
efforts to break them as “buyer’s remorse.” But in recent weeks
lawmakers and legal experts have called for reforms to this system.
Estreicher has proposed that the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, the government body that oversees workplace discrimination,
track sexual-misconduct-related settlements and investigate employers
who use them repeatedly. In addition to Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s
legislation regarding congressional employees, state lawmakers in New
York and California are pushing legislation to curtail the use of
nondisclosure agreements in sexual-abuse cases. “These secret
settlements perpetuate the problem. They allow rich men to continue to
be sexual predators,” Connie Leyva, the California state senator who has
announced legislation in that state, told me. “I hope that we can get
this done in California, and that it will spread like wildfire around
the country.”
Allred raised concerns about the potential reforms, which she feared
could limit victims’ options. She noted that “anyone who agrees to enter
into a settlement has a choice” and accepts both the costs and the—sometimes considerable—benefits. Good attorneys, she argued, explain
the full implications of such agreements. “And then the client makes an
informed choice.”
Gutierrez, Perkins, and other women who signed agreements with Weinstein
told me that they felt their consent was far from informed. Gutierrez
said that she wished she had been aware that Weinstein had faced similar
allegations in the past. When, after the fact, she learned that his
behavior with her was part of a pattern, she was filled with guilt. “I
couldn’t even think of that person touching someone else,” she told me.
“It made me have chills.” Gutierrez said that she wants to warn people of the
risks of silence. “People need to really change right now,” she said.
“To listen and speak. That was the worst thing—people not speaking.”
HuffPo | Many
have believed the accusations against Roy Moore of sexual assault and
harassment against teen girls to be massively hypocritical since for
years he’s presented himself as a hardcore evangelical man of faith, and
he has a loyal white Christian evangelical following.
But
what if Moore’s alleged actions actually meld with a religious belief
among some evangelicals, even if the adherents won’t outright admit it?
Moore
in fact represents an extremist wing of an already theocratic-leaning
base of the GOP that believes all women must be subservient and submit ―
as Mike Huckabee, who hasn’t pulled his full-throated endorsement of Moore, infamously once said of women with
regard to their husbands, expressing his own “Handmaid’s Tale” dream
come true ― and that would no doubt include young women such as teen
girls. After all, as one of Moore’s defenders in the Alabama GOP said in dismissing the allegations, “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”
And
since the advent of Donald Trump, this more extreme group of
evengelicals has cleaved away from others and joined the alt-right and
white nationalists, led by former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon
― who is a front line warrior for Moore’s election campaign ― and which include white supremacists and racists like those we saw in Charlottesville.
Jack Jenkins, senior religion reporter at Think Progress, has been charting the growth in the Trump era of Christian nationalism ―the
melding of some evangelicals and their beliefs with nationalistic
movements and ideologies ― in several excellent and important articles.
He, too, puts Roy Moore at the nexis of the white nationalist movement and the extremist evangelical movement.
As someone who has covered the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voters Summit (VVS) for years,
I, along with other observers, saw a marked difference in the speakers
and in the crowd this past October, when Donald Trump became the first
sitting president to speak at the event. Some long-time leaders like
those from the Southern Baptist Convention ― whose Russell Moore is a Never Trumper
― were not there, along with their followers. They were replaced by
Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and other white nationalists and their
followers who never had an interest in VVS and are far from what anyone
would think of as devout Christians.
“White Nationalism and Christian Right Unite at Values Voter Summit,” was the headline of Adele Stan’s piece on Bill Moyers.com last month. A longtime progressive journalist, Stan, too, has covered VVS for years, as has Right-Wing Watch’s
Peter Montgomery. Both of them agreed in a discussion on my radio
program that this marriage of evangelicals and white nationalists was
clear at this year’s VVS, a sort of realignment taking place. The star
of VVS this year was Roy Moore ― backed by Bannon and his minions ― who
would become the test candidate for catapulting Christian nationalism
further into the mainstream.
dailycaller |An Alabama pastor railed against Roy Moore’s accusers, arguing that the allegations are their sexual fantasies and that they could have looked older as teenagers.
Wise argued that the women coming forward to accuse Moore must be getting paid to do so, and that their allegations against Moore were actually their sexual fantasies about Moore, and that Moore could not be blamed for sexual acts with underage women since they sometimes look older.
“I don’t know how much these women are getting paid, but I can only believe they’re getting a healthy sum,” Wise told the Boston Globe.
“There ought to be a statute of limitations on this stuff. How these gals came up with this, I don’t know. They must have had some sweet dreams somewhere down the line. Plus, there are some 14-year-olds, who, the way they look, could pass for 20,” Wise added.
Wise told the Boston Globe that he would support Moore regardless of the veracity of the allegations that he committed sexual acts with a 14-year-old girl and several other teenage girls in his 30s. He was not the only pastor to rally to Moore’s defense, as both pastor Franklin Raddish of South Carolina and pastor Franklin Graham spoke out against Moore’s critics.
BostonGlobe | “I don’t know how much these women are getting paid, but I can only
believe they’re getting a healthy sum,” said pastor Earl Wise, a Moore
supporter from Millbrook, Ala.
Wise said he would support Moore
even if the allegations were true and the candidate was proved to have
sexually molested teenage girls and women.
“There ought to be a
statute of limitations on this stuff,” Wise said. “How these gals came
up with this, I don’t know. They must have had some sweet dreams
somewhere down the line.
“Plus,” he added, “there are some 14-year-olds, who, the way they look, could pass for 20.”
For
40 years, “these women didn’t say a word. They were cool as a
cucumber,” said pastor Franklin Raddish, a Baptist minister from South
Carolina and a Moore supporter.
“You’re asking me to believe them,’’ Raddish said, “when their own
mother didn’t have enough red blood in her to . . . go and report this?
Come on.”
The statements are indicative of a broader shift among conservative
evangelicals — and particularly white evangelicals. Long thought of as a
voting bloc that demanded their lawmakers to be pious and spiritual,
some are now even more accepting of a lawmaker’s personal indiscretions
than the average American, polling data indicate.
Eighty percent
of white conservative evangelicals voted for Trump, according to 2016
election exit polls, even after the infamous “Access Hollywood’’ tape
and the numerous allegations from women who said that he sexually
assaulted them.
Six years ago, just 30 percent of white
evangelical Protestants believed an elected official “who commits an
immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and
fulfill their duties” as a public servant, according to The Public
Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit polling firm focused on faith
issues.
BostonGlobe | ‘‘In my 45 years in journalism, I have prided myself on being an
advocate for the careers of the women with whom I have worked,’’ Rose
said in a statement provided to The Post. ‘‘Nevertheless, in the past
few days, claims have been made about my behavior toward some former
female colleagues.
‘‘It is essential that these women know I hear
them and that I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior. I am
greatly embarrassed. I have behaved insensitively at times, and I accept
responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these
allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared
feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.
‘‘I have
learned a great deal as a result of these events, and I hope others will
too. All of us, including me, are coming to a newer and deeper
recognition of the pain caused by conduct in the past, and have come to a
profound new respect for women and their lives.’’
Most of the women said Rose alternated between fury and flattery in
his interactions with them. Five described Rose putting his hand on
their legs, sometimes their upper thigh, in what they perceived as a
test to gauge their reactions. Two said that while they were working for
Rose at his residences or were traveling with him on business, he
emerged from the shower and walked naked in front of them. One said he
groped her buttocks at a staff party.
Reah Bravo was an intern
and then associate producer for Rose’s PBS show beginning in 2007. In
interviews, she described unwanted sexual advances while working for
Rose at his private waterfront estate in Bellport, New York, and while
traveling with him in cars, in a hotel suite and on a private plane.
‘‘It
has taken 10 years and a fierce moment of cultural reckoning for me to
understand these moments for what they were,’’ she told The Post. ‘‘He
was a sexual predator, and I was his victim.’’
sfgate | In the video above, the technology is initially developed with the
intention of combating crime and terrorism, but the drones are taken
over by an unknown forces who use the powerful weapons to murder a group
of senators and college students. The video does contain some graphic
content.
Russell, an expert on artificial intelligence, appears at the end of
the video and warns against humanity's development of autonomous
weapons.
"This short film is just
more than speculation," Russell says. "It shows the results of
integrating and militarizing technologies that we already have." Fist tap Big Don.
edge | The big question that I'm asking myself these days is how can we make
a human artificial intelligence? Something that is not a machine, but
rather a cyber culture that we can all live in as humans, with a human
feel to it. I don't want to think small—people talk about robots and
stuff—I want this to be global. Think Skynet. But how would you make
Skynet something that's really about the human fabric?
The first thing you have to ask is what's the magic of the current AI? Where is it wrong and where is it right?
The good magic is that it has something called the credit assignment
function. What that lets you do is take stupid neurons, these little
linear functions, and figure out, in a big network, which ones are doing
the work and encourage them more. It's a way of taking a random bunch
of things that are all hooked together in a network and making them
smart by giving them feedback about what works and what doesn't. It
sounds pretty simple, but it's got some complicated math around it.
That's the magic that makes AI work.
The bad part of that is, because those little neurons are stupid, the
things that they learn don't generalize very well. If it sees something
that it hasn't seen before, or if the world changes a little bit, it's
likely to make a horrible mistake. It has absolutely no sense of
context. In some ways, it's as far from Wiener's original notion of
cybernetics as you can get because it's not contextualized: it's this
little idiot savant.
But imagine that you took away these limitations of current AI.
Instead of using dumb neurons, you used things that embedded some
knowledge. Maybe instead of linear neurons, you used neurons that were
functions in physics, and you tried to fit physics data. Or maybe you
put in a lot of stuff about humans and how they interact with each
other, the statistics and characteristics of that. When you do that and
you add this credit assignment function, you take your set of things you
know about—either physics or humans, and a bunch of data—in order to
reinforce the functions that are working, then you get an AI that works
extremely well and can generalize.
In physics, you can take a couple of noisy data points and get
something that's a beautiful description of a phenomenon because you're
putting in knowledge about how physics works. That's in huge contrast to
normal AI, which takes millions of training examples and is very
sensitive to noise. Or the things that we've done with humans, where you
can put in things about how people come together and how fads happen.
Suddenly, you find you can detect fads and predict trends in
spectacularly accurate and efficient ways.
Human behavior is determined as much by the patterns of our culture
as by rational, individual thinking. These patterns can be described
mathematically, and used to make accurate predictions. We’ve taken this
new science of “social physics” and expanded upon it, making it
accessible and actionable by developing a predictive platform that uses
big data to build a predictive, computational theory of human behavior.
The idea of a credit assignment function, reinforcing “neurons” that
work, is the core of current AI. And if you make those little neurons
that get reinforced smarter, the AI gets smarter. So, what would happen
if the neurons were people? People have lots of capabilities; they know
lots of things about the world; they can perceive things in a human way.
What would happen if you had a network of people where you could
reinforce the ones that were helping and maybe discourage the ones that
weren't?
wired | The new religion of artificial intelligence is called Way of the Future. It represents an unlikely next act for the Silicon Valley robotics wunderkind
at the center of a high-stakes legal battle between Uber and Waymo,
Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle company. Papers filed with the Internal
Revenue Service in May name Levandowski as the leader (or “Dean”) of the
new religion, as well as CEO of the nonprofit corporation formed to run
it.
The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the
realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial
Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”
That includes funding research to help create the divine AI itself. The
religion will seek to build working relationships with AI industry
leaders and create a membership through community outreach, initially
targeting AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the
worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The filings also say that the church
“plans to conduct workshops and educational programs throughout the San
Francisco/Bay Area beginning this year.”
That timeline may be
overly ambitious, given that the Waymo-Uber suit, in which Levandowski
is accused of stealing self-driving car secrets, is set for an early
December trial. But the Dean of the Way of the Future, who spoke last
week with Backchannel in his first comments about the new religion and
his only public interview since Waymo filed its suit in February, says
he’s dead serious about the project.
“What is going to be created
will effectively be a god,” Levandowski tells me in his modest
mid-century home on the outskirts of Berkeley, California. “It’s not a
god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if
there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what
else are you going to call it?”
During our three-hour interview, Levandowski made it absolutely clear
that his choice to make WOTF a church rather than a company or a think
tank was no prank.
“I wanted a way for everybody to participate in
this, to be able to shape it. If you’re not a software engineer, you
can still help,” he says. “It also removes the ability for people to
say, ‘Oh, he’s just doing this to make money.’” Levandowski will receive
no salary from WOTF, and while he says that he might consider an
AI-based startup in the future, any such business would remain
completely separate from the church.
“The idea needs to spread
before the technology,” he insists. “The church is how we spread the
word, the gospel. If you believe [in it], start a conversation with
someone else and help them understand the same things.”
Levandowski
believes that a change is coming—a change that will transform every
aspect of human existence, disrupting employment, leisure, religion, the
economy, and possibly decide our very survival as a species.
“If
you ask people whether a computer can be smarter than a human, 99.9
percent will say that’s science fiction,” he says. “ Actually, it’s
inevitable. It’s guaranteed to happen.”
We’ve
been worried about a massive frontal assault, a work of Internet
sabotage that would shut down commerce or choke off the power grid. And
with good reason. The recent exploratory raid by Russian hackers on American nuclear facilities reminds us that such threats are real.
But
we failed to prepare for an attack of great subtlety and strategic
nuance. Enemies of the West have hacked our cultural advantages, turning
the very things that have made us strong — technological leadership,
free speech, the market economy and multi-party government — against us.
The attack is ongoing.
With each passing week, we learn more. Russia
and its sympathizers have cranked up the volume on existing political
and cultural divisions in the West, like some psychic version of the Stuxnet hack
that caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to spin so fast they tore
themselves to pieces. They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of
Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to
believe and spread it. They have targeted online ads designed to
intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.
They have partnered with WikiLeaks, the supposed paragon of free speech,
to insert propaganda into influential Twitter accounts — including
@realDonaldTrump.
They have created thousands of phony online identities
to add heat to political fever swamps.
The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work.
Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes
us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll
farms. Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital
communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers. The West
has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.
DailyMail | The wildly popular Toy Freaks YouTube
channel featuring a single dad and his two daughters has been deleted,
amid a broader crackdown on disturbing children's content on the video
streaming platform.
Toy Freaks, founded
two years ago by landscaper Greg Chism of Granite City, Illinois, had
8.53million subscribers and was among the 100 most-viewed YouTube
channels before it was shutdown on Friday.
Though
it's unclear what exact policy the channel violated, the videos showed
the girls in unusual situations that often involved gross-out food play
and simulated vomiting. The channel invented the 'bad baby' genre, and
some videos showed the girls pretending to urinate on each other or
fishing pacifiers out of the toilet.
Another series of videos showed the younger daughter Annabelle wiggling her loose teeth out while shrieking and spitting blood.
'He is profiting off of his children's pain and suffering,' one indignant Reddit user
wrote about the channel last year. 'It's barf inducing and no mentally
stable person or child should ever have to watch it.'
A
YouTube spokesperson said in a statement: 'It's not always clear that
the uploader of the content intends to break our rules, but we may still
remove their videos to help protect viewers, uploaders and children.
We've terminated the Toy Freaks channel for violation of our policies.
counterpunch | The New York Times recently
published a list of 25 men “accused of sexual misconduct” since the
Harvey Weinstein revelations first came out in early October. The list
is a who’s-who of “players” in the entertainment, political, media and
corporate worlds. Even scandalous stories about Bush-the-elder are
finally coming out after decades of suppression. In being outed, many
of the male predators have lost their jobs or contracts, some of their
marriages ended, high-priced defense lawyers have been retained and a
few say they are seeking professional counseling.
Many of those identified as being or having been a sexual aggressor
are being subject to public shaming. For a while, their lives might be
miserable, under a public magnifying glass as to how he could have done
what he is “accused” of doing and, therefore, who really is this
man? However, for some, the price to be paid may be far harsher,
including an arrest, trial and (if found guilty) jail as a sex
offender. Prosecutors in New York, Los Angeles and London are
sharpening their legalistic claws as they seek criminal indictments
against Weinstein. Who will be the next player to fall?
Since the Reagan-era of the 1980s, the U.S. has engaged in two
domestic wars – a war on drugs and a war on sex. Both have roots dating
from the 1920s Prohibition campaign; both rejected the 1960s-70s
countercultural insurgency. Both have been played out at federal and
local levels — and both are failures!
The country’s drug-addiction “epidemic” has shifted from black to
while, from the inner-city or urban ghettos to the suburbs and rural
heartland. Throughout the country, low-level drug offenses are being
decriminalized, criminal penalties are being lessened and the
traditional ethos of harsh punishment is being undercut by calls for
restorative justice.
When launched, the war on sex drew politicians, law enforcement and
people of good intentions, conservative and liberal (including anti-porn
feminist and gay-rights advocates), into alignment with the religious
right. They joined forces in a campaign to forcefully suppress what was
broadly conceived as a domestic security threat, violation of the
sexually acceptable.
The sex offender was – and remains — a perfect target for moral
outrage. He (mostly) is someone who crossed a moral line and committed
an unpardonable offense. If he cannot be executed for his affront to
civil and religious decency than, at least, he can be shamed or
stigmatized, imprisoned, placed in indefinite detention and listed on a
sex-offender’s registry.
The 25 men identified by the Times are “players” in the
entertainment, political, media and corporate worlds. Others will
surely be added to the list. Their outing is a friction point in the
seismic shift in American social values now underway. Those so far
identified come from the celebrate sector, not most people everyday
life. Unfortunately, misogyny is endemic to American life, but gets
little local media or public attention until it becomes a media
spectacle like what’s happening today. Its all-to-often considered a
private matter, rather than a social practice.
twitchy | The lengths some people are willing to go to in order to defend Al Franken …
Leeann Tweeden is NOT a newswoman.. She was a
Playboy model & bikini fitness model.. she on cover of Playboy 2x
MAXIM 3x and FHM 5x… and Howard stern. She was brought on USO tour as
part of comedy skit so that she COULD be groped !
Huh. So because she is a Playboy model and has been on
Howard Stern that apparently means what? That she doesn’t count? Oh and
please with that last line, ‘… she was on USO tour as part of a comedy
skit so that she could be groped.’
Sadly this oddly angry meteorologist wasn’t the only one playing
the ‘her skirt was too short’ game with Leeann Tweeden, but this is
certainly one of the uglier tweets we’ve seen on Twitter. Fist tap MVD.
dailywire | While it’s certainly encouraging to see progressive pundits,
politicians, and celebrities finally give some credibility to Bill
Clinton’s accusers, it all feels forced. It’s as though progressives are
being forced to acknowledge these women — at least in passing — simply
because the topic of sexual abuse is so prevalent in the news. It’s all
too little, too late.
Clinton was accused of several heinous
crimes. Juanita Broaddrick says Clinton violently raped her in 1978;
Kathleen Willey says he sexually assaulted her in 1993; Paula Jones says
he exposed himself to her in 1991.
theatlantic | If the ground beneath your feet feels cold, it’s because hell froze over the other day. It happened at 8:02 p.m. on Monday, whenThe New York Timespublished an op-ed called “I Believe Juanita.”
Written by Michelle Goldberg, it was a piece that, 20 years ago, likely would have inflamed the readership of the paper and scandalized its editors. Reviewing the credibility of Broaddrick’s claim, Goldberg wrote that “five witnesses said she confided in them about the assault right after it happened,” an important standard in reviewing the veracity of claims of past sex crimes.
But Goldberg’s was not a single snowflake of truth; rather it was part of an avalanche of honesty in the elite press, followinga seemingly innocuous tweetby the MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “As gross and cynical and hypocritical as the right’s ‘what about Bill Clinton’ stuff is,” he wrote, “it’s also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.”
As gross and cynical and hypocrtical as the right's "what about Bill Clinton" stuff is, it's also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.
What happened next can only be compared to the moment when Glinda the Good Witch of the North came to Munchkinland and told the little people that it was finally safe.Come out, come out, wherever you are!
thewrap | Donald Trump drew outrage in October 2016 for his “Access Hollywood”
boast about kissing and grabbing women without their consent. Now Los
Angeles radio host Leeann Tweeden says Sen. Al Franken kissed her
without consent on a 2006 USO tour — and produced a photo of him groping
her while she slept.
So how did Franken respond when the video emerged of Trump talking
about doing something very similar to what Franken is now accused of
doing?
weeklystandard | Anyone who has followed the career of Al Franken should be unsurprised to learn that he was a jerk to Leeann Tweeden. Because if you go back to Live from New York, Tom Shales’ brilliant oral history of Saturday Night Live, Franken appears as a lying, drug-abusing (and distributing), jackass.
A couple choice excerpts—remember, this is an oral history, so they’re from the primary sources:
Al Franken: There was not as much cocaine as you
would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble.
But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up.
There was a very
undisicplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on
Tuesday. We didn't have the kind of hours that normal people have. And
so there was a lot of waiting until Tuesday night, and then going all
night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some coke to
stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and
laughing at stuff.
People used to ask me about this and I'd always say,
"No, there was no coke. It's impossible to do the kind of show we were
doing and do drugs." And that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell.
Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately, for some people, it was
impossible to do the show without the drugs.
So Franken liked to tell funny lies about not using drugs when he
wasn’t writing a book castigating Republicans which was titled—this is
so great—Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
"Another example of giving the game away in few words came two nights
ago when the liberal-elitist 'Inside Elections' political analyst Stuart
Rothenburg spoke on the PBS NewsHour. 'The Democrats as a party'
Rothenburg told NewsHour host and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
member Judy Woodruff, 'are divided between the Bernie Sanders wing and
Hillary Clinton wing, the pragmatists and ideologues.'
For Rothenburg, the Clinton wing members are the 'pragmatists,' the
realistic adults who want to 'get things done' (one of the great
neoliberal president Obama’s favorite phrases and claims). The Sanders
folks are 'ideologues,' a pejorative term meaning people who are mainly
about ideology and who are carried away by their own flighty and
doctrinal world view.
This was a slap (an ideological one I might add) at the more progressive
and social-democratic faction of the Democratic Party – a blow
masquerading as 'objective' and detached political analysis."
If you watch this relatively short video much of what has been puzzling
you about the failure of our political system will be made clearer.
Franklin Roosevelt could work tirelessly for the common person because
he was already comfortable in his own skin with regard to his social
status. And more importantly, as a result of his long term paralysis he
knew how little social status really meant. As suffering sometimes
does, it introduces compassion and empathy, even among the upper crust.
But the New Deal principles were shunned for the credentialed
aspirations of those class-climbing, middle class kids who would be rich
and acknowledged as members of an elite crowd with the right kinds of
bona fides. There are probably few better recent examples than the
Clintons. Their attitudes towards the average American are
paternalistic at best, and highly cynical and patronizing at worst.
They attempted to disguise their credentialed, professional class
preferences with 'identity politics.' But if you look at the
culmination of actual policy initiatives, versus platform platitudes,
the Democrats, similarly to the GOP, serve no one but themselves. Winning...
They rely on the 'lesser of two evils' to scrape out the occasional win,
when the excesses of the other party drive people to embrace 'hope and
change,' and to be largely betrayed once again.
Why We Started to Fear Extinction
-
*Why We Started to Fear Extinction | John McWhorter & Tyler Austin Harper |
The Glenn Show*
Everyone has a theory about how the world will end, but how ...
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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 ...