yournewswire |John Homeston, a retired CIA agent, has admitted this week on
National Russian Television (NTV) that the CIA was behind the creation
of the 1980s hip hop scene and financed major hip hop acts including
NWA, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five.
The government at the time spent “big money, serious money” on this covert operation destined to “further division” and “corrupt the American youth to nihilist, anti-establishment and anti-American ideologies”, he explained in a half hour interview broadcast on national television.
Famous hip hop songs of the legendary hip hop outfit NWA were even
scripted by a team of psychologists and war propagandists of the CIA. “F#ck the police,” and “When I’m called off, I got a sawed off / Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off,”
and other nihilist and anti-establishment lyrics were intended to
unleash a wave of cynicism towards authorities, promote the use of heavy
drugs, and entice the youth with revolutionary, counter-establishment
ideas.
The retired CIA agent claims the social engineering maneuver was “extremely successful.“
“We understood at the time that music was a powerful means of propaganda to reach the youth,” explained the 77-year-old man.
“Our mission was to use teenage angst to our advantage and turn
Generation X into a decadent, pro-drug and anti-establishment culture
that would create uprisings and further division within society. We even
infiltrated mainstream radio to promote their music and reach millions
of people everyday,” he admitted, visibly proud of the accomplishment.
“For many of us in the CIA, infiltrating the 1980s hip hop scene
was one of the CIA’s most successful experiments of propaganda to date,” he acknowledged during the interview.
“You could say Frankenstein’s monster got up off the table and started goose-stepping.”
vice |VICE: What exactly is the Black Speculative Arts Movement
Dr. Reynaldo Anderson: BSAM is an umbrella term that looks at several different positions [like] magical realism, Afrofuturism, black science fiction, black quantum futurism, Afro-surrealism, ethnography—different perspectives related to this movement. It's a collection of artists, intellectuals, and activists that we have in these conventions.
Later, while brainstorming with John, he connected me to Maia "Crown" Williams, the founder of MECCAcon, the Midwest Ethnic Convention for Comics and Arts [who] operates a film festival and is a founding member of Ava DuVernay's ARRAY out of Detroit. With her expertise in film and comic conventions, she was very valuable as a co-founder to forming an ongoing convention aspect of the movement.
How long ago did you start thinking about this movement?
We are in the second wave of Afrofuturism, and it's also sociopolitical. When you think about science fiction and what we are doing with Nightlife, a lot of these people who are addicted to drugs have similar behaviors to those of zombies. There is a connection there as a literary or critical theorist. The way I think about science fiction and speculative philosophy happens in real life when people are using all these chemicals and drugs on their body and how it impacts their behavior, as they react like some of these people that we read about in novels. I think it's because society is changing so quickly the only reference we have to understand what happens to us is science fiction or horror. Things that we read in science fiction books used to be unthinkable. Now, they are a reality.
Let's talk about your book, Afrofuturism 2.0. How did you come to be involved in that project?
The book was the result of several years of thinking about the term "Afrofuturism." Many people preceded me in its conceptual development, like Mark Dery, Alondra Nelson, Kodwo Eshun, and others. I first heard of the term in the 90s as a graduate student when I was working on my PhD focusing on the Black Panther Party. The 2.0 project came out of a couple of things. One, I thought about Afrofuturism being different than it was when it was formulated in the 90s.
Afrofuturism 2.0 is the era that we're in now, this era of social media, technological acceleration, globalization, and environmental stress that we are dealing with. I put together a call for papers to put a book around the ideas that really mattered to Afrofuturism from 2005 to now. The other difference is that Afrofuturism is now a transdisciplinary pan-African techno cultural movement. It's global. It's not just American. It takes place in Africa, Latin America—all over the world people are doing it. It was the spirit of those spiritual and intellectual currents going on that led to the book being developed that I co-edited with Charles Jones.
Counterpunch | In contrast, an ongoing exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute shows the early Soviet arts in all their bustling contradiction and coming-to-be. The CIA could not have produced anything on this scale, which required a world-shaking collision of forces and a belief uncomfortably close to the religious. Malevich, Dziga Vertov, El Lissitzky, Lenin, Mayakovsky… The US, too, had considerable forces at its disposal (Buster Keaton, first and foremost). The strange thing is that this exhibition, mounted in a refreshingly no-nonsense and rather cool style, still manages to inspire, as if the past was waiting for the present to catch up to it. This power lies not so much in the myriad forms of the works, which may be bound in time, but in the pure electricity of their still-disarming presence. Against the morose ideas of ends, the grand mortuary they call ‘history’, against the relegation of past works of art to nostalgia and price, something else appears beside the collages, constructivist paintings, fabrics and living spaces constructed for the great new socialist world. We are always told that Stalin was the culmination of this moment in time. Who says? And who paid him to say it? The answer is obvious. They say that here is only one modernism; that there is only one history (and one power able to declare that it is over); that there is only one self to express; that there is only one public and one art which can express it (sometimes fearfully, it has to be admitted). If this sums up the most banal kinds of socialist realism, it is equally applicable to the art the CIA promoted in the middle of last century. Behind the paintings was the logic of pacification.
Alan Dulles’ influence extends far beyond his admittedly meagre artistic output. The CIA’s most recent work of criticism is the destruction of San’a and Aleppo, where the Agency has taken to task outmoded theories of architecture in an imperial inversion of the Situationists’ support for the Watts riots. And TheIntercept informsus that Erik Prince, infamous Blackwater capo, and that old has-been Oliver North are setting up a parallel intelligence agency to defend the embattled President against a rogue CIA. Thus, the old rivalry between Classical and Romantic has returned with a swinging post-modern, mercenary twist. Although painting seems to be off the radar for now, the ideas behind the Abstract Intelligence school await resurrection in another form whose inelegance may delight or offend, depending on the myths necessary for the murder of both the Image and its reflection.
independent - 1995 | For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
gizmodo -2010 | There's little more divisive than modern art—most take a staunch "brilliance" or "bullshit" stance. So it should come as a surprise that the straight-laced feds at the CIA leaned toward the former camp—or at least saw it as brilliantly exploitable in the psychological war against the Soviets. Reports from former agents acknowledge what was always a tall tale in the art world—that CIA spooks floated pioneering artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, to drop an aesthetic nuke on Communism. What seemed like natural popularity of certain artists was, in part, actually a deliberate attempt at psychological warfare, backed by the US government.
But why modern art? At the time period in question—the 1950s and 60s—the artistic style of the moment was Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism (or AbEx, if you want to impress people at your next snooty cocktail party) stood for, above all else, self expression. Radically so. Take a look at a Pollock, for instance.
bbc - 2016 | In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, something exciting happened in the art world in New York. A strange but irresistible energy started to crackle across the city, as artists who had struggled for years in poverty and obscurity suddenly found self-confidence and success. Together, they formed a movement that became known, in time, as Abstract Expressionism. It is currently the subject of a major exhibition, featuring 164 artworks by 30 artists (including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko), at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
One of the most remarkable things about Abstract Expressionism was the speed with which it rose to international prominence. Although the artists associated with it took a long time to find their signature styles, once the movement had crystallised, by the late ‘40s, it rapidly achieved first notoriety and then respect. By the ‘50s, it was generally accepted that the most exciting advances in painting and sculpture were taking place in New York rather than Paris. In 1957, a year after Pollock’s death in a car crash, the Metropolitan Museum paid $30,000 for his Autumn Rhythm – an unprecedented sum of money for a painting by a contemporary artist at the time.
counterpunch | Reason number one is why we currently have Donald Trump for
president. The man cannot hold a train of thought for the ten or 15
seconds it takes to express it or to type it into a Tweet, lies so often
I don’t think he even knows when he’s doing it half the time, and has
no moral core. And yet a third of American voters think he’s just great.
And even though all his policies are damaging the very people — the
poor, forgotten white working class — that he likes to highlight as
being his main concern, those people, who are now at risk of losing
their subsidized health insurance available under Obamacare, their
Medicaid, their Supplemental Security Income checks (available to the
disabled and to children and young single parents left in need by the
death of a working parent/spouse) and the protection against
predatory lenders afforded by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
(CFPB), continue to back him, and will likely vote for him in 2020.
Reason number two is why, despite proof that the Democratic Party
leadership and its pre-annointed 2016 presidential candidate preference
Hillary Clinton, worked hand-in-glove to steal the nomination from
Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and his tens of millions of
supporters last year, and despite the knowledge that that same corrupt
leadership is hard at work now blocking progressive efforts to
democratize the next Democratic primary, and to run real progressives as
candidates for House and Senate in 2018 instead of more of the same
corporatist mob, Democratic voters will submissively cave in as always
and vote for those same lackluster and corrupted corporatists, either
handing wins to Republican opponents, or electing/re-electing
ineffective, self-aggrandizing hacks.
There are other problems too, of course. To a certain extent, both
Republican and Democratic voters in the US are blinded to reality. In
the case of Republicans, who tend to be less well educated, or even if
they have higher degrees, to be in thrall to fanatic religious doctrines
that over-ride any scientific thinking they might once have learned,
this blindness to reality is celebrated. Among Democrats, who fancy
themselves to be the “reality-based” voters, however, there is also a
blindness to reality. Democrats refuse for example to see the larger
picture: for example that the US is absurdly over-militarized and badly
in need of being pacified and disarmed. No amount of calls for better
funding for social needs can succeed without first closing down the over
800 bases that the US operates abroad, terminating all the undeclared
foreign wars and military adventures in places like Syria, Pakistan,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc., shrinking the Army, Navy, Air Force,
Marines and Special Forces and the nuclear forces and slashing the
overall military budget by at least 75%. To fail to recognize this
reality is as stupid as your typical Republican yahoo’s refusal to
accept the reality of rampaging climate change. It is simply Democratic
yahooism.
nationalreview | Did the FBI and Justice Department use Steele’s information to get
the FISA warrant? One certainly hopes not, for two salient reasons.
First, the dossier, particularly as it relates to Page, is incredibly
far-fetched. I am assuming that, at the time it began receiving the
dossier reports, the FBI did not know that Steele was working for the
Clinton campaign — indeed, we do not yet know whether Steele himself
knew who, ultimately, was paying for his work. If the bureau were aware
of the Clinton campaign’s role, using the dossier would be indefensible.
We should assume for now, though, that if investigators were scrupulous
enough to resist seeking a warrant for Page while he was officially
connected to the Trump campaign, they would doubly have avoided using
one campaign’s information as a basis for spying on its opposition.
Nevertheless, the explosive information was unverified. There were
abundant reasons to doubt its veracity when it came to Page. And the FBI
could easily have taken measures less drastic than seeking
court-ordered surveillance; it could, for example, have interviewed
Page, who had cooperated with the FBI in the past.
The second reason to hope the dossier was not used is more alarming. If
the FBI and Justice Department relied on it, this would very likely mean
that they fell victim to an influence operation, based on false
information, by Russian intelligence services. Steele’s sources are
unidentified Russians, at least some of whom knew Steele to be a spy for
hire. It is possible, if not likely, that these Russians fed Steele
false information in order to see if Western intelligence services would
bite and, if the Kremlin got lucky, to sow discord and chaos into the
American political system.
I hope they did not succeed, but we need to find out. One more
disturbing fact: Because Page is a U.S. citizen, the Justice Department
and FBI would have had to show the FISA court not only that he was
acting as a foreign agent for Russia but that his activities involved or
may have involved violations of federal criminal statutes. (See Section
1801(b)(2) of Title 50, U.S. Code.) I don’t know of any basis for
attributing criminal activity to Page other than the Steele dossier —
but, of course, I don’t know everything the FBI knows.
Was the August 2016 decision to spy on a Trump associate based on a
Clinton campaign screed’s claim of a corrupt Trump-Russia deal? Did FBI
and Justice Department officials lose their professional objectivity
because Steele’s information fit their anti-Trump bias? Was the Steele
dossier, in effect, the “insurance policy” Agent Strzok had in mind?
President Trump can provide the answers to these questions: He just
needs to order the FBI and Justice Department, led by his appointees, to
cooperate with Congress’s investigations.
WaPo | In the federal complaint about sex discrimination and retaliation,
Funkhouser accused Ramsey, then Andrea Thomas, according to the Star, of
making “unwelcome and inappropriate sexual comments and innuendos” when
he was a human resources manager for LabOne.
Funkhouser
alleged that he had suffered consequences at work because he had
rebuffed an advance he said she made during a business trip in 2005.
“After
I told her I was not interested in having a sexual relationship with
her, she stopped talking to me,” he wrote, according to documents filed
in court. “In the office, she completely ignored me and avoided having
any contact with me.”
The EEOC closed its investigation in 2005,
saying that it was “unable to conclude that the information obtained
establishes violations of the statutes.” Though Ramsey was not charged
directly in the lawsuit, she had been named in the complaint. It was
settled by the company after mediation in 2006 and had begun to be
discussed in political circles recently, the Star reported.
Without
naming Funkhouser, Ramsey said that a man decided to bring a lawsuit
against the company after she eliminated his position.
“He named me in the allegations, claiming I fired him because he refused to have sex with me,” she wrote. “That is a lie.”
She said she would have fought to clear her name had the suit been brought against her.
“I
would have sued the disgruntled, vindictive employee for defamation,”
she wrote. “Now, twelve years later this suit is being used to force me
out of my race for Congress. Let me be clear: I never engaged in any of
the alleged behavior. And the due process that I love, that drew me to
the field of law, is totally denied.”
theatlantic | Earlier this month, the research firm PerryUndem
found that Democratic men were 25 points more likely than Republican
women to say sexism remains a “big” or “somewhat” big problem. According
to October polling data sorted for me by the Pew Research Center,
Democratic men were 31 points more likely than Republican women to say
the “country has not gone far enough on women’s rights.” In both
surveys, the gender gap within parties was small: Republican women and
Republican men answered roughly the same way as did Democratic women and
Democratic men. But the gap between parties—between both Democratic men
and women and Republican men and women—was large.
Since Trump’s
election and the recent wave of sexual-harassment allegations, this
partisan divide appears to have grown. In January, when PerryUndum asked
whether “most women interpret innocent remarks as being sexist,”
Republican women were 11 points more likely than Democratic men to say
yes. When PerryUndum asked the question again this month, the gap had
more than doubled to 23 points. A year ago, Democratic men were 30
points more likely than Republican women to strongly agree that “the
country would be better off if we had more women in political office.”
The gap is now 45 points.
Over the decades, a similar divergence has occurred in Congress. Syracuse University’s Danielle Thompson notes
that, in the 1980s, “little difference existed between Republican and
Democratic women [members of Congress] in their advocacy of women’s
rights.” In the 1990s, Republican women members were still noticeably
more moderate than their male GOP colleagues. That created a significant
degree of ideological affinity between women politicians across the
aisle. Now it’s gone. There are many more Democratic than Republican
women in Congress. But, Thompson’s research shows, the Republican women
are today just as conservative as their male GOP colleagues.
Why
does this matter? First, it clarifies why Democrats forced Al Franken to
vacate his Senate seat but Republicans didn’t force Roy Moore from his
Senate race. Republicans of both genders are simply far more likely than
Democrats of both genders to believe that women cry sexism in response
to “innocent remarks or acts” and that America has “gone far enough on women’s rights.”
It’s not surprising, therefore, that Democratic women senators took the
lead in demanding that Franken go while Republican women senators
reacted to Moore pretty much like their male colleagues.
Secondly,
this partisan divergence hints at the nature of the backlash that the
current sexual-harassment reckoning will spark: Anti-feminist women will
help to lead it. In part, that’s because anti-feminist women can’t be
labelled sexist as easily as anti-feminist men. But it’s also because,
given their conservative attitudes, many Republican women likely find
the current disruption of gender relations unnerving.
jessescrossroadscafe | "DNC Chairman Perez and allied power brokers keep showing
that they’re afraid of the party’s progressive base. No amount of
appealing rhetoric changes that reality."
“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
Czesław Miłosz
I guess this sort of nonsense is what happens when you allow a powerful
private interest like Hillary, Inc. to take over your organization and
shape its mission for their own purposes.
The result is an imperious, top down operation where only a few insiders
can follow the money because they control it. And the grass roots
initiatives and state organizations starve from neglect.
Budgetary and fiduciary oversight and transparency within your own
organization is fundamental to any good governance. But not within a
credentialed oligarchy, which is what the DNC had apparently become.
It seems to have started out as the ascendance of the self-proclaimed
elite, the knowing, and their super-delegates. But in reality, all they
had in addition to their professional pedigrees and places of power was
the unique talent of betraying their duties in order to amass enormous
amounts of money. They maintained and expanded their power by
distributing the party's funds selectively, ruthlessly, and with a
Machiavellian intent for the accumulation of personal wealth and power.
Surprising that a community organizer wouldn't understand that. Of
course it seems like he understood very little about reform, financial
or otherwise. Or wanted to.
Who are these five consultants and what did they do to earn their $700
million? Were these no-bid contracts? Who approved them?
Whatever it was, it could not have had much to do with effectively
winning elections. But it had everything to do with the arrogance and
self-delusions of a few largely isolated from those who they were sworn
to serve and protect.
WaPo | On display at the House Judiciary Committee hearing this week was the
ham-handed, unsightly spectacle of Republican lawmakers trying to
discredit the special prosecutor and the FBI in order to provide the
president with a fig leaf, presumably one he’ll use at some point to
fire Robert S. Mueller. As a Democratic adviser put it, we witnessed a
“shameless and irresponsible ploy to cover for the president and cast
doubt on Mr. Mueller.” The immediate tool was the text messages sent by
one FBI agent, Peter Strzok, to another, Lisa Page, which Republicans
used, as the source put it, to distract from “the direct threat that
President Trump poses to the Department of Justice and our democratic
institutions.”
In this Republicans had an enabler in the person of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. Eli Lake reported:
Both
Strzok, an FBI counter-intelligence agent, and Page, an FBI lawyer,
were involved in the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private
email server, and were both briefly on Mueller’s team investigating
Russia’s influence of the 2016 election. In the texts from 2015 and
2016, they complained about the Republican presidential nominee’s
intelligence and demeanor (including in unprintable terms). In July,
those private texts came to the attention of the Justice Department’s
inspector general. The FBI reassigned Strzok to human resources, while
Page left the special counsel’s probe.
The inspector general’s
investigation is ongoing. Perhaps more evidence will emerge that the
privately held opinions of two investigators contributed to then-FBI
director James Comey’s decision in July 2016 not to charge Clinton with a
crime. (That was when the Republicans said the FBI was pro-Clinton.
Before Comey called the finality of that inquiry into question just days
before the 2016 election and the Democrats said the FBI was
anti-Clinton.) Until charges are pressed and evidence is considered,
however, Page and Strzok are owed some due process.
But
in this case, Rosenstein threw them under the bus, disclosing their
private texts to Congress and the media. It’s rare to see such an
aggressive act of betrayal by a political appointee on members of his
own department, for the sole reason (apparently) to curry favor with the
party of the president who appointed him.
Yesterday, the Justice Department released a subset of text messages requested by the Committee. The limited release of 375 text messages between Mr. Peter Strzok and Ms. Lisa Page indicate a highly politicized FBI environment during both the Clinton and Russia investigations. For example, one text message from Ms. Page proclaims to Mr. Strzok, “God(,) Trump is a loathsome human.”1
Some of these texts appear to go beyond merely expressing a private political opinion, and appear to cross the line into taking some official action to create an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency. Mr. Strzok writes the following to Ms. Page:
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40…2
Presumably, “Andy” refers to Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. So whatever was being discussed extended beyond just Page and Stzrok at least to Mr. McCabe, who was involved in supervising both investigations.3
Another text from Ms. Page to Mr. Strzok on April 2, 2016, says the following:
So look, you say we text on that phone when we talk about hillary because it can’t be traced, you were just venting bc you feel bad that you’re gone so much but it can’t be helped right now.
That text message occurred during Mr. Strzok’s involvement in the Clinton investigation and days before he interviewed Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills on April 5, 2016 and April 9, 2016, respectively. Thus, the mention of “hillary” may refer to Secretary Clinton and therefore could indicate that Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page engaged in other communications about an ongoing investigation on a different phone in an effort to prevent it from being traced.
Any improper political influence or motives in the course of any FBI investigation must be brought to light and fully addressed. Former Director Comey’s claims that the FBI “doesn’t give a rip about politics” certainly are not consistent with the evidence of discussions occurring in the Deputy Director’s office around August 15, 2016.
Accordingly, please answer the following no later than December 27, 2017:
1. On what date did you become aware of the text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page and on what date were they each removed from the Special Counsel’s office? 2. Are there any other records relating to the conversation in Andrew McCabe’s office shortly before the text described above on August 15, 2016? If so please produce them to the Committee. 3. Please provide all records relating to Andrew McCabe’s communications with Peter Stzrok or Lisa Page between August 7, 2016 and August 23, 2016. 4. What steps have you taken to determine whether Mr. Strzok, Mr. Page, and Mr. McCabe should face disciplinary action for their conduct? 5. My understanding is that the Inspector General’s current investigation is limited to the handling of the Clinton email matter only. What steps have you taken to determine whether steps taken during the campaign to escalate the Russia investigation might have been a result of the political animus evidenced by these text messages rather than on the merits? 6. Has the Department identified the referenced “that phone” Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page used to discuss Secretary Clinton? What steps has the Department taken to review the records on this other phone that allegedly “can’t be traced.” If none, please explain why not? If steps have been taken, please detail them and provide all records reviewed.
I anticipate that your written reply and any responsive documents will be unclassified. Please send all unclassified material directly to the Committee. In keeping with the requirements of Executive Order 13526, if any of the responsive documents do contain classified information, please segregate all unclassified material within the classified documents, provide all unclassified information directly to the Committee, and provide a classified addendum to the Office of Senate Security. Although the Committee complies with all laws and regulations governing the handling of classified information, it is not bound, absent its prior agreement, by any handling restrictions.
philosophyofmetrics | The cryptocurrency craze is built upon the blockchain technology.
Blockchain was created in mystery, with the assumed inventor
disappearing into obscurity. Some have made the case that blockchain was
in fact created by AI for the purpose of building a de-centralized AI
economy. That could be the case, but regardless, the technology is here
to stay, and will infiltrate and transform all aspects of human
existence and interaction.
The best way I’ve found to understand blockchain is to compare it to
the human brain. The brain has synapses which serve the function of
allowing neurons to transfer electrical and chemical signals to other
neurons. Like the neurons in the human brain, the blockchain technology
has nodes which serve the same purpose of transferring information and
data. Once the data exists on the blockchain, it can never be destroyed
or altered. There will always be an accurate record of all transactions.
This is being likened to an artificial intelligence hive mind which
will eventually connect everything in the world, including SMART
appliances, SMART watches, SMART cities, and eventually SMART human
beings. But I would like to take it a step further and suggest that
blockchain technology, and Ethereum specifically, is more comparable to
the whole human body and DNA in particular. The complex interactions and
transactions which take place within the body and our DNA are being
replicated on the blockchain and Ethereum platforms.
This has explosive repercussions on our understanding and acceptance
of the de-centralized world which is now emerging in our midst. One of
the big esoteric questions we’ve always asked ourselves regarding our
individual material, spiritual, and mental fragmentation, was how do we
complete a process of de-fragmentation without surrendering to a
material centralization which would dominate the totality of our lives?
We can see with blockchain and Ethereum, that a massive
de-centralization, or de-fragmentation, of processing and functionality,
will allow each individual component to maintain individuality, while
the art of de-fragmenting our human inefficiencies can proceed without
corrupting into ideological disasters, such as Communism and other
externalizations of human weakness.
The recent explosion in the value of Bitcoin is indicative of the
growing interest in the blockchain technology. But in some regards
Bitcoin is already obsolete. There are some fundamental differences
between Bitcoin and Ethereum. Here is a list of just seven which have
been complied by Cryptocompare.com:
In Ethereum the block time is set to 14 to 15 seconds compared
to Bitcoins 10 minutes. This allows for faster transaction times.
Ethereum does this by using the Ghost protocol.
Ethereum has a slightly different economic model than Bitcoin –
Bitcoin block rewards halve every 4 years whilst Ethereum releases the
same amount of Ether each year ad infinitum.
Ethereum has a different method for costing transactions
depending on their computational complexity, bandwidth use and storage
needs. Bitcoin transactions compete equally with each other. This is
called Gas in Ethereum and is limited per block whilst in Bitcoin, it is
limited by the block size.
Ethereum has its own Turing complete internal code… a
Turing-complete code means that given enough computing power and enough
time… anything can be calculated. With Bitcoin, there is not this form
of flexibility.
Ethereum was crowd funded whilst Bitcoin was released and early
miners own most of the coins that will ever be mined. With Ethereum 50%
of the coins will be owned by miners in year five.
Ethereum discourages centralised pool mining through its Ghost
protocol rewarding stale blocks. There is no advantage to being in a
pool in terms of block propagation.
Ethereum uses a memory hard hashing algorithm called Ethash that
mitigates against the use of ASICS and encourages decentralised mining
by individuals using their GPU’s.
The information in that list represents the core areas in which our
world is transforming. This cannot be stopped. Though Bitcoin may
explode even higher, and some nations and institutions may attempt to
regulate and slow the onset of the blockchain and Ethereum, the genie is
now out of the lamp and nothing can put it back. Blockchain is not just
for cryptocurrency and economics. It will build the foundation and
framework of everything in the world of tomorrow.
technologyreview | I’m standing in what is soon to be the center of the world, or is
perhaps just a very large room on the seventh floor of a gleaming tower
in downtown Toronto. Showing me around is Jordan Jacobs, who cofounded
this place: the nascent Vector Institute, which opens its doors this
fall and which is aiming to become the global epicenter of artificial
intelligence.
We’re in Toronto because Geoffrey Hinton is in Toronto, and
Geoffrey Hinton is the father of “deep learning,” the technique behind
the current excitement about AI. “In 30 years we’re going to look back
and say Geoff is Einstein—of AI, deep learning, the thing that we’re
calling AI,” Jacobs says. Of the researchers at the top of the field of
deep learning, Hinton has more citations than the next three combined.
His students and postdocs have gone on to run the AI labs at Apple,
Facebook, and OpenAI; Hinton himself is a lead scientist on the Google
Brain AI team. In fact, nearly every achievement in the last decade of
AI—in translation, speech recognition, image recognition, and game
playing—traces in some way back to Hinton’s work.
The Vector Institute, this monument to the ascent of Hinton’s
ideas, is a research center where companies from around the U.S. and
Canada—like Google, and Uber, and Nvidia—will sponsor efforts to
commercialize AI technologies. Money has poured in faster than Jacobs
could ask for it; two of his cofounders surveyed companies in the
Toronto area, and the demand for AI experts ended up being 10 times what
Canada produces every year. Vector is in a sense ground zero for the
now-worldwide attempt to mobilize around deep learning: to cash in on
the technique, to teach it, to refine and apply it. Data centers are
being built, towers are being filled with startups, a whole generation
of students is going into the field.
The impression you get standing on the Vector floor, bare and echoey
and about to be filled, is that you’re at the beginning of something.
But the peculiar thing about deep learning is just how old its key ideas
are. Hinton’s breakthrough paper, with colleagues David Rumelhart and
Ronald Williams, was published in 1986. The paper elaborated on a
technique called backpropagation, or backprop for short. Backprop, in
the words of Jon Cohen, a computational psychologist at Princeton, is
“what all of deep learning is based on—literally everything.”
When you boil it down, AI today is deep learning, and deep learning
is backprop—which is amazing, considering that backprop is more than 30
years old. It’s worth understanding how that happened—how a technique
could lie in wait for so long and then cause such an explosion—because
once you understand the story of backprop, you’ll start to understand
the current moment in AI, and in particular the fact that maybe we’re
not actually at the beginning of a revolution. Maybe we’re at the end of
one.
This site is devoted to all and everything associated with the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units and their applications to LETS, local exchange trading systems. Definitions of scope are broad and shall include: m-valued logic (e.g., fuzzy logic, Lukasiewicz logic); theory of monetary instruments; related quantum theoretical issues; applications technologies (hardware and software); research and development; the involved strategic planning issues; real politik of insinuating m-logically-valued exchange systems into the prevailing Newtonian institutionalization; quantum accounts of self-organization as they apply to questions of monetary theory; autopoiesis and its graphical representation systems; metaphors in theoretical biology, biometeorology, oceanography, and related sciences of multiscale dynamical systems; applicability of complexity theory to monetary systematics; history of any and all related subjects. Definitions of exclusion are narrow and shall be determined only by the propensity of any given contribution to elicit ennui.
Hypertext markup language is one very small step for mankind in the direction of employing m-valued logics. Free associations once were pristine logical accommodation schemata by virtue of animistic “identity transparency”. We are inspired by this fact and will embody that inspiration as complete disregard for conventions of binary logical thought -- though we will make no active effort in crass display of such unrespect.
RT | FBI Director Christopher Wray has declined to tell the House
Judiciary Committee if he was prohibited from sharing documents that
would show whether the notorious Steele dossier was used to obtain a
FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
Wray
was appearing before the the House Judiciary Committee Thursday, after
President Donald Trump’s recent tweet that the FBI’s reputation is “in tatters.”
Rep.
Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked Wray about the FBI’s possible use of the
Trump–Russia dossier, also known as the Steele dossier, named after its
author ex-British spy Christopher Steele. It was a document paid for by
the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton campaign to
be used as opposition research against Trump in 2016. It contained
allegations that Trump colluded with the Russian government in the 2016
US presidential election and engaged in lewd acts. The veracity of the
salacious claims in the dossier were further undermined by the
revelation that Steele paid Russian sources for information pointing to
collusion.
Jordan also referred to Peter Strzok, an FBI agent and
former deputy head of counterintelligence who led the investigation into
Clinton’s use of private emails, and reportedly recommended that former
FBI director James Comey describe Clinton’s actions as “extremely careless,” rather than “grossly negligent”
– a term that implies felony charges under US law. It was revealed this
week that Strzok was dismissed this summer from Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s probe into alleged collaboration between Trump and Russia for
sending “anti-Trump text messages.”
Jordan alleged that Strzok used the Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warrant for spying on members of the Trump team.
“My hunch is it has something to do with the dossier,” Jordan said. “Did
Peter Strzok help produce and present the application to the FISA court
to secure a warrant to spy on Americans associated with the Trump
campaign?”
Wray refused to answer, saying, “I'm not prepared to discuss anything about a FISA process in this setting.”
Jordan wouldn’t let Wary off the hook. “We're not talking about what happened in the court, we're talking about what the FBI took to the court,” he said. “The application. Was Peter Strzok involved in taking that to the court?”
conservativetreehouse | However, the ongoing Dossier story
gets far more intriguing as it is now discovered that Bruce G Ohr’s
wife, Nellie H. Ohr, actually worked for Fusion GPS and likely helped
guide/script the Russian Dossier. (Link)
Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie
H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the
opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s
duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear
but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr
has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff
confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer
and fall of 2016.
But wait, it doesn’t stop there… Mrs. Nellie Ohr was not only a
Fusion GPS contracted employee, but she was also part of the CIA’s Open
Source Works, in Washington DC (link)
Both Mr. and Mrs Ohr worked on a collaborative group project surrounding International Organized Crime. (pdf here) Page #30 Screen Shot Below
The so-called fact checkers insists that any comparison of the FBI and KGB is “ridiculous” because the FBI is “subject to the rule of law and is democratically accountable.” But
there is little or no accountability when few members of Congress have
the courage to openly criticize or vigorously cross-examine FBI
officials. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs admitted in 1971 that Congress was afraid of the FBI:
“Our very fear of speaking out (against the FBI) ... has watered the
roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny ... which is
ensnaring that Constitution and Bill of Rights which we are each sworn
to uphold.” The FBI is currently scorning almost every congressional
attempt at oversight. Thus far, members of Congress have responded with
nothing except press releases and talk show bluster.
Politifact repeatedly scoffs at the notion that the FBI is “a secret police agency such as the old KGB.”
And since the FBI is not as bad as the KGB, let’s mosey along and
pretend no good citizen has a right to complain. A similar standard
could exonerate any American president who was not as bad as Stalin.
In
the 1960s, some conservatives adorned their cars with “Support Your
Local Sheriff” bumper stickers. How long until we see Priuses with
“Support Your Secretive All-Powerful Federal Agents” bumper stickers?
But those who forget or deny past oppression help forge new shackles for
the American people.
newatlas | "The reactor technology we are testing
could be applicable to multiple NASA missions, and we ultimately hope
that this is the first step for fission reactors to create a new
paradigm of truly ambitious and inspiring space exploration," says David
Poston, Los Alamos' chief reactor designer.
"Simplicity is essential to
any first-of-a-kind engineering project – not necessarily the simplest
design, but finding the simplest path through design, development,
fabrication, safety and testing."
Rated at 10 kilowatts, the
Kilopower reactor puts out enough power to support two average American
homes and can run continuously for ten years without refueling. Instead
of plutonium, it uses a solid, cast uranium 235 reactor core 6 inches
(15 cm) in diameter. This is surrounded by a beryllium oxide reflector
with a mechanism at one end for removing and inserting a single rod of
boron carbide. This rod starts and stops the reactor while the reflector
catches escaping neutrons and bounces them back into the core,
improving the efficiency of the self-regulating fission reaction. Until
activated, the core is only mildly radioactive.
The heat from the reactor
is collected and transferred using passive sodium heat pipes. These feed
the heat to a set of high-efficiency Stirling engines. These are
closed-loop engines that run on heat differences that cause a piston to
move back and forth similar to the piston in an internal combustion
engine, though with a compressible gas medium instead of an exploding
mixture of petrol and air. This cools the reactor via a radiator
umbrella as well as powering a dynamo to generate electricity.
The design is modular, so the
self-contained reactor units can be hooked together to provide as much
power as needed, whether it's a deep space probe or a Martian outpost.
According to Lee Mason, STMD's principal technologist for Power and
Energy Storage at NASA Headquarters, the technology is "agnostic" to its
environment, allowing it a wide range of applications.
The Kilopower project is
currently working toward a full-power test lasting about 28 hours. From
there, NASA hopes to move to a test in space, but the Nevada tests are
more of a breadboard test in a vacuum to show that the technology is
feasible.
"What we are striving to do is give space missions an option beyond
RTGs, which generally provide a couple hundred watts or so, says Mason
says. "The big difference between all the great things we've done on
Mars, and what we would need to do for a human mission to that planet,
is power. This new technology could provide kilowatts and can eventually
be evolved to provide hundreds of kilowatts, or even megawatts of
power. We call it the Kilopower project because it gives us a near-term
option to provide kilowatts for missions that previously were
constrained to use less. But first things first, and our test program is
the way to get started."
spacenews | A White House schedule of the president’s activities, released late Dec. 10, includes a 3 p.m. Eastern “signing ceremony for Space Policy Directive 1.” The schedule didn’t provide additional details about the event or the document, but a White House official later confirmed that the directive is linked to human space exploration policy.
“The president, today, will sign Space Policy Directive 1 (SPD-1) that directs the NASA Administrator to lead an innovative space exploration program to send American astronauts back to the Moon, and eventually Mars,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said in an statement Dec. 11.
The directive, Gidley said, was prompted by initial work of the National Space Council, which was reconstituted by the president in a June 30 executive order and held its first public meeting Oct. 5. “The president listened to the National Space Council’s recommendations and he will change our nation’s human spaceflight policy to help America become the driving force for the space industry, gain new knowledge from the cosmos, and spur incredible technology,” he said.
The event will coincide with the 45th anniversary of the last crewed mission to land on the moon. The Apollo 17 lunar lander touched down on the moon on Dec. 11, 1972. Statements from administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, has have made clear their interest in human lunar missions.
“We will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond,” Pence said at the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council Oct. 5 at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.
Pence, at that meeting, directed NASA to provide a 45-day report on plans to carry out such missions. “The Council is going to need the whole team at NASA to work with the Office of Management and Budget to provide the president with a recommended plan to fill that policy,” Pence told NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot at the meeting.
Lightfoot, speaking at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council Dec. 7, said the agency had delivered a version of the report on those plans to the Council. “We continue to work with the Space Council on that action, and they’re reviewing the preliminary draft of that now,” he said. “Once that report becomes more final, we’ll share more information.”
It has said only that it will brief the press on Thursday and that the discovery has been made by the Kepler space telescope. It also said that Google has been involved in the breakthrough discovery.
But beyond that it said very little. Still, some clues give us a little insight into what the major announcement might be about to actually reveal.
Perhaps the strangest and most mysterious thing about the announcement – at least, beyond what the announcement actually is – is the fact that Google is involved.
"The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google," the otherwise mysterious and not very detailed announcement reads. "Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analysing Kepler data."
Nasa and Google haven't talked about this focus on machine learning much before, so it's not clear how exactly it's being used and to what purpose. But we can have a decent guess: Google is expert at using artificial intelligence to find patterns and learn like a human, and it's probably using the technology to sort through the data being sent by Kepler to pick out things that are of interest.
TheAtlantic | The email about “a most peculiar object” in the solar system arrived in Yuri Milner’s inbox last week.
Milner,
the Russian billionaire behind Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million
search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, had already heard about
the peculiar object. ‘Oumuamua barreled into view in October, the first interstellar object seen in our solar system.
Astronomers
around the world chased after the mysterious space rock with their
telescopes, collecting as much data as they could as it sped away. Their
observations revealed a truly unusual object with puzzling properties.
Scientists have long predicted an interstellar visitor would someday
coast into our corner of the universe, but not something like this.
“The
more I study this object, the more unusual it appears, making me wonder
whether it might be an artificially made probe which was sent by an
alien civilization,” Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy
department and one of Milner’s advisers on Breakthrough Listen, wrote in
the email to Milner.
A
day later, Milner’s assistant summoned Loeb to Milner’s home in Palo
Alto. They met there this past Saturday to talk about ‘Oumuamua, a
Hawaiian word for “messenger.” Loeb ran through the space rock’s
peculiarities, particularly its elongated shape, like a cigar or
needle—an odd shape for a common space rock, but ideal for a ship
cruising through interstellar space.
For Milner, the object was becoming too intriguing to ignore. So he’s decided to take a closer look.
Breakthrough Listen announced
Monday that the program will start checking ‘Oumuamua this week for
signs of radio signals using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
The interstellar asteroid is now about twice the distance between the
Earth and the sun from our planet, moving at a brisk clip
of 38.3 kilometers per second. At this close distance, Green Bank can
detect the faintest frequencies. It would take the telescope less than a
minute to pick up something as faint as the radio waves from a
cellphone. If ‘Oumuamua is sending signals, we’ll hear them.
motherjones | Later in the review, Magnet summarizes The Dream and the Nightmare, which he wrote in the 90s:
In that book, I argued that the counterculture’s remaking
of mainstream white American culture in the 1960s — the sexual
revolution; the fling with drugs…the belief that in racist America, the
criminal was really the victim of society…[etc.] — all these attitudes
that devalued traditional mainstream values trickled down from young
people and their teachers in the universities, to the media, to the
mainstream Protestant churches, to the ed schools, to the high schools,
and finally to American culture at large.
And when these
attitudes made their way to the ghetto, they destigmatized and validated
the already-existing disproportionate illegitimacy, drug use, crime,
school dropout, non-work, and welfare dependency there, and caused the
rate of all these pathologies to skyrocket startlingly in the 1960s and
beyond.
….Aghast at the minority-crime explosion that rocked not just the
ghettoes but much of urban America, voters began electing officials,
especially in New York, who believed that the real victim of a crime was
the victim, not the criminal — who ought to be arrested and jailed — and crime fell accordingly.
In other words, blacks today have no cause to blame their troubles on
anyone but themselves. Unless they want to blame it on lefty
counterculture. This is pretty putrid stuff, and I don’t feel like
taking it on right now. Instead, I’m going to change the subject so
suddenly you might get whiplash.
Here we go: it’s hardened beliefs like this that make it so hard for
many people to accept the lead-crime hypothesis that I’ve written about frequently and at length. A lot of teen pathologies did
start to skyrocket in the 60s, but the primary cause was almost
certainly lead poisoning. Certainly lead was the proximate cause of
increases in crime, teen pregnancy, and school dropout rates. And these effects were
more pronounced among blacks than whites, because blacks lived
disproportionately in areas with high levels of lead. The opposite is
true too: the decline in these pathologies starting in the 90s was due
to the phaseout of lead in gasoline.
In theory, none of this should be too hard to accept. The evidence is
strong, and given what we know about the effects of lead on brain
development, it makes perfect sense. In practice, though, if lead
poisoning was the primary cause of the increase in various pathologies
in the 60s and beyond, then the counterculture wasn’t. And if the
phaseout of leaded gasoline was responsible for the subsequent decline,
then the EPA gets the credit, not tough-on-crime policies. And that
can’t be tolerated.
On the left, the problems are similar. Liberals tend to dislike
“essentialist” explanations of things like crime rates because that
opens the door to noxious arguments that blacks are biologically more
crime prone than whites. As it happens, lead poisoning isn’t truly an
essentialist explanation, but for many it’s too close for comfort. And
anyway, liberals have their own explanations for the crime wave of the
60s: poverty, racism, easy availability of guns, and so forth.
nydailynews |
Campaigning against Alabama’s lightning-rod Senate candidate Roy Moore,
a leading Democrat called on President Trump to resign over sexual
harassment claims several women have made against him.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) made the comments at a weekend campaign
appearance in Alabama for Democratic candidate Doug Jones, who is locked
in a tight race against Moore, the Republican nominee facing his own
allegations of sexually abusing minor girls.
“I just watched Sen. Al Franken (inset left) do the honorable thing and
resign from his office,” Booker told Vice News. “My question is, why
isn’t Donald Trump doing the same thing — who has more serious
allegations against him, with more women who have come forward.”
Franken (D-Minn.) announced Thursday he would be resigning from the
Senate in the “coming weeks” after eight women accused him of either
groping or trying to kiss them.
breitbart | Booker’s efforts to push inaccurate information about both Moore and
Trump—and his decision to use a Jones campaign event to call for Trump’s
resignation as president of the United States—only serve to undermine
Jones’ efforts to win the election in Alabama. Jones has already had a
tough time claiming he is a moderate who can work with Republicans, and
he is literally running television ads right now claiming he is not a
radical leftist Democrat, despite his record on the issues.
But when his surrogates are pushing for President Trump’s removal
from office—and they consider this election a referendum on whether
Trump should remain president—it makes it much easier for Moore to
publicly support Trump’s agenda and note that Jones is a radical leftist
who will oppose the president at every turn. It also helps President
Trump’s criticisms of Jones on the issues, for which he has many, and
Trump’s call for Alabamians to back Moore for the Senate resonate
further in Alabama.
Booker may have just blown whatever slim chance Jones has left, and
if Moore does end up pulling through and winning on Tuesday as expected
now, Booker may have just handed the moral high ground back to Trump and
Moore and the anti-establishment by making this a referendum on Trump’s
presidency.
NYTimes | It’s a legitimate observation. It’s also a dead end. Turnabout may be fair play, but it’s foul morality. It’s also foolish politics. Mirroring the ugliness of white nationalists and the alt-right just gives them the ammunition that they want and need.
Which is precisely what some fevered activists at Evergreen State College did when they shouted down a white biology professor and the school’s white president, who stood there as one woman screamed: “Whiteness is the most violent system to ever breathe.” (I deleted the profanity between “violent” and “system.”)
It’s what an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware did with a Facebook post saying that Otto Warmbier — the American student who was imprisoned in North Korea, came home comatose and died soon after — “got exactly what he deserved.” The professor wrote that like other “young, white, rich, clueless white males” in the United States, Warmbier thought “he could get away with whatever he wanted.”
Meanwhile a professor at Trinity College in Hartford used his Facebook page to post an incendiary story about the Republican lawmakers who found themselves under gunfire on an Alexandria, Va., baseball field. Its headline included the language “let them die,” a phrase that the professor also folded into a hashtag accompanying a subsequent Facebook post.
Thanks in large part to social media, which incentivizes invective and then magnifies it, our conversations coarsen. Our compasses spin out of whack. We descend to the lowest common denominator, becoming what we supposedly abhor. I’m regularly stunned by the cruelty that’s mistaken for cleverness and the inhumanity that’s confused with conviction.
berkeley | Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than
800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, UC
Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and
created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they’re
connected.
“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to
account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in
response to each video,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a UC
Berkeley psychology professor and expert on the science of emotions.
Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an
island, the study found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion
between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement
and adoration,” Keltner said.
“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because
everything is interconnected,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a
doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “Emotional experiences
are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.”
“Our hope is that our findings will help other scientists and
engineers more precisely capture the emotional states that underlie
moods, brain activity and expressive signals, leading to improved
psychiatric treatments, an understanding of the brain basis of emotion
and technology responsive to our emotional needs,” he added.
How is an LLM like a mechanical clock?
-
Let's think about LLMs a little more here, but first let's think about
mechanical clocks.
A clock movement is an arrangement of gears and springs and lev...
A Foundation of Joy
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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
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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
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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
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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 ...
