ghionjournal | It is a sad sight to see; it’s like we are revisiting the slave trade
where neighbors sell their own neighbors down the river for the sake of
money.
Malcolm X identified them a long time ago, he realized the lethality of the boule society,
the few who have attained success yet refuse to reach back and lift up
others behind them. I was once in this cloaked society, a man of Omega Psi Phi,
I too used to pretend that I cared about justice while dabbling in the
very orders that impoverish the majority. It says in the bible that man
cannot serve God and mammon concurrently; now I understand the wisdom of
these words:
“No one can serve two masters: Either he will
hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the
one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” ~
Matthew 6:24
Sure enough, I learned the hard way that one cannot be in two places
at the same time—either we choose one side or the other. For far too
long, I chose ego over God only to feel the fires that come with empty
pride and emptier affiliations. Look I’m really not trying to be preachy
over here; even though it is the day of Sabbath, my aim is not to
convert you into my line of thinking. I am just telling my truth as best
as I can and then letting the chips fall where they may.
The truth is this: the boule society have become a bullet upon the
temples of the African-American communities. Rooted in Masonic
traditions, the “Divine 9”—as they call themselves haughtily—have made
it their purpose to rise above their station and dismissively thumb
their noses at those with lesser opportunities. It’s like Orwell’s
“Animal Farm”, where all are equal except those who walk in
two Weitzman and Guccis are more equal.
There is no need to be coy here, the people I’m referring to are
those in “black” Greek fraternities and sororities—AKAs, Deltas, Betas
Ques, Kappas, Sigmas, Alphas, Zetas and Iotas—who wear letters and throw
up demonic signs and symbols paying homages to Luciferian societies.
Most of them have zero idea what they are doing; they are blinded by
ideologies and bonded by ignorance to respect that which disrespects
them thoroughly. The vast majority are branded either outwardly or
inwardly, they bow before Satan without understanding who they are
pledging their lives to.
charleshughsmith |Unbeknownst to most Americans, many core systems are already in the first stages of collapse.
No corporate sector does a better job of masking dysfunction and profiteering than healthcare,
and so the collapse of healthcare systems will surprise everyone who swallowed the sector's
glossy PR.
Though 2020 is widely perceived as "the worst year ever," it was only a snack. The real banquet
of consequences will be served in 2021. The reason 2020 was only a snack is that systems
didn't break down in 2020. The reason 2021 is the main course is that systems
will break down, and once broken, they cannot be restored. Systems have numerous sources of potential fragility:
1. Systems can be tightly bound to other
fragile systems, setting up the potential for a domino-like cascading collapse that starts
with one system failure that then brings down every connected, interdependent system.
2. Systems can be hollowed out by self-interested insiders who mistakenly believe the system
can survive endless looting.
3. Systems can be weakened by perverse incentives that provide strong incentives to
under-invest in core functions and divert revenues to profiteering and extraction (stock buybacks,
bonuses to managers, etc.)
4. Systems can appear robust to casual observers because insiders cloak the decay of function,
accountability and transparency.
5. The decline of functionality / results can be hidden by bureaucratic obscurity (accounting
statements in which all the important information is buried in footnotes starting on page 217, etc.)
and by complexity thickets that reduce accountability to near-zero: no one is responsible
for the decay of function, accountability and transparency.
6. Process replaces results as the Prime Directive of the system. Devoting resources
to following processes rather than to getting results generates an illusion of functionality
even as the ability to evolve and adapt is lost.
7. Buffers that enabled effective responses to crisis are stripped to the bone as
redundancy and resilience are discounted as "hurting profits" or "needless expenses."
8. Insiders and the public / customers wrongly assume money can solve all of these systemic
frailties. But money cannot buy trust, competence, institutional depth, productive incentives
or anything else that is essential to robust, anti-fragile systems.
Americans are unprepared for the collapse of core systems. The secular faith holds
that corporate ownership of core systems, centralized state control and the relentless
pursuit of infinite greed will magically manifest the best of all possible worlds because
self-enrichment by any means available is what perfects systems.
off-guardian | The World Health Organization has changed the
definition of “herd immunity” on the Covid section of their website,
inserting the claim that it is a “concept used in vaccination”, and
requires a vaccine to be achieved.
Both of these statements are total falsehoods, which is demonstrated
by the WHO’s own website back in June, and every dictionary definition
of “herd immunity” you can find.
To quote the WHO’s own original definition:
Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an
infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either
through vaccination or a natural immunity developed through previous
infection.
This definition was posted on the WHO’s website on June 9th of this year, and conforms with the general usage of the term for generations.
‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a
concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected
from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.
No explanation is offered for the change, in fact note of the change is made on the website at all.
The typical dosing for humans is 200 micrograms per kilogram of body mass- but can be safely upped to 600 micrograms per kilogram of body mass for prophylactic use against covid.
Any reservations about using veterinary ivermectin and veterinary medications in general? (true confession, I keep a large supply of veterinary antibiotics and other medications because they are easily obtained over the counter, exponentially less expensive than the same molecule packaged for humans, and are identical to those requiring a prescription for human consumption
Based on the type of animal, they are often in different media that may not work as well in humans. Also, the dosing may be different for
a cow or horse and again, the amount of medication in the pills is formulated to dissolve in that specific animal intestine.
Veterinary Ivermectin is not problematic, though you can run into problems with other medications. People in rural America know they can afford animal meds but not human meds and take the chance. Post reset, there will be a LOT MORE rural uhmurkans.
Because this is a real thing in our society, I encourage you to hollar at your veterinarian connected homies. Potentially have your veterinary meds evaluated for safety. That is unfortunately the world we live in - so man-up and get used to it.
The safety issues with Ivermectin in humans seem to be concentrated on transplant drugs like tacrolimus and cyclosporin, on HIV drugs, on antifungal drugs and on some types of antibiotics.
The Eastern Virginia Medical Center Covid treatment protocol is straight fire. They have been updating this
protocol since the beginning. They use evidence based medicine. They are basically the entire Department of Medicine – primary care, critical care, infectious disease. They have been way out over the curve
on this epidemic from the beginning. They instantly update this protocol with new findings. In my opinion, they are doing a much better public service than any of your Great Reset sock-puppeted politicians or health aligned agencies.
You can see where they are using Ivermectin – and it is being done more and more by smart physicians all over the world. Because of the very good safety profile, it would be great if more information was made available about this drug. It would be preferable to having folks self-medicate with literal horse pills.
This is the air powered costume an employee wore in the Emergency Dept.of Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center Xmas day to spread cheer. Turns out employee unknowingly had covid , now 43 employees have covid .Kaiser investigating if costume blower helped spread the virus. pic.twitter.com/DLLi8z5e2T
LATimes | An employee working the Christmas shift at Kaiser Permanente San Jose
Medical Center has died after falling ill with COVID-19. The worker was
one of at least 43 staff members
who tested positive for the coronavirus in recent days, an outbreak
possibly linked to a staff member who wore an inflatable holiday costume
to lift spirits.
The staff member who appeared briefly in the
emergency department Christmas Day wore an air-powered, holiday-themed
costume, according to a hospital executive. KNTV-TV, the San Jose NBC station that first reported the outbreak, reported that the costume was an inflatable Christmas tree.
Inflatable
costumes are typically battery-powered and use a fan to keep the
costume puffed up. But such a fan can also cause virus particles to
travel much farther in a room.
KNTV-TV reported that the person who died was a woman who worked as a registration clerk in the emergency department.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with those affected by this terrible
loss. We are providing support to our employees during this difficult
time,” said a statement issued by the hospital late Sunday.
In a
statement Saturday, Irene Chavez, senior vice president and area manager
of Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center, said officials were
investigating whether the costume contributed to the outbreak.
“Any
exposure, if it occurred, would have been completely innocent, and
quite accidental, as the individual [wearing the costume] had no COVID
symptoms and only sought to lift the spirits of those around them during
what is a very stressful time,” Chavez said.
What Is the Great Reset? Part I: Reduced Expectations and Bio-techno-feudalism - “the Great Reset” is but a coordinated propaganda campaign shrouded
under a cloak of inevitability. Rather than a mere conspiracy theory, as
the New York Times has suggested,9 the Great Reset is an attempt at a conspiracy, or the “wishful thinking”10 of socioeconomic planners to have corporate “stakeholders”11 and governments adopt the desiderata of the WEF.
In order to sell this package, the WEF mobilizes the warmed-over
rhetoric of “economic equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “a shared
destiny,” among other euphemisms.12 Together,
such phrases represent the collectivist, socialist political and
ideological component of the envisioned corporate socialism13 (since economic socialism can never be enacted, it is always only political and ideological).
I’ll examine the prospects for the Great Reset in future
installments. But suffice it to say for now that the WEF envisions a
bio-techno-feudalist global order, with socioeconomic planners and
corporate “stakeholders” at the helm and the greater part of humanity in
their thrall.
The Great Reset, Part II: Corporate Socialism - Nevertheless, the aims of the WEF are not to plan every aspect of
production and thus to direct all individual activity. Rather, the goal
is to limit the possibilities for individual activity, including the
activity of consumers—by dint of squeezing out industries and producers
within industries from the economy. “Every country, from the United
States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas
to tech, must be transformed.”6
As Hayek noted, “when the medieval guild system was at its height,
and when restrictions to commerce were most extensive, they were not
used as a means actually to direct individual activity.”7
Likewise, the Great Reset aims not at a strictly collectivist planning
of the economy so much as recommends and demands neofeudalistic
restrictions that would go further than anything since the medieval
period—other than under state socialism itself, that is. In 1935, Hayek
noted the extent to which economic restrictions had already led to
distortions of the market:
How much further, then, the Great Reset would take us toward the kinds
of restrictions imposed under feudalism, including the economic stasis
that feudalism entailed!
The Great Reset, Part III: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics - The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in
the West, only in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political elite began
with a socialist-communist political system and implemented “capitalism”
later, the elite in the West began with “capitalism” and is aiming to
implement a socialist-communist political system now. It’s as if the
Western oligarchy looked to the “socialism” on display in China, and
said, “yes, we want it.”
This explains many otherwise seeming contradictions, not the least of
which is the leftist authoritarianism of Big Tech. Big Tech, and in
particular Big Digital, is the ideological communications apparatus for
the advancement of corporate socialism, or capitalism with Chinese
characteristics.
The Chinese characteristics that the Great Reset aims to reproduce in
connection with Western capitalism would resemble the totalitarianism
of the CCP. It would require a great abridgement of individual
rights—including property rights, free expression, freedom of movement,
freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the free enterprise
system as we understand it.
The Great Reset would implement the political system in much the same
way as China has done—with 5G-enabled smart city surveillance, the
equivalent of social credit scores, medical passports, political
imprisonment, and other means of social and political repression and
control.
In the end, socialism with Chinese characteristics and capitalism with Chinese characteristics would amount to the same thing.
technologyreview | The first thing to understand here is that neural networks are
fundamentally function approximators. (Say what?) When they’re training
on a data set of paired inputs and outputs, they’re actually calculating
the function, or series of math operations, that will transpose one
into the other. Think about building a cat detector. You’re training the
neural network by feeding it lots of images of cats and things that are
not cats (the inputs) and labeling each group with a 1 or 0,
respectively (the outputs). The neural network then looks for the best
function that can convert each image of a cat into a 1 and each image of
everything else into a 0. That’s how it can look at a new image and
tell you whether or not it’s a cat. It’s using the function it found to
calculate its answer—and if its training was good, it’ll get it right
most of the time.
Conveniently, this function approximation
process is what we need to solve a PDE. We’re ultimately trying to find a
function that best describes, say, the motion of air particles over
physical space and time.
Now here’s the crux of the paper.
Neural networks are usually trained to approximate functions between
inputs and outputs defined in Euclidean space, your classic graph with
x, y, and z axes. But this time, the researchers decided to define the
inputs and outputs in Fourier space, which is a special type of graph
for plotting wave frequencies. The intuition that they drew upon from
work in other fields is that something like the motion of air can
actually be described as a combination of wave frequencies, says Anima
Anandkumar, a Caltech professor who oversaw the research alongside her
colleagues, professors Andrew Stuart and Kaushik Bhattacharya. The
general direction of the wind at a macro level is like a low frequency
with very long, lethargic waves, while the little eddies that form at
the micro level are like high frequencies with very short and rapid
ones.
Why does this matter? Because it’s far easier to
approximate a Fourier function in Fourier space than to wrangle with
PDEs in Euclidean space, which greatly simplifies the neural network’s
job. Cue major accuracy and efficiency gains: in addition to its huge
speed advantage over traditional methods, their technique achieves a 30%
lower error rate when solving Navier-Stokes than previous deep-learning
methods.
The whole thing is extremely clever, and also makes
the method more generalizable. Previous deep-learning methods had to be
trained separately for every type of fluid, whereas this one only needs
to be trained once to handle all of them, as confirmed by the
researchers’ experiments. Though they haven’t yet tried extending this
to other examples, it should also be able to handle every earth
composition when solving PDEs related to seismic activity, or every
material type when solving PDEs related to thermal conductivity.
And to be 💯% honest, it was hard during this to be targeted+marred as some sellout-enemy of the people over a late tactical disagreement over 1 floor vote.
Also a bummer to see figures excuse comments like “f- her and f- anyone who protects her.” That’s not tone,that’s violence
One of the 1st votes I ever cast broke w/ my party over House rules that strangled transformative legislation for working people + climate. It was honestly terrifying.
cbslocal | The new year brought a disturbing discovery at the San Francisco home
of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, where, early
Friday morning, vandals spray-painted her house and left a severed pig’s
head in front of her garage.
The graffiti says “Cancel rent” and “We want everything” —
possibly referencing coronavirus stimulus checks. There was also a
severed pig’s head in a pool of red paint left in front of the garage
door.
San Francisco police say they first got the call about the incident
around 2:00 a.m. on Friday. Speaker Pelosi was not home as she is
currently in Washington D.C.
Neighbors say while they understand the frustration over politics on
Capitol Hill and they say this type of vandalism doesn’t help resolve
anything.
“I don’t think that this is a useful way to go about it and it’s a
terrible start to this new year, when we are hoping for less anger and
hatred than we’ve had to deal with for the last year,” said Audrey
Carlson, a neighbor of Speaker Pelosi.
KPIX reached out to Speaker Pelosi’s office for comment on the incident but has not heard back.
San Francisco police have not released any information about suspects
in the case. Also, no one has come forward claiming responsibility for
the vandalism. Some of the graffiti mentions UBI (universal basic
income) and “cancel rent,” so it is possible the culprit is someone
associated with those movements.
Other messages were spray painted along the front porch, but the rest of
McConnell's home appeared to be untouched. As of Saturday morning,
Louisville Metro Police said it does not know who is responsible for the
damage.
"I’ve spent my career fighting for the First Amendment and defending
peaceful protest. I appreciate every Kentuckian who has engaged in the
democratic process whether they agree with me or not," McConnell said in
a statement responding to the vandalism. "This is different. Vandalism
and the politics of fear have no place in our society. My wife and I
have never been intimidated by this toxic playbook. We just hope our
neighbors in Louisville aren’t too inconvenienced by this radical
tantrum."
wsws | Since the late 1960s, the efforts to racialize scholarly work,
against which Genovese rightly polemicized, have assumed such vast
proportions that they cannot be adequately described as merely “inane.”
Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race
theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open
for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity
has replaced social class and related economic processes as the
principal and essential analytic category.
Whiteness” theory, the
latest rage, is now utilized to deny historical progress, reject
objective truth, and interpret all events and facets of culture through
the prism of alleged racial self-interest. On this basis, the sheerest
nonsense can be spouted with the guarantee that all objections grounded
on facts and science will be dismissed as a manifestation of “white
fragility” or some other form of hidden racism. In this degraded
environment, Ibram X. Kendi can write the following absurd passage,
without fear of contradiction, in his Stamped from the Beginning:
For
Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a
double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand
years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of
insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light.
Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore
Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society
eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. … Enlightenment ideas
gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection
between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between
darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. [19]
This
is a ridiculous concoction that attributes to the word “Enlightenment” a
racial significance that has absolutely no foundation in etymology, let
alone history. The word employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in
1784 to describe this period of scientific advance was Aufklärung,
which may be translated from the German as “clarification” or “clearing
up,” connoting an intellectual awakening. The English translation of Aufklärung as Enlightenment
dates from 1865, seventy-five years after the death of Benjamin
Franklin, whom Kendi references in support of his racial argument. [20]
Another
term used by English speaking people to describe the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries has been “The Age of Reason,” which was employed by
Tom Paine in his scathing assault on religion and all forms of
superstition. Kendi’s attempt to root Enlightenment in a white racist
impulse is based on nothing but empty juggling with words. In point of
fact, modern racism is connected historically and intellectually to the
Anti-Enlightenment, whose most significant nineteenth century
representative, Count Gobineau, wrote The Inequality of the Human Races.
But actual history plays no role in the formulation of Kendi’s
pseudo-intellectual fabrications. His work is stamped with ignorance.
istory
is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an
essay titled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Professor Philip
A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, “I posit that there
exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and
institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white
racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music
theory.” [21]
This degradation of music theory divests the
discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The
complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality,
consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived,
Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering
in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a
passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from
“whiteness” and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the
1930s and 1940s to liberate music from “Jewishness.” The Nazis denounced
Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious
manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar
fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely “above average as a
composer,” and that he “occupies the place he does because he has been
propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years.” [22]
Academic
journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with
ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the
onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda
Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New
Hampshire, proclaims that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes
in physics,” and introduces the concept of “white empiricism”
(italics in the original), which “comes to dominate empirical discourse
in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters
of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena.” [23]
Prescod-Weinstein
asserts that “knowledge production in physics is contingent on the
ascribed identities of the physicists,” the racial and gender background
of scientists affects the way scientific research is conducted, and,
therefore, the observations and experiments conducted by
African-American and female physicists will produce results different
than those conducted by white males. Prescod-Weinstein identifies with
the contingentists who “challenge any assumption that scientific
decision making is purely objective.” [24]
uchicago | In this article I take on the question of how the exclusion of Black
American women from physics impacts physics epistemologies, and I
highlight the dynamic relationship between this exclusion and the
struggle for women to reconcile “Black woman” with “physicist.” I
describe the phenomenon where white epistemic claims about science—which
are not rooted in empirical evidence—receive more credence and
attention than Black women’s epistemic claims about their own lives. To
develop this idea, I apply an intersectional analysis to Joseph Martin’s
concept of prestige asymmetry in physics, developing the concept of white empiricism
to discuss the impact that Black women’s exclusion has had on physics
epistemology. By considering the essentialization of racism and sexism
alongside the social construction of ascribed identities, I assess the
way Black women physicists self-construct as scientists and the
subsequent impact of epistemic outcomes on the science itself.
Who is allowed to be an observer in physics, and who is fundamentally
denied the possibility? In this article, I propose that race and
ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics, despite the universality
of the laws that undergird physics, and I introduce the concept of white empiricism
to provide one explanation for why. White empiricism is the phenomenon
through which only white people (particularly white men) are read has
having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and Black people
(particularly Black women) are produced as an ontological other. This
phenomenon is stabilized through the production and retention of what
Joseph Martin calls prestige asymmetry, which explains how social
resources in physics are distributed based on prestige. In American
society, Black women are on the losing end of an ontic prestige
asymmetry whereby different scientists “garner unequal public
approbation” in their everyday lives due to ascribed identities such as
gender and race (Martin 2017,
475). White empiricism is one of the mechanisms by which this asymmetry
follows Black women physicists into their professional lives. Because
white empiricism contravenes core tenets of modern physics (e.g.,
covariance and relativity), it negatively impacts scientific outcomes
and harms the people who are othered.
White empiricism comes to
dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully
shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical
and social phenomena. Based primarily on their own experiences, white
men, who are the dominant demographic in physics, construct the figure
of the observer to exclude anyone who does not share the attending
social and intellectual identities and beliefs. These beliefs can limit
investigations of what constitutes a reasonable physical theory, whether
the scientific method should be brought to bear on this physical
theory, and the capacity to understand how incidents of racism disrupt
the potential for objective discourse. Essentially, white empiricism
involves a predominantly white, predominantly male professional
community selectively failing to apply the scientific method to
themselves while using “scientific” evaluation to strengthen the
barriers to Black women’s entry into physics. White empiricism is
therefore a form of antiempiricism masquerading as an empirical approach
to the natural world. By denying agency to Black women in discussions
of racism, white empiricism predetermines the experiences of Black women
in physics.
To provide an example of the role that white
empiricism plays in physics, I discuss the current debate in string
theory about postempiricism, motivated in part by a question: why are
string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to
racial hegemony? I believe the answer is that knowledge production in
physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists.
Contingentists focus on top-down social forces, or the contingency
associated with laboratory instrumentation; in this way, they challenge
any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.1
Scientists are also typically monists—believers in the idea that there
is only one science—who, rather than feeling burdened to prove there is
only one science, expect contingentists to prove that there can be more
than one (Soler 2015b). This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix.
wirepoints | “As recently as Thursday,” according to WGN, Sarah Chambers “tweeted
to rally special education teachers not to return to work Monday because
it’s unsafe. Just a few hours earlier, Chambers posted a picture on
Instagram that appears to show her pool side in Puerto Rico and talking
about going to Old San Juan for seafood.”
According to WGN, the post also mentions she previously had COVID,
got a negative test result and consulted her doctor before traveling.
Chambers, you may remember, was part of that solidarity mission last year by CTU members to communist Venezuela we wrote about.
At the time, she said on Twitter that “The USA does not want people
to realize that another world is possible with justice and love.”
Chambers also wrote on Twitter that the delegation hadn’t seen a single
homeless person during their trip. No mention that housing might be
plentiful because over three million people have fled – about 10% of the
population.
In 2017, the school district fired her for, as reported by WTTW,
“leaving her own classroom to barge
into classrooms of other teachers and issue her own instructions to
students, interfering with statewide tests, and participating in a
scheme to remove and transport students without any chaperone who had
cleared criminal background checks, without alerting school officials
which students would be missing from class and which students were
unaccounted for….”
However, she claimed she was fired in retaliation for other matters and the CTU got her reinstated, the union says.
Props to Ben Bradley at WGN for catching this story.
gatestoneinstitute |According
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Over 81,000 drug
overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12 months ending in
May 2020, the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a
12-month period..." That is equal to one-third of the total number of
deaths supposedly attributed to the COVID pandemic.
Deaths equal to one-third of the pandemic? From another cause? Where
is the wall-to-wall news reporting on that public health crisis? Why
aren't people marching in the streets demanding action and justice for
that threat to human life? Since Joe Biden was elected president, we
have not heard a peep from Antifa and BLM -- maybe they can take up the
drug overdose cause?
In October, federal law enforcement officials arrested Mexican
General Salvador Cienfuegos as he arrived in Los Angeles for a family
vacation. Cienfuegos was accused of taking bribes and protecting cartel
leaders when he served as defense minister from 2012 to 2018. A month
later, the U.S. dropped charges and returned Cienfuegos to Mexico.
"Foreign policy considerations" was the official lie covering for the
reversal of what might have been an incremental step forward towards
legitimate justice in America's decades-long, losing "War on Drugs."
Every thinking person who has contemplated the drug corruption crisis
confronting America knows that absolutely nothing will happen to
Cienfuegos now that he is back in Mexico. He gets off Scot-free, other
than having to vacation in places other than the United States.
The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the Cienfuegos debacle, noted:
"Gen. Cienfuegos's return puts an uncomfortable spotlight
on Mexico's judicial system. More than nine in 10 crimes are never
reported or punished, according to the country's statistics agency."
Let us look more deeply at the drug crisis we face at the level of
families and communities. We can get lost looking at national overdose
numbers and corrupt foreign generals. Dirty cops are killing Americans,
directly and indirectly. In a border community like El Paso, the Mexican
cartels have an insidious, silent and powerful control that few people
wish to acknowledge or accept -- that includes a largely compliant news
media who usually report what happens, but rarely, if ever, ask "Why?"
or "How can this go on, decade after decade, without accountability or
resolution?"
More than seven years of ongoing investigation by Judicial Watch in
that region has revealed law enforcement corruption that ranges on a
scale from merely turning a blind eye; to marked law enforcement
vehicles being used to move burlap bales of marijuana; all the way up to
senior officials communicating with and tipping-off cartel members
about planned operations. That is what some of the supposedly "good
guys" are doing.
This is a dark, dangerous and threatening side of life in American
communities across the country. The drugs do not just materialize out of
thin air in Dayton, OH, or Rockville Centre, NY, or Whitefish, MT. If a
population is dying from overdoses that is one-third as large as the
COVID pandemic -- and we don't see, don't hear about it, and apparently
don't really care about it -- what does that say about us?
Tens of thousands of law enforcement officers, billions of taxpayer
dollars, nearly fifty years -- and the highest overdose rate in history?
It is terribly unpopular to blame law enforcement, especially when they
are being unfairly attacked by the militant fringe elements like Antifa
and various lunatic municipal officials seeking to defund them -- but
cleaning house within various agencies and increasing police pay would
go a long way towards thwarting our greatest domestic threat.
A year ago, President Donald J. Trump declared he would name Mexican
Cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. He paused his decision, and
then tabled it, based on assurances from Mexican President Andrés Manuel
López Obrador and a reported wave of resistance from his own cabinet.
The incoming Biden administration has the cartels virtually
"high-fiving" each other -- they know a Biden administration will do
nothing to stop cartel dominance and control of the US-Mexico border.
What law enforcement officer is going to put his life on the line for a
Biden administration policy? None. Unless there is an unforeseen and
dramatic positive change in law enforcement at the federal, state and
municipal levels, expect more of our dirtiest little secret for years to
come and a continuation of the United States' longest war.
NYTimes | While traffickershave
also continued to try to push drugs through ports of entry, the
American authorities have detected at least one particularly dramatic
shift in tactics in the profile of smugglers caught at those border
crossings.
Before the pandemic, the
cartels would frequently hire foreign-born smugglers who would cross the
border from Mexico into the United States under the pretense of tourism
or a shopping trip.
But because the
pandemic-related border restrictions have blocked entry to many foreign
visitors, the trafficking groups have been recruiting a greater number
of American citizens and Green Card holders, who are not bound by the
restrictions, to smuggle drugs into the United States, American
officials said. These smugglers are most often discovered with the
narcotics hidden inside their bodies, officials said.
Guadalupe
Ramírez Jr., director of field operations for Customs and Border
Protection in Arizona, recalled that when he was director of the ports
of entry in Nogales from 2009 to 2016, “internal carriers,” as such
smugglers are known by border officials, were rare.
“Now
it seems like almost on a daily basis we’re getting internal carriers,”
and most are American citizens or permanent residents, Mr. Ramírez
said.
The challenges of getting drugs
into the United States also appears to have spurred the development of
clandestine laboratories in the United States for the production of
synthetic drugs, said Celina Realuyo, professor at the William J. Perry
Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at the National Defense
University in Washington.
And law
enforcement agencies around the world have also detected an acceleration
in the use of cryptocurrency and the so-called dark web for drug
transactions and money laundering during the pandemic, she said.
“They’re
adjusting,” Ms. Realuyo said of the drug trafficking groups. “They
already had kind of a wherewithal, and what they’re doing is they’re
just adapting quicker to their context.”
Mayor John Cooper called the blast on Second Avenue
an attack on infrastructure. The effects of that attack are sure to
ripple through the region for weeks, as the telecom giant scrambles to
restore services while maintaining the integrity of an active
investigation site teeming with federal agents.
State
and local officials and experts say the fact that a multistate region
could be brought to its knees by a single bombing is a "wake-up call,"
exposing vulnerabilities many didn't know existed and predicting it
would lead to intense conversations about the future.
The
bombing and the damage to the AT&T office was a "single-point of
failure," said Douglas Schmidt, the Cornelius Vanderbilt professor of
computer science at Vanderbilt University.
NYPost | Thousands of residents in Aspen, Colorado were left without heat
during near-zero degree weather after vandals — possibly green activists
from an environmental group — attacked the city’s gas system,
authorities said Monday.
The vandals apparently attacked three separate Black Hills Energy gas
lines, one in Aspen and two in Pitkin County, leaving around 3,500
residents shivering in their homes Saturday night, The Aspen Times reported.
The Aspen Police Department said the words “Earth first!” were
written on one pipe near Aspen. It’s unclear if the environmental group
“Earth First!” was behind the vandalism.
Aspen assistant police chief Bill Linn believes the vandals would
have to be familiar with the gas system to pull off the scheme.
“They tampered with flow lines,” Linn said. “They turned off gas lines.”
Police scrambled to distribute thousands of space heaters to
residents while Black Hill Energy continued working Tuesday to restore
the gas.
FT | Baysean statistical models, (so-called AI) inherently amplify bias of whatever data
set they have been modeled on. Moreover, this amplification is exponential,
meaning the more you use AI, the more biased it will get via self
learning. Since it is impossible to eliminate bias completely in a
training dataset, any AI system will eventually become extremely biased.
Self correcting mechanisms suffer from the same problem since they
too are AI based, you end up with a system that is unstable and will always
eventually become extremely biased based on even minute impossible to
eradicate biases in its initial data set.
“F*** the algorithm!” became one of the catchphrases of 2020, encapsulating the fear that humanity is being subordinated to technology. Whether it was British school students complaining about their A level grades or Stanford Medical Centre staff highlighting the unfairness of vaccination priorities, people understandably rail against the idea of faceless machines stripping humans of agency.
This is an issue that will only grow in prominence as artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous in the computer systems that power our modern world.
To some extent, these fears are based on a misconception. Humans are still the ones who exercise judgment and algorithms do exactly what they are designed to do: discriminate. Whether they do so in a positive or a negative way depends on the humans who write these algorithms and interpret and act upon their output.
It may on occasion be convenient for a government official or an executive to blame some “rogue” algorithm for their mistakes. But we should not be fooled by this rhetoric. We should hold those who deploy AI systems legally and morally accountable for the outcomes they produce.
Artificial intelligence is no more than a technological tool, like any other. It is a powerful general purpose technology, akin to electricity, that enables other technologies to work more effectively. But it is not a property in its own right and has no agency. AI would sound a lot less frightening if we were to relabel it as computational statistics.
That said, companies, researchers and regulators should pay particular attention to the feedstock used in these AI systems: data. Researchers have shown that partial data sets used to power modern AI systems can bake in societal inequities and racial and sexual prejudices. This issue has been highlighted at Google following the departure of Timnit Gebru, an ethical researcher, who claimed she was dismissed after warning of the dangers of large-scale language generation systems that rely on historic data taken from the internet.
theverge | It’s not the first time Boston Dynamics has shown off its robots’ dancing skills:
the company showcased a video of its Spot robot doing the Running Man
to “Uptown Funk” in 2018. but the new video takes things to another
level, with the Atlas robot tearing it up on the dance floor: smoothly
running, jumping, shuffling, and twirling through different moves.
Things get even more incredible as more robots file out,
prancing around in the kind of coordinated dance routine that puts my
own, admittedly awful human dancing to shame. Compared to the jerky
movements of the 2016 iteration of Atlas, the new model almost looks like a CGI creation.
Boston Dynamics was recently purchased by Hyundai,
which bought the robotics firm from SoftBank in a $1.1 billion deal.
The company was originally founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it became known for its
dog-like quadrupedal robots (most notably, the DARPA-funded BigDog, a
precursor to the company’s first commercial robot, Spot.) It was bought
by Alphabet’s X division in 2013, and then by Softbank in 2017.
While the Atlas and Handle robots featured here are still
just research prototypes, Boston Dynamics has recently started selling
the Spot model to any company for the considerable price of $74,500. But can you really put a price on creating your own personal legion of boogieing robot minions?
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
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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 ...
