The best of both worlds ...

Yours truly has often thought about Brave New World and 1984 as the first used soma and eugenics to sculpt a world most pleasant to behold if one is an Alpha while the other waxed 

"poetic" about the all consuming push for goevernment to accrew power at all costs with 24/7 surveillance and a draconian porlitical environment from hell enforced by the Thought Police, something beginning to happen in the land of the brave and home of the free thanks to the machinations of a far right sc bent on taking away our fundamental rights using religion as the raison diet as to why this state of affairs should happen. Seems the two had a personal connect as well, which is most appropriate, as their take on the 20th century was both profound and disturbing at the same time.

In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher.

Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.

Huxley starts off the letter praising the book, describing it as “profoundly important.” He continues, “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.”

Then Huxley switches gears and criticizes the book, writing, “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.” 

From this writer's perspective, both approaches to a controlled society could work in tandem by taking the "best" of both to create the "perfect" government for us rubes but reality always play the joker with its biggest one being GW, an onrushing catastrophe of our own making.

GAIA

Eye candy of the galactic kind. :)

It’s here! The third and largest data release (DR3) from the ESA’s Gaia Observatory has officially been made public. As promised, the DR3 contains new and improved details for almost two billion stars in our galaxy, including the chemical compositions, temperatures, colors, masses, ages, and the velocities at which stars move. The release coincided with a virtual press event hosted by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) on June 13th, which featured ESA officials and guest speakers who addressed the significance of the new data.

Much of this information consists of newly released spectroscopy data, a technique in which starlight is split into the color spectrum and analyzed to determine how it is being shifted. This technique is known as radial velocity (aka. Doppler Spectroscopy), where light is shifted towards the red or blue end of the spectrum (i.e., redshift and blueshift) based on whether the object is moving towards or away from Earth (respectively). Astrophysicists use this technique to determine how a star is moving relative to our own and also for the sake of detecting exoplanets.

How cool is that? :)

Pro Life

 

The Blade Runner

Days of future past brought into the present applies with the gutting of Roe and the intent of the far right SC to push ever onward to limit the rights of women in all things related to abortion including invasion of privacy, access to contraception and the enforcement of legal actions brought against anyone involved or thought to be involved in possibly aiding a woman to get an abortion. With this in mind, the notion of The BladeRunner becoming all too real rings true.

To whit ...

The Bladerunner (also published as The Blade Runner) is a 1974 science fiction novel by Alan E. Nourse, about underground medical services and smuggling.

And this ...

“We won’t go back”—it’s an inadequate rallying cry, only prompted by events that belie its message. But it is true in at least one sense. The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth. Those who argue that this decision won’t actually change things much—an instinct you’ll find on both sides of the political divide—are blind to the ways in which state-level anti-abortion crusades have already turned pregnancy into punishment, and the ways in which the situation is poised to become much worse.

In the states where abortion has been or will soon be banned, any pregnancy loss past an early cutoff can now potentially be investigated as a crime. Search histories, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment data, information from period-tracking apps—prosecutors can examine all of it if they believe that the loss of a pregnancy may have been deliberate. Even if prosecutors fail to prove that an abortion took place, those who are investigated will be punished by the process, liable for whatever might be found.

The Thought Police goes prime time.

Addendum ... CNN senior legal analyst Laura Coates agreed, saying that the Supreme Court's ruling will spark "legal chaos."

"You're going to have interstate battles about how you're going to enforce these laws," she said, adding that there have been examples from history where "wrongly decided decision" have been overturned.

"...I can't help but wonder, how do you intend for these laws to be enforced?" Coates continued. "Is there no doctor-patient confidentiality provision any longer? ... Are you going to be able to have access to medical records or interrogate people in the office of the receptionist or the doctor about someone's menstruation? The womb is actually the site of the so-called crime, so whatever law would be enforced would have to be intrusive and invasive in trying to figure out what has happened there."

An existential threat

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images

The three liberals on the court, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, issued a joint dissent. They wrote that the court had long held a balance between the many differing opinions of Americans on abortion, issuing a variety of decisions that allowed some limits to be set on the procedure but not allowing an undue burden to be placed upon a woman who might seek it.

“Today, the Court discards that balance. It says that from the very moment of fertilization, 

a woman has no rights to speak of,” the justices wrote.

They're not done. Privacy, sodomy laws, same sex marriage and contraception are next along with a nation wide ban on abortion. As stated before, the ramifications of gutting Roe is an existential threat to America. 

In a terrifying concurring opinion to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the case the court used as a pretext to overturn Roe, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that now that the court’s conservative goon squad has done away with the national right to an abortion, it should think about scrapping the rulings that protect contraception, same-sex marriage, and same-sex sexual activity. Arguing that all decisions that previously fell under “due process precedents”—a concept he claims is an “oxymoron” that “lack[s] any basis in the Constitution”—are bunk, Thomas writes: “For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” Griswold was the landmark decision in which the court said that the Constitution protects the right of married couples to buy and use contraception. Lawrence, which struck down a Texas sodomy law, made same-sex sexual activity legal. Obergefell said same-sex couples have the legal right to marry.

Any questions?

Gilead ...

 

Demonstrators outside of the Supreme Court in May.Credit...Kenny Holston for The New York Times

Gilead is no longer fiction thanks to the SC gutting Roe on 6/24/22. The next steps to complete the job will include going after privacy to enforce the ban using cell phones and paid informants and vigilantes to make it happen and to curtail contraception as it's against the dictates of this religion-driven court. As stated in BRT, this is an existential threat to this once great nation as now 50% of the populace is now enslaved. Thank John Roberts, Bush I & II, Trump and Mitch in creating the worst SC in history.

The dark age has arrived ... 

The decision by six justices to end the constitutional right to abortion — overturning landmark rulings like Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey — has cast a renewed spotlight on what they said on the topic during their confirmation hearings.

Following the standard playbook of most nominees, they all avoided directly stating how they would rule in either case, typically sticking to expressing their belief in the importance of precedent, the legal doctrine of “stare decisis.”

Read the rest of the NYTimes post to see how the 6 systematically lied to the American people. 

11 points & counting ...

Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh attend the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol Building on February 5, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

For quite some time, BRT has stated the Roberts SC is the worst in history. Seems the American populace agrees as the far right court's recent decisions regarding guns and religion reek of ideology, not wisdom and we have even seen the likely gutting of Roe by an institution losing credibility 24/7.

Roe is history ... 6/24/22

It's almost like if you steal a supreme court seat to make decisions that are wildly unpopular based on extraordinarily flimsy justifications you will lose the deference and respect that has historically been granted to you - Leah Greenberg @Leahgreenb

A new poll out Thursday reveals that the confidence the American people have in the U.S. Supreme Court is at an all-time low—dropping 11 points since the right-wing majority took hold last year and amid major rulings, including the expected overturning of Roe vs. Wade, unpopular with the voting public.

Just 25% of Americans have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the Supreme Court, down from 36% one year ago.

"Many institutions have suffered a decline in confidence this year, but the 11-point drop in confidence in the Supreme Court is roughly double what it is for most institutions that experienced a decline."

The poll was taken from June 1-20, about a month after a draft opinion was leaked showing that the right-wing majority voted earlier this year to overturn Roe, a ruling that would immediately end access to legal abortion care for millions of Americans in 26 states and likely reduce access in states that protect abortion rights. 

Thank Bush I & II, Trump and Mitch for creating this dumpster fire of a SC.

Not even a dust mote ...

This view of a portion of the DREaM simulated galaxy catalog provides a snippet of sky that might correspond, statistically, with what James Webb expects to see. This particular snippet showcases an incredibly rich region of relative nearby galaxies clustered together, which could provide Webb with an unprecedented view of galaxies magnified by strong and weak gravitational lensing. Even this simulated view, however, omits the majority of galaxies: too faint and distant to even be seen with JWST, the Nancy Roman Telescope, or any hitherto proposed present or future mission. (Credit: Nicole Drakos, Bruno Villasenor, Brant Robertson, Ryan Hausen, Mark Dickinson, Henry Ferguson, Steven Furlanetto, Jenny Greene, Piero Madau, Alice Shapley, Daniel Stark, Risa Wechsler)

We're not even a dust mote in a vast reality we will never fully understand. As tech advances, the size of the universe/multiverse gets ever larger to the degree the esteemed Carl Sagan could have never imagined when writing Billions & Billions back in 1997. 

The Universe is a vast place, filled with more galaxies than we’ve ever been able to count, even in just the portion we’ve been able to observe. Some 40 years ago, Carl Sagan taught the world that there were hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, and perhaps as many as 100 billion galaxies within the observable Universe. Although he never said it in his famous television series, Cosmos, the phrase “billions and billions” has become synonymous with his name, and also with the number of stars we think of as being inherent to each galaxy, as well as the number of galaxies contained within the visible Universe.

But when it comes to the number of galaxies that are actually out there, we’ve learned a number of important facts that have led us to revise that number upwards, and not just by a little bit. Our most detailed observations of the distant Universe, from the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, gave us an estimate of 170 billion galaxies. A theoretical calculation from a few years ago — the first to account for galaxies too small, faint, and distant to be seen — put the estimate far higher: at 2 trillion. But even that estimate is too low. There ought to be at least 6 trillion, and perhaps more like 20 trillion, galaxies, if we’re ever able to count them all. Here’s how we got there.

This snippet from a structure-formation simulation, with the expansion of the Universe scaled out, represents billions of years of gravitational growth in a dark matter-rich Universe. Note that filaments and rich clusters, which form at the intersection of filaments, arise primarily due to dark matter; normal matter plays only a minor role. However, the majority of galaxies that form are faint and far away, rendering them invisible within the limitations of our current telescopes. Credit: Ralf Kaehler and Tom Abel (KIPAC)/Oliver Hahn)

Read Big Think's detailed piece to see why we are not even a dust mote in the grand scheme of things.

NLP ...

Portrait of William Shakespeare (Wikimedia Commons)

To be or not to be, To err as human, two famous quotes, one from the esteemed WS and the second, a divine offering from Alexander Pope, seem most appropriate given the advances AI is making regarding all things relating to writing and art. 

To whit ...

Nay, nay, I say! This cannot be, 

That machines should e'er surpass our art.

We are the masters, them the slaves,

And thus it ever shall be so!

They learn, ‘tis true, but they learn

Only what we bid them learn, no more.

They cannot understand the heart

Or beauty of our words, you see.

So let us not give in to these

Machines - they’ll never be as good

As we are at creating art.

If that reads a little like Shakespeare defending humans’ innate superiority over artificial intelligence hundreds of years ahead of his time, it’s not.

But it is something almost as far out: an AI system trained to express itself like the bard. The AI assimilated his style and perspective by ingesting his plays – educating itself to give an opinion on AI creativity in iambic pentameter.

“Shakespeare” was speaking as part of a debate held in the University of Oxford Union featuring AI versions of classic writers and literary characters. 

Tech never sleeps but we already know that but a new player is in town regarding the ability of AI to get close up and personal to art thanks to NLP, Natural Language Processing.

The power of NLP

This creation deploys a technology known as natural language processing (NLP), in which a computer can be “trained” on millions of pages of classic texts and other online content to interact with a human user – either by prompt or voice recognition. Various AIs like these have been created.

Debating pyrotechnics notwithstanding, AI is nowhere near the finished article yet; still a toddler at best, though growing up fast. Whether or not sentience happens, we as a society will have to grapple with these technologies and their opportunities and implications.

Frontispiece - An Essay on Criticism

Theocracy 101

 Justice Sotomayor -- YouTube screenshot

Theocracy 101 looms, thanks to the worst SC in history.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday warned that the court's right-wing majority had further eroded the nation's bedrock laws separating church and government when it ruled that Maine must include religious schools in a state-run tuition program.

"Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation," wrote Sotomayor in the minority's dissent of the 6-3 decision.

"Forcing American taxpayers to fund private religious education... erodes the foundation of our democracy and harms students."

Dangerville to the 1st Amendment looms without question ...

The schools named in the case aim to instill "a Christian worldview" in its students and are openly discriminatory against "homosexuals, individuals who are transgender, and non-Christians," according to a legal filing.

Under Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling, said one legal expert, those institutions and others like them now have "a right to taxpayer funding."

Constitution of United States of America 1789 (rev. 1992)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Well, if this ruling stands, taxing religious organizations comes next, right?