Only the 6th ...

 

Santos was expelled from Congress on 12 December, and seems to be determined
to take others down on his way out. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Actually hate to see him go. :)

Well, the saga of the esteemed George Santos has ended with his expulsion from congress, only the 6th who have achieved this "honored" distinction, which says volumes about just how craven this institution truly is. If one was a fly on a wall, able to see the inherent corruption of those bought and paid for "representatives" who supposedly represent us, one would soon find out Santos lacked the brains and guile to hide the monies given to him by the real owners of the country so eloquently voiced by the late great George Carlin.

Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., leaves the Capitol after being expelled from the House of Representatives, Friday, Dec. 1, 2023, in Washington. The House has voted to expel Santos following a critical ethics report on his conduct that included converting campaign donations for his own use, making him just the sixth member in the chamber’s history to be ousted by his colleagues. Expulsion requires support from two-third of the House. 

How George Santos responded to being fact-checked on 14 of his biggest lies

Santos told reporters after his expulsion he was done with Congress.

“Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place,”
he told reporters outside the US Capitol after the vote.

Needless to say, he'll be on TV as he's now a celebrity where there's no such thing as bad PR. :)

Time to cull the herd, right?

Two thousand deer are mowing through native plants on Catalina, allowing flammable grasses and shrubs to proliferate, an island conservationist said.

Herbivorous rats, you know, the beautiful white tailed deer of Bambi fame, are hardy and hungry to the max, Living in Fairfield county, yours truly knows what happens when any animal proliferates beyond reason in terms of habitat loss, something now happening on Santa Catalina Island, an environment unique in terms of the native species that have lived there for thousands of years. 

Santa Catalina Island | Date: 2019-03-30 Sensor: MSI on Sentinel-2B Resolution: 

10m RGB Composites: True color, Band 4-3-2 Image

Santa Catalina Island is the crown jewel of the Channel Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Southern California that is so biodiverse it is often called “North America’s Galápagos.”

A rugged mountain jutting out of the sea, Catalina, as it is commonly known, is home to more than 60 plants and critters found nowhere else on earth. Plump quails and miniature foxes unique to the island scurry across the dirt roads that wind through scrubby hillsides. Thick pillows of fog roll onshore and coat the leaves of rare plants with dew. Bald eagles swoop far above the glittering Pacific.

But the habitat is suffering because much of the native flora has been ravaged by animals shipped here over the past century for ranching, hunting and filming movies.

To Lauren Dennhardt, the lead conservationist on the island, there is only one way to save Catalina for future generations: Kill all the deer.

There's a reason why if one does the research.

A rugged mountain jutting out of the sea, Catalina, as it is commonly known, 

is home to more than 60 plants and critters found nowhere else on earth.

But the habitat is suffering because much of the native flora has been ravaged by animals shipped here over the past century for ranching, hunting and filming movies.

The contours of the island were also seen as prime ground for hunting, and 18 mule deer from California forests were introduced nearly a century ago. Now, 2,000 deer are mowing through the native plants here.

That has eroded soil, depleted the food supply for other animals and, most alarming, allowed flammable shrubs and grasses to proliferate, said Dr. Dennhardt, lowering her window while driving to grab a fistful of tumbleweed-like brush growing on a Catalina hillside. These nonnative plants, she said, could create conditions akin to those that fueled the recent catastrophic fire in Maui.

Outrage has ensued over the prospect of gunning down deer from the sky.

Time to cull the herd if you want to save the habitat, right?

Carpet bombing Gaza ... yet again

(Photo Credit: John Macdougall/AFP)

At least 21 people have been killed since the Israeli army restarted its war on Gaza during the early hour of 1 December, after a one-week pause that saw the release 

of dozens of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners.

Carpet bombing Gaza, designed to eliminate Hamas, will not work. It didn't work in Algeria, Nam, Iraq or Afghanistan as indigenous fighters don't have to win, just outlast. IMHO, Israel is entering into an existential crisis of their own making, something bound to happen when 800,000 Palestinians were driven out of Palestine in 1948 by Begin and significant others in an ethnic cleansing operation the Palestinians call the NAKBA. People driven off their land never forget, something the Israelis are beginning to find out in no uncertain terms as the Palestinians will not give up, no matter what the cost may be.

“Amid the return to combat, we stress the government of Israel is committed to achieving the goals of the war — releasing our hostages, eliminating Hamas, and ensuring that Gaza can never again threaten the people of Israel,” the statement adds.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir took to social media on Friday morning to say Hamas should be destroyed “without compromises, without deals,” adding that the renewed bombardment of the world's largest open-air prison must be conducted at “maximum power.”

This will not end well.

Mr. K ...

Gotta bust this one out today

He's finally dead. Brilliant, ruthless and a decorated war criminal, the death of Cambodia was the arch creation of Mr. K, the model Secretary of State who orchestrated Nam for Nixon, a catastrophe of biblical proportions, based on a lie.

LONGTIME FOREVER WARS READERS will remember that back in June of 2022 I mentioned a "very long obituary I recently finished for a major magazine" about Henry Kissinger. The strange thing about preparing an obituary of Kissinger is that while you write it, you have no choice but to think: please don't let Kissinger die before I'm done. But last night my wife ran over to me phone-first to show me that he had finally died. So, finally, here is "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies." If the piece feels like it takes too long to reach its end, well, I'm just marrying form and content. 

Rolling Stone editor Noah Shachtman, twice my boss and forever my friend, commissioned this piece from me a while ago. After I wrote a Donald Rumsfeld obituary for him at The Daily Beast in 2021, it only made sense. I knew from more than 13 years of working with Noah that he wouldn't restrain me from using plain language like "war criminal." His headline for the Rumsfeld one was "Donald Rumsfeld, Killer of 400,000 People, Dies Peacefully." (The Kissinger one was a rare headline that I wrote.) 

A truly great obit ...

Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory. 

That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be. - Spencer Ackerman 

Addendum: Yet another take on Mr. K. Well worth reading IMHO.

Michael Avedon/August

Henry Kissinger, the Hypocrite

From 1969 to 1977, Mr. Kissinger established himself as one of the most powerful functionaries in history. For a portion of that time, he was the only person ever to serve concurrently as national security adviser and secretary of state, two very different jobs that simultaneously made him responsible for shaping and carrying out American foreign policy. If his German Jewish origins and accented English set him apart, the ease with which he wielded power made him a natural avatar for an American national security state that grew and gained momentum through the 20th century, like an organism that survives by enlarging itself.

Mr. Kissinger was not uncomfortable with that dynamic. For him, credibility was rooted in what you did more than what you stood for, even when those actions rendered American concepts of human rights and international law void. He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. That bombing — often indiscriminately massacring civilians — did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.

It is ironic that this brand of realism reached its apex at the height of the Cold War, a conflict that was ostensibly about ideology. From the side of the free world, Mr. Kissinger backed genocidal campaigns — by Pakistan against Bengalis and by Indonesia against the East Timorese. In Chile he has been accused of helping to lay the groundwork for a military coup that led to the death of Salvador Allende, the elected leftist president, while ushering in a terrible period of autocratic rule. The generous defense is that Mr. Kissinger represented an ethos that saw the ends (the defeat of the Soviet Union and revolutionary Communism) as justifying the means. But for huge swaths of the world, this mind-set carried a brutal message that America has often conveyed to its own marginalized populations: We care about democracy for us, not for them. Shortly before Mr. Allende’s victory, Mr. Kissinger said, “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Any questions?

Arc Line ...

Arc Line

Depicted above is a delicate arc of ice with the background removed to show how profoundly beautiful nature can be. What's also obvious is just how transitory this arc of ice is because one day later, it was gone. Now, look at our economy, driven by code and AI, abstracted to the nth degree with the stock market forever going into the stratosphere until it doesn't, something slowly beginning to happen thanks to the inevitable fact, resources on our finite planet keeping us alive are not infinite, which means the economy of the world will soon revolve around said resources, a physics driven reality not even AI and the endless manipulation of money can change as man moves further into the 21st century.

The era of financialization, globalization and digitization is giving way to an era in which materials will dominate the global economic, social and political orders. Life will revolve around obtaining the basics of life rather than around marketing to consumers with discretionary income/credit to spend.

The material world is ruled by physics, chemistry and cost, not finance or politics. Humanity has already consumed / depleted the cheap, easy-to-get resources, from coal and oil to topsoil, wild fisheries and fresh water aquifers. The net result is that all resources will cost more to extract, process and transport, and these systemically higher costs manifest as inflation / loss of purchasing power: it will take more units of labor / money to buy the essentials of life, leaving fewer units of money for discretionary spending in the consumer economy and fewer units available to support additional debt.

And so it begins. - K. Vonnegut

A simple matter of division

Dinosaurs, the true story :)

Hilarious to a fault!!! Awesome says it all. Dinosaurs, the true story, rules. :)

The Treachery of Images ...

Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius. By th’ mass, and ‘tis like a camel indeed.

Hamlet. Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius. It is back’d like a weasel.

Hamlet. Or like a whale.

Polonius. Very like a whale. 

Seems Shakespeare was indirectly channeling AI, news and social media where people talk to their choir, believing almost anything as long as it aligns with one’s world view ... which brings up the notion of Deepfakes as they’re Everywhere. Just go to almost any site and see nonsense, usually in full color, residing on the right hand side or on the bottom of the web page, saying something patently ridiculous regarding a celebrity, news event or “scientific” fact, accompanied with a clickable AI graphic showing said tidbit to be “true”. One of the usuals is a huge beast found on a beach near you. 

AI generated image of Pope Francis wearing a puffy winter jacket

The Idea Dynamo

A 1923 cartoon by H.T. Webster captioned 
"In the year 2023 when all our work is done by electricity.”

Prescient to a fault, Webster’s Idea Dynamo presages the emergence of AI, the open-ended tech able to generate virtually anything of note by simply inputting, text, sound or visual  prompts as needs warrant. From "writing" research papers magically dealing with quantum mechanics to effortlessly generating detailed 3D photo-realistic art depicting something like the work seen below, AI’s changing reality 24/7 whether we like or not. 

Portret Robota Ai Fikcyjnej Pięknej Dziewczyny Z Generatywną Sztuczną Inteligencją Ai

https://pl.freepik.com/autor/scaliger99 

The Intelligence Equation

Eyes of Portia schultzi - A jumping spider supreme

Jumping spiders plan ahead to catch prey, octopuses, masters of camouflage and escape, not only use shells as houses but also as blinds to get close to their quarry, crabs. Crows solve puzzles like 7 year olds and monkeys use rocks to crack nuts but the real avatars of intelligence are the whales with the sperm whale having the largest brain on the planet, configured like ours but only bigger.

Cachalot_-_Sperm_whale_-_Drawing_by_Johann_Anderson_1746mod 2

Melville’s Moby Dick, besides being existential, is also scientific as Melville was an acute observer trying to understand how reality works or ... “Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Melville tried to answer these questions but failed because in 1851, the notion of sound, let alone, sonar, was not part of the equation nor did whalers even conceptualize why spermaceti, used to enhance echo location, existed in the sperm whale’s head in the first place.

Difficulties learning whale ...

Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles.  

An approach to sperm whale communication that integrates biology, robotics,
machine learning, and linguistics expertise

At Project CETI, Rus’s first task was to isolate sperm whale clicks from the background noise of the ocean realm. Sperm whales’ vocalizations were long compared to binary code in the way that they represent information. But they are more sophisticated than that. 

But grasping the structure of a language is not a prerequisite to speaking it—not anymore, anyway. It’s now possible for AI to take three seconds of human speech and then hold forth at length with its same patterns and intonations in an exact mimicry. In the next year or two, Raskin predicts, “we’ll be able to build this for animal communication.”

The Gift of Prometheus

Prometheus - God of forethought, fire, and crafty counsel

When reading MIT’s Technology Review's article discussing the possible emergence of super intelligent AI’s going rogue, the notion of Prometheus' gift of fire to man and Phillip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? resonate.

lya Sutskever/OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist
Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue.

60 Minutes | Geoffrey Hinton/Godfather of AI & former Google Fellow

Scott Pelley: Does humanity know what it’s doing?

Geoffrey Hinton: No. I think we’re moving into a period when for the first time ever we may have things more intelligent than us.  

Scott Pelley: You believe they can understand?

Geoffrey Hinton: Yes.

Let’s think probabilities because reality, as defined by Quantum Mechanics, is probabilistic so the concept of AI going rogue becomes a distinct possibility as we don’t know how AI works due to the fact code has to write code to enable neural nets, the analog front end of AI, to interact with the real world in real time as human programmers cannot write software in real-time to do the task at hand, an inconvenient fact the so called AI experts seem to ignore at our peril.

In essence, we don’t know where AI ‘s headed as guesstimates about predicting the future remains but a crapshoot thanks to the vagaries of reality. :)

Houston, we have a problem

 

Why is this so? Well, the smart phone, the additive love child of tech, is one reason why because its so easy to get “information” just fast enough to avoid boredom as instant gratification isn’t fast enough.

Not Thinking Things Through

Consider the exhausted Odysseus, slowly sailing toward the coast of Ithaca while sleeping next to a bag carrying all the winds save the favorable west, a gift generously given to the weary travelers by Aeolis, god of the winds. The crew, also tired from the 10 year Trojan War but all too greedy for their own good, decide to open the bag thinking there was treasure to be had, thus consigning themselves to death or enslavement when their ship is driven back into the Mediterranean when all the winds escaped from the bag, forcing Odysseus to wander the sea for another 10 years before reaching Ithaca yet again. 

Copyright & Public Domain

Yours truly has often talked about the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) with emphasis on intellectual property rights vis a vis copyright, the disaster perpetrated on the US by the late Sonny Bono (The Mickey Mouse Act) who, as California congressman, extended the length of copyright from the Founders 14 years plus one allowed extension of 14 years (if the cr holder was still alive) to life plus 70, which means Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, written in 1905, could theoretically remain outside of public domain until 2025 as Einstein died in 1955. Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, debuted in 1928. Disney died in 1966, ergo, Steamboat would not enter the PD until 2036.

Question, how many chimps does it take to write Hamlet?

As we all know, in order for AI to advance, it needs to hoover up our data, lots and lots of data. What’s better is the fact the tech giants categorically state the content acquired is theirs, not ours, thus potentially able to be copyrighted, which means, our content’s not ours. 

Google is explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot. 

A battle is brewing in the U.S. Copyright Office over artificial intelligence’s use of copyrighted material — and Big Tech is spending millions to ensure they win. “Over the last decade or more, there has been an enormous amount of investment — billions and billions of dollars — in the development of AI technologies, premised on an understanding that, under current copyright law, any copying necessary to extract statistical facts is permitted,” Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a comment to the Copyright Office. 

A Wicked Problem

In conclusion, the abuse of copyright created by Bono and the courts, combined with the abuses of the tech giants regarding who owns what when feeding their AI’s our online content means we have lost ownership of our data but more importantly, the tech giants have lost control of AI because if one doesn’t know how said tech works, then controlling same is impossible. 

Lest we forget, it’s all about the money ... yet again.

OpenAI’s then-CEO Sam Altman asked U.S. legislators to regulate artificial intelligence over safety concerns. Weeks later, he fought such regulations in Europe.

After OpenAI's Blowup, It Seems Pretty Clear That 'AI Safety' Isn't a Real Thing

In short: If the point of corporate AI safety is to protect humanity from runaway AI, then, as an effective strategy for doing that, it has effectively just flunked its first big test. That’s because it’s sorta hard to put your faith in a group of people who weren’t even capable of predicting the very predictable outcome that would occur when they fired their boss. How, exactly, can such a group be trusted with overseeing a supposedly “super-intelligent,” world-shattering technology? If you can’t outfox a gaggle of outraged investors, then you probably can’t outfox the Skynet-type entity you claim to be building. That said, I would argue we also can’t trust the craven, money-obsessed C-suite that has now reasserted its dominance. Imo, they’re obviously not going to do the right thing. So, effectively, humanity is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Addendum:  Altman's reinstated as Open AI's CEO

The Future of AI is Analog

(Lord Kelvin) William Thomson's first tide-predicting machine, 1876.

Built by A. Légé & Co., 20 Cross Street, Hatton

With the advent of digital, single purpose analog systems, like Lord Kelvin’s, (inventor of the analog computer) withered away but no longer as AI needs to handle the vagaries of the real world in real-time using neural nets, the analog construct required by AI in order to function. Digital can do the job but only at enormous cost in terms of efficiency and power, something becoming increasingly problematic as society moves further into the 21st century.

Digital counts, Analog measures.

The red sinusoid can be described by peak amplitude (1), peak-to-peak (2), RMS (3), and wavelength (4). The red and blue sinusoids have a phase difference of θ.

Using a new-age analog chip, you just express all the factors in a differential equation and type it into Achour’s compiler, which converts the equation into machine language that the chip understands. The brute force of binary code is minimized, and so is the power consumption and the heat. The HCDC is like an efficient little helper residing secretly amid the modern hardware, and it’s chip-sized, unlike the room-sized behemoths of yesteryear.

When analog computing's in place, AI will be EVERYWHERE.

Postscript ...

The World of Pretend

The Treachery of Images, 1929 by Rene Magritt

A good friend of mine wrote an incredible piece of music titled The World of Pretend detailing the career of Veronica Lake, an extremely talented women who decided to go off grid, only to be seen in the various film noir flicks she did in the 1940's. To this writer, the age we are living in indirectly relates to hers as the emergence of AI is creating an alternative reality in which we all live 24/7. With this being said, there is no morality in tech, it all depends on who's creating said tech, something we should all recognize as we move further into the twenty first century.

Same as it ever was. - Talking Heads

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Stephanie Arnett/MITTR | OPENAI (ILYA)

When reading MIT's Technology Review's article discussing the possible emergence of super intelligent AI's going rogue, the notion of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? resonates.  

Cover of first hardback edition

I’ve come to meet Sutskever, OpenAI’s cofounder and chief scientist, in his company’s unmarked office building on an unremarkable street in the Mission District of San Francisco to hear what’s next for the world-tilting technology he has had a big hand in bringing about. I also want to know what’s next for him—in particular, why building the next generation of his company’s flagship generative models is no longer the focus of his work. 

Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue.

A lot of what Sutskever says is wild. But not nearly as wild as it would have sounded just one or two years ago. As he tells me himself, ChatGPT has already rewritten a lot of people’s expectations about what’s coming, turning “will never happen” into “will happen faster than you think.”

“It’s important to talk about where it’s all headed,” he says, before predicting the development of artificial general intelligence (by which he means machines as smart as humans) as if it were as sure a bet as another iPhone: “At some point we really will have AGI. Maybe OpenAI will build it. Maybe some other company will build it.”

Let's think probabilities because reality, as defined by Quantum Mechanics, is probabilistic so the concept of AI going rogue becomes a possibility as we don’t know how AI works due to the fact code has to write code to enable neural nets, the front end of AI, to interact with the real world in real time as human programmers cannot write software in real-time to do the task at hand, an inconvenient fact the so called AI experts seem to ignore at our peril.

In essence, we don't know, in this case, where AI 's headed as guesstimates about predicting the future forever remains a crapshoot thank to, you guessed it, the vagaries of Quantum. :)

Happy T Day! :)

"If it bleeds, it leads"

President John F. Kennedy is seen shortly before his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. Associated Press

No, this piece isn't about the assassination and new findings about a possible second shooter but rather about how bad news, like war, makes money as people are morbidly curious and desirous to avoid being bored so capping on interesting tidbits, no matter how bad, is better then being bored, right?

Why this piece? Well, yours truly was one of the Satellite News Channel lead artists back in the 80's, a job that was really special as SNC was not only the beta test site of state-of-the art video tech now used by virtually every news station in the world but also, SNC was the precursor of all the 24/7 news channels running on air as we speak so ... the notion of bad news bringing in serious money to the news outlets of the world is a no brainer to me without question.

In journalism, bad news sells. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a famous industry catchphrase, which explains why violent crime, war and terrorism, and natural disasters are ubiquitous on TV news.

The fact that journalists and their employers make money from troubling events is something researchers rarely explore. But even if it seems distasteful, the link between negative news and profit is important to understand. As a media historian, I think studying this topic can shed light on the forces that shape contemporary journalism.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy 60 years ago offers a case study. After a gunman killed the president, television news offered wall-to-wall, nonstop coverage at considerable cost to the networks. This earned TV news a reputation for public-spiritedness that lasted decades.

This reputation – which may seem surprising now but was widely accepted at the time – obscured the fact that TV news would soon become enormously profitable. Those profits are due in part because awful news attracts big audiences – which remains the case today.

As televisions report news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a woman weeps in a Sears department store in Levittown, Pa.  Jack Rosen/Getty Images

It's all about the money ...

Shortly after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the TV networks demonstrated their sensitivity to the tragedy by canceling commercials and devoting all their airtime to the story for several days. CBS President Frank Stanton would later call it “the longest uninterrupted story in the history of television.” At one point, 93% of all U.S. TVs were tuned into the coverage.

Estimates vary, but the networks’ decision to forgo ads may have cost them as much as US$19 million – which is $191 million in 2023 dollars.

But no longer ...

Ultimately, the chaotic, cacophonous and confusing decade of the 1960s would end up launching the hyper-commercial media world we live in today. Chasing sensational investigative stories, such as Watergate and the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, would generate higher ratings and more advertising revenue, and turn broadcast journalists into national celebrities.

The original values animating network broadcast journalism at its inception would surrender to more lucrative formats. “60 Minutes” – a CBS News production – eventually became the most valuable network-owned programming property in the history of American television, and by the 1980s almost every local news station had launched its own “I-Team” investigations group.

End result ... Network 24/7.