Illusion & Reality - The Art of War

A truly excellent article regarding Trump, racism and the deep state titled Strip and Flip: Democracy in a Cage - Robert C. Koehler, Reader Supported News echoes what yours truly has talked about in BRT for quite a long time as power elites have run every country in the world since the beginning of time, including ours.

Whatever else delivered Trump to our doorstep, the most undeniable element in his “victory” was the Electoral College. It’s hardly adequate to call this institution obsolete; its existence is the manifestation of racist hell.

“. . . to protect their interests in a nation where they were being rapidly outnumbered, Southerners got an Electoral College that included a ‘3/5ths clause,’” Fitrakis and Wasserman write. “Slaves (who could not vote themselves) were counted for 3/5ths of a vote for president and in establishing congressional districts.”

This is American history stripped naked, its basic lie revealed. Slavery wasn’t simply a regrettable sideshow. Repression and dehumanization — the creation of an “other” — smolder at the nation’s core. Because of slavery and institutionalized racism, impoverished white people could still feel good about themselves — and there would be no mixed-race uprisings against the status quo, which is still the case.

In other words, democracy is only acceptable if it can be controlled by those already in power, and the essence of this control is to ensure that the conditions benefiting the powerful are not seriously threatened. This condition has not gone away. American democracy remains in a cage, which means “we the people” — and our will to create a better world — also remain in a cage.

Interestingly enough, in an indirect way, Koehler channels the great Paddy Chayefsky in his astute take on nooze, elections and the organized bamboozling on the part of the deep state, of our grossly ignorant populace.

To this I would add mainstream media contempt for anyone who questions the election results sanctified on Election Night by TV anchorpersons, no matter that they differ significantly from exit poll results. I would also add the extraordinary superficiality of presidential elections: the systematic jettisoning of populist candidates, such as Bernie Sanders, from contention, and the avoidance of real issues (e.g., the military budget) in the debate, creating a huge public-interest void in the process.

But there is hope.

But all of these extraordinary efforts to keep democracy caged make me believe that the country — and the world — are on the brink of profound change. Most of us want a world free of poverty and war and would vote for its creation if we could.

Fitrakis and Wasserman make the following recommendations: “We need to win universal automatic voter registration; transparent voter rolls; a four-day national holiday for voting; ample locations for all citizens to conveniently cast ballots; universal hand-counted paper ballots; automatic recounts free to all candidates; abolition of the Electoral College; an end to gerrymandering; a ban on corporate money in our campaigns.”

Copy that. :)

Paddy Chayefsky

Seems about right ... but.

Although yours truly firmly believes that no one can predict the future due to the vagaries of quantum mechanics and chaos, one can make educated guesses and the guesstimate on when AI takes over all of our jobs as per ScienceAlert seems about right ... but.

And just in case you think you'll play it smart and develop the AI that is going to take over the world, the experts think there's a slim chance that machines will be the ones developing AI within half a century, and odds-on they'll be running the show in about 80 years.

The researchers set the 50 percent chance line for artificial intelligence being better at just about everything – a point they describe as High Level Machine Intelligence – in just under 50 years. At which point they think there's a likelihood that AI will be capable of doing just about any job you can imagine by 2140.

I'm betting it will take less than 80 regarding machines designing machines. When that happens, uncertainty becomes the watchword.

It gets better.

The experts are far from infallible. They predicted that AI would be better than humans at Go by about 2027. (This was in 2015, remember.) In fact, Google’s DeepMind subsidiary has already developed an artificial intelligence capable of beating the best humans. That took two years rather than 12. It’s easy to think that this gives the lie to these predictions.

I rest my case.

Click here to get the in depth paper on said topic.

Sleight of hand

Astounding sleight of hand without question. Amazing to the max.

Passing Thru

A short clip showing the comings and goings of the Westport, CT train station along with related environs. Enjoy.

The path to Giedi Prime

The path to Giedi Prime is nigh according to Trump, the avatar of dirty, obsolete tech and the arch druid denier of the importance of science in a once great country known as America.

A large number of climate experts believe the Paris Climate Accord does not go nearly far enough in addressing the crisis of abrupt anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD).

Nevertheless, in what is clearly both a symbolic move and a nod to his fossil fuel backers, Donald Trump will be pulling the US out of the agreement, according to several reports today.

The US, along with nearly 200 other countries, agreed to voluntarily reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in 2015. Interestingly, given the ongoing Russia scandal that is plaguing the White House on a daily basis now, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement will make the US and Russia the only industrialized countries that reject taking action to mitigate ACD.

Trump has claimed that ACD is a "hoax," despite the fact that 97 percent of the global scientific community agrees that humans are the cause of our warming planet. The majority of the remaining 3 percent of the scientific community has been shown to be taking funding from the fossil fuel industry.

Trump's move displays a callous disregard for the future of life on Earth. A recently published study showed that the depletion of dissolved oxygen in Earth's oceans is occurring much faster than previously believed. Hence, ACD is now recreating the conditions that caused the worst mass extinction event on Earth, the Permian mass extinction that took place approximately 250 million years ago and annihilated 90 percent of life. Dramatic oceanic warming and acidification were key components of this extinction event, and these conditions align with what we are seeing today.

Any questions?

Concept Artist - Alex Tornberg

Juno Rocks :)

Juno's now a prime time player. Awesome! :)

A Set of 5

Flower Moon

Light out of Darkness

The Power of 1

Ready to Fly

Channeling Voodoo Child

Funnies yet again

It's a hoax.

It's all about the money ... for the military

But not for Ryan. 

An Inconvenient Truth

Filling the swamp.

Random Sightings

From the Flower Moon to the Bloomin Metric and Redding's Memorial Day Parade, the arrival of summer in CT is nigh. Enjoy.

Taking the Long View

ELT - Awesome tech, awesome science to come.