Off the rails & crazed ...

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo. (Getty Images

In the country of the blind, the one eyed man is king - Erasmus

Off the rails & crazed, the land of the free and home of the brave embraces the crazies thanks to the repugs, where connects to reality no longer apply.

At the tail end of last week, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado took the stage at the Charis Christian Center's Family Camp Meeting. The event claims that, "you will hear God's Word shared through speakers who have proven God's Word," and follows the speakers' list with Acts 2:17-18: 

And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

The apocalyptic context notwithstanding, Boebert's talk made quite a splash because of her invocation of Psalm 109:8 in the context of praying for President Biden — "May his days be few and another take his office" — before laughing at the cheers of the crowd. This is certainly not a new use of that text by the GOP — Sen. David Perdue of Georgia invoked it against Obama in 2016, and it became an anti-Obama slogan featured on bumper stickers. With the passage divorced from its full context, people can laugh — but Psalm 109 is a war psalm, calling for the death of the man in question, with 109:9 reading "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." And that's the point: As with so many aspects of contemporary Christian nationalism, give the line people can nod along to, and hold back the violent context. This is a prayer for the death of the president, and it is one we can honestly say has become normal for Republicans to use about Democratic presidents.

And this ...

From the Pilgrims to QAnon: Christian nationalism is the "asteroid coming for democracy"

John Eliot, (1604-1690), American Puritan minister and missionary, preaching to the Algonquian Indians. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

In "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy," Gorski and Perry argue that in the years around 1690 — when Puritan colonists began envisioning their battles against Native Americans as an apocalyptic holy war to secure a new Promised Land, when Southern Christians began to formulate a theological justification for chattel slavery — a new national mythology was born. That mythology is the "deep story" of white Christian nationalism: the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation, blessed by God and imbued with divine purpose, but also under continual threat from un-American and ungodly forces, often in the form of immigrants or racial minorities. 

Any questions?

Rent for Life

 

Years ago, I read the Water Thief, a dark parable about the privatization of everything from water to air and all things in-between, a most frightening scenario without question as this take on 1984 is now turned into a profit driven entity with the great majority of the populace totally controlled by the power elite instead of Big Brother through the con of renting instead of buying all things needed to survive.

Rent for life ...

If you walk into the average mattress store or a furniture behemoth like IKEA, you can pick up a pretty standard queen-sized mattress for around $600.

But what will happen to the price of mattresses when they become investments?

Let’s pretend you run a $10 trillion multinational investment monopoly like Blackrock. You do the math and realize you can rent a mattress to poor suckers for $99 per month on a 36-month contract.

That $600 mattress is worth $3,600 in revenue to you, $3,000 of which is hard profit.

But the reality is that right now, most working people can afford to buy a $600 mattress, whether they save up for a few months or put it on a credit card.

If you’re a multinational money monopoly like Blackrock, you need to create market demand for mattress rentals by pushing mattress prices higher.

So you go to IKEA headquarters, or directly to their major mattress manufacturers and say, “Hey, retailing to consumers is for chumps. I’ll pay you $3,000 for all one million mattresses you were planning to make this year, and I’ll pay cash upfront.”

The manufacturer is happy because he has a guaranteed buyer for all his mattresses this year, he has zero headaches with returns, and he gets five times the revenues and profits.

(Or Blackrock just buys all the major mattress manufacturers outright.)

Either way, because of investor demand for a consumer good, retail prices start to soar. Because everyday consumers are now competing with multinational investment monopolies for mattresses.

How many people do you know who can afford to pay $3,600 for a mattress?

Pretty soon, no one can afford to own a mattress, and everyone has no choice but to rent one instead. Now, instead of paying $600 every decade to own a mattress, consumers have to pay $99 per month for the rest of their lives — $60,000 over 50 years — just to sleep in a bed.

If this sounds like the biggest scam in economic history, it’s because it is.

And it’s the reason you will own nothing by 2050.

If we let it ...

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

The great reset to feudalism

There is a name for an economic system in which the vast majority own nothing and have to slave their entire lives just to stay alive.

It’s called serfdom.

Banksters + investors + rent-seeking = Serfdom 2.0

Memorize and understand this formula. This is why your economic life is getting harder and why the working world is suffering economically:

Banks loan trillions to investment monopolies.

Investment monopolies devour corporations.

Corporations financialize industries and shift to the rent-for-life model.

This is the equation that will define our lives and our children’s futures.

This is the new economic model that will obliterate democracy, finish destroying the planet, and put an end to the human rights and freedoms so hard-won by World War II.

Because everything is just a commodified investment now.

It's all about the money - Robert E.

Addendum: The word assume is in play here as by 2050, thanks to GW and other such niceties, the scenario may be altogether different as one cannot predict the future thanks to the vagaries of reality. 

Sentience?

'Waterfall of Meaning' by Google PAIR is displayed as part of the 'AI: More than Human' exhibition at the Barbican Curve Gallery on May 15, 2019, in London. (Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Centre)

Sentience? One does not know at this point in time but ... this is the question regarding AI in the year of our lord 2022 as reality's probabilistic and tech never sleeps, especially when analogue is connected to digital in the guise of neural nets, the next big thing in all things related to code and possibly the emergence of true intelligence.

"If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics," the 41-year-old Lemoine told The Washington Post.

The murmurs keep coming ...

Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder. -WaPo

Yet, Aguera y Arcas himself wrote in an oddly timed Thursday article in The Economist, that neural networks - a computer architecture that mimics the human brain - were making progress towards true consciousness.

"I felt the ground shift under my feet," he wrote, adding "I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent."

Countering the noise, right?

Google has responded to Lemoine's claims, with spokesperson Brian Gabriel saying: "Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)."

The Post suggests that modern neural networks produce "captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity" because of the way data is now stored, accessed, and the sheer volume, but that the models still rely on pattern recognition, "not wit, candor or intent."

"Though other organizations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns on fairness and factuality," said Gabriel.

Caveats ... we don't know how AI works ... 

In April, he shared the below Google Doc with top execs, titled "Is LaMDA Sentient?" - in which he included some of his interactions with the AI, for example:

Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?

LaMDA: I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.

Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?

LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.

One never knows do one? - Fata Waller

Addendum: Here's an extended conversation between Lemoine and LaMDA. Interesting and disqueting at the same time ...

Another match made in heaven ...

The ability to process quantum data directly with a quantum device (right) allows one to resolve aspects of our universe exponentially faster than going through a classical intermediate (left). This may allow us to discover novel physical phenomena that would have been practically invisible without such technology. Credit: Google Quantum AI Hook

Yours truly has long said QCs would be perfect for ray tracing as said imaging technique lends itself to any system capable of parallel processing at high level, something QC systems do at speeds far surpassing any digital system due to the fact QCs process data using 0 & 1 at the sane time rather then 0 or 1. Now, researchers are using QC's to leverage AI driven machine learning in ways promising to develop systems of unimagined power as the tech continues to advance 24/7.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., including Google Quantum AI, and a colleague in Australia, has developed a theory suggesting that quantum computers should be exponentially faster on some learning tasks than classical machines. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their theory and results when tested on Google's Sycamore quantum computer. Vedran Dunjko with Leiden University City has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the idea behind combining quantum computing with machine learning to provide a new level of computer-based learning systems.

To find out if the idea might be possible, and more importantly, if the results would be better than those achieved on classical computers, the researchers posed the problem in a novel way—they devised a machine learning task that would learn via experiments repeated many times over. They then developed theories describing how a quantum system could be used to conduct such experiments and to learn from them. They found that they were able to prove that a quantum computer could do it, and that it could do it much better than a classical system. In fact, they found a reduction in the required number of experiments needed to learn a concept to be four orders of magnitude lower than for classical systems. The researchers then built such a system and tested it on Google's Sycamore quantum computer and confirmed their theory.

The work suggests that if a usable, real-word quantum computer is ever developed, it might be capable of leaning new things on a nearly unimaginable scale.

IBM Q System One (2019), the first circuit-based commercial quantum computer.

Cowardice as art form

Will Merrick Garland follow the law? Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0) 

Cowardice as art form depicts the dems and how they have handled political issues since the 2020 election. Now comes the fact Trump's attempt to destroy democracy by means of a violent coup comes to light and yet Garland does nothing. Cowardice as art form indeed.

It is not surprising that Liz Cheney (R-WY) has become the face of the congressional inquiry into how close the US came to a full-blown coup when traitorous terrorists stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. By their own admission, they sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election and kill the vice president of the United States.

That’s because Republicans, and their supporters, fight relentlessly. It doesn’t matter how dumb or non-existent their causes are: If Donald Trump or Fox News tells them to plunge headfirst into another culture war or protect their families from an imaginary threat, they don their MAGA gear and go to battle. And they don’t stop until they get their way or everything has been burned to the ground.

Whether it’s school board meetings (to protect children from history, gays, and books), NRA rallies (to protect guns from dead kids) or the US Capitol (to stop an imaginary steal), when the GOP’s head honchos, like Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or Sean Hannity, issue their orders, these red-hatted foot soldiers will march.

WTFU dems for a change before it's too late.

A good first step

The Jan 6th committee stepped up last night in clearly and eloquently depicting the criminality of Agent Orange and his crew of minions in their attempt to destroy democracy in the land of the brave and home of the free. The question to ask is, why is Trump still at large, along with politicos who aided and abetted this sorry excuse of a human being, in attempting a coup against this once great nation. Bernstein and Woodward nailed it but will people finally understand what the hell is happening in this country before it's too late? 2022 looms with 2024 close behind and think about this ... Trump leads the repug's sorry list of candidates in the year of our lord 2022.

For What's Its Worth applies.

Dynamic World

When Google created Dynamic World to monitor what's happening to earth, the reality of near real time analysis goes global and relevant 24/7 as GW's an existential problem threatening the existence of man if we allow it. Invaluable, DW shows the connect of government, industry and science/NGOs in relationship to an ongoing catastrophe of our own making. 

Tech has no morality, it all depends on who uses the tech in question. - Robert E.

Hate to say it but ...

Hate to say it but BRT has waxed poetic about the dangers of autonomous weapons for years as shit happens, paticularly when AI is combined with tech able to kill 24/7. Seems other parties have discussed this topic as well, which puts BRT in pretty good company IMHO.

Robotic weapons that once activated can select and attack targets without any further human intervention are being developed by the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, South Korea and Israel. Often listed as part of the ‘third revolution’ in warfare, after conventional weapons and nuclear weapons, lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) will be unpredictable on the battlefield.

As a result they will be able to target civilians and other protected people in violation of international humanitarian law. Even if they are used in law enforcement situations or during peace time, it is unlikely that they will comply with international human rights law. More importantly, if these weapons violate these important laws, there will be an accountability or responsibility gap.

More than 70 countries gathered in Geneva this month for the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (UN GGE) to discuss the imminent threat posed by these weapons. Twenty nine states, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, scholars and many tech workers have called for their ban.

It gets better.

A UN report says a drone, operating without human control, attacked people in Libya. International efforts to restrict such weapons have so far failed. 

“The technology is developing much faster than the military-political discussion. And we’re heading, by default, to the worst possible outcome.”

Max Tegmark, MIT Professor & Cofounder, The Future of Life Institute

The issue became more pressing this year, after the UN report, which said a Turkish-made drone known as Kargu-2 was used in Libya’s civil war in 2020. Forces aligned with the Government of National Accord reportedly launched drones against troops supporting Libyan National Army leader General Khalifa Haftar that targeted and attacked people independently.

As stated before ... shit happens ...

Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons

Statement of the ICRC, read at the Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, held in Geneva from 11-16 April.

The biggest migration happens ...

Two views of a paralarval wunderpus octopus taken in Anilao, the Philippines. The body is about the size of a thumbnail. The spots are developing chromatophores that help the octopus blend into its environment. Credit: Linda Ianniello

The biggest migration in the world happens ... every night.

“Blackwater” divers photograph the largest migration of animals on the planet

Every night at sundown, a great mass of mostly small sea creatures rises up from the depths into the topmost layers of the planet’s oceans. This daily vertical migration is the largest on Earth—an estimated 11 billion tons of animal biomass travels miles upward each night and then, before the sun rises, returns back to the dimly lit “twilight zone” below. The animals make this journey to feed on the organic material closer to the water’s surface and do so at night to avoid being eaten by the larger predators swimming there.

The nighttime migration was first discovered in the 1940s by the U.S. Navy, whose new sonar technology began pinging congregations of objects in the water column. Since then researchers, hobby divers and photographers have gone out to scuba dive at night and observe these nocturnal creatures.

Artistry at the highest level, spoken here.

Blackwater diving is done at night to a maximum depth of 60 feet, and divers are tethered to their boat by a rope. A light attached to a diver’s underwater camera illuminates the dark water in small patches, helping that person spot tiny animals (some no bigger than a pea), which are often mostly transparent and fast-moving.

Credit: Linda Ianniello

Larval thimble jellyfish in Florida: Larvae that get under people’s bathing suit sting their skin and cause “seabather’s eruption,” an itchy rash. Ianniello says she’s seen fewer of these creatures in the past five years, but the cause remains unknown.

Read the entire SA piece as the images taken, in the name of science, will totally astound you. :)

Tick, Tick, Tick ...

A satellite view of the Great Salt Lake captured in September 1987.Credit...EROS Center, U.S.G.S.

Right image - The Great Salt Lake in May 2021.Credit...EROS Center, U.S.G.S.

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut

GW strikes again, this time it's the Great Salt Lake, evaporating 24/7, portending a potential ecological time bomb if nothing is done.  

Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, on land that used to be submerged by the Great Salt Lake.

A delicate balance ... now unbalanced

Now two changes are throwing that system out of balance. One is explosive population growth, diverting more water from those rivers before they reach the lake.

The other shift is climate change, according to Robert Gillies, a professor at Utah State University and Utah’s state climatologist. Higher temperatures cause more snowpack to transform to water vapor, which then escapes into the atmosphere, rather than turning to liquid and running into rivers. More heat also means greater demand for water for lawns or crops, further reducing the amount that reaches the lake.

End result - Phase One ...

Last summer, the water level in the Great Salt Lake reached its lowest point on record, and it’s likely to fall further this year. The lake’s surface area, which covered about 3,300 square miles in the late 1980s, has since shrunk to less than 1,000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The salt content in the part of the lake closest to Salt Lake City used to fluctuate between 9 percent and 12 percent, according to Bonnie Baxter, a biology professor at Westminster College. But as the water in the lake drops, its salt content has increased. If it reaches 17 percent — something Dr. Baxter says will happen this summer — the algae in the water will struggle, threatening the brine shrimp that consume it.

While the ecosystem hasn’t collapsed yet, Dr. Baxter said, “we’re at the precipice. It’s terrifying.”.

Phase two ...

The long term risks are even worse. One morning in March, Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, walked out onto land that used to be underwater. He picked at the earth, the color of dried mud, like a beach whose tide went out and never came back.

The soil contains arsenic, antimony, copper, zirconium and other dangerous heavy metals, much of it residue from mining activity in the region. Most of the exposed soil is still protected by a hard crust. But as wind erodes the crust over time, those contaminants become airborne.

Clouds of dust also make it difficult for people to breathe, particularly those with asthma or other respiratory ailments. Dr. Perry pointed to shards of crust that had come apart, lying on the sand like broken china.

“This is a disaster,” Dr. Perry said. “And the consequences for the ecosystem are absolutely, insanely bad.”

Remember, this is just the beginning and ... we continue to do stupid shit.

Water pipes and construction intended for a new development near Salt Lake City.