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If AI Thinks George Washington is a Black Woman, Why Are We Letting it Pick Bomb Targets?

Posted by M. C. on March 6, 2024

Google Gemini’s ridiculous image generator got all of the headlines in the last two weeks, but a more important AI announcement went mostly unnoticed

By Matt Taibbi
Racket News

If AI Thinks George Washington is a Black Woman, Why Are We Letting it Pick Bomb Targets?

After yesterday’s Racket story about misadventures with Google’s creepy new AI product, Gemini, I got a note about a Bloomberg story from earlier this week. From US Used AI to Help Find Middle East Targets for Airstrikes:

The US used artificial intelligence to identify targets hit by air strikes in the Middle East this month, a defense official said, revealinggrowing military use of the technology for combat… Machine learning algorithms that can teach themselves to identify objects helped to narrow down targets for more than 85 US air strikes on Feb. 2…

The U.S. formally admitting to using AI to target human beings was a first of sorts, but Google’s decision to release a moronic image generator that mass-produces black Popes and Chinese founding fathers was the story that garnered the ink and outrage. The irony is the military tale is equally frightening, and related in unsettling ways:

Bloomberg quoted Schuyler Moore, Chief Technology Officer for U.S. Central Command. She described using AI to identify bombing targets in Iraq and Syria, in apparent retaliation for a January 28th attack in Jordan that killed three U.S. troops and injured 34. According to Moore, it was last year’s Hamas attack that sent the Pentagon over the edge into a willingness to deploy Project Maven, in which AI helps the military identify targets using data from satellites, drones, and other sources.

“October 7th, everything changed,” she said. “We immediately shifted into high gear and a much higher operational tempo than we had previously.”

The idea that the U.S. was so emotionally overcome on October 7th that it had to activate Project Maven seems bizarre at best. The Pentagon has boasted for years about deploying AI, from sending Switchblade drones to Ukraine that are “capable of identifying targets using algorithms,” to the “Replicator” initiative launched with a goal of hitting “1000 targets in 24 hours,” to talks of deploying a “Vast AI Fleet” to counter alleged Chinese AI capability. Nonetheless, it’s rare for someone like Moore to come out and announce that a series of recent air strikes were picked at least in part by algorithms that “teach themselves to identify” objects.

Project Maven made headlines in 2018 when, in a rare (but temporary) attack of conscience, Google executives announced they would not renew the firm’s first major Pentagon contract. 4,000 employees signed a group letter that seems quaint now, claiming building technology to assist the U.S. government in “military surveillance” was “not acceptable.” Employees implored CEO Sundar Pichai to see that “Google’s unique history, its motto Don’t Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users set it apart.”

But the firm’s kvetching about Don’t Be Evil and squeamishness about cooperating with the Pentagon didn’t last long. It soon began bidding for more DoD work and won a contract to provide cloud security for the Defense Innovation Board and a piece of a multibillion-dollar CIA cloud contract, among other things. Six years after its employee letter denouncing surveillance/targeting the military as “unacceptable,” Alphabet chief and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt chairs the Defense Innovation Board, and through efforts like Project Nimbus Google is essentially helping military forces like Israel’s IDF develop their own AI programs, as one former exec puts it.

The military dresses up justification for programs like Maven in many ways, but if you read between the lines of its own reports, the Pentagon is essentially chasing its own data tail. The sheer quantity of data the armed forces began generating after 9/11 through raids of homes (in Iraq, by the hundreds) and programs like full-motion video (FMV) from drones overwhelmed human analysis. As General Richard Clarke and Fletcher professor Richard Schultz put it, in an essay about Project Maven for West Point’s Modern War Institute:

[Drones] “sent back over 327,000 hours (or 37 years) of FMV footage.” By 2017, it was estimated for that year that the video US Central Command collected could amount to “325,000 feature films [approximately 700,000 hours or eighty years].”

The authors added the “intelligence simply became snowed under by data,” which to them meant “too much real-time intelligence was not being exploited.” This led to the second point: as Google’s former CEO Schmidt put it in 2020, when commenting on the firm’s by-then-fully-revived partnership with the Pentagon, “The way to understand the military is that soldiers spend a great deal of time looking at screens.”

Believing this was not an optimal use of soldier time, executives like Schmidt and military brass began pushing for more automated analysis. Even though early AI programs were “rudimentary with many false detections,” with accuracy “only around 50 percent” and even “the difference between men, women, and children” proving challenging, they plowed ahead.

Without disclosing how accuracy has improved since Maven’s early days, Schultz and Clarke explained the military is now planning a “range of AI/ML applications” to drive “increased efficiency, cost savings, and lethality,” and a larger goal:

To prepare DoD as an institution for future wars—a transformation from a hardware-centric organization to one in which AI and ML software provides timely, relevant mission-oriented data to enable intelligence-driven decisions at speed and scale.

This plan, like so many other things that emerge from Pentagon bureaucracy, is a massive self-licking ice cream cone.

Defense leaders first push to make and deploy ever-increasing quantities of flying data-gathering machines, which in turn film gazillions of feature films per year worth of surveillance. As the digital haul from the robot fleet grows, military leaders claim they’re forced to finance AI programs that can identify the things worth shooting at in these mountains of footage, to avoid the horror of opportunities “not being exploited.” This has the advantage of being self-fulfilling in its logic: as we shoot at more targets, we create more “exploding insurgencies,” as Clarke and Schultz put it, in turn creating more targets, and on and on.

Read the Whole Article

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Proposed Peace Amendment to the United States Constitution

Posted by M. C. on March 6, 2024

By Emanuel Pastreich
Fear No Evil

Article nine states,

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”

Very little is said about how Article Nine could make Japan a leader in security because Japan is positioned to make real security threats like climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, pollution, information warfare, and class warfare, the center of its security policy to a degree that other nations are not capable of.

https://emanuelprez.substack.com/p/peace-amendment-to-the-united-states?publication_id=885592&post_id=142202295&isFreemail=true&r=1fkpmf&triedRedirect=true

It is one of the great ironies of history that at the very moment the United States plunges deeper and deeper into war hysteria, that our politicians and government officials are possessed by the demons of complete annihilation and endless expansion, that falsehood and hypocrisy wrap their tentacles around the arms and legs of public intellectuals, at the very moment that it becomes impossible in Washington DC to talk about any subject that is not tied to war, at the very moment that the entire United States is being transformed into a military economy—one wherein all critical decisions are made by military contractors, privatized police, prisons, and for-profit intelligence (and at the top, the militarized private equity firms who pull the strings) it is a terrible and comic irony that we, of all the nations of the Earth, should be pressuring Japan to give up its commitment to oppose militarism as expressed in the Japanese constitution and to join us, as junior partners, in our suicide march towards world war and nuclear holocaust.

We have things so completely backwards. The United States does not have any need to, let alone have any right to, pressure Japan to give up its peace constitution, or to stir up the desires for fortune latent in Tokyo’s military contractors. We know that some Japanese are already itching for an excuse to prepare for war, and to destroy Japanese civil society by creating a military economy as a means of bringing even more wealth and power to the few.

No! It is the United States that needs a peace constitution, and it needs it right now.

We failed to return to a peace economy after the Second World War and the institutional and cultural cancer resulting from an economy stimulated by, and propped up by, war, has metastasized and spread throughout the entire society so that war is everywhere, from children’s toys to parking spaces for veterans, to glowing tributes by politicians to those who kill in blind obedience to the state.

We need now an institutional, intellectual, and spiritual commitment to an economy and a society that is founded in peace, that is committed to peace, and that rewards citizens for their constructive economic contributions to the wellbeing of their families, their neighborhoods, their regions, their country, and to the entire Earth.

I do speak these words lightly. And I speak them as someone who has spent decades thinking about, and writing about, security and conflict. But the truth must be spoken, and we do not have long before the great reckoning.

Maybe there are those who can justify a society that is addicted to war, to destruction, and to endless expansion. That is not my job.

War is not caused by a few bad apples, or a lack of maturity among political leaders. It is the product of an economic system that demands consumption and praises growth. For war is the greatest force for consumption and growth—until, of course, it leaves everything in ruins.

War is a product of a concept of economics, detached from morality and humanity, that has no concern for the long-term and that focuses on returns for the rich calculated over weeks and months, an inhuman economics wherein the long-term wellbeing of the citizens of the Earth is irrelevant.

This speculation-driven casino economy has pushed overproduction across the country which forces us to wrap everything in plastic so as to keep profits flowing to petroleum companies, and to prepare for war because the only factories left in America are those making military parts. Yes, most constructive factories have been moved overseas as part of the great “free trade” fraud perpetrated by the corporate parties.

The Japanese Constitution

Let us take a look at article nine of the Japanese constitution, that part of Japan’s post-war legacy that is so offensive to the American politicians and bureaucrats who have become the slaves of military contractors, and that is also repulsive to the bankers behind the stage who benefit from war preparations in Asia.

Article nine is also a rallying cry for Japanese militarists who wish to create a new empire and for well-paid security consultants deployed in Japan to promote expensive fighter planes that cannot even take off and land, missile defense systems that cannot stop anything, but who are unconcerned by the fact that Japan cannot provide its own food, that its water is being slowly poisoned with chemicals from factories and military bases, or that its nuclear power plants are sitting targets just waiting for an enemy attack.

Article nine states,

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”

Article nine is invaluable in its intentions and spirit and it has had a positive impact around the world, even as its meaning has been diluted, then distorted, and then eviscerated though shifts in Japanese policy, starting with the establishment of the “Self-Defense Forces,” followed by the integration of the Japanese economy into the American war economy during the Korean War, and culminating in the false concept of “collective security,” a fig leaf for aggressive military expansionism and entry into the international arms market.

At the same time, we must recognize that there are problems with Article Nine.

First, the text suggests that Japan must renounce war as an idealistic aspiration for “international peace based on justice and order,” rather than as a necessity in an age in which we are faced with the choice between “hegemony and survival,” as Noam Chomsky famously put it.

The absence of a concrete articulation of the logic behind renouncing war for a practical goal, not only for the abstract ideals of justice, has generated unending criticism holding that the Japanese constitution is overly idealistic and even a violation of Japan’s sovereign rights.

It will be critical in future debates on security policy to explain how Japan’s position on the use of war is realistic and strategic, and how it is unmistakably in the long-term interests of the Japanese and the international community.

It is also critical that Japanese, and Americans, challenge the assumptions underlying American security policy. Failure to do so, that is to merely assume that somehow Japan is protected by the United States while it enjoys its “peace constitution” encourages criticisms in the United States that Japan is a free rider, and complaints in Japan that Japan has become an American colony. That is to say that both the United States and Japan must express a similar commitment to peace.

In addition, article nine employs the terms “war” and “nation” as if they are static, unchanging, objects whose parameters are clear and that do not shift or evolve over time.

The essential nature of war does not change; the means by which war is waged, and the subjects in war, are constantly evolving. It is still true that guns, tanks, and fighter planes are used to wage war. Yet war today extends into diverse fields and takes place in visible and invisible forms at multiple levels. The media, entertainment, and AI have been weaponized and used to dumb down and render the population passive. This is not technology for a more convenient life, but rather another form of war.

Nano technologies are employed to invisibly attack the functions of the body, or to alter the environment. New biotechnology weapons can render victims ill, or incapacitated. The same for electromagnetic radiation, infrared radiation, and a host of other new weapons, or potential weapons.

Information warfare similarly is employed to create false narratives that confuse citizens as part of a divide and conquer strategy.

These forms of war fall outside of the narrow definition of “war” put forth in Article Nine, even though these forms of war are being conducted today in a more devastating manner than traditional warfare.

Similarly, the concept of “nation” has shifted so radically as to demand significant revision of the concept of war. War today is not conducted just between nations, but also between ethnic groups, between multinational corporations, and increasingly between classes. The driving force behind the current global war is a class war between the super-rich and everyone else, that it to say a war that goes beyond the assumptions of Article Nine.

We are confronted by a brave new world stretching to the horizon in which national borders are only for little people, in which the nation state exists only for television broadcasts and United Nations events, in which the real decisions behind the war against humanity are made by hidden financial powers who manipulate all the governments of the world, presenting us with pathetic puppets who stumble through a tragically amusing diplomatic show that is put on for the working man and women by private equity.

Sadly, the current discussion of Article Nine of Japan’s constitution revolves around how to remove it, or to misinterpret it, so as to transform Japan into a nation that wages war, and that will have the third largest military in the world.

Very little is said about how Article Nine could make Japan a leader in security because Japan is positioned to make real security threats like climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, pollution, information warfare, and class warfare, the center of its security policy to a degree that other nations are not capable of.

Read the Whole Article

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Greedflation-A Caseyism

Posted by M. C. on March 5, 2024

This the introduction of the latest Senator Casey Update. He has my best interests at heart.

“Like most Americans, you’ve probably noticed that your budget is being stretched thinner these days. Even as inflation has cooled, the prices of everyday items are still high. Big corporations want you to believe that it’s because of rising costs, but there’s something else going on, something I call greedflation.

Greedflation is a practice where corporations raise prices faster than the rate of inflation to increase their own profits. And it’s happening everywhere.

From groceries and paper goods to cleaning supplies and entertainment, nearly every category of your family’s budget has likely seen price increases due to greedflation. In 2021 and 2022, the average family in Pennsylvania spent thousands more a year due to greedflation, while at the same time corporations were raking in record profits. In fact, while inflation rose by 14% between mid-2020 and mid-2022, corporate profits rose by 74% – five times as much as inflation.

I’ve been calling out corporate greedflation and, late last year, I released my first report on this issue. Here’s an overview:”

The bottom line of the update is faceless, unelected, career bureaucrats will be deciding who is making too much, how much is too much and the penalties which in the end will be born by the public.

Of course this requires more bureaucracy, staff, buildings, copiers for implementing new regulations in every state to save us money and save us from ourselves. All the things government does best.

One of the more memorable statements by George Will is corporations are not tax payers (nor penalty payers), they are tax collectors. Taxes and penalties are ultimately costs of doing business, if the company is still in business.

Prices are going up, mainly due to government (which includes Casey) but the market solution is the best solution. The consumer should decide to buy or not and whom to buy from or not. Casey uses soft drink company profits as an example. There is a plethora of drink brands and prices to choose from. We don’t need the government to mess up that business any more than it already is.

It is the market, i.e. you and I, who should best determine which companies survive and which don’t.

“The year 2022 did see some inflationary events like the war in Ukraine and various supply

chain disruptions for micro processing chips, lumber and other goods.”

Lumber and tariffs. A brilliant example of government skewering the public for the benefit of corporate campaign contributors.

Tariffs raise cheap import prices so far above the price of domestic suppliers that the domestic suppliers can raise their prices to almost that of imports. Screw you!

Ukraine! Swiss and Spanish villa prices have “inflated” thanks to US taxpayer supplied cash infusions to foreign government officials.

“Other analysts have reached similar conclusions as the Federal Reserve research and our

report, finding that increased corporate profits comprise a large portion of increased

inflation in the post-pandemic period. These analysts include the President of the European

Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Economic Policy Institute (EPI),

and Roosevelt Institute, among others.”

The last place I would look for accurate/unbiased information is the Fed, central banks and government foreign aid (bribery) institutions.

Casey neatly sidesteps the main causes by far of inflation. Wild welfare-warfare government spending and money printing by the Federal Reserve to cover those costs.

If Casey was serious about inflation he would:

Admit government malfeasance is the main culprit

Demand a balanced budget (unfortunately that requires a non-interventionist foreign policy and reduced campaign contributions, a non-starter)

Demand an audit and elimination of the Federal Reserve

Resignation from public life for being part of the government wrecking ball on American life.

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Federal Reserve Responsibility for Consumer and Government Debt Crises

Posted by M. C. on March 5, 2024

The economic crisis will be worsened by the moral crisis caused by the belief among too many Americans at all levels of society that they have a right to government-provided economic security at the expense of their fellow citizens. This will result in violence and the growth of authoritarian political movements.

by Ron Paul

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/federal-reserve-responsibility-for-consumer-and-government-debt-crises

According to the Federal Reserve, credit card delinquencies increased by 50 percent in 2023, while consumer debt grew to 17.5 trillion dollars. A recent survey by Clever Real Estate found that three in five Americans have credit card debt and that 23 percent of Americans increase their credit card debt every month. The survey also found that 48 percent of Americans (including 59 percent of millennials) use credit cards for essential living expenses.

The overreliance on credit cards and the accompanying increase in consumer debt are consequences of our fiat money system. Since Richard Nixon severed the last link between the dollar and gold in August of 1971, the dollar’s value has declined by 87 percent based on the government’s understated Consumer Price Index numbers. This means that even though Americans’ nominal wages have increased, their real wages have declined as their dollars buy less.

The continuing erosion of the dollar’s value makes it impossible for many Americans to accumulate meaningful savings. Those Americans who can save may actually lose money by doing so thanks to the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax that erodes the value of savings. This is why Congress has felt it necessary to provide tax incentives to encourage saving for things like retirement, education, and health care.

See the rest here

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Washington’s ‘Credibility’ Gap

Posted by M. C. on March 5, 2024

The danger now that this credibility crisis has become obvious to all is that the neocons will again show up as arsonists at the fire they set themselves. We have reached the limits of US force, we are now reaping what the neocon interventionists have sown for the past three decades. And it isn’t going to be pretty.

by Daniel McAdams

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/washingtons-credibility-gap

This article first appeared as an exclusive update to RPI subscribers. Subscribe for free here.

I know one good writer for the American Greatness publication – Julie Kelly who writes on the injustice of the January 6th persecutions – but even though I get their regular updates in my email box I never open them up. It seems like more or less just another of the “conservative” outlets that churn out highly political and politicized fodder – with plenty of “outrage stories” –  not very well thought-out on pages heavily laden with annoying ads.

Again, I could be wrong.

But one recent headline from my in-box caught my attention so I opened it up: “Lack of Credibility Places U.S. Deterrence Under Great Strain.” In the piece – predictably – the authors open with the statement, “American national security and the security of many of our allies depend upon the ability of the U.S. to deter aggression.” The presumption already in the piece is laid out: the US is the “indispensable nation” that must expend unlimited resources anywhere and everywhere to maintain total dominance for its own sake and for the sake of its allies.

Failure to dominate everywhere will lead to failure to survive anywhere. 

The other assumption in the piece is that the massive US monetary outlay in and of itself will be sufficient to dissuade any country (or group) anywhere on earth from taking any course of action in opposition to Washington’s will – even if said country or group believes course of action in question is critical to its own national security needs or interests. With enough weapons, tough talk, and eagerness to use both, any nation or group will give up on its own goals and interests and defer to those of Washington. Will bow to Washington’s will.

See the rest here

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Know Your Enemy – Part 2

Posted by M. C. on March 3, 2024

– the Frankfurt School and how we got here

Probably the most influential member of the newly established Frankfurt School in America was Herbert Marcuse. He defined what he meant by disintegrating and destroying the Christian Western civilization from within: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society – there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended- What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”

Christian Western civilization = Christian terrorists. Aren’t you glad the FIB is on top of that crisis?

Francis Christian

https://francischristian.substack.com/p/know-your-enemy-part-2

In my previous Substack essay, I addressed the urgent imperative for our present generation to understand the pressing, pertinent, ever present and long shadow of Bolshevism (the Russian brand of Communism) in society today. My readers are encouraged to refer back to Part 1 of this essay, since in every way, this essay is a continuation of the previous one.

After the violent, bloody events of October 1917 brought the Communists to power in Russia, it became clear to the Bolsheviks over the next few years, that much of Europe would not succumb to a bloody political takeover and revolution. It had been tried – incipient, violent Communist takeover projects in Germany, Hungary and Italy had all failed and were extinguished in their very early stages. Since the internationalization of Communism/Bolshevism is a fundamental goal of the Communist tyranny, a different way to take over society had to be found.

Francis Christian’s Essays is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In a diabolically evil and brilliant move, the Bolsheviks decided to corrupt, subvert, radically change and transform society from within. No cataclysmic, single, violent revolution was necessary. The takeover would be accomplished by a pervasive rot from within.

Just as a chief goal of the Bolsheviks of the Russian revolution was the overthrow of Russian Christian society and the Russian Orthodox Church with the declaration of atheism as the only State doctrine, those who wished to export the revolution to Western Europe realized that Western civilization had resulted from the touch of Christ upon the Western centuries. The foundations of the value systems of the West built in these Christian centuries had to be attacked from within – and overturned.

In Frankfurt, Germany, a group of intellectuals (who had earlier met with Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Moscow) founded the “Institute for Social Research” in 1923 and subsequently formulated the goal of achieving the takeover of society by fostering a “cultural revolution.” The Institute worked closely with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. During its first ten years in Germany, it used the Weimar Republic (post-first world war Germany) and its citizens as a testing ground for the cultural takeover of the West. The cultural and moral decadence of Germany in the 1920s was largely a result of the activities of the Frankfurt “Institute for Social Research” and affiliated groups and disciples of the new Bolshevism, including theatre/burlesque and the German film industry (which later migrated to Hollywood).

Rather than a murderous, continuous class struggle between the oppressed worker and the “bourgeois” as envisioned by Marx, the new cultural Marxists of Frankfurt put forward the theory that everyone in the West was oppressed by the norms of Western, Christian civilization – the logical, next step for them, was the overthrow of the Christian West. The revolution would then be complete.

See the rest here

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Cocoa Panic? World’s Largest Chocolatier Plans 19% Workforce Cut As Prices Hit Record Highs

Posted by M. C. on March 3, 2024

Now that is a problem!

Of course we have a military base in Ghana. Maybe the military could actually do something worthwhile in a foreign country where they don’t belong and help with the chocolate.

https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/?s=03

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/cocoa-panic-worlds-largest-chocolatier-plans-19-workforce-cut-prices-hit-record-highs

Tyler Durden's Photo

by Tyler Durden

The world’s largest maker of bulk chocolate is planning to cut about 19% of its workforce, totaling 2,500 jobs, as part of a cost-reduction strategy in response to a worsening cocoa shortage in West Africa, which has driven prices to record highs. 

“It’s about reducing complexity and eliminating duplication and inefficient structures,” Swiss chocolate maker Barry Callebaut CEO Peter Feld said in an interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt on Monday. 

Feld continued: “It’s about reducing complexity and eliminating duplication and inefficient structures.” 

Handelsblatt said the job cuts will be implemented across Barry Callebaut’s operations worldwide over the coming 18 months. 

The move signifies Barry Callebaut is likely preparing for future demand woes as cocoa output in top grower Ivory Coast collapses, sending prices in London to record highs. 

According to trader Ecom Agroindustrial Corp., Ivory Coast’s cocoa output is expected to plunge by as much as 20% this growing season. 

See the rest here

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The Hazards of One-way Communication and What to Do about Them

Posted by M. C. on March 2, 2024

An excerpt from The Sociobiology of Liberty

The 19th Century Prussian–evolved plan, imported into America around the turn of the 20th Century, is to transform our free-thinking children into good little “human resources” who will always follow one-way communication (orders) without hesitation — and will stop thinking for themselves.

Frederick the Great and the Prussian elite determined this was necessary to turn their kids into effective cannon-fodder so they wouldn’t lose the next war with Napoleon. I’m not making that up. And “we” adopted it.

By L. Reichard White

The Hazards of One-way Communication and What to Do about Them

Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner. –Lao Tzu

When one of our small-group ancestors saw another’s face, unless the second ancestor was blind, the seeing of faces was mutual. This “mutual seeing” results in “two-way communication.” But today there are folks who haven’t ever seen your face at all, yet you may still feel you know them face-to-face – – – because you have seen their faces.

TV news readers such as Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, etc. are early 21st Century examples, as are movie stars and other “celebrities.” Taylor Swift? AND, especially politicians.

While they’ve never seen our face, we see theirs regularly on TV, newscasts, movies, podcasts, in the newspapers, etc.. This results in one-way communication — them to us. Affiliation that happens as a result of such one-way communication has quite interesting side-effects – – –

During the evolution of our ancestral small-groups — 30 folks all in the same place at the same time was a large gathering — there was no writing so nearly all of their communication was face-to-face and in-the-moment. This meant that face-to-face responses were always possible and expected, even if just an acknowledgement that the previous message had arrived.

Further, except temporarily in emergencies or coordinated activities such as a hunt, there was no permanent chain-of-command or even meaningful hierarchical rank to block originations, corrections, or other responses.

Even in tribal meets, everyone who wished-to could speak or else, even in the case of a war council, co-ordinated action wasn’t going to happen. Our Native Americans carried this natural base-line mode of “open-mic” social organization to it’s logical conclusion – – –

“People [native Americans] who do not vote for an issue — whether they abstain or vote against it — often resent having to abide by it and insist that they should not be affected by the final decision since they did not themselves affirm it. A number of Indian groups — such as the Hopis here in the Southwest — are still divided over the issue of their constitution, those who voted against it or who did not participate in the constitutional election, insisting that they should not be bound by the vote of the others.” –James E. Officer, Journal of American Indian Education, Volume 3 Number 1, October 1963, INFORMAL POWER STRUCTURES WITHIN, INDIAN COMMUNITIES

This mode of social organization, depending on multi-way communication, is still practiced elsewhere as, for example, “Quaker Process,” etc.

And even some of our early American thinkers understood the logic – – –

See the rest here

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MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage”

Posted by M. C. on March 2, 2024

Don’t forget those deplorable Christian terrorists!

By Matt Taibbi
Racket News

“Tom, I’ll start with you,” began Mika Brzezinski. “Why are rural white voters a threat to democracy at this point?”

Fastball delivered, University of Maryland professor and co-author of just-released White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.

White Rural Rage, which I made the mistake of reading,is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed by Thomas Frank in The People, No. When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America.

The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.

Nobel-winning columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times spent the last year telling “ignorant” Middle America its negative feelings about the economy are “demonstrably false,” because despite what their bank accounts or home evaluations might say, “Bidenomics is still working very well.” When White Rural Rage came out this week he rushed to review it, the intransigent refusal of yokels to accept his wisdom being his favored current hobby horse. “The Mystery of Rural White Rage” is remarkable on multiple levels, one being that after spending so much energy talking about the health of the economy, he pulls out an economic version of Sam Kinison’s classic “Move to the Food!” routine:

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers. Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are?

He answers his question: “Some cities have become unaffordable… and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.”

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Know Your Enemy

Posted by M. C. on March 2, 2024

– we must not underestimate them

To the well known aphorism, “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” I would like to add another phrase of my own, that perhaps more accurately describes the present – those who sleep through the past are sleepwalking into disaster.

Francis Christian

https://francischristian.substack.com/p/know-your-enemy

A remarkable disappearing act has taken place in the last thirty odd years since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Through a coordinated propaganda campaign by think tanks, legacy media, the internet and governments, the mass genocides, murders, terrors, tortures, incarcerations, disappearances, show trials, famines and multiplied miseries of Communism have been all but completely hidden from the masses.

You would think that a system that systematically and ruthlessly killed many more millions than the Nazis did and lasted for many more decades than the short, murderous rule of the third Reich would be the subject of numerous scholarly studies, retrospective news articles, actual narratives and case studies and dedicated academic departments. Clearly, this has not been the case – and there is instead a desire by the ruling classes to induce a sense of mass amnesia about the horrors of Communism. Why is this?

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Hollywood has no doubt also played its part in this game of subterfuge and omission. There have been numerous well know, moving motion pictures about the terrors of the Holocaust in which millions of Slavs, Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled were killed. Lest we forget, we must remember the evils of Naziism. But can you remember the last Hollywood generated motion picture that showed you the stories of the much greater number of people that the Bolsheviks (Russian Communists) put to death in the Soviet Union during the years of Communism? Or of the gulag prison system that the Bolsheviks invented to starve, torture and imprison political and other dissidents (and the many, stirring stories of defiance in the gulag, including those by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Or of the millions of Christians who were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and put to death by the Communists? For example, why has there not been a Hollywood motion picture that describes the compelling story of the Christian pastor Richard Wurmbrand (my readers can read his breathtaking, heroic, true story in the 1970s era book, “Tortured for Christ”) who endured many years of torture under Communism? Some motion pictures that tell these stories were produced privately, but not by the marketing and financial juggernaut that is Hollywood. Why is this?

The answer is actually quite simple. The ideological descendants of the same people behind the murderous Bolshevik Communist regime that brought unspeakable suffering to millions of Russians and Eastern Europeans (before engulfing China and SE Asia in a similar convulsion), are in charge of our Western Governments and institutions today. The same players, the same playbook, the same international goals. They don’t want you to know of the connection of course – because if you do, the similarities are so stark that you will take notice and be enraged. The Bolsheviks/Communists of today are just as determined, just as ruthless, just as efficient and likely much more powerful than their Soviet ancestors. We ignore them at our peril.

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