“Have you ever owned a business?”
Labour secretary avoids answering such a simple question…
Putin as the Tsar?
by Sergey Markov
Putin as the tsar? Which tsar in Russian history is he comparable to?
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Patriarch Kirill has compared Putin with Alexander Nevsky. The logic here is that Nevsky repelled the West’s attack on Russia. Putin has the same task.
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Putin often associates himself with Prince Vladimir, the baptizer of Rus’. Logic is: Putin erected a monument to him near the Kremlin and right where he himself enters the Kremlin, as if he were his guardian angel.
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The opposition often compares Putin to Ivan the Terrible. Logic: the same repressions. And the KGB-FSB are like Ivan’s guardsmen.
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The West compares Putin with Stalin. They say omnipotent and repressive.
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Patriots in Russia demand that Putin be like Alexander the Third. That is, build an empire on your own national basis.
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And the population of Russia would like Putin to be like Brezhnev. And this, by the way, is the Chinese ideal of a ruler: he does nothing, and everyone lives very well because of it.
Is the US Going Full Mafia Style?
US senators issue ‘mafia-style’ threat as Israeli military enters Rafah
A group of Republican lawmakers released an open letter threatening officials of the International Criminal Court and their families with reprisal if the body issues arrest warrants against Israeli officials, referencing a US statute commonly referred to as “The Hague Invasion Act.”
“When you read that letter, which I have – anybody can go online and find it – it looks like something from the mafia,” said host Garland Nixon on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program. “It’s a mafia-style letter. It is the US saying, ‘look, we’re not going to pretend like we’re liberal interventionists and we’re going around the world to do good. You will do what we say or, basically, we’ll come after you and your families.”
“It’s the honest face of US imperialism,” he concluded. “I got to give them credit. That is US imperialism without a mask on.”
“That’s the only difference, and when you look at what the US threatened to do – sanctioning employees, preventing members of the ICC and their families from coming to the United States, and then closing with ‘you have been warned’ – what a threat this is,” responded author Robert Fantina (Algora Publishing 2006). “As you said, mafia, tin-pot dictator kind of behavior.”
“To issue this kind of a threat against an internationally-recognized body whose goal is world justice and the adherence to international law, it does pull the mask off the United States,” he said. “It’s a rogue nation. It believes in might makes right, has no interest in diplomacy, and has no interest in human rights or international law. It holds all those things in contempt,” Fantina emphasized.
Netanyahu has likewise warned the ICC against issuing arrest warrants, claiming that doing so would be an “unprecedented antisemitic hate crime.”
via Sputnik
Israel Under Scrutiny, At Last
Israel govt spox ‘has no idea’ how many civilians IDF has killed
Piers Morgan had Israeli government spokesperson Avi Hyman squirming when he pressed for an answer on how many civilian deaths it was responsible for, despite also having exact figures for Hamas ‘terrorists’ it had killed.
Hyman blamed the “fog of war” for not having exact numbers of Palestinian civilians Israel has killed, instead referring Morgan to Hamas figures which he simultaneously rejected.
“That does imply you are putting a bigger premium on killing Hamas terrorists in terms of numbers and accountability than you are on innocent civilians. That can’t be right, surely?” Morgan asked
World Bank’s Climate Plan
by Frederica di Sario via Politico
The politically touchy recommendation is one of several suggestions the World Bank offers in order to cut climate-harming pollution. | Guillaume Souvant/AFP via Getty Images
Cows and milk are out, chicken and broccoli are in — if the World Bank has its way, that is.
In a new paper, the international financial lender suggests repurposing the billions rich countries spend to boost CO2-rich products like red meat and dairy for more climate-friendly options like poultry, fruits and vegetables. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to save the planet from climate change, the bank argues.
The politically touchy recommendation — sure to make certain conservatives and European countries apoplectic — is one of several suggestions the World Bank offers to cut climate-harming pollution from the agricultural and food sectors, which are responsible for nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“We have to stop destroying the planet as we feed ourselves,” Julian Lampietti, the World Bank’s manager for global engagement in the bank’s agriculture and food global practice, told POLITICO.
The paper comes at a diplomatically strategic moment, as countries signed on to the Paris Agreement — the global pact calling to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — prepare to update their climate plans by late 2025.
With the world needing to accelerate its emissions cuts to keep the Paris deal’s goals alive, the World Bank wants officials to pay more attention to the agriculture and food industries, which the bank says have long been neglected and underfunded.
According to the report, countries must funnel $260 billion each year into those sectors to get serious about erasing their emissions by 2050 — a common goal for developed economies. That’s 18 times more than countries currently invest.
Governments can partly plug the gap by reorienting subsidies for red meat and dairy products toward lower-carbon alternatives, the World Bank says. The switch is one of the most cost-effective ways for wealthy countries — estimated to generate roughly 20 percent of the world’s agri-food emissions — to reduce demand for highly polluting food, it argues.
The result, it adds, would essentially price climate impact into food costs.
“The full cost pricing of animal-sourced food to reflect its true planetary costs would make low-emission food options more competitive,” the report says, stressing that shifting to plant-based diets could save twice as much planet-warming gases as other methods.
Demand for meat and dairy products comprises almost 60 percent of agri-food emissions.
Lampietti warned against too much focus on “what you shouldn’t do,” encouraging more attention “on what you should do.” Food is an “intensely personal choice,” he added, saying he fears that what should be a data-based debate may be turned into a culture war battle.
“The big worry here is that people start using this as a political football,” he said.
Jeff Bezos’ Grandfather, A DARPA Co-Founder
What’s not widely known is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search.
One year before Gise died in 1995, Bezos founded Amazon in the garage of his Bellevue, Washington home.
Or so we’re told…
John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.”
One year before Gise died in 1995, Bezos founded Amazon in the garage of his Bellevue, Washington home.
Or so we’re told…
John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.”
News website Leading Report’s Patrick Webb commented on Greenewald’s findings, saying, “There has long been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using “frontmen” for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders.”
With the contents of Gise’s FBI file unlikely to ever be unearthed and likely never destroyed, just inaccessible to FOIA requests or the public, other X users commented on Webb’s and Greenewald’s posts, pointing out how DARPA possibly created other big tech firms:
Questions swirl about DARPA’s involvement in creating Amazon, given Bezos’ grandfather’s connection to the secret agency.
Alzheimer’s, Is it a Genetic Disease After-All?
People with two copies of a risk gene have genetic form of Alzheimer’s – Reuters
People who carry two copies of the APOE4 gene are virtually guaranteed to develop Alzheimer’s and face symptoms at an earlier age, researchers reported on Monday
The study in the Nature Medicine journal could redefine such carriers as having a new genetic form of the mind-wasting disease, changing Alzheimer’s research forever. (A key limitation of the study is that it involved mostly people of European ancestry.)
So, there is an Alzheimer’s gene after-all?
People who carry two copies of the APOE4 gene are virtually guaranteed to develop Alzheimer’s and face symptoms at an earlier age, researchers reported on Monday
The study in the Nature Medicine journal could redefine such carriers as having a new genetic form of the mind-wasting disease, changing Alzheimer’s research forever. (A key limitation of the study is that it involved mostly people of European ancestry.)
So, there is an Alzheimer’s gene after-all?
Abstract
This study aimed to evaluate the impact of APOE4 homozygosity on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) by examining its clinical, pathological and biomarker changes to see whether APOE4homozygotes constitute a distinct, genetically determined form of AD.
Data from the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center and five large cohorts with AD biomarkers were analyzed. The analysis included 3,297 individuals for the pathological study and 10,039 for the clinical study.
Findings revealed that almost all APOE4 homozygotes exhibited AD pathology and had significantly higher levels of AD biomarkers from age 55 compared to APOE3 homozygotes. By age 65, nearly all had abnormal amyloid levels in cerebrospinal fluid, and 75% had positive amyloid scans, with the prevalence of these markers increasing with age, indicating near-full penetrance of AD biology in APOE4 homozygotes.
The age of symptom onset was earlier in APOE4 homozygotes at 65.1, with a narrower 95% prediction interval than APOE3 homozygotes. The predictability of symptom onset and the sequence of biomarker changes in APOE4 homozygotes mirrored those in autosomal dominant AD and Down syndrome.
However, in the dementia stage, there were no differences in amyloid or tau positron emission tomography across haplotypes, despite earlier clinical and biomarker changes. The study concludes that APOE4 homozygotes represent a genetic form of AD, suggesting the need for individualized prevention strategies, clinical trials and treatments.
Data from the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center and five large cohorts with AD biomarkers were analyzed. The analysis included 3,297 individuals for the pathological study and 10,039 for the clinical study.
Findings revealed that almost all APOE4 homozygotes exhibited AD pathology and had significantly higher levels of AD biomarkers from age 55 compared to APOE3 homozygotes. By age 65, nearly all had abnormal amyloid levels in cerebrospinal fluid, and 75% had positive amyloid scans, with the prevalence of these markers increasing with age, indicating near-full penetrance of AD biology in APOE4 homozygotes.
The age of symptom onset was earlier in APOE4 homozygotes at 65.1, with a narrower 95% prediction interval than APOE3 homozygotes. The predictability of symptom onset and the sequence of biomarker changes in APOE4 homozygotes mirrored those in autosomal dominant AD and Down syndrome.
However, in the dementia stage, there were no differences in amyloid or tau positron emission tomography across haplotypes, despite earlier clinical and biomarker changes. The study concludes that APOE4 homozygotes represent a genetic form of AD, suggesting the need for individualized prevention strategies, clinical trials and treatments.
Woke Curriculum, Training in the US Military
by Jim Hoft via The Getaway Pundit
The United States Military Academy at West Point is introducing a new curriculum that includes courses on “deconstructing patriotism,” “cross-dressing in the military,” and other topics related to gender norms and representation.
These courses are part of a broader initiative by the Biden regime to integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) propaganda into the curriculum over duty, honor, and country.
Former Navy SEAL and Representative Scott Taylor (R-VA) tweeted his concerns after the curriculum was reportedly shared with him, stating, “This was sent to me, classes at U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Quite sure China and Russia are not teaching this nonsense to their officers. Fix yourself.”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton also weighed in, calling out the Biden regime for “abusing cadets at West Point” through indoctrination.
The controversial courses are as follows:
- Deconstructing Patriotism: Exploring Postmodernism and US Army Recruitment Amidst the Lack of a National Narrative
- Uniformed Perspectives: The Evolution of Cross-Dressing in the Military and Gender Norms
- Do My Leaders ‘Get’ Me?: Unpacking the Importance of Representation in the Military
- Harder Rights: An Approach to Espoused Values and Behavior Inconsistency
The point of contact for these courses is Dr. Morten Ender, Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair of the Diversity & Inclusion Studies Minor at West Point.
Dr. Ender has published on related topics, including a paper titled “Dinner and a Conversation: Transgender Integration at West Point and Beyond,” and “Inclusion in the U.S Military: A Force for Diversity.“
These courses are a distraction from the Academy’s mission to produce leaders capable of winning wars.
The Pentagon suggested that the United States military entered 2024 with its smallest size and lowest qualification levels in nearly eight decades. This development raises significant concerns about national security and military readiness in an era of evolving global threats.
According to Daily Mail, the total number of active-duty personnel has dropped to levels not seen since the early 1940s, a period before the U.S. entered World War II.
The emerging challenges in military recruitment are becoming increasingly evident, as seen in this year’s significant shortfall of 41,000 personnel. This gap highlights the widening disconnect between the military establishment and the younger generations.
Recruiting has been hampered by the COVID-19 vaccine mandates as well as an increasingly woke military atmosphere where trans soldiers are give special privileges while Christian soldiers are persecuted, bases host drag shows, and leaders with a history of anti-white statements are hired.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth claimed that ‘woke’ criticisms of the military hurt recruiting. Over the last three years, it has been widely reported that recruiting is way down across all branches of the U.S. military.
It’s fascinating that this official is claiming that woke criticisms are the problem, not the woke policies that have been put in place.
Artificial Intelligence? or Artificial Hallucinations?
y Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
It has been a year and a half now since the first Large Language Model (LLM) AI app was introduced to the public in November of 2022, with the release of Microsoft’s ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI.
Google, Elon Musk, and many others have also now developed or are in the process of developing their own versions of these AI programs, but after 18 months now, the #1 problem for these LLM AI programs remains the fact that they still lie and make stuff up when asked questions too difficult for them to answer.
It is called “hallucination” in the tech world, and while there was great hope when Microsoft introduced the first version of this class of AI back in 2022 that it would soon render accurate results, that accuracy remains illusive, as they continue to “hallucinate.”
Here is a report that was just published today, May 6, 2024:
Large Language Model (LLM) adoption is reaching another level in 2024. As Valuates reports, the LLM market was valued at 10.5 Billion USD in 2022 and is anticipated to hit 40.8 Billion USD by 2029, with a staggering Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.4%.
Imagine a machine so native to language that it can write poems, translate languages, and answer your questions in captivating detail. LLMs are doing just that, rapidly transforming fields like communication, education, and creative expression. Yet, amidst their brilliance lies a hidden vulnerability, the whisper of hallucination.
These AI models can sometimes invent facts, fabricate stories, or simply get things wrong.
These hallucinations might seem harmless at first glance – a sprinkle of fiction in a poem, a mistranslated phrase. But the consequences can be real, with misleading information, biased outputs, and even eroded trust in technology.
So, it becomes crucial to ask, how can we detect and mitigate these hallucinations, ensuring LLMs speak truth to power, not fantastical fabrications? (Full article.)
Many are beginning to understand this limitation in LLM AI, and are realizing that there are no real solutions to this problem, because it is an inherent limitation of artificial computer-based “intelligence.”
A synonym of the word “artificial” is “fake”, or “not real.” Instead of referring to this kind of computer language as AI, we would probably be more accurate in just calling it FI, Fake Intelligence.
Kyle Wiggers, writing for Tech Crunch, reported on the failures of some of these recent attempts to cure the hallucinations of LLM AI a few days ago.
Why RAG won’t solve generative AI’s hallucination problem
Hallucinations — the lies generative AI models tell, basically — are a big problem for businesses looking to integrate the technology into their operations.
Because models have no real intelligence and are simply predicting words, images, speech, music and other data according to a private schema, they sometimes get it wrong. Very wrong. In a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, a source recounts an instance where Microsoft’s generative AI invented meeting attendees and implied that conference calls were about subjects that weren’t actually discussed on the call.
As I wrote a while ago, hallucinations may be an unsolvable problem with today’s transformer-based model architectures. (Full article.)
Devin Coldewey, also writing for Tech Crunch, published an excellent piece last month that describes this huge problem of hallucinating inherent in AI LLMs:
The Great Pretender
AI doesn’t know the answer, and it hasn’t learned how to care.
There is a good reason not to trust what today’s AI constructs tell you, and it has nothing to do with the fundamental nature of intelligence or humanity, with Wittgensteinian concepts of language representation, or even disinfo in the dataset.
All that matters is that these systems do not distinguish between something that is correct and something that looks correct.
Once you understand that the AI considers these things more or less interchangeable, everything makes a lot more sense.
Now, I don’t mean to short circuit any of the fascinating and wide-ranging discussions about this happening continually across every form of media and conversation. We have everyone from philosophers and linguists to engineers and hackers to bartenders and firefighters questioning and debating what “intelligence” and “language” truly are, and whether something like ChatGPT possesses them.
This is amazing! And I’ve learned a lot already as some of the smartest people in this space enjoy their moment in the sun, while from the mouths of comparative babes come fresh new perspectives.
But at the same time, it’s a lot to sort through over a beer or coffee when someone asks “what about all this GPT stuff, kind of scary how smart AI is getting, right?” Where do you start — with Aristotle, the mechanical Turk, the perceptron or “Attention is all you need”?
There are only three things to understand, which lead to a natural conclusion:
- These models are created by having them observe the relationships between words and sentences and so on in an enormous dataset of text, then build their own internal statistical map of how all these millions and millions of words and concepts are associated and correlated. No one has said, this is a noun, this is a verb, this is a recipe, this is a rhetorical device; but these are things that show up naturally in patterns of usage.
- These models are not specifically taught how to answer questions, in contrast to the familiar software companies like Google and Apple have been calling AI for the last decade. Those are basically Mad Libs with the blanks leading to APIs: Every question is either accounted for or produces a generic response. With large language models the question is just a series of words like any other.
- These models have a fundamental expressive quality of “confidence” in their responses. In a simple example of a cat recognition AI, it would go from 0, meaning completely sure that’s not a cat, to 100, meaning absolutely sure that’s a cat. You can tell it to say “yes, it’s a cat” if it’s at a confidence of 85, or 90, whatever produces your preferred response metric.
So given what we know about how the model works, here’s the crucial question: What is it confident about? It doesn’t know what a cat or a question is, only statistical relationships found between data nodes in a training set. A minor tweak would have the cat detector equally confident the picture showed a cow, or the sky, or a still life painting. The model can’t be confident in its own “knowledge” because it has no way of actually evaluating the content of the data it has been trained on.
The AI is expressing how sure it is that its answer appears correct to the user.
This is true of the cat detector, and it is true of GPT-4 — the difference is a matter of the length and complexity of the output. The AI cannot distinguish between a right and wrong answer — it only can make a prediction of how likely a series of words is to be accepted as correct. That is why it must be considered the world’s most comprehensively informed bullshitter rather than an authority on any subject. It doesn’t even know it’s bullshitting you — it has been trained to produce a response that statistically resembles a correct answer, and it will say anything to improve that resemblance.
The AI doesn’t know the answer to any question, because it doesn’t understand the question. It doesn’t know what questions are.
It doesn’t “know” anything! The answer follows the question because, extrapolating from its statistical analysis, that series of words is the most likely to follow the previous series of words. Whether those words refer to real places, people, locations, etc. is not material — only that they are like real ones.
It’s the same reason AI can produce a Monet-like painting that isn’t a Monet — all that matters is it has all the characteristics that cause people to identify a piece of artwork as his. (Full article.)
“AI” was the new buzz word for 2023 where everything and anything related to computer code was being called “AI” as investors were literally throwing $trillions into this “new” technology.
But when you actually examine it, it really is not that new at all.
Most people are familiar with Apple’s female voice “Siri” or Amazon.com’s female voice “Alexa” that responds to spoken language and returns a response. This is “AI” and has been around for over a decade.
What’s “new” with “generative AI” like the new LLM applications, is the power and energy to calculate responses has greatly been expanded to make it appear as if the computer is talking back with you as it rapidly produces text.
But these LLM’s don’t actually create anything new. They take existing data that has been fed to them, and can now rapidly calculate that data at speeds so fast that it makes the older technology that powers programs like Siri and Alexa seem to be babies who have yet learned how to talk like adults.
But it is still limited to the amount, and the accuracy, of the data it is trained on. It might be able to “create” new language structures by manipulating the data, but it cannot create the data itself.
Another way to look at it, would be to observe that what it is doing in the real world is making humans better liars, by not accurately representing the core data.
This enhanced ability to lie really struck me recently when watching a commercial for the new Google Phones:
Here Google is clearly teaching people how to deceive people and lie about the actual data that a Google phone captures by using “AI”, as in photographs.
Lying and deceiving people sells, while the truth most often does not, and when the public watches a commercial like this for Google’s latest phone, the reaction, I am sure, among most, is that this is really great stuff, as our society has now conditioned us to believe that lying and deceiving people is OK in most situations.
Another Zionist Crime – The Psychopathic Destruction Of Rafah
via Moon of Alabama
This morning the Israeli army ordered hundred thousands of refugees to move from the eastern part of Rafah to the already destroyed and likewise overcrowded area around Khan Younis. Hours later it started to bomb and destroy the place.
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The eastern part of Rafah includes the Rafah crossing to Egypt through which food an other necessities enter Gaza. It also includes the largest still existing healthcare facility.
As the Zionist entity will likely continue in its usual pattern the eastern part of Rafah will be completely destroyed. After that it will do the same with its western part.
There will not be one building left in Gaza that is inhabitable.
I mostly refrain from writing about the crimes of the colonial settler regime. It is simply beyond my emotional capabilities.
This poem, by Caitlin Johnstone, is probably the best way to express my feelings:
I Oppose Israel’s Atrocities In Gaza Because I’m Not A Psychopath
I don’t oppose the butchery in Gaza because I love Hamas or hate Jews or love Islam or hate America. I don’t oppose the butchery in Gaza because I’m a lefty or a commie or an anarchist or an anti-imperialist. I oppose the butchery in Gaza because I’m not a fucking psychopath.
Every one who openly or silently supports the Zionist in this should be in jail.