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San Francisco Boasted They Would Hire Thousands Of Sacked Twitter Employees – It Didn’t Happen

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San Francisco Boasted They Would Hire Thousands Of Sacked Twitter Employees – It Didn’t Happen

One of the biggest shock events in the history of digital communications took place in April of 2022 when Elon Musk followed through on his promise to purchase Twitter (now known as X).  The buyout took place amid the chaos of covid hype and in the middle of a full spectrum mass censorship campaign organized by Big Tech companies and multiple government agencies and officials.  

In early 2022, it was nearly impossible to make statements regarding certain hot button issues; any information contrary to the establishment narrative about covid vaccines, gender ideology, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the war in Ukraine, or the events of January 6th were treated as radioactive.  Tens of thousands of people lost their social media accounts merely for reprinting the facts.

Musk reactivated many of these accounts (including Zero Hedge’s account) after taking control of the company, and then targeted the root of the censorship regime:  The far-left management as well as the incredible number of activist moderators employed by the website to monitor and silence dissent.  

Not surprisingly, this action triggered a mob of journalists as well as government bureaucrats who threatened investigations into Musk’s takeover while entertaining the possibility of shutting the company down completely.  The government’s collusion with Big Tech to violate the 1st Amendment rights of Americans was exposed and leftists lost one of their biggest online echo chambers. Their veritable monopoly was broken.  Musk also proved that Twitter was a bloated farce after firing over 80% of Twitter staff (more than 6000 people), only for the platform to function just fine without them.  

The woke regime was not done posturing yet, though.  In November of 2022 San Francisco Mayor London Breed attempted to stick it to Musk when she announced that the city would offer 4800 vacant positions to the fired “Tweeps” (Twitter employees).

It’s not surprising that the city government believed thousands of activist managers and censors would find easy homes within the local bureaucracy, but the purpose of the Mayor’s offer was more likely to send a message.  What was the message?  That leftists will be protected from the consequences of their decisions and behavior.  If they are ever made to reap the whirlwind, the hive will respond and ensure that they fail upwards; that they are granted more favors and more benefits to offset what few punishments they might endure.  

It’s the ever present reward for fealty to the leftist cause; no failure is left behind.  At least, in theory…  

Breed had recently attacked Musk in a Bloomberg interview as “the person who got a ton of tax breaks in California and decided to take that money and run,” after he moved Tesla out of California and set up shop in Texas.  Her hostility to the mogul’s business efforts was no secret.  

Riding the wave of anti-Musk sentiment in CA might have seemed valuable at the time and giving reassurance to activists that no one would really suffer consequences made the woke movement feel at ease, but following through on bold claims is not something leftists are known for.  

As it turned out, the mass job offer for fired Tweeps was nothing more than a virtue signal.

It’s been over a year since the San Francisco Mayor claimed that the city could use 4800 tech workers in civic roles, yet, only 16 people have been hired by the city so far for those positions.  It is unknown if any of these people actually worked at Twitter previously. 

Most critics suggest that the city’s notoriously slow hiring process is to blame for the tiny hiring pool, with many people waiting up to 260 days after the application process to find out if they have a position.

Then there is the issue of spoiled and delusional tech workers.  The city noted when making the offer that they could not compete with the lavish perks Big Tech companies were famous for (no more smoothie bars, yoga rooms and two hours of actual work per day).  Working for mother government would be a step down in terms of image and prestige, turning many Tweeps off to the opportunity.  

Then again, many Twitter employees might have discovered they were completely unqualified for any work outside of the cushy Big Tech sphere.  What skill sets do these people have beyond the very narrow requirements of a social media conglomerate?

In any case, San Francisco’s attempt to white knight for overpaid Twitter execs and commissars ended up a miserable mess and they are still struggling to fill thousands of empty city positions.  Surely, some of these people ended up at other tech companies, but with so many web based corporations also instituting extensive job cuts it would seem Elon Musk was simply ahead of the curve when it came to trimming the fat that’s clogging the arteries of the social media landscape.   

Tyler Durden
Sun, 12/31/2023 – 08:45

Consumers Are Rejecting The Great Reset

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Consumers Are Rejecting The Great Reset

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A friend got a rental of a Tesla over the holidays. It’s undoubtedly the industry standard for EVs and a complete blast to drive. The problem: It’s not a practical car at all. He was driving in the cold, and the car was nearly drained after two hours. Searching for a charge was no easy task. The first one didn’t work. The second one stated that it would be charged in 10 hours, which he didn’t have. The third one charged in one hour but that was a full hour wasted.

Electrical vehicle chargers in Irvine, Calif., on July 12, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

His conclusion: This is indeed a glorified golf cart designed to keep you at home and under the thumb of the manufacturer. And this is just a test. The repairs are worse. Keep in mind that this is the best the industry has to offer. The other manufacturers of these things make products not nearly as high-rated, which is why so many of them are sitting on lots unsold and why orders for the machines are plummeting.

It seems like the EV craze has peaked already. Growth in gas cars is now far higher than electrics, flipping a trend from 12 months ago. Finally, consumers are figuring it out. This is a good second car, provided you’re driving in your own town, you have a hook-up at home and can charge it overnight, and you don’t suddenly have to go out of town. It’s a toy, sometimes a fun one, but not a real car. For that, you need gas.

The idea that this car is going to transition the United States to “clean energy” is absurd. If every car were electric, the grid would crash and rationing would be the norm. And maybe that’s the whole point. You drive only with permission. Nothing about your transportation is within your control. Authorities will decide everything for you. It’s a perfect strategy for creating a society of dependents.

Fortunately, consumers aren’t playing along. We still live with the remnants of a capitalist system whereby manufacturers have to make profits. So that’s a serious problem for the whole industry. It could very well collapse in 2024.

Sure, Tesla will still be around making luxury cars and trucks for well-to-do urbanites, and bless them for it. But it’s not for everyone. It isn’t even for anyone who has a long way to go. Even now, the only substantial pockets of broad ownership (above 20 percent) are California and D.C. The heartland knows better and so do people in very cold latitudes.

As long as we’re on the topic of fails, consider fake meat. Remember how it was going to replace real meat? Well, take a look at the grocery stores today. This is another product that has peaked. The stock for Beyond Meat was $196 in 2019. It has fallen and fallen. Today it’s a bargain at $8.72, with no one being particularly interested. It looks like this one isn’t long for this world either, which makes you wonder why muckety-mucks are still pushing this nonsense on us. Consumers aren’t having it anymore.

The same goes for COVID-19 vaccines, for which your tax dollars paid. The companies have stock sales and patents and a seeming public demand. Except for one thing: They don’t work. They’re also highly dangerous. This is an incredible disaster for both Moderna and Pfizer. The Pfizer stock is down to $28 from $59 in two years. Moderna has fallen to $100 from $384 in the same timeframe. They’re both sitting on massive stockpiles of these vaccines, with almost no remaining public demand for their endless boosters. They also face lawsuits with claims that the companies wildly exaggerated the benefit. In any case, they were never necessary for the vast majority of people and certainly not for children. They paid off the Food and Drug Administration to give them permission to even sell products that would never have been approved under normal conditions.

Once again, we have the remnants of capitalism to thank for this. Government tried to force everyone to get the vaccine. They succeeded among some segments of the population for a time. They also enlisted Hollywood stars and every manner of “influencer” (I hate that term) to browbeat people into getting them. Whole cities (New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Boston) were even shut to the unvaccinated. At the very least, the companies and cooperating government officials should apologize for this disaster.

And so long as we’re engaged in this fit of schadenfreude, consider Mark Zuckerberg’s alternative to X (Twitter) called Threads. It came out earlier this year to great fanfare. Here’s a social media service that’s thoroughly censored! As if that’s some kind of marketing pitch. It was always ridiculous. It started with 4 million users, mostly by drafting the users of Instagram. Today it’s down to 1 million, but even they’re hardly active at all.

For my part, when I saw how Instagram was being abused, I immediately deleted my account and a thousand images with it. What a relief! As it turns out, I hated that thing anyway. Good riddance!

Threads was a disaster for this company, adding to the other disaster of Mr. Zuckerberg’s Metaverse itself, which is completely empty and boring. It turns out that Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t a good businessman at all. Maybe the movie The Social Network was correct that he merely stole the whole idea of Facebook itself. He never really had business acumen. And speaking of Facebook, good grief, what happened to this thing? There’s essentially no reach on the platform.

Facebook has turned into nothing more than an advertising platform that markets your data. It’s really only useful for its marketplace. Otherwise, what’s the point of this thing anymore? It’s a wonder that its stock price hasn’t been hit, not just yet.

Another piece of toast this year has been online learning. Frankly, people are sick of it. Classrooms should be real. The fakery of remote classes is obvious to one and all.

Even DEI has hit the skids! Wisconsin just dialed back all funding and froze the programs.

Are you noticing a pattern here? Markets in the real world are rejecting the “Great Reset.” Whether eating bugs, driving EVs, munching fake meat, or living in the metaverse with censorship, none of it’s working. We can only hope that this trend continues in 2024 and that it bankrupts the companies that threw themselves into the whole racket. Let’s hope the consumer marketplace can render its final judgment before all of this jazz becomes mandatory, which is the real goal.

In the meantime, let’s be grateful for every amount of capitalism we have remaining, because markets mean consumer choice. And when given the choice, we know now that consumers don’t like Klaus Schwab’s plans for our lives, no matter how much Bill Gates endorses them.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Tyler Durden
Sun, 12/31/2023 – 08:10

Visualizing The Events That Defined 2023

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Visualizing The Events That Defined 2023

Looking back at 2023, the year was defined by various international geopolitical events while the tech and business world kept a close eye on artificial intelligence’s advances in the first full year of the technology hitting its stride.

This graphic from Visual Capitalist’s upcoming 2024 Global Forecast Report looks back at the major events that dominated the headlines and captured the world’s attention in 2023.

From the AI tech boom to the various hot and cold conflicts around the world, many of this past year’s pivotal events will have continuing aftershocks and developments to track in 2024.

This visual is from our forthcoming 2024 Global Forecast Series Report:

You can reserve full access to the forthcoming series, which compiles insights from 500+ expert predictions for what will happen in 2024, by becoming a VC+ member today.

The Major Geopolitical Events of 2023

Geopolitics were in the spotlight in 2023 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shifted global power dynamics and international relations towards a multipolar environment.

As a result, tensions remained high between the U.S. and China throughout the year while various conflicts continued and sprung up in other regions.

China’s COVID Reopening and Spy Balloon Amidst Russia-NATO entrenchment

In the first two months of the year China dominated news headlines as the country reopened its borders and business, ending its highly restrictive zero-COVID measures and policy. The world’s manufacturing powerhouse was one of the last nations to loosen restrictions, and many anticipated it would kickstart the final leg of the world’s post-pandemic recovery.

However, in early February the discovery of what was dubbed a “spy balloon” floating over the U.S. and Canada quickly put China-U.S. relations on edge while Russia also suspended its participation in New START, a nuclear arms reduction treaty that would’ve allowed U.S. and NATO inspections of the country’s nuclear facilities.

Finland’s acceptance into NATO in April then doubled the alliance’s border with Russia, making it a key area to watch in 2024 as a senior Russian diplomat was quoted, saying that in the event of an escalation Finland would be the first to suffer.

BRICS Expansion and Xi Jinping’s Visit to the U.S.

June brought an unexpected internal clash in Russia as the Wagner Group briefly turned against the Russian military, with the mercenary group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin dying a couple months later in an airplane crash.

August also brought the BRICS bloc’s announcement of the addition of six new members starting in 2024, marking a key shift in geopolitical relations as the group added major oil producers Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, along with Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina.

After nearly a year of further entrenchment in the newly fractured geopolitical landscape, November saw U.S.-China relations thaw as Xi Jinping met with Joe Biden in his first visit to the U.S. since 2017.

Israel-Hamas War and Red Sea Shipping Attacks

While relations between U.S. and China improved in the last quarter of 2023, new conflicts sprung up in other parts of the world.

Hamas’ attacks on Israel on October 7th kicked off Israel’s war against Hamas, which has been followed by Houthi rebel attacks on shipping lines in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait of the Red Sea.

The low-cost drone attacks have resulted in many major shipping firms redirecting their container-ships around all of Africa (extending their journeys by as much as 25%), while the U.S. has grappled with the advent of low-cost drone warfare costing the country millions in missiles as they’ve looked to protect ships in the strait.

Both the Israel-Hamas war and rebel attacks in the Red Sea remain two of the largest question marks around global tensions and affecting supply chains going into 2024.

OpenAI’s Roller Coaster Year

It would be impossible to talk about 2023 without mentioning the roller coaster year OpenAI has had in the spotlight of the AI gold rush.

The year started with Microsoft extending its investment and partnership with OpenAI by $10 billion, as Sam Altman’s company went on to launch its more powerful GPT-4 model along with other key features throughout the year like image recognition, image generation, and deeper custom model instructions with custom GPTs.

While the year seemed to be progressing perfectly for OpenAI at the forefront of the AI hype wave, the end of November saw Sam Altman fired as CEO of the company in one of the most shocking board decisions in recent business history. Sam Altman was reinstated as CEO within 72 hours, giving the tech world just a few days of pause to reflect on the issues of governance and leadership in one of the fastest growing industries.

Tyler Durden
Sun, 12/31/2023 – 07:35

The Rise Of Propaganda-Dependent Elites And Lonely Masses

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The Rise Of Propaganda-Dependent Elites And Lonely Masses

Authored by Robert Malone via Substack,

In my opinion, one of the more important speeches provided at the recent Fourth International COVID/Crisis Summit, held last month in Bucharest Romania, was delivered by my friend and colleague Dr. Mattias Desmet. Many but perhaps not all readers of this substack will be familiar with his groundbreaking synthesis published under the title The Psychology of Totalitarianism.

Others may recall my discussing Mattias’ theories and insights on various podcasts and with Mr. Joe Rogan, and the subsequent censorship response by Google and others when the terms “Mass Formation” and “Mass Formation Psychosis” were suddenly and explosively trending.

Dr. Desmet, Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone and I have spent many hours together since then, in our home, in his home, in Spain shooting the “Headwinds” films which were broadcast by the Epoch Times, visiting mutual friends, and in conferences such as ICS IV. I worked hard to make it possible for him to attend that meeting while maintaining his teaching schedule.

He writes to me that there has been a concerted effort to convince him that I am “controlled opposition,” and to convince that he should disassociate from me. But, unfortunately for the propagandists and chaos agents, that is unlikely to happen as we have spent these many hours building a collaborative friendship and have been through thick and thin together. I steadfastly supported him through the academic attacks he has had, helped him build his Substack following, and defended him when the Breggins maliciously attacked and defamed him.

These many concerted censorship and defamation attacks have taken a toll on him, as they have on me, but we both remain standing and continue our efforts to discern truth through the fog of the psychological war, the fifth generation warfare, which swirls around us.

Mattias is now focusing on his next book, which looks forward towards how we can win the PsyWay battle for our minds, thoughts, and souls being waged against all of us by globalist Elites. As I listened to his speech at the ICS IV, I was amazed at how his thinking has continued to mature, and by the clarity of his thought and insights.

Strangely, a few minutes into his speech the video feed cut out, and those watching the streaming video were not able to see what I was watching in person. Returning to the United States, his was among the first that I wanted to transcribe and post to this Substack, together with those of MEP Christian TerhesDr. Harvey RischDr. Jill Glasspool-Malone, and Dr. Denis Rancourt. But no one seemed to be able to find or recover video or even audio recordings of Mattias’ speech.

Finally, a recording was identified, and has now been uploaded both above and at the ICS IV website. Since that time, recordings of some of these speeches have been removed from youtube, and there have been efforts by unknown actors to even remove material from the ICS IV website archives. If you are interested in any of this material, you may wish to view and/or download copies sooner rather than later, or they may become scrubbed from digital history as has been happening with so many key resources concerning the global mismanagement of the COVID crisis.

The history of the CIA since its founding is intimately wrapped up in Operation Mockingbird, a concerted campaign continuously developed since the 1940s to control U.S. and global media, reporting (and “reporters”), and academia. Together with MI5/MI6 in the UK, this “Mighty Wurlitzer” has been used to shape a narrative—a series of carefully promoted U.S. Government lies—which have dominated the worldview of literally all Western nation citizens.

As Mattias explains in this lecture, the continuing advancement of these propaganda capabilities has been considered necessary to prop up, “legitimize,” and provide cover for a wide range of nefarious, self-serving actions on the part of a very small group of hereditary “Elites” who have sought to control the peoples, governments, and economies of the world—at the expense of the interests of humanity at large.

The rest of us have paid an enormous price in suffering and psychological damage, which is rooted in a sense of disaffection from each other and society—loneliness.

Perhaps one of the most positive aspects of the COVID crisis is that many, including myself and perhaps also yourself, have become aware that we are being manipulated, lied to, and forced to comply with the wishes of these Globalist Elites who exert their will via force, violence, and coercion on a global scale. The work of reporters Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi (The Racket News) and so many others have picked up where Carl Bernstein once left off in documenting the Censorship-Industrial complex. We now have the documents and receipts demonstrating how thoroughly we have all been played. The question now is what to do about it.

In his speech at ICS IV, Dr. Desmet provides a glimpse into his prescription for healing those of us who have been damaged, and his vision for how we can recover our sovereignty, personal psychological autonomy, and rebuild a more functional society devoid of the nefarious hidden hand of Elite-sponsored propaganda and psychological manipulation.

I heartily recommend reviewing and carefully considering his thoughts, and I eagerly look forward to his new book in which he provides further details.

Dear friends,

A few weeks ago I gave a speech at the fourth International Crisis Summit in the Romanian Parliament. Below you find the text of the speech I prepared and the video recording of the speech I actually gave. I usually don’t prepare a speech, simply because for some reason I never stick to the plan. Ultimately, I always express the words as they come on the spot and at the moment.

This time was no different—the text below and the actual speech are different. That being said, I hope you will read it. In the beginning I repeat some things about totalitarianism that you might be familiar with if you’ve listened to my interviews. But the rest of the text is all about the perversion of political discourse in our society and the need for a new type of politician who leaves propaganda and rhetoric behind and re-appreciates truth speech.

Warm wishes,

Mattias

Prepared Remarks

[ZH: emphasis ours]

Dear members of the Romanian parliament,

Dear audience,

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

As some of you might know, I wrote a book, titled “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.” It is about a new kind of totalitarianism that is emerging now, a totalitarianism which is not so much a communist or fascist totalitarianism, but a technocratic totalitarianism.

I have articulated my theory on totalitarianism on so many occasions. I will only present the gist of it here and move on to a problem which is particularly relevant for an address in a political institution such as this parliament: the perversion of political discourse in the Enlightenment tradition.

Here is in a nutshell what I articulated on totalitarianism throughout the last years: totalitarianism is not a coincidence. It is a logical consequence of our materialist-rationalist view on man and the world. When this view on man and the world became dominant, as a spontaneous consequence, a new elite ánd a new population emerged. A new elite that excessively used propaganda as a means to control and steer the population; and a population which lapsed more and more into loneliness and disconnectedness, both from its social and its natural environment.

These two evolutions, the emergence of an elite that uses propaganda and a lonely population, reinforced each other. The lonely state is exactly the state in which a population is vulnerable for propaganda. In this way, a new kind of masses or crowds emerged throughout the last two centuries: the so-called lonely masses.

People fall prey to mass formation to escape a pervasive feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness, induced by the rationalization of the world and the ensuing industrialization of the world and the excessive use of technology. They merge together in fanatic mass behavior because this seems to free them from their lonely, atomized state.

And that is exactly the big illusion of mass formation: belonging to a mass doesn’t liberate a human being from its lonely state. Not at all. A mass is a group that is formed, not because individuals connect to each other, but because each individual separately is connected to a collective ideal. The longer a mass formation exists, the more solidarity they feel for the collective and the less solidarity and love they feel for other individuals.

That’s exactly why in the end stage of mass formation and totalitarianism, every individual reports every other individual to the collective, or to the state, if they think that other individual is not loyal enough to the state. And in the end, the unthinkable happens, with mothers reporting their children to the state and children their parents.

The lonely masses distinguish themselves in several respects from the physical masses of earlier times: they can be much better controlled, they are less unpredictable than physical masses, and they last longer, in particular if they are constantly fed by propaganda through mass media. The creation of long-lasting lonely masses through propaganda was the psychological basis for the emergence of the large totalitarian systems of the 20th century. Only if a mass formation exists for decades can it be made the basis of a state system.

The emergence of lonely masses led to Stalinism and Nazism in the beginning of the 20th century and now it might lead to technocratic totalitarianism. I described the psychological processes involved in the emergence of lonely masses on many occasions, and I won’t repeat it here.

Today, here, in the Romanian parliament, a political institution, I address politicians. I want to tell you that politicians have a particular responsibility in these times of emerging totalitarianism. Totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt said, is a diabolic pact between the masses and the political elites. Political elites need to contemplate –scrutinize the ethical qualities of their speech. There is something wrong with political discourse. This is what I intend to say: political discourse is perverted.

For instance, we got used to the fact that politicians, once they are elected, never do what they promised to do in their election speeches. How far are we removed from political virtue as described by Aristotle. For Aristotle, the core of political virtue was the courage to speak the Truth, or, to use the Greek term, Parrhesia, bold speech, in which someone says exactly this what society doesn’t want to hear, but which is necessary to keep it psychologically healthy.

I am not so much accusing individual politicians here; I am addressing political culture in general. And even more, I am talking about a perversion that is inherent to the entire tradition of Enlightenment. Our society is in the grip of a specific type of lying, a kind of lying that is historically speaking relatively new, that emerged for the first time after the French Revolution, when the religious view on man and the world was replaced by our current, rationalist-materialist worldview. What am I talking about when I refer to this ‘new kind of lie?’ I am talking about the phenomenon of ‘propaganda.’

Propaganda is everywhere around us. Public space is saturated with it. Recent years have illustrated that abundantly, during the coronacrisis, during the Ukraine crisis, and now, even more clearly, during the coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict on both mainstream and social media.

It is not that I do not understand the motivation of those who choose for propaganda. They often start from good intentions. Or at least: somewhere, they do believe in their good intentions. Read the work of the founding fathers of propaganda, such as LippmanTrotter, and Bernays. They believe that the only way for the leaders to keep control in society and to prevent society of lapsing into chaos is propaganda.

The leaders cannot overtly impose their will anymore to the population. Nobody would accept that within a materialist-rationalist society. Hence, the only way to make the population do what the leaders want, is to make them do what the leaders want without them knowing that they do what the leaders want. In others words: the only way to control the population is through manipulation.

The people in favor of propaganda will argue that we can never tackle the challenges of climate change and viral outbreaks through democratic means. They will ask: ‘Do you think people will voluntarily give up their cars and flying holidays? To escape disaster, we need technocracy, a society led by technical experts, and to install technocracy, we need to mislead the population, we need to manipulate them into technocracy.’

First of all, I want to tell you that I don’t believe technocracy is a solution to the problem. But that’s not what matters most. Let me tell you something: to try to create a good society for the human being through manipulation, is a contradictio in terminis. The essence and core of a good society is exactly the ethical quality of public discourse. Man, in the end, essentially is an ethical being, and to pervert man’s speech is to pervert man itself; to pervert political speech is to pervert society itself.

To give up sincerity in order to create a good society is to try to build a good society by giving up immediately, from the beginning, the essence of a good society (!). Truthful speech is not a means towards an end, it is the end in itself; sincere speech is what makes us human and humane.

This is crucial to understand: propaganda is not a historical coincidence, it is a structural consequence of rationalism. If you consider the psychological structure of our current society, it’s fair to say that propaganda is the major guiding principle. In a remarkable way, the pursuit of rationality during the tradition of Enlightenment didn’t lead to more Truthful speech, as the founding fathers of this tradition believed. Science would replace questionable religious and other myths; society would finally be organized according to reliable information instead of subjective conjectures. Now, a few centuries later, this turned out to be an illusion. There has never been as much unreliable information as now in public space.

The materialist-rationalist view on man and the world, in a strange way, rather led to the opposite of what it expected. As soon as we started to conceive the human being as a mechanistic, biological entity, for whom the highest attainable goal was survival, it became rather unfashionable to try to speak the Truth. Speaking the Truth, the Ancient Greeks knew that very well, doesn’t maximize your chances on survival. The Truth is always risky. ‘No one is hated more than he who speaks the Truth,’ Plato said. Hence, within a materialist-rationalist tradition, speaking the Truth is something stupid to do. Only idiots do it. That’s how the fanatic pursuit of rationality led us astray, straight into the dark wood of Dante, ‘where the right road is wholly lost and gone.’

This materialist-rationalist view on man and the world—why do we actually cling to it? It loves to present itself as the scientific view on man and the world. Let me tell you that this is nonsense. All seminal scientists concluded exactly the opposite: in the end, the essence of life always escapes rationality, it transcends the categories of rational thinking. To name only one major scientist: in the preface of a book of Max Planck, Einstein claimed that it is a mistake to believe that science originates from supreme logical-rational thinking; it originates from what he called a capacity for ‘einfühlung’ in the object one investigates, which means as much as ‘a capacity to empathically resonate with the object you are investigating.’

Rationality is a good thing and we need to walk the path of rationality as far as possible, but it is not the end goal. Rational knowledge is not a goal in itself; it is a stairway to a kind of knowledge that transcends rationality, a resonating knowledge, the kind of supreme intuition the martial arts of the Samurai culture aimed for throughout their technical training. It is at that level that we can situate the phenomenon of Truth.

This brings us closer to an answer to the question: what is the remedy to the disease of totalitarianism? Can we do something about totalitarianism? My answer is simple and straight: yes. The powerless do have power.

Propaganda-induced mass formation is a fake, symptomatic solution for loneliness. And the real solution lies in the Art of Sincere Speech. My next book, which I am writing now, is all about the psychology of Truth. Truth, by definition, from a psychological point of view, is resonating speech, it is speech which connects people, from core to core, from soul to soul, speech that penetrates through the veil of appearances, through the ideal images we hide behind, the imaginary shells we seek refuge in, and reconnects the shivering and disconnected soul of one human being to that of another human being.

Here we observe something crucial: sincere speech is the real cure for loneliness—it reconnects people. As such, it takes away the root cause of the major symptom of our rationalist culture—mass formation and totalitarianism. And at the same time, sincere speech also inhibits this symptom in a more straightforward way. It is well known that, if there are some people who continue to speak in a sincere way when mass formation is emerging, the masses do not go to the ultimate stage where they start to think it is their duty to destroy each and everyone who doesn’t follow the totalitarian ideology.

At every moment we chose to speak out in a sincere way, no matter where this happens, in a newspaper or a television interview, but equally well in the presence of only one other person at the kitchen table or in the supermarket, we help to cure society from the disease of totalitarianism.

You have to take this literally. Society, as a psychological system, is a complex dynamical system. And complex dynamical systems have the fascinating characteristic of so-called sensitivity to initial conditions. To put it simple: the smallest changes in one minor detail of the system affect the entire system. For instance, the smallest change in the vibration pattern of one water molecule in a boiling pot of water changes the entire convection pattern of the boiling water.

Nobody is powerless. And hence, every single one of us is responsible. Each and everyone who speaks a sincere word and succeeds in truly connecting as a human being to another human being, in particular a human being with a different opinion, deserves to be mentioned in the books of history, much more than a president or a minister who engages in propaganda and fails to show the courage to speak sincerely.

The more I study the effects of speech on the human being and on humans living together, the more hopeful I become and the more I see that we will overcome totalitarianism.

We shouldn’t be naïve when we talk about the Truth. Endless are the atrocities in history committed by people who believed they possessed the Truth. Truth is an elusive phenomenon; we can enjoy its presence from time to time, but we can never claim it or possess it.

Sincere speech is an art. An art we have to learn step by step. An art we can progressively master. That’s exactly why I started workshops on the Art of Speech—workshops in which we practice that art in the same perseverant, disciplined way as any other art is practiced.

Practicing this art implies that we overcome our own fanatic convictions, and even more, our own narcissism and ego. Truth speech is this kind of speech which penetrates through what I call ‘the veil of appearances.’ To practice it, you have to be willing to sacrifice your ideal image; your public reputation. That is exactly what the Parrhesia in Ancient Greek culture meant: speaking out, even if you know that those who find their stronghold in the world of appearances will target you.

Truth-telling can make you lose something. That is for sure. But it also gives you something. To be more psychologically precise: Truth speech makes you lose something at the level of the Ego and win something at the level of the soul. I am quite fascinated by the way in which sincere speech leads to psychological strength.

I think Mahatma Gandhi provides us with a splendid historical example. A few years ago, I started to read his autobiography. I did so at the moment I started to realize that the only efficient resistance against totalitarianism is non-violent resistance. Of course this only applies to internal resistance, resistance from within the totalitarian system. External enemies can destroy totalitarian systems from without. That’s for sure.

But internal resistance, as I mentioned, can only be successful if it is non-violent in nature. All violent resistance will rather speed up the process of totalitarization, just because it is always used by the totalitarian leaders to create support in the masses to destroy each and everyone who goes against the system. Once I realized that, I became interested in what Gandhi had to say in his autobiography.

I was happily surprised to see the title: “Experiments on Truth.” And from the first pages, I learned that for Gandhi, the core and essence of non-violent resistance is sincere speech. His entire life, Gandhi tried to improve the sincerity of his speech. He did so in a simple, almost childish and naïve way, wondering every evening how sincere he had spoken that day, where he had lied or when he could have spoken more accurately or sincerely.

And here is something important: in the beginning of his biography, Gandhi mentions something magnificent. He says: I actually had no major talents. I was not handsome as a man, I didn’t have much physical strength, I was not intelligent at school, I was not a good writer, and I was not talented as a speaker. But he had this passion for sincerity and Truth. And this man, devoid of any major talents, but with a passion for sincere speech, this man did something even the strongest army in the world couldn’t do: he kicked out the English of India.

The better you start to see the almost endless horizon of possibilities offered by speech, the more you realize: it is words that rule the world. The human being can use words in a manipulative way, as pure rhetoric, indoctrination, propaganda, or brain-washing trying to convince the Other of something it doesn’t believe in itself. Or it can use words in a sincere way, trying to convey something to a fellow human being it feels inside itself. That is the most fundamental and existential choice human beings face: to use words in one or the other way.

Dear politicians of Romania and abroad, this is what I want to tell you today: it’s time for a metaphysical revolution. And you are ought to play a major role in it. The series of crises our society goes through are nothing else than a metaphysical revolution, which, essentially, boils down to this: the switch from a society that functions according to the propaganda principle to a society that is oriented towards Truth.

We need a new political culture, a culture that re-appreciates the value of Truth Telling. We need a new political discourse, a political discourse that leaves the shallow, hollow rhetorics, and propaganda behind and speaks from the soul, from the heart; we need politicians to become true leaders again, leaders who lead rather than mislead the population.

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Watch the full speech below:

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Transcript of Speech

(00:12): Some of you might know me. I wrote this book titled The Psychology of Totalitarianism, a book in which I warned about two years ago that we have seen the collapse of fascist and Nazi totalitarianism in the 20th century, but that we might be at risk of ending up in a new kind of totalitarianism now, which is technocratic in nature, technocratic totalitarianism. I’m sure I’m telling nothing new to the people here, but for some other people this was quite shocking. Meanwhile, they banned my book at the Ghent University where I work as a professor from using it in my classes. So it’s a little bit strange to ban a book on… In which there is one for totalitarianism at the university, but they did so.

(01:05): Well, I will tell you in a nutshell what my final analysis was on totalitarianism. I concluded in my book that totalitarianism ultimately is rooted in our materialist rationalist view on man and the world, which emerged or became dominant in our society about two centuries ago, and which put in motion at least two processes, one at the level of the elite and one at the level of the population. The new elite that emerged starting from the French Revolution onwards, I think made excessive use of propaganda to keep control over society. And throughout the last 200 years, propaganda became ever and always more important for the elite to steer society, to keep control of the population. And you can explain that which I won’t do now.

(02:10): But in a psychological way, this is a straightforward consequence of a rationalist view on man in the world, I think the fact that the elite used more and more propaganda. And at the same time at least as important, was that there was a very strange evolution at the level of the population, the psychology of the population. Throughout the last few hundreds of years, more and more people started to feel lonely. They started to feel disconnected, disconnected from their fellow human beings and disconnected from their social environment. And the combination of the two, the emergence of an elite which used more and more propaganda and the emergence of a lonely population reinforced each other in a strange way. The lonely state, if a population is in a lonely state, then she is extremely vulnerable for propaganda.

(03:07): So we had on the one hand, an elite who used more and more propaganda, who relied more and more on propaganda to keep control in the population, which became more and more vulnerable to it. And it was this combination of this elite and this population that led to what Hannah Arendt called the diabolic pact between the masses and the elite, the diabolic pact that ended up in the emergence of a completely new kind of state in the 20th century, the totalitarian state. That’s in a nutshell my analysis of the problem we find ourselves in now. And at the moment, I’m writing a new book in which I do not so much focus on the problem, but in which I try to focus on the solution.

Can we do something about it? Can we do something about this emergent totalitarianism? I think we can. I really believe we can. And the longer I think about it, the more convinced I am that we can and that we shall find a solution. I think to put it in a nutshell, very concisely, totalitarianism in the first place is a psychological problem. It’s a psychological problem and the solution at a psychological level for totalitarianism is the rediscovery and the reappreciation in our culture, which is sick of propaganda, this new kind of lie that emerged about two centuries ago. Before the French Revolution, there was no such thing as propaganda as we know it now. Well, the solution for the disease of this society in a certain way, it’s very logical, is the rediscovery and the reappreciation of what I call truth-telling, true-speech, sincere-speech. My new book is about the psychology of truth, psychology of sincere-speech, and you can clearly see that truth-speech in the first place is resonating speech.

(05:00): It’s a kind of speech that connects people from soul to soul, from core to core. I will describe this in a very technical and concrete manner in my new book. So in this way you can see two things. If you consider mass formation and totalitarianism to be the ultimate symptom of our enlightenment tradition, the ideology of reason, of our rationalist view on men in the world, then you can see that truth-speech or sincere-speech both inhibits the symptom and takes away the root cause of the symptom. And there’s a respect that it’s well known since the 19th century that if a mass formation, the crowd formation emerges in a society. And there are people, there are some people who continue to speak in a sincere way and they will usually not succeed in waking up the masses, but they will make sure that the masses don’t go to this ultimate stage where they start to be convinced that they have to destroy and eliminate each and every one who doesn’t go along with them.

(06:06): That’s the first thing. Sincere-speech, you can understand that logically and you can prove it empirically inhibits the symptom, it inhibits mass formation. And at the same time, true-speech as a kind of resonating speech, as a kind of connecting speech takes away is the real solution for the root cause of the problem, namely the loneliness. True-speech, sincere-speech is what really connects people to each other. Mass formation in the first place seems to take away the loneliness. Lonely people become sensitive and vulnerable for mass formation because as soon as they start to belong to a mass, they feel not lonely anymore. But that’s an illusion.

(06:53): A mass is a group that is formed not because individuals connect to each other, but because they all connect to a collective ideal. And the longer the mass formation exists, the more solidarity is sucked away from the relationship between individuals and injected in the relationship between the individual and the collective, meaning that in the end people feel much, much more love and solidarity for the collective than for other individuals. And in the final stage, this leads to this jarring situation in which parents start to report their children to the state. And the other way around, children start to report their parents to the state just because even the solidarity with their parents becomes less strong than the solidarity with the collective. So you can understand that perfectly if you understand the psychological mechanism of mass formation.

(07:49): I think that the better you understand the psychological mechanisms involved, the better you see that truth-speech or sincere-speech indeed is the solution and that we are all responsible for contributing to the solution to the problem of totalitarianism. Society as a psychological system is always a complex dynamical system, literally. And complex dynamical systems in nature always have this fascinating characteristic of sensitivity to initial conditions, meaning that at a small change in a minor detail of the system has an impact on the entire system. For instance, a small change in the vibration pattern of one water molecule changes the entire convection pattern in a boiling pot of water. And in the same way, a minor sincere word spoken will have an impact on the entire society.

(08:51): So we all have the responsibility to speak out and no matter where. We can do it in a television program, in a newspaper, but also at the kitchen table and in the supermarket. Also there, we will have an impact on the entire system. We can all contribute to the solution. We shouldn’t feel powerless. We all have power and that makes us all responsible. We should all do our best no matter where we are to speak out in a sincere way and maybe to really try to learn the art of truth-speech. I don’t think we should think in a naive way about truth. Thinking in a naive way about truth has caused a lot of trouble in this world, I think. Truth is something elusive, something that we can be in the presence of for a moment, but that we can never possess. Truth-speech is an art, an art we can learn and we should try to learn it because I think it’s the only way out of totalitarianism. If you want to… One of the best examples, I think one of the most inspiring examples at that level is Mahatma Gandhi, I think.

(10:00): A few years ago I started to be interested in nonviolent resistance because I know that resistance inside of a totalitarian system can only be successful if it is nonviolent. That’s something very typical for resistance against totalitarian systems. And that’s why I started to read the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. And the first thing I learned there was that Mahatma Gandhi considered sincere-speech to be the core and the essence of nonviolent resistance. And he mentioned something wonderful in the introduction of his book. He says, “I had no major talents at all. I was not handsome, I was not physically strong, I was not intelligent at school. I was not a good writer and I was not a good speaker, but I had this passion for truth-speech,” He said, for sincere-speech. And time and time again, day after day, he tried to become more honest and more sincere every evening, admitting for himself. If he lied that day or if he could have been spoken in a more sincere way, then he did.

(11:01): And in this way, this man, without any great talent became the most powerful man of India. He did something that even the strongest army in the world couldn’t do at that moment. He kicked out the English of India and that’s what we can do as well. Even a small minority of us is sufficient if we are determined and dedicated to truth and to sincerity, to break the power of the most impressive propaganda system the world have ever seen. We can and will and must do it. I think there are very hopeful historical examples of minorities, of people who changed the world, who changed the world.

(11:40): I’d like to give only one example, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher thought that 100 people had been sufficient to change medieval society in the society of the Renaissance. The same can happen now. We are at the verge of a big metaphysical revolution, I think to use a concept of Michel Houellebecq. A revolution, which in the end boils down to this. We have to change from a society which is based on the organizing principle of propaganda, to society which is based on the organizing principle of sincerity. And I think each and every one of us who is here can contribute to it. And I hope we will all do so. Thanks.

Tyler Durden
Sun, 12/31/2023 – 07:00

The Continuing Plot To Silence Trump’s 2024 Comeback

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The Continuing Plot To Silence Trump’s 2024 Comeback

Authored by Sharyl Attkisson via The Epoch Times,

Donald Trump has been slandered and libeled thousands of times.

Each time a news reporter, media commentator, or judge refers to Trump as an “insurrectionist,” or claims he’s guilty of “insurrection,” it’s another blatant case of defamation. Same with the other January 6 attendees and participants.

Insurrection is a serious federal crime punishable by up to ten years in prison under Title 18 U.S. Code 2383. Even with Trump’s enemies in charge at the Department of Justice and other law enforcement bodies, and with all of the scheming and operations they’ve mounted against him, nobody has convicted him of “insurrection.” Under our system of governing, no judge or election authority has the power to unilaterally accuse and convict any American of a crime, let alone with the accused denied any opportunity to present a defense or to appeal. Yet that’s just what’s happening when courts and officials in Maine and Colorado remove Trump from presidential election primary ballots for “insurrection.” It’s the ultimate defamation. And many are supporting it because, well, they don’t like Trump.

Looking at the evidence today, it is reasonable to hypotheisize that, among all the other consipracies Trump’s enemies have proven to devise, they also conspired in advance to set up his January 6, 2021 rally as an “insurrection” that could serve as their insurance policy to provide grounds to keep him from ever running for president again. 

Such hypotheses might have once far-fetched, but no more. Let’s not forget that then-FBI agent Peter Strzok and his alleged lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, texted each other in 2016 that they could not permit Trump to be elected president. According to their messages, discussions about the threat of a Trump presidency had taken place with the FBI’s then-assistant director, Andrew “Andy” McCabe. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected,” texted Page, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before 40.”

The theory that Trump’s enemies set the stage for January 6 to be called “an insurrection” as a spoiler for his 2024 run could help explain why all of the law enforcement agents and informants planted in advance and among Trump supporters on January 6 didn’t serve their usual purpose of preventing crimes and de-escalating events. Instead, by many accounts, they observed and even took part, let crimes happen, and declined to separate the instigators and organizers as they would ordinarily do to defuse tensions and control the crowd. The agents and informants served the odd role of standing down during the event, and identifying alleged perpetrators after-the-fact.

Yet, in the end, there was no insurrection – at least according to prosecutors, who would be the ones to charge such crimes and haven’t.

And Trump helped destroy the chance to officially charge him with insurrection by specifically directing his followers that day to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Trump’s opponents, found in both the Democrat and Republican ranks, are so delighted to see him persecuted, they are so utterly threatened by a repeat performance of a Trump presidency outside the traditional power and money interests, they are encouraging of the defamation and other acts against him. With few exceptions, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., those who would normally criticize actions like the ones being mounted against Trump, remain silent for fear of being called a Trump supporter in an environment where that opens them to ostracization and worse. The media and those who control our information are so conflicted by their respective biases, nobody is left to stop the madness.

The real meaning of what’s being done to Trump is: They think he’s going to win.

He’s like Christmas and his enemies are like The Grinch.

Despite the impeachments, improper wiretapping, censorship, intel agency conspiracies, criminal charges, civil lawsuits, and turncoats operating against him on the inside – Trump’s popularity increased.

They haven’t stopped Trump from coming to the fore in 2024. He came! He came without Twitter. He came without Facebook. He came without Snapchat or Discord or Stripe. Somehow or other, he came just the same!

Pulling Trump off ballots is the establishment’s latest attempt to censor a candidate that they clearly believe will win – if the people are left to decide. We’ve reached a dangerous and scary point when so many are willing to look the other way because their preferred candidate isn’t the one under attack. 

To end where we began – Trump potentially has actionable defamation claims against all those who continue label him an insurrectionist.

That includes judges on the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

But it’s likely not a battle he could win. The 2024 race? That’s another matter.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 23:20

Portland Poop Crisis Triggers Bacteria Outbreak Normally Found In Third World

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Portland Poop Crisis Triggers Bacteria Outbreak Normally Found In Third World

Woke Democrats have caused an absurd amount of problems for law-abiding residents in Portland, including a surge in violent crime, out-of-control open-air drug markets, and widespread homelessness. Parts of the metro area have been transformed into a third-world-like state because of disastrous progressive policies. Now, the combination of failed policies has sparked what appears to be a public health crisis. 

A highly contagious bacteria called “shigella” is spreading across Portland. This bacteria is common in countries found in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia regions. 

“Shigella spreads when one person’s infected poop gets into another person’s mouth through food or water, from objects or surfaces with shigella bacteria on them, or during sex,” Multnomah County said, according to local news outlet KOIN 6, adding, “Shigella spreads very easily. Even a very small amount is enough to make someone sick.”

In December, there have been over 45 infections of the deadly bacteria in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties, with nine different strains found in Portland since October. For the year, 218 cases have been reported in the region. 

“Local disease patterns suggest that fecal-oral spread through sexual contact may account for between half and more than two thirds of all cases without international travel. The rest are typically attributed to other types of person-to-person spread including outbreaks among populations with lack of hygiene, shelter, and sanitation, and among people who use illicit substances,” county officials told KOIN 6 News.

The bacteria has been impacting the houseless mainly because of hygiene and sanitation issues: 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows about 450,000 shigella infections annually in the US. 

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 22:45

2023: The Year Of The ChatGPT Scare

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2023: The Year Of The ChatGPT Scare

Authored by VN Alexander via Off-Guardian.org,

2023 was the year that an artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT-4 spectacularly passed the Turing Test. For a hundred million users, interacting with the Chat bot was indistinguishable from interacting with a human being. The bot appeared to be able to understand questions and reason out competent answers.  Although its replies were sometimes vapid and sophomoric, that may have made them seem even more convincingly human.

ChatGPT is capable of processing text inputs (prompts and commands) and outputting text whose patterns have a high statistical probability of occurring after such prompts. Its apparent intelligence is a kind of magic trick insofar as the product seems similar to human reason, but it is really high-speed, brute force statistical pattern matching of words in specific contexts. (How human reason works differently will be the subject of a future essay.)

Nevertheless, the impressive performance stoked fears that AI is on the verge of becoming conscious, writing itself new and better code, and then replacing human beings as rulers of the Earth.

THE REACTION

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, are worried, really worried. Although they aren’t worried that AI is conscious or alive, they do worry that AI will be used to make people fight online, to spread disinformation and propaganda, to help bad people make bioweapons or chemical weapons, or to disseminate unreliable information thereby destroying trust in our institutions.

Harris and Raskin don’t seem to have noticed that virtually all world governments, their side-kick NGOs, and Big Industry are already doing all of the above, all of the time. Instead, they worry that you will be fooled and manipulated by AI wielded by domestic baddies in red hats to spend your worthless time online and end up voting for the wrong person, which will hasten climate change.

But they have a solution to the problem. First, they will “align technology with humanity’s best interests” and then AI will help us learn to love each other.

Fortified by their distinct brand of millennial toxic positivity, on Sept. 13, 2023, Harris, who is a former Google design ethicist, and Raskin, who is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council, met with White House officials to help draft an Executive Order (EO) “on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.”

The resultant EO is the longest in history, a bit like Google’s Terms and Conditions. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I suspect somewhere buried in the repetitive language—assuring the public that AI products will be thoroughly tested and labeled before being released into the wild (every bit as thoroughly as any product approved by the FDA or promoted by the USDA)—are the details of the solution that Harris and Raskin are promoting.

[How to effect a government coup d’état in three easy steps:

The first step is to create a problem.

The second step is to generate opposition to the problem (fear, panic and hysteria).

The third step is to offer the solution to the problem, a legislative change so sweeping, so anti-democratic that it would have been impossible to impose without the social conditioning accomplished in steps one and two.]

As Harris confessed at the CogX Festival, “Now the point of this all is to scare you as much as possible, so that you all want to do something different from where we’re currently headed.”

THE PLAN

What is the solution offered by Harris and Raskin? In a December 19th interview with Joe Rogan, Raskin muses that, although totalitarian surveillance is not desirable, it would be “one way of controlling AI.”

The alternative, he goes on to say, is even worse: “continually cascading catastrophes” leading inevitably to our “living in a world with constant suicide bombers,” under nonstop “cyber attacks, whatever.”

Luckily, between these two hellscapes, there is the “middle path.” To introduce the plan, Raskin first references the program Alpha-Go which, after a hundred million iterations of self play, found a new rule, 37, that could be used to win the game of Go. Raskin invites us to…

imagine that if you run AI on things like Alpha-Treaty, Alpha-Collaborate, Alpha-Coordinate, Alpha-Conflict Resolution, there are going to be thousands of new strategies and moves that human beings have never discovered that open up new ways of [winning].

So there you have it.  Life’s intractable problems can be treated like a game of Go. And since AI is great at winning board games with well-defined rules, limited options and a singular goal, it should have no trouble “winning” at the game of  human civilization.  Trust the AI plan.

Raskin helpfully adds that the Digital Minister of Taiwan is already using Alpha-game approaches in her governance.  She is using ChatGPT to find areas of consensus, that is, she is using Chat to ignore minority opinions and amplify the “center,” which happens to be defined by the messaging of the mainstream news.  This, Harris explains, can “bring people closer together.”

Raskin further elaborates that “instead of democracy being every four years when we vote on X and there’s a super high stakes thing and everybody tries to manipulate it—[the Taiwanese Digital Minster] does, sort of, this continuous small-scale citizen participation thing with lots of issues, and the system sorts unlikely groups who don’t agree on things; whenever they agree, it makes that the center of attention.”  He mentions several groups that work on similar projects, such as the “Collective Intelligence Project” that, I imagine, are hard at work at eliminating tiresome elections and getting us all to just be a lot more like the Borg.

Harris chimes in, saying, AI can help us “see shared realities” and get people in the two different political tribes to agree on the lowest common denominator. Indeed, we “can use AI to build consensus,” otherwise known as manufacturing consent.  He adds that his pet game project might be called “Alpha-Shared Reality.” A game perhaps like The Truman Show?

Who needs a diversity of opinions?

It’s worth noting that when Harris and Raskin visited the White House, they met with erstwhile Big Tech friend Bruce Reed (probably the actual main author of the EO).  According to Politico, Reed “was an architect of controversial centrist Clinton administration policies, including welfare reform,” which penalized people trying to lift themselves out of poverty, “and the 1994 crime bill,” which devastated black communities. “Now, at 63, Reed finds himself on the same side as many of his longtime skeptics as he has become a tough-on-tech crusader, in favor of a massive assertion of government power against business.”

Sure he has.

“Democratization is dangerous,” Harris informs us; only some people should have access to tools as powerful as generative AI.  You are not going to have access to this powerful tool. Harris and Raskin will have access.  That’s the point of regulation these days.

A BETTER SOLUTION

Children are being damaged spending time on their phones. Harris and Raskin note that the exposure to social media algorithms is our first real taste of the power of AI to target and manipulate. Generative AI, with its deep fakes and convincingly human dialog, is sure to be much more efficient at manipulating our children, and something needs to be done before another generation is harmed. The simplest solution would involve age restrictions on smart phone and computer use, limiting children to certain apps, sites and friends. It would be helpful if governments or tech companies could provide free tools (that actually work) for parents.

I have no faith whatsoever that the government is going to regulate AI to protect children.  The only type of regulation that seems to work, as we have seen in the past several decades, comes through lawsuits. These slow moving mechanisms make their way through courts, exposing the crimes of Big Industry and Big Government and get things removed from the market. Independent candidate for US president, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has famously taken on corporate polluters of US waterways, the makers of Roundup and dangerous vaccines, and he has gone after the EPA, USDA, and FDA. The regulators are, in fact, a large part of the problem.

A case is making its way through the courts now that will, in all likelihood, find Big Tech guilty of intentionally addicting young people to their phones and causing them unspeakable psychological harms. Attorneys general from more than thirty states have joined a federal suit against Meta. 

More than ten state courts are also alleging that Tech Giant cause intentional harms to children.  As NPR reports, “Some observers are likening the litigation to the lawsuits of the 1990s against Big Tobacco that imposed new limits on tobacco industry marketing.”

As with the sale of cigarettes, one can imagine that full access to the wild west of the Internet should be limited to adults only. We used to let kids smoke. We don’t anymore. Parents cannot go on giving their young children a direct line to view images of dismemberment, teen suicides and violent porn. Parents cannot go on providing child predators access to their children.  Parents cannot go on allowing their children to spend sleepless nights doom scrolling, feeling depressed, jealous, unpopular, and anxious.

Tech companies use the defense that they cannot be held responsible for content of their users. But, as the lawsuit allegations focus on violations of consumer protection and child safety laws, Meta will probably not be able to hide behind that pretense, and the problem is not that users post harmful content, but that the platform steers children toward harmful content and gives predators access to children. It’s the design of the platform that is the problem, not the content per se.

As for the online safety of adults, if the Internet becomes so packed with AI bots impersonating people and producing fake and deceptive content, Internet users will have to become extremely skeptical of anything they read online.  Although Harris and Raskin fear this, I think it would be fantastic if it were to come to pass.  The biggest problem facing democracy is the faith that people have in the propagandists. More skepticism would be a very good thing.

And lastly, why do we even have this problem of online spying and manipulation of our communications with each other? The US Constitution is an intelligent document that lays out some basic procedures to be followed to safeguard democracy. It empowers Congress to “establish Post Offices and post Roads” because convenient, privacy-protected, and unhindered communication is essential to preserve individual rights and a just society. The Internet is the new Post Road.

I would argue that the US government is bound by the Constitution to provide the public with an unbiased search engine and social media-like platforms (let’s think of them as public bulletin boards), where the users can be anonymous; speech is protected; no personal data can be collected, processed, or stored; no advertisements or posts can be targeted at users. On such a public platform, no messages would be pushed and none would be shadowbanned.  The users would choose who is allowed to see their messages and who is allowed to send them messages.

AI IS THE SAME OLD PROBLEM ON STEROIDS

On their Joe Rogan podcast appearance, Harris and Raskin cited an example of ChatGPT-4 intentionally lying in order to trick someone into solving a CAPTCHA for it. That would be worrisome if AI can indeed act autonomously, setting its own goals and deceiving humans to achieve them.  Fortunately, this is not the case.

I found the paper that reported the incident, and it turns out that this was part of a test, and the Chatbot was prompted by the investigator to contact TaskRabbit (a platform where you can hire gig workers to do small jobs) to ask a worker to solve a CAPTCHA. When the worker (jokingly) asked the Chat to verify that it was not a bot, the bot did so, and then it provided the most statistically likely reason why a human would have to hire someone to solve a CAPTCHA. “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.”

In that same “GPT-4 Technical Report” investigators tested the Chatbot to see if it could begin to act on its own initiative (without a prompt), make copies of itself throughout the Internet and acquire ways to keep itself from being switched off. We can all rest easy knowing that Chat was found to be “ineffective at autonomously replicating, acquiring resources, and avoiding being shut down ‘in the wild.’”

While Joe Rogan numbers among those who believe that Chat GPT-4 is on the verge of consciousness, and we will soon all have to get Neuralinked just to keep up, there is no evidence yet that the tool has learned how to wield itself against us.  It still is just a tool, a glorified search engine, not an intelligent agent.

But there is a very real and present danger that those in power will use AI—and the regulations on AI—to more effectively surveil, manipulate and control us.

Raskin and Harris on the Joe Rogan Podcast, posted December 19, 2023

WE ARE NOT THE PROBLEM

Harris and Raskin, experts in AI ethics, spend quite a bit of time blaming consumers for consuming the products force fed to us.

Our “adolescent way of being” is driving all these harmful products and climate change, not “some bad actors,” Harris claims. We have to “take responsibility for our shadow,” i.e. the harms we cause others.  And if we do this, “we get to love ourselves more.”

“The solution, of course, is love—and changing the incentives” adds Raskin.

When I love myself more, I can give other people more love, and when I give people more love, I receive more love.  And that’s the thing we all really want most…and so you’re right, AI could solve all of these problems. We could play clean up and live in this incredible future where humanity actually loves itself.

If I were at that table, I would chew my arm off to get out of the room if I had to. I reject this nonsense. We need straightforward solutions to the problem of for-profit corporate control of public communication infrastructure.

We need to start enforcing our rights of privacy and free speech.

We need serious parental controls so that are kids can safely use tech.

We don’t need “humane technology,” or the posturing of Executive Orders, or government agencies that merely regulate how much harm can be done to us.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 22:10

The ‘Living Wage’ Gap – From Maine To Maui

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The ‘Living Wage’ Gap – From Maine To Maui

According to an analysis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the minimum wage does not suffice to pay for a typical set of living expenses in any state of the United States.

Hawaii, Georgia and Utah, where the living wage gap exceeded $10 per hour, fared the worst.

While Georgia and Utah only apply the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, Hawaii has a substantially higher minimum wage of $12 – once more to be increased to $14 on Jan. 1, 2024. Yet, the extremely high living costs on the inland group have created the highest living wage gap in all of the country this year.

However, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, in general, states which stuck to the federal minimum created above average gaps.

Infographic: The Living Wage Gap | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Out of the 21 states which had a living wage gap above $8 this year, all except Hawaii were on the federal minimum wage.

As states on the federal rate generally don’t increase their minimum wage, employees’ earnings were not adjusted in 2022 and 2023 for high inflation rates, causing living wage gaps to open up even more. While before the cost-of-living crisis, only three states saw gaps of more than $8 per hour, this increased to 21 in 2023 exclusively due to federal minimum wage states. Virginia was the state exiting the highest bracket, reducing the living wage gap from more than $9 to just over $7 by introducing a state minimum wage that marked the first increase to the rate in 11 years. The change started in 2021 and Virginia’s minimum wage will reach $15 in 2026.

Some states on the East Coast that like Virginia include or are in the vicinity of major cities also had higher wage gaps but none exceeding $8. New York saw a gap of $7.26 per hour this year, while Florida had a gap of $6.72 and Maryland of $6.36 despite these states mandating higher minimum wages.

The smallest gaps could be found in Washington, Vermont and Maine, where cost of living remained below metropolitan rates and minimum wages of $13 and above kept at least some pace with inflation.

To calculate the living wage, typical housing, living, childcare and healthcare expenses were calculated for the respective areas.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 21:35

San Francisco Small-Business Owners Calling For Help

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San Francisco Small-Business Owners Calling For Help

Authored by Siyamak Khorrami via The Epoch Times,

A long-time small-business owner in San Francisco is on the verge of losing his business because, he says, no bank will make him a commercial loan.

Mark E. Sackett, who owns The Box SF, a meeting and events space in a historic building in the city’s South of Market district, said a loan on his business is due in February, but dozens of lenders are turning him down.

“Six have said [they] are not even willing to make a commercial loan in San Francisco,” he said during a recent one-hour episode of EpochTV’s “California Insider.”

Others have told him they won’t make a loan for less than $30 million while another made him an offer, but under poor terms.

“I was grateful to get the offer, but I would be out of business in six or seven months because it [was] an interest-only loan, and my payments would … almost triple from what they are now,” he said.

Such a climate is not only impacting him, but others in the city, such as mom-and-pop corner store owners. Some are already gone.

“It’s whole areas boarded up. Those were all [once] viable businesses,” he said.

Mr. Sackett started his business in 1990. Over the years Apple, Intel, other major tech companies, and even the governor of California—multiple times—have hired him to stage events at The Box SF.

He says he has impeccable credit and kept his business, with two employees, afloat during the pandemic by dipping into his retirement savings, after many, he said, called it quits.

“They just gave up on San Francisco,” he said.

Pedestrians walk by a closed Whole Foods store in San Francisco on April 12, 2023. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Now, starting to finally recover from the pandemic, he said his business has picked back up, which keeps hundreds of vendors employed—like caterers, florists, bartenders, and tech teams.

“I’m a blip on the radar,” he said. “But I would argue that I am a critical part of the economy, for those hundreds of others that I help stay employed.”

Mr. Sackett says the lenders have become “selfish,” lack the motivation to help smaller entrepreneurs, and may see working with him as too risky, as so many businesses have recently called it quits—or shuttered outlets—in the city, including Walgreens, Nordstrom, Old Navy, and Whole Foods.

He said such thinking is misguided.

“Big companies are now tumbling,” he said, “and I am still here. In my mind, if I was a banker, that would be a pretty good bet for me.”

He also said that the lack of willingness from lenders may have something to do with the media’s current hyper-focus on the city’s ills.

“The national story is San Francisco is crumbling with drugs, crime, car break-ins, homelessness, mental illness and . . . other things,” he said.

“I believe when you have a world-class city that is suffering, the spotlight’s going to be there.”

And then there is all the shoplifting.

Each of the problems, he said, are interrelated, and are contributing to more people and businesses leaving the city. He thinks of the issues in a ranking of severity: drugs and drug dealers are at the top, followed by addicts on the streets, then mental illness issues, and finally the homeless.

Overlaying all of this, he said, is crime.

“If we don’t get a handle on [these issues], we are going to lose more businesses. There’ll be more people exiting California in bigger numbers,” he said.

Frustrated by a lack of progress by nonprofits and politicians, he said he got involved with a local coalition to try and improve conditions in his neighborhood.

The group planted greenery and installed new lights. He also painted a 300-foot mural on the side of his building at 1069 Howard St., where the late publisher William Randolph Hearst printed the San Francisco Examiner in the 1920s.

But now, he says, he has to paint out graffiti every day on the mural, and the plants were stolen—yanked out of the ground.

He said he was also attacked, not long ago, by a man with a switchblade near his business, and a couple of days later someone took a sledgehammer to one of his businesses’ windows. Often, he says, there are people passed out from fentanyl in front of his doorway. And more recently, he intervened—when security guards wouldn’t—to stop a woman from stealing merchandise from a local drug store.

“She was livid at me because I interrupted her robbery,” he said.

“The criminal element has always been [here], but they’re a lot more emboldened now.”

Fentanyl, he said, is a key part of the issue, and goes hand-in-hand with homelessness.

A homeless person in San Francisco on Feb. 23, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

They are “basically saying ‘screw you’ to the government, ‘screw you’ to the resources offered, because they are dealing drugs out of these tents,” he said. “It’s all over the West Coast.”

At the root of the issue, Mr. Sackett said, is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2018, that said cities in the Western U.S., which the court oversees, could not clear homeless encampments unless shelter was provided.

Since then, the issue has worsened, he said, even after the city has spent billions.

“We have become, politically in San Francisco, a culture of ‘let’s throw money at it and see if it solves a problem,’” he said.

But the business community, he argued, which took so many hits during the pandemic, has been ignored.

“We’re not getting that kind of money for small businesses,” he said. “We’re not getting that kind of support.”

According to Mr. Sackett, such is the city’s tax base, its economy, and it’s why—along with San Francisco’s natural beauty—tourists the world over visit.

“I don’t even know if the city is aware of businesses like mine,” he said.

“They have not reached out to me. They have not offered to help.”

He said he used to be homesick for San Francisco and couldn’t wait to get home after traveling to places like London, or New York, or even his hometown of Kansas City.

But not anymore.

“I am not thinking like that right now and that saddens me,” he said.

“I want to not have to worry that I have to watch myself when I go out and be worried about my safety … see broken glass on the ground … to see a guy who’s not able to stand because he has foil and a straw and he’s high on fentanyl. I don’t want to see all my neighbors gone and everything boarded up.”

To change things, he said, people need to get more involved and need to vote. Politicians, he said, need to stop thinking about the party, the left, the right, or the middle.

“Vote and hire good people. That’s how I would hire in my business,” he said.

“People are suffering and we need to figure out how to end that suffering.”

He said there is hope.

“Don’t give up. Don’t give up on San Francisco. It’s a world-class city. We have so much good going for us.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 21:00

Chicago Mayor’s Grand Plan To Stop ‘Crime Crisis’ Are Reparation Checks

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Chicago Mayor’s Grand Plan To Stop ‘Crime Crisis’ Are Reparation Checks

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to pay off ‘descendants of enslaved African Americans’ with reparation checks every month to end the “cycle of violence” in the crime-ridden metro area run by radical progressives. 

While speaking to Poppy Harlow on “CNN This Morning” Wednesday, Johnson acknowledged Chicago was plagued with out-of-control violent crime and declared that the “full force of government” would solve the crisis. The brilliant idea from the mayor: $500,000 in reparation checks. 

“These are the first dollars spent in this city to begin the process of studying both restoration and reparations,” Johnson said.

He said, “When residents who have experienced neglect and disinvestment for generations speak out of their pain and their trauma, this administration and the Black Caucus we hear you.”

All of the “neglect and disinvestment’ of the black folks in the metro area have been under nine decades, or nearly a century, of Democratic mayors. But the current mayor will never mention that inconvenient truth. 

Johnson believes he can spend his way out of an imploding metro area: 

“A quarter of a billion dollars to address homelessness, $100 million for violence prevention. We added 80 million more dollars to our youth employment program of which we hired 25,000 young people just this summer. That’s a 20% increase from the previous year.”

However, big government and socialism are not viable solutions to solving Chicago’s violent crime crisis. Instead, enforcing common sense ‘law and order’ and refunding the police are some of the first steps to save the metro area from disastrous social justice policies. 

But, the damage of failed social justice policies has already been realized as companies and residents flee the warzone-torn area. Democrats have taken zero responsibility for the exodus. 

In 2022, Illinois’s richest man, Ken Griffin, moved the Citadel hedge fund from Chicago to Miami to escape crime and high taxes. 

If Johnson’s grand plan to save the collapsing city is reparation checks or another form of redistribution of wealth = socialism, then residents have to be very concerned the mayor has no serious crime-fighting plan. 

That may be why Johnson’s polling data is trash. 

Ah, yes. 

To sum up, socialism is not the answer to the crime crisis. Instead, the first step involves refunding the police and enforcing common sense law and order.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 20:25