Cometh the new platform, cometh new actions in law, the fragile litigant ever ready to dash off a writ to those with (preferably) deep pockets. And so, it transpires that artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, for all the genius behind their creation, are up for legal scrutiny and judicial redress. Certainly, some private citizens are getting rather ticked off about what such bots as ChatGPT are generating about them.
Some of this is indulgent, narcissistic craving – you deserve what you get if you plug your name into an AI generator, hoping for sweet things to be said about you. Things …
Thanks to Thomas Friedman’s relentless service as a mouthpiece for US empire and capital, he’s permitted to continuously churn out his pseudo-thought piece every week.
— Belen Fernandez, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work
Thomas Friedman, a self-professed “liberal,” is the New York Times most widely read columnist and its most influential flak for corporate interests at home and abroad. He exhibits all the self-assumed hubris of American elites.
Friedman’s latest piece is “America, China and a Crisis of Trust” (NY Times 4/14/23). Wading through his vacuous, self-serving prose, smug certainties, side-tracking anecdotes and off-putting verbosity is a chore but in essence, …
If anyone was expecting a new tilt, a shine of novelty, a flash of independence from Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on April 17, they were bound to be disappointed. The anti-China hawks, talons polished, got their fill. The US State Department would not be disturbed. The Pentagon could rest easy. The toadyish musings of the Canberra establishment would continue to circulate in reliable staleness.
In reading (and hearing) Wong’s speech, one must always assume the opposite, or something close to it. Whatever is said about strategic balance, don’t believe a word of …
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) unequivocally condemns and opposes the recent indictment of four members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), alongside three Russian nationals.
The unsealed indictment states that on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, levied charges of “conspiring to covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda and interfere illegally in U.S. elections.” While no evidence of conspiracy, propagandizing, or interference has been presented, the APSP and its members have the right, as all U.S. citizens do, to freely criticize U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
Not since the …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / April 19th, 2023
Leaked document predicts a “protracted war beyond 2023.” Image credit: Newsweek
The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. President Biden dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of “great consequence.”
What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while …
America’s nuclear-war strategy is to win a nuclear war, not merely to deter one. This has been especially the case since 2006. But it did not start in 2006 to become that way. A 1981 PhD thesis by William C. Martel, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, one of America’s leading universities, was titled “A nuclear war-fighting strategy for the United States.” It stated that such “war involves first-strike attacks against ICBMs, SLBMs and strategic bombers” but not against cities because: “It is …
Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China did not quite go according to plan, though much depends on what was planned to begin with. In one sense, the French President was consistent, riding the hobbyhorse of Europe’s strategic autonomy, one hived off from the US imperium and free of Chinese influence.
Europe’s third-way autonomy would be a mighty thing for the Elysée Palace, especially given French pretensions in steering it. After all, Frau “Mutti” Merkel is no longer de facto European chief, presiding over the bloc with matronly care. Her successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is finding himself caught in undergrowth, a …
by Sonoma County Climate Activist Network / April 18th, 2023
A huge climate/environmental justice issue is looming over Sonoma County and the rest of California. A hungry monster is currently chomping up our trees and forests and burning them for power generation, converting them into fuel pellets for shipping overseas to European and Asian markets for burning, or turning them into biofuels for aviation. Exported fuel pellets are also burned for energy generation. Biomass energy (“bioenergy”) is being called “renewable energy.” It is taking away critical funds for real renewables like solar and wind energy.
Biofuels and biomass energy are not clean, not carbon neutral, and not sustainable. In fact, they …
It has been fifty-five years since Senator Robert F. Kennedy stepped onto the presidential nominating stage to try to mend the massive breach that had opened in American society. The country was torn asunder by the Vietnam War, racism, poverty, the assassination of President Kennedy and the soon-to-be assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Chaos reigned as Lyndon Johnson lied and Richard Nixon matched him in verbal and actual treachery. A war between Middle America and the elites running the government was breaking out across the country. A great divide between whites and blacks, rich and poor, the working …
Spring, the season of renewal, is here. The ants are diligently building their little symmetrical ant hills. The robins are in their nests occupied with posterity. And the anointed members of Congress, after a long recess, aka vacation, return to work on April 17. The next day, April 18, is the deadline for filing taxes.
Congress collectively is less than the sum of its parts. That is because there are only a few dozen sterling Representatives and Senators worthy of their voter constituents back home. These lawmakers, however, are unable to accomplish as much as they would like and as much …
For years, US intelligence officials could hold their allies, notably the British, in contempt for leaking like sinking vessels and harbouring such espionage luminaries as the Cambridge Five. The whirligig of time has returned the favour with the latest leak from the US Department of Defense. They pose a question pregnant with relevance: Do Washington’s allies have any reason to trust their own secure channels of sharing defence information? The answer: probably not.
The spray of Pentagon documents began appearing on such platforms as Twitter, 4chan, Telegram and a Discord server that hosts video games. (How odd, go the …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / April 16th, 2023
We’re not living the American dream.
We’re living a financial nightmare.
The U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.
The government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.
According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.
As the Editorial Board for the Washington Post warns:
The nation has reached a hazardous moment where what it owes, as a percentage of the total …
NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell assured the public “that the use of this technology will be transparent, consistent, and always done in collaboration with the people who we serve.” [emphasis added]
Those of us in this movement sometimes forget that for most people, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is a meeting in Davos where the rich and famous like to hang out once a year. They have no idea of what the WEF truly is about and what it has accomplished over the course of the last 50 years. Even those of us who follow the WEF can forget what their true mission is, and how deeply they are involved in crafting the new world order, ergo: The Great Reset.
Evolutionary Mismatches Challenge the Darwinian Unconscious
by Bruce Lerro / April 15th, 2023
Orientation
Most people who call themselves Marxists will tip their hat to Darwin and then move on. They laude his theory of natural selection for why species go extinct. They will support his gradualist theory that change is slow in the biological world. Of course, they will celebrate how humans evolved from the ape line rather than descended from the heavens. But once this is acknowledged and socio-cultural evolution for humans begins, Darwin seems not to be needed. In present time, Marxists are fine when they hear Darwinian explanations for other species …
Brandon Johnson, a progressive black community activist, union organizer, and former teacher, won the Chicago mayoral election against Paul Vallas, the corporate Democrat opponent. Johnson’s victory expressed popular rejection of neoliberal privatization and respect for progressive unions, in particular the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Johnson was outspent two to one, but not out-organized, winning 52-48%. The election displayed once again the power and organizing skills of the CTU, and showed that people, when they are involved, can upend election predictions.
His campaign also showed how easily leftists can slide from opponents of the corporate rule of America with their two parties …
Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022) and White Tiger (2021) (Spoiler alert)
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / April 15th, 2023
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, (Elective Affinities, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809)
What kind of culture do we want? What kind of culture do we need? Our culture reflects our fundamental ideologies and these ideologies are rooted in patriarchal religion and neoliberal politics in the main.
It’s a culture that depicts the class system, war, and in general, people dealing with the system in its many different facets, through drama, adventure, comedy, terror, horror, etc.
The origins of our culture are thought to go back thousands of years when, …
In the U.S., COVID-19 vaccines injured 6.6 million people, disabled 1.36 million people, caused more than 300,000 excess deaths, and cost the economy an estimated $147 billion in damage — in 2022 alone — according to a new analysis by Humanity Projects, a wing of Portugal-based research firm Phinance Technologies.
Note: I am not attacking people personally, or their right to opinions. However, I have been in this rodeo since 1983, academia, with the deans, chairs, provosts, VPs and presidents, and plethora of others, who hands down (not all) got it wrong about the value of and reason for education, K12 and higher ed. This is my subtitle:
another echo chamber of academics yammering and never getting deeper with AI’s bad boy/bad girl history [plus the provost of University of Florida, the “first AI university” sponsored the talk]
Holidays in my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ farm in Plain Grove, Pennsylvania, 35 miles from East Palestine, Ohio. My grandfather’s grandfather fought at Gettysburg and homesteaded the 160-acre farm after the Civil War. My grandmother sold it in the 1960s for $13,000, lacking a male heir to do the work; but my relatives still live in the area.
I have therefore taken a keen interest in the toxic chemical disaster that resulted when a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine on Feb. 3, although it is not my usual line of research. The official narrative doesn’t seem to add up. …
Over the last couple of years there have been three books published, or about to be, which have dealt prominently with the question of whether violence against fossil fuel CEO’s and/or sabotage of fossil infrastructure is warranted. The case is made in all three that it might be given the absolute criminality of those CEO’s as they fight the shift away from fossil fuels and onto truly clean renewables, doing so despite certainty that unless we make that shift, and right now, the world’s ecosystems and its many life forms are in very deep trouble.
Can organizations sincerely say they are leading the climate justice fight without also being unapologetically antiwar? Short answer — no. Here’s why.
We cannot end climate change without ending war. The United States military is the planet’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gasses and consumer of oil. The US military and its weapons, consistently deployed to secure economic dominance for the few while ensuring suffering for the many, has no place on a just and livable planet. The corporate interests and fascist, militarist tendencies that lead humanity into conflict are the very same that view our Earth, its atmosphere, and its …
Distractions divide us and guarantee we’ll never talk about essential core challenges. The egregious, central obstacles to “promoting the general welfare” are never mentioned by the talking heads, the pundits or politicians, to whom we look for guidance and leadership.
Distract and divide promises catastrophe, even to those who use it to further their sinister agenda. It’s astonishing how myopic most of the people at the top are, eh?
The control of everything by a tiny, short-sighted ruling elite is now total and the consequences are apocalyptic. We helplessly watch as their pursuit …
