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Brookings defines artificial intelligence (AI) as “a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.” Replicating human intelligence in machines has positively influenced data collection, manufacturing processes, solving efficiency issues, and other business processes.
Even with its various benefits, AI has been running into some challenges when it comes to bias. It’s important to continue researching these biases and implementing anything capable of ridding AI of discrimination completely.
Extreme religious and settler parties are a firm majority in Israel’s new parliament. Now they want a leader truly committed to their cause
by Jonathan Cook / March 29th, 2021
As 13 parties struggle with Israel’s complex post-election maths, seeking alliances that can assure them power, the most significant outcome of the vote is easily missed. The religious fundamentalists and settler parties – Israel’s far right – won an unprecedented and clear-cut victory last week.
Even on the most cautious assessment, these parties together hold 72 seats in the 120-member parliament. For more than a decade they have underwritten Benjamin Netanyahu’s uninterrupted rule. That is why all the current talk in Israel and the western media about two equal camps, right and left, pitted against each other – …
Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have long ignored serious criticisms of charter schools in a variety of ways. They have always believed, for example, that simply repeating worn-out phrases like “charter schools provide choice” will automatically cause everyone to dismiss the need for any discussion, investigation, and critical thinking about the well-documented negative effects of charter schools on education, society, the economy, and the national interest.
“Choice,” however, is not an argument for the existence or expansion of privately-operated charter schools.
Boris Johnson’s March 16 speech before the British Parliament was reminiscent, at least in tone, to that of Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2019, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China.
The comparison is quite apt if we remember the long-anticipated shift in Britain’s foreign policy and Johnson’s conservative government’s pressing need to chart a new global course in search for new allies – and new enemies.
Xi’s words in 2019 signaled a new era in Chinese foreign policy, where Beijing hoped to …
I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.
A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / March 29th, 2021
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.—Martin Luther King Jr. (A Knock at Midnight, June 11, 1967)
In every age, we find ourselves wrestling with the question of how Jesus Christ—the itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist …
Last week, Australians found themselves delighting in another fit of cancel culture, this time in the art world. Tasmania’s Dark Mofo art festival prides itself on being gritty but the mood was very much about removing any grit to begin with. Interest centred on the project of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who had proposed soaking a Union Jack Flag “in the blood of its colonised territories”. The blood would come by way of donations. First Nation peoples “from countries claimed by the British Empire at some point in history, who reside in Australia” would furnish the liquid.
This is a version of a speech given outside the headquarters of ReconAfrica in Vancouver BC on Water Day — March 22, 2021.
We are on stolen CS?wx?wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:l? and S?l?i?lw?ta?/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and x?m??k??y??m (Musqueam) land and what is happening here today, the assault of Indigenous peoples and the invasion of their territories by Canada, its corporations and economic elites is also happening to the San people in Southern Africa. In a recent petition by activists we have learned that: “ReconAfrica has been given permission to drill for fossil fuels in the Kavango basin …
The United States of America is victim of its own propaganda. Since being founded, the USA has always depicted itself as a beacon of democracy and liberty, a land of opportunity and hope where a person can accomplish rags to riches through hard work and initiative. For many the American Dream is viewed as a reality and can we be surprised that the Statue of Liberty’s inscription is taken literally:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Many of you in the middle class are opposed to socialism. You still think there is some chance for you under capitalism and you fear that the socialists will take what little you have and divide it among the shiftless and thriftless. You need not have the slightest fear. The socialist has no use for your small capital; it would do (them) not the least good. (They are) after the earth, the trusts, and the machinery of production. Besides, soon you will have nothing to divide. When the big capitalists get …
Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy.
We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with the concerns of others.
In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this moment of crisis.
Canadian politicians: "serving America's geopolitical interests"
by Daniel Dumbrill / March 25th, 2021
This is an excerpt from the “American/Canadian Propaganda – a Xinjiang ‘Genocide’ Panel” video. I encourage you to watch the whole thing, including Max Blumenthal’s part. The video can be found here: https://youtu.be/xdw1Nc6MJRg? I’ve decided to subtitle this portion in both English and Chinese, as I know many overseas Chinese (and Asians in general) are suffering from the consequences of anti-China propaganda, and may even begin to believe it themselves. I’d like as many people as possible to understand this message encouraging people to think critically, dig deeper …
To begin, it must be emphatically stated that the arrest of any person on knowingly false charges is a grave abnegation of morality and a despicable travesty of justice by whichever governmental, law enforcement, or judicial body involved.
The Canadian government has upped its diplomatic pressure to secure the release of two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who were arrested in China more than 2 years ago for allegedly spying for a foreign entity and illegally procuring state secrets.
The CBC pointed to a “show of solidarity, 28 diplomats from 26 countries, including the United States, …
A Palestinian man, Atef Yousef Hanaysha, was killed by Israeli occupation forces on March 19 during a weekly protest against illegal Israeli settlement expansion in Beit Dajan, near Nablus, in the northern West Bank.
Although tragic, the above news reads like a routine item from occupied Palestine, where shooting and killing unarmed protesters is part of the daily reality. However, this is not true. Since right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced, in September 2019, his intentions to formally and illegally annex nearly a third of the occupied …
Six years ago, on March 26, 2015, the US green-lighted and provided logistical support for the Saudi bombing of Yemen that continues on a daily basis. The US/Saudi war, which includes as allies the several members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, is an undeclared war, illegal under international law, and an endless crime against humanity. The US and the Saudis have dropped cluster bombs on Yemen since 2009. Yemen has no air force and no significant air defenses. Two years ago, …
One way or another, the majority of Americans will survive COVID-19.
It remains to be seen, however, whether our freedoms will survive the tyranny of the government’s heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., we may all be long-haulers, suffering under the weight of long-term COVID-19 …
US President Joe Biden’s attempted slander against Russian leader Vladimir Putin – calling him a “killer” – was not only disgraceful. It was also very stupid.
Such foul-mouth conduct betrays the American leader as having no class whatsoever. It demeans oneself and it tarnishes the supposed prestige of his office as the world’s self-declared most powerful man.
But the verbal jab also set up Biden for a swift body slam by the judo master Putin.
The Russian president gave a calm and magnanimous response to the American counterpart’s comment in an ABC News interview last week in which Biden agreed to …
What is the “Big Picture” of Covid-19, alias SARS-CoV-2 ? Is it what we could also call the end-game, or what Aldous Huxley called the “Brave New World” (1932), science-fiction – gradually turning into reality in the form of the UN Agenda 2030 – with the implementing tool of the Bill Gates created Agenda ID2020 (see here) ?
We are at the beginning of the end-game. We are in what the 2010 Rockefeller Report calls “The Lockstep” scenario. This is the first one of four scenarios, prompted by an invisible enemy, a virus, a corona virus, akin to the …
The Biden administration continues to engage in that favourite activity White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki can only describe as “circling back”. And much circling is taking place in the context of Afghanistan.
The cupboard of calamities is well stocked, with the US facing an emboldened Taliban keen to hold Washington to its word in withdrawing the last troops by May 1. In doing so, there is little chance that the US sponsored government in Kabul would survive. But dithering past the date will also be an open invitation to resume hostilities in earnest.
As things stand with the Afghanistan Peace Agreement, …
Newsclick’s Prabir Purkayastha talks about the recent Anchorage meeting between Chinese and US officials, the larger dimensions of the Indo-Pacific strategy of the United States, and how all of this ties into the politics around vaccines that dominates global diplomacy today.
There were Cold War preparations underway as early as August 1945 and the two regions selected, Korea and Vietnam, were pre-planned years in advance before the actual wars were to take place, Cynthia Chung writes.
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In Part One of this series I discussed how a massive U.S. arms stockpile in Okinawa, Japan that was originally intended to be used for the planned American invasion of Japan was cancelled once the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was …
The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers
by Edward Curtin / March 22nd, 2021
You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings. Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence. They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail. They never see the storm coming, even as they create it. Their …
The mass media considers Alexei Navalny to be Vladimir Putin’s main opponent. However, a “Levada Center poll from November 2020 — three months after Navalny’s poisoning — found that only 2% of Russians would vote for Navalny if he were a presidential candidate. That is a number that has remained steady for years.” How is it possible that there can be such a divergence of views?
In the western media, Navalny has been portrayed as an indefatigable Russian patriot who is trying to expose corruption in Russian society and has been victimised by various criminal prosecutions.
In June 2018, the Joint Action Committee against Foreign Retail and E-commerce (JACAFRE) issued a statement on Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart. It argued that it undermines India’s economic and digital sovereignty and the livelihood of millions in India.
The deal would lead to Walmart and Amazon dominating India’s e-retail sector. These two US companies would also own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords, joining the ranks of Google and Facebook.
JACAFRE was formed to resist the entry of foreign corporations like Walmart and Amazon into India’s e-commerce market. Its …
Promises are very much made to be broken, and the Biden administration is proving to be no exception. In a moral fit, the Biden White House has gone through the ranks of staffers with a keen eye on past marijuana use and wielded the axe and cudgel. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, a firm exponent of volte face, left media outlets with the impression that the administration had had a moment of sensible enlightenment. Consideration had been given to updating “the policies to ensure that past marijuana use wouldn’t automatically disqualify staff from serving in the White House.”
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
— aphorism
There is dumb-downing, cancel culture (I’ve been cancelled since beginning in 1972 in high school, way before the trendy terminology), forced consent, manufactured bifurcation, false balance, triangulation, perception as reality, equivocation, a host of propaganda techniques unleashed by Edward Bernays and Goebbels, and the ugly quartet of Infantilization-McDonaldization–Walmartization-Disneyfication:
George Ritzer introduced the concept of McDonaldization with his 1993 book, The McDonaldization of Society. Since that time the concept has become central within the field of sociology and especially within the sociology …
Russia impacted the U.S. election results in 2016 or 2020.
Russia hacked into U.S. election machines.
The recent U.S. government report alleging election interference contained any evidence of anything.
The report so much as alleged Russian involvement in the Biden-Ukraine-corruption story.
Russia changed the GOP platform.
Russia worked with WikiLeaks.
Russia met with Michael Cohen in Prague.
17 U.S. agencies claimed Putin launched cyber-attacks in 2016.
Russia hacked Vermont’s electricity.
The pee and prostitutes story.
Anyone has confirmed the allegation against Russia of placing bounties on heads …
Both before the First World War and before the Second World War, the world public basically simply watched the arms build up and other preparations for war. This lackadaisical blandly interested public attitude seems to be present again. Criminally insane investors in war openly race forward with the inventing and manufacturing of ever new and novel weapons of mass destruction, while planning and propagandizing a need for war. From time to time, spokespersons for their political, media and military lackeys discuss their prerogatives for war as if the rest …
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (Credit: Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
The most toxic substance on Earth is separated from exposure to society by ½” of steel encased in a canister.
— Paul Blanch, registered professional engineer, US Navy Reactor Operator/Instructor
That eye-opener comes from renowned nuclear expert Paul Blanch in reference to spent fuel rods removed from San Onofre Nuclear Generation Plant buried near the sea on California’s southern coastline 50 miles north of San Diego.
Seventy-three 20-foot tall canisters of highly toxic nuclear spent fuel rods are nestled underground within 108 …
