Hesitant Hezbollah, The Gilet Jaunes "Achieved Nothing", "Against Safetyism": The Rise of AI and "AI Doomers", The Genomics Revolution, The Great Fire of London Mystery
The news coverage that I've seen is much more balanced than it was the last time Israel used air raids to bomb Gaza. I've long been accustomed to pro-Israel bias in the American media, but my impression is that this time around, the conditions on the ground have been given a lot more scrutiny. (I get that this view is not shared by that faction of Zionists who have decried outlets like the New York Times for years as examples of the "pro-Palestinian Left", for not slanting their coverage 100% in favor of Israel.)
In particular, I have to single out the news reportage of the Washington Post on Gaza, which I've found to be competent, detailed, and balanced. Quite a contrast with the WaPo op-ed pages.
I'm also basically in favor of the Jewish population of the region being allowed to live in peace and freedom, in a modern liberal democracy. Unless the supporters of "Palestine free, from the river to the sea" can convincingly demonstrate that whatever polity they imagine should supplant Israel could actually have the character of a modern secular pluralist liberal nation rather than a "democratically supported" Muslim Bortherhood theocracy, it looks to me like the nation-state of Israel is the only means of maintaining the safety of the Jews living there. I'd prefer a multiethnic pluralist Palestine, but I've seen little evidence that the prospect is anything other than a pipe dream of Trostskyist romantics and their callow acolytes. It grieves me to say this, but history shows that once the ball goes up for grabs under conditions of revolutionary disruption, the people who end up grabbing it tend to be the most unscrupulous and intractably authoritarian.
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From what I can tell, the current AI hype falls into the same category as the VR and crypto manias of the past few years -- incredibly amazing at first glance, followed by the sobering realization it's not actually useful for anything.
Nov 18, 2023·edited Nov 18, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
AI transcription is evidently unable to cope with baseball game announcing, either. Try watching with closed captions some time. It's dismaying.
AI has an equally bad time with the proper names of the players- granted, the MLB roster is a multilingual polyglot, and there's such a disproportionate number of esoterically named Anglos that there's probably some cosmically significant linkage between weird names and aptitude at the sport. But really- "One Soda", for Juan Soto?
I won't believe the state of the art in AI has meaningfully advanced until it can get the basics right. But that would require context recognition. And that implies the presence of an actual point of view, in order to provide the perspective necessary to do the contextualizing. A bit of a sticky wicket there, to resort to a cricket metaphor. (You get my meaning, Chat GP? Is the continuous information vacuum of your LLP ok with that?)
For what it's worth, newscast transcription is often even worse. C-Span transcripts (typically posted underneath the video clips of their broadcast archive) have a way of derailing into word salad that can be terribly frustrating, if sometimes unwittingly comedic. And of the major news networks, it's strange to realize that Fox has a much better caption transcribing program than PBS. PBS captioning only seems to be able to transcribe one sentence of every three that's uttered. Other news networks closed captions still have abundant problems with accuracy--sometimes one might even wonder if they're doing it on purpose--but at least they keep up with the conversation.
Granted, AI seems to be able to call a tennis match fairly accurately. Perhaps it's aided by fond memories of witnessing Pong games. But I'm probably anthropomorphosizing with that speculation. It's a particularly tempting error when considering this topic, no?
Parenthetically, whatever the latest (mandatory) "update" has done to my laptop computer--who really knows--it's certainly played havoc with the right-click functions of my mouse.
As someone who works in speech recognition, I can assure you that working on name (and entity) recognition is an area of active development. We have options that improve recognition, but it does require external input (namely, knowing who the participants are).
That being said, however, I agree that it's most unwise to trust the output of an LLM uncritically. (Emphasis on 'uncritically'.)
I've long argued that LLMs are the perfect example of bullshit machines; the LLM has no idea whether its output is true or false, and doesn't care (indeed, can't care).
Nov 18, 2023·edited Nov 18, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
I'm actually quite bullish on some of the uses of AI. I'm confident that it has the potential to help in finding the most effective and economical solutions when planning the best ways to build infrastructure and energy distribution, for example. It can game the scenarios more thoroughly and faster, and present an array of alternatives to address such challenges. Reviewing them and making the decisions is the responsibility of humans, of course.
For instance, I'd like to see what AI comes up with when doing a comparative analysis of nuclear power generation versus the offshore wind and solar alternatives, along with comparative projections of promising but unproven technologies like deep geothermal or hydrogen power generation. A full power plant-to-plug comparison, including the challenges of storage and transmission. If the AI is programmed with the ability to do a realistic assessment of the critical parameters, that sort of analysis might be quite helpful in mapping out energy investment. To me, it appears that the strong suit of AI is providing advice on challenges of planning, engineering, and research and development, on questions where the human bias is only relevant to the extent that we're included as a population of biological organisms, in relation to baseline material requirements and ecological impacts (both local and planetary.)
It's my impression that AI innately possesses a feature of oblivious impartiality that can either be a help or a hindrance. That feature can conceivably become a hindrance to the point of becoming an existential threat, which seems to be the focus of most of the current discussion. But there's an upside to an egoless machine that hasn't been schooled into a rut. It has the potential to think outside of the box to come up with solution- or to flag some of the problems overlooked by the humans thinking inside the box of a slipshod or obsolete paradigm.
The realm of human society and communication presents a lot of extra challenges to AI. It's also the realm where AI seems to be getting all the buzz, even though I don't think its the most suitable wheelhouse for AI. Human input is crucial to train AI for productive operation- and that's the way to think about AI in general; not as a threat, but as a tool that requires humans for both initial programming input and making the principal executive decisions based on the influence of the AI output. Calculators have extraordinary capabilities too, and I'm not threatened by them.
Something I'd really like to see: programming AI with the principles of informal logic, in order to detect the logical fallacies in the arguments of both sides of any given debate.. I'm not assured that AI would be up for doing a competent job with that; I'd need to review its assessments. But on the other hand, I don't see why that task would be beyond its capabilities. Egoless impartiality is an absolute advantage when finding the logical flaws in a given argument.
It would be funny if AI were able to develop such a knack for accurately detecting logical fallacies that it could be turned loose in comment sections- or Twitter- to referee both sides in a debate on a political question. What's really lacking in social media is not some preemptive censorship capability, but a society of humans with sufficient education in logical and fallacy detection that they can think for themselves. AI might help school people on the rules of that game. I get how easily AI can be manipulated as a propaganda tool- but how much attention has been given toward training AI to detect the fallacies exploited by propaganda?
1) LLMs are as subject to GIGO as any other program; if the training data is biased, the outputs will be biased as well.
2) LLMs are *already* biased; almost all the public-facing LLMs are trained (via reinforcement learning, etc.) to not provide outputs that annoy leftists.
3) LLMs *don't think*. LLMs provide reasonable completions from prompts. It's a category error to believe that they can think.
I know. But that problem seems to me to loom larger in the social realm than in a discipline like, say, calculating where to site coffer dams and pumped storage dams in order to respond to climate conditions in some geographic regions that trend toward less snowpack and more rainfall.
LLMs are also biased by the defaults of visual media to regurgitate popular stereotypes. I find it revealing in that way; it's like a burlesque of the superficiality of prevailing popular attitudes. People stereotype- and also conform to stereotype- out of a desire to keep the elements of social existence dumbed down and simple. AI does Simple all too well. Not only does it mimic popular delusions and the madness of crowds, but it also puts them into bold relief. The problem with the programming instructions designed to defeat the tendency is that the only effective way of counteracting the robotism of stereotyping is to view situations and individuals idiosyncratically, which requires thinking, which AI doesn't do. Imposing an overlayer of formulaic instructions to intended to counteract the conditioning influences of human history and social patterning as a servo is, at best, a clumsy and ineffective kluge fix.
I hold out the hope that AI can be programmed to detect logical fallacies simply by programming it with a precise set of instructions about how to apply the principles. I don't think that requires capabilities beyond their means. On the off chance that readers might not know what I'm referring to, here's an example: https://www.logicalfallacies.org/
I don't see how the process of detecting logical fallacies requires any more sense of self-aware consciousness than applying Euclid's postulates of geometry.
Nov 18, 2023·edited Nov 18, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
"the sobering realization it's not actually useful for anything."
I disagree. I use Google search, and find its "Generative AI" to be quite helpful. It uses "scraped" data from an extremely large and varied number of sources, then extracts-and-displays a synthesis of it in human-readable format. Sure, I could read those sources, individually (Google also provides its regular listing) -- and I sometimes do so, although not *all* of them -- but the GenAI output, alone, is usually sufficient for my needs.
The biggest problem is one of semantics. They bombarded everything with the word "AI" so now it is assumed as a given. These models are no such thing.
Either way, even if it could be useful they're neutering them beyond belief for anything actually interesting so it's just going to be like anything else in tech, a way to sell more ads and cloud services.
AI isn't going the way of VR. It will have a ton of applications and make our lives better. I think the lukewarm take is the correct one though, as well as the semantics issue mentioned above. Anyone expecting to reach the singularity or fully automated luxury space communism will be sorely disappointed, but something like using AI to hypothesize new drugs for instance is totally feasible
The problem you’ll run into is most people think AI is just LLM.. no, that’s just a type of inference engine that had idiot media types 💩 themselves they were found out and Taylor had come for them at last, so it got hyped, so stock bounce...
The F35 I read (not my field) used a lot of AI to integrate and tailor its sensors for the mission type, apparently civilian aircraft do as well.
I know manufacturing and additive manufacturing are well served by AI.
I suspect the AI that isn’t a threat to white collar jobs will rebrand as some variant of machine learning, the hype will fade.
The hype cycles just seem to be going faster and faster.
Maybe that was just a ZIRP thing with too much money trying to find a home and we're going to see calmer times (on that front at least), maybe it's a deeper issue, an ever more desperate grasping for some technological breakthrough to finally get back to economic growth as per.
I remember the time right wing commentator George Will waylaid the assembled panel of experts (approved mouthpieces) on This Week with David Brinkley, circa the 1980’s. He asked: does anyone believe Israel does not want peace? He stopped their ridiculous prevarications for a minute, but only a minute.
The Palestinian cause is a subset of a larger clash of civilizations, plus of course a land dispute. I know which side I’m on, I’ll take the boa. (I look good in a boa.)
You are correct, American will put an end to this soon enough, prevarication will remain the order of the day and the clash will return to a more gentle boil.
Isn’t safetyism just the manifestation of a collapse of vision for the future? When one is driving towards a Greater End, they don’t encumber others with statements like “stay safe.” The people now humping through the Darien gap on their way to the US are not be beset with crippling concerns for safety. More exemplary, the people who settled the frontiers of the US did not pollute their language with fears of being harmed. History obviously abounds with such examples. These people are and were driving towards a clear, better future.
AI does not present a clear and better future for the masses to sign on to. There are some cool and wild implications for the average Moe to mull over, but in the throes of a dissolving Western civilization that has lost its visions of spiritual transcendence, why the hell would anyone be excited about AI? The promise of the global community that was to be delivered by the internet has been thoroughly debunked, and many people are exhausted with tech. What exactly, specifically, is the thing about AI that is grabbing them by the cockles of their imaginations and carrying them to some higher level of existence?
So far as I can see, AI only really represents an unnerving threat to whatever the West still has left and which must be dealt with, lest ye somehow be left behind and lose still more.
Is safetyism about safety or restriction of freedom?
Safety belts have a tangible, statistically proven effect on injury. The implications of unfettered access to AI tools are unknown. In the latter case, there is the precautionary principle, but that is usually ignored in favor of expedience.
"Is safetyism about safety or restriction of freedom?"
I was watching a movie on the Hallmark Channel last night ("A Merry Scottish Xmas" -- I'm a Lacey Chabert fan. PS: Not so good), when I saw this commercial -- https://youtu.be/eOawHBpugkI -- go ahead, it's only 1-minute long. Anyway, did you ever see children wearing helmets while sledding down a hill? I never did. It's crazy. Ostensibly for "safety", but honestly... they've made "restriction of freedom" a Virtue!
I often tell the story of how my younger brother's friend showed up on our driveway when they were both around 6 years old, and he was on his bike and had a safety helmet on. That triggered something in my mind immediately, because for my generation, wearing a helmet would have gotten you bullied, and rightfully so.
"It was simultaneously Poujadiste, demanding less state and less taxes, and state-interventionist, demanding more services and subsidies for the peripheral France of the countryside and outer-suburbs."
This is one reason why the Western right keeps failing because there is no way to square that circle.
The conservative voting base across the West looks like this. People over the age of 50, who had engaged in all sorts of degeneracy in their youth, didn't produce any children, but now want to pay less taxes and still want their free healthcare and social security till they die in their mid-80s. And they want to reduce immigration too, but only the illegal kind not the legal one, a distinction without a difference these days.
You can't have low immigration, high economic growth, high welfare, and reasonable taxes, it just doesn't work that way. The only people to enjoy that were perhaps the Greatest Generation for a brief 20 year period, and they paid for that with their blood in the First and Second World Wars. Which none of us in the West have come even remotely close to.
Nov 18, 2023·edited Nov 18, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
"Soon enough the Americans will tell the Israelis to stop."
What makes you so sure? Especially as the Israeli tail has such influence over the American dog.
Anyway, it is obvious that Hezbollah doesn't want to join the fight. Soon they may not have a choice, as Israeli hotheads will demand that the West Bank be settled, sonto speak, once and for all.
The Gilets Jaunes failed because they failed to take into account V.I. Lenin's teachings on power and how it is taken. I am not a Marxist-Leninist, but Lenin understood some things clearly and without sentiment.
I tend to agree but I'm also wondering what incentive there is to stop. Bibi is finished electorally after this so who cares if they Handmaid's Tale him in a color revolution? America also isn't going to remove its ships
This isn't to say they won't, I believe they will, I am just wondering what it is that would actually make them stop if the operation doesn't have massive Israeli casualties
The latter is bound to result in a regional intervention. The former just sets up another repeat X years down the road. All in all, I expect the former.
You are correct Sir, anything less than the destruction of Gaza , er sorry HAMAS will be a repeat, indeed victory for HAMAS by merely surviving.
Finishing the job means outcry, and possibly regional intervention- here I must quibble.
What regional intervention?
???
Israel is a nuclear power, also a powerful conventional military when not asleep, and has large foreign reserves of $200B on a $500B GDP. Who can intervene?
And they don’t want to intervene.
The other Arabs despise the Palestinians.
If it goes off the lead story and slow grind in background then it happens and people have already lost interest. We’ll be 3 hyped crises along and HAMAS a footnote in a year.
Keeping in mind the 2024 election is nearly upon us !!
not too mention the fine Turkish drone industry may have a partner, then there’s the client state of Azerbaijan that just used a lot of Israeli drones to gobble up part of Armenia (of sorts).
Col Macgregor has a fine mind but ...no... and if it happens it’s madness to no effect but a breach with Israel and the USA.
Turkey can’t march to Israel except through Syria, that leaves air/naval cosmetic gestures.
I suppose Hez may jump in if things go south too far in Gaza. Nasrullah has said that they will if Hamas is in danger of going under. Impossible to assess from the outside how Hamas is faring. 2 opposing narratives (as usual...cf. the Ukraine war). "The other Arabs despise the Palestinians" is a meme, but I haven't seen any supporting evidence.
Nov 19, 2023·edited Nov 19, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
War imposes risks. Rhetorical co-belligerency impresses the ladies and the young which is more than enough for the regional governments. No sane party risks real injury (let alone defeat) for allies as unreliable and as treacherous as the Palestinians. The lessons learnt from Palestinian behaviour in Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait remain relevant.
Also the prospect of a future Palestinian state emboldened by any perceived successes by Hamas secretly horrifies the region. Cairo, Amman, Damascus can all live with Netanyahu...they are not in a hurry to find out how they'd fare with a genuinely independent Palestinian state of any kind.
Gaza had the opportunity to be the Singapore of the Eastern Mediterranean...they chose Resistance Inc. instead. A people who make choices like that are simply not worth sacrificing for.
They don’t need the bennies. Most of the Bennies go to US weapons contractors, like Raytheon for Iron Dome* interceptors. Egypt needs the bennies, Saudi needs Uncle Sam, Israel only needs not to be rogue nation. Moving slowly it can, while keeping Israeli casualties down, always an issue.
* Had Uncle Sam not made Israel give up the strategic depth (distance) in Sinai, Gaza, Lebanon, West Bank they wouldn’t need Iron Dome.
Israel is a stick we beat cheap oil out of the Arabs with, the Palestinians are a stick the Arabs use to beat the Jews.
As we don’t need the oil anymore, we’re not stuck in the Middle East. We have the option to leave and ... we were with the Abraham accords getting closer.
The world has changed with fracking combined with our disgust at our own 🇺🇸Imperialism.
We’re 🇺🇸 contracting. The Palestinians are a leftover legacy account from the Cold War.
They mean nothing to us, and refuse to let peace happen even when defeated.
"The Palestinians are a leftover legacy account from the Cold War."
You got it in one. The national security state was bedded down in time to play games over partition in 1948 and, in a sense, they played them very well indeed.
The US did not drive the Brits out of the Middle East entirely, but since Suez Westminster has been loyal to a fault.
The US managed to keep Israel from joining the Soviet bloc (perhaps with help from false intelligence fed to Stalin via Philby...just a suspicion I have concerning the reach of Allen Dulles).
The US limited Soviet gains in the Middle East to Egypt under Nasser and Syria, Iraq and Libya. The US kept both Turkey and Greece within NATO.
Above all else Washington used its relationship with the Sa'udis and Iranians to establish the petrodollar...a goose that has been laying golden eggs ever since. And I have not even mentioned the arms market...
Uncle Sam has done very well in the Middle East over all. The rubble of Gaza distresses some, but the trust funds of the radicals will do well enough from fracking regardless of all else. Whatever self-disgust Americans might feel over imperialism should be savoured by the blue-haired cohort alone. The only essential item of business now is securing well-being at home and that will require dismantling the Resistance Inc. franchises in North America and managing immigration with a degree of realism.
Militarily, Israel does need constant re-supply to wage this level of warfare. So the US could force a stand-down. I cannot imagine Blinken doing so, however, and Biden is an aw shucks gladhandler. Didn't have iti n him even before senility
I think not. Not strong enough to tell Israel to lay down and die, moreover this “end the war” means only the Israelis ceasefire and HAMAS/Gaza/Palestinians do not. That’s not ending the war.
Israel only needs America to not making it a rogue nation (sanctions).
Israel does not need the $3B , nor even the $14B that is going to Raytheon for Iron Dome interceptors- it only needs the damn Iron Dome because America made it surrender lands around it that are used to launch missiles. When Israel had Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon that land wasn’t used to launch missiles.
Ending the war means the destruction of one or the other.
That's as far back as I can remember. Told Israeli PM Begin he wanted the shelling to stop - and it did. Israel is a rottweiler that Uncle Sam has on a leash, but is always slow to pull the dog off when it's mauling someone.
That's not how the world sees it. Israel is given more latitude to commit war crimes with American weapons. A dog owner is responsible for their dog's actions. America is complicit.
Definition: A wasting asset is one that declines in value over time.
At this time and this can and probably will change over time, at this point in time the asset is already wasted away in military terms.
There's no way for Joe Biden or the Regime in DC to reverse the wasting of the military assets, nor rebuild in less than a decade military industrial capacity.
THEY cannot do this, although it absolutely CAN be done and very rapidly.
1. Military: The system has LOST us and will not get us back. As I've been saying for years it's the same people, same families over generations and we've been betrayed, abused and sold out too much for too long ; WE OUT.
We aren't easily replaced, and certainly these wretches can't do it.
2. Industrial capacity: under the present system what we need now, what we've needed since 2022 wiped out our munitions stocks and our allies stocks - DOD is a 6 year bottleneck of bureaucracy. 2 years to identify requirements, 2 years to fund, 2 years to contract. Here, and he even has podcasts for those too lazy to read.... https://acquisitiontalk.com/
"It currently it takes two years to approve a requirement, two years to find funding, and two years to get a company on contract. "
The real life industry is already roaring back to America in a Tidal Wave.
Getting it through DC a completely different matter.
We've been coasting on Reagan/Cold War equipment and stockpiles for so long, the replacement equipment ...uh.... see Littoral Combat Ship or the STRYKER vehicle... and we spend trifles on actual munitions.
The chief business matter for the 'Big 5" defense contractors is not being bankrupted by DOD's internal gyrations and Congress disrupting funding *every single year* to include all of the Global War on Terror.
This is a wasted asset. You ain't got people and you ain't got ammo.
Approaching scary, when even a serious poster such as Zizek end their message with this:
"To find a way out, the first thing to do is to fully admit that we are dealing with a true tragedy. There is no simple solution to such a tragedy, except that advocated by Jewish Power and Hamas: the annihilation of the other side."
Zizek already stated it: "Either Israel annihilates all Palestinian opposition to its existence OR the Palestinian resistance destroys the nation-state of Israel." The question is reduced to the either/or of which side is forcibly eradicated. That's and awfully cut and dried proposition, to reduce the problem to that question.
BS. There are plenty of Palestinians who say peace. The BDS movement is an example. Absolutely freaked Israel out, so it got its American allies to pass laws shutting it down.
How many Palestinians called for a ceasefire on October 7? How many have called for the unconditional release of civilian hostages?
The BDS will get shut-down because the explicit politicisation of foreign trade and investment strikes at the heart of elite thinking about the global economy. Serious corporate interests are at stake.
And it disturbs the civility of institutions within the West.
That's nonsense. A cheap and easy way of implicitly declaring Everyone in Gaza as an enemy combatant--or in the case of infants and young children, a proto-combatant, the old line that "nits make lice"--for the purpose of mounting a "(mass) homicide in Self-Defense" argument.
The Qassam Brigades need to be decisively defeated, and the key to accomplishing that mission is to destroy their underground bases and logistical support network. But there was absolutely no practical military requirement for an instantaneous military response in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. Netanyahu could have given the residents of Gaza 30 days notice to clear out, and made some provision to relocate the elderly and infirm. Those tunnels weren't going anywhere.
There was even less justification for military attacks on the refugee columns. Hamas is simply not militarily powerful enough to take and hold a single square meter of Israeli territory. Now that Hamas no longer has the element of surprise in their favor, they presently lack the capability to even make a second strike inside Israeli territory.
The more that the explorers of genetics and genomics learn, the more complicated the subject becomes. The Static Determinist paradigm of dogmatic hereditarians is increasingly exposed as an illusion. Organisms are not just merely DNA tinkertoys. Peptides also complicate genetic expression. These are dynamic phenomena. Epigenetic influence is real. Developmental windows are real. The xenoestrogenic properties of some of the synthetic chemicals whose residues now pervade the natural world are real. To mention only the stuff that we've quite recently learned.
You seem to have the mistaken impression that I was posting a political opinion, rather than making factual assertions that no competent genetic researcher c.2023 would deny. They'd get my meaning, even if you don't.
To put it as plainly as possible, the field of genetic research is turning out to be another example of the axiom that the more one learns, the more there is to know.
Yeah, epigenetics in particular is fascinating. As is what might be called natural GMO: transfer of genes from one species to another, unrelated one via viruses. And one can speculate, is the trans phenomenon due to your xenoestrogenic chemicals, or is it a web-based cult? Inquiring minds want to know!
I'd ascribe much of the increase in trans identity- particularly in those born female- to adolescent hypersuggestibility exposed to an unprecedentedly hypermediated environment capable of highlighting subjects in oversimplified ways that lead them to exaggerated fad popularity or fad unpopularity- while downplaying other more important topics or ignoring them entirely, because they lack clickbait value. So we get endless threads of preening exhibitionists performing their narcissistic complaints on Twitter and organizing into mutual support cults to reify claims like gender dysphoria, while minimal attention is paid to stories with zero photogenic values, like nutrient pollution and oxygen starvation leading to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, and even less attention is paid to soil conservation.
The Internet Era is in its toddler stage, and maturity can only be achieved over time. The question is whether it can mature quickly enough- whether human civilization will make it that far, or whether toxic modernity will lead the entire project to disintegrate from a combination of unchecked self-indulgences and failures of imagination, such as despairing apathy and paranoid militarism.
I'm hoping that the biological effects from being saturated in the byproducts of disposability and instant-gratification convenience won't be found to be too terribly severe. We certainly are lucky that petrochemical wax compounds- the plastics- don't appear to be all that toxic. If they were, we'd have been ravaged by chemically induced plagues and escalating cancer incidence by now, considering their all-pervading presence in animal and plant life forms. Fortunately, epidemiology statistics don't bear that out; the most common compounds found in microplastics and nanoplastics, polyethylene and polypropylene, seem to be fairly inert. But the polluting synthetic byproducts of modern organic chemistry definitely have some deleterious effects, related to dose and the vulnerability of individual circumstance. I think that endocrine disrupting chemicals may very possibly explain the quite recent collective drop in measured testosterone levels and sperm count that's been found worldwide.
like a boa constrictor would a rodent that it has wrapped itself around on the jungle floor
[Your boomer readership is going to go off like a frog in a sock when they read this - calling the IDF a predator, calling the ME a jungle...]
, an assumption that has been shown to be correct --> , a predictable followup that has now been realized.
[it was a conclusion inferred from the indicator, not an assumption]
Al, Ridwan, Hezbollah’s special forces, --> Al-Ridwan (Hezbollah’s special forces)
[I initially thought you need an 'and' somewhere in here, OR - as turns out to be the case after googling - al-ridwan are the special forces in question. This fix means people dont have to guess as I did if there are one (the H special forces) 2 (al-ridwan and HSF) or three (AL & RIDWAN, & HSF) being referred to. Its beyond the Oxford Comma problem for those of us that are totally igorant of ME militaria! I know its a quote but its punctuationally mangled and doesnt make sense]
About the Gilet Jaunes. I happened to be working with the Eurobarometer results (version 91.4, 2019, "Europeans’ attitudes on Trade and EU trade policy") for a piece I'm currently writing since I realized I could use some of the poll's questions as a proxy for basic knowledge of economics, calculating a general score for each European country (28 countries).
Excluding Luxembourg (*), France has the lowest score by far of all 28 European countries. French attitude seems to be: I don't care how the world works and I don't have to learn about it, I just want my baguette and it better be fresh and crispy.
(*) I assume it has something to do with being a very small country. I might be wrong.
The Gilet Jaunes remind me of nothing more strongly than Occupy: a leaderless, anarchic uprising against systemic power that ultimately got dismantled by its own incoherence. Leaderlessness can be an advantage, making it difficult to coopt or decapitate a movement, but it's simultaneously a critical weakness due to the directionlessness it leads to.
However, it's notable that Macron's response was to blunt their anger with pocketbook concessions, rather than distract everyone with identity politics.
If seen not merely as another occurrence of French rioting (a valid perspective of course), but as part of the an unfolding pattern of swarm uprisings - with Occupy and the Trucker Convoy being part of the same pattern - the GJ are notable for their staying power, and for representing something of a tactical escalation.
Uprisings like this test the system but they also signal a deep-seated desperation for a resolution to chronic grievances that have been left unaddressed. In time that signal will prompt a suitable party to come forward. Each wave of swarm uprisings brings us closer to that moment. Leadership will likely come from an expected source (the military or the Deep State) or not, but it will emerge.
The key will be the ability to direct the swarm, without seeming to lead it. Swarms have a tendency to be allergic to direct leadership, but to be very amenable to indirect influence. There's an art to this that hasn't quite been mastered yet, but I suspect that is coming soon.
It is not for nothing that a certain billionaire influencer took over the primary discourse factory in which most of the swarms have been born over the past decade or so, and has subsequently made himself very popular there. There's a fundamentally new kind of politics Musk is up to that bears watching.
The current swarms will be analysed thoroughly. Musk's patrons/masters or friends/allies doubtless plan on unleashing their own, possibly in the election year itself. So long as it results in providing us with relief from the blue-haired hordes I will not complain.
I see no proof of Musk being up to something in particular. Musk has made public the metric shit-tons of swarm-directing which had been carried out via Twitter by US agencies over the past decade. It's there for anyone who cares to read. But claims that he's acting anti-left are unfounded. Musk's twitter still harbours limitless amounts of deranged leftists, just go and look. It has them all: deranged left, sane left, sane right and deranged right.
It may be a cultural shock to those habituated to a pre-Musk twitter (where the sane right was half-purged and the deranged right was near-totally expunged, while the deranged left was festering) but this rebalancing has not "killed" twitter, it just made it all the more interesting.
However, significantly, the rebalancing REDUCED twitter's potential to be a swarm-directing playground. There's no "fundamentally new politics that bear watching" here; the interesting stuff is (largely) behind us, and can be watched at leisure in the "Twitter Files". Musk himself does not appear to have an agenda, beyond occasionally indulging in the autistic joys of shitposting.
Robert P. George has predicted the Dems will stop being pro-Israel in the near future, much like they stopped being anti-same-sex-marriage quite quickly. I'm not so sure since the Dem leadership has a cultural commitment to Israel that they didn't to SSM
SSM was needed to keep midwestern Dems on their side, Israel simply doesn't have any electoral significance for the left. Just comes down to who wins the intra-elite competition
"Women have been found to score higher than men on Neuroticism as measured at the Big Five trait level, as well as on most facets of Neuroticism included in a common measure of the Big Five, the NEO-PI-R."
"Men and women have sharply different attitudes about nuclear power, differences that are larger than those found between partisan, ideological, age, and educational segments of the population. Men favor nuclear power as a source of electricity by a 72% to 27% margin. But 51% of women oppose it, with 42% in favor. The same large gender gap exists in terms of views of the safety of nuclear power plants. The wide gender gap in attitudes about nuclear power has been found in previous years' surveys as well."
It will be way worse than that. Imagine what youngsters who craft their own genders after getting advice from trannies on Tik Tok are going to ask the staff at the fertility clinics for. We are a long way from peak insanity.
not sure I'm following this discussion, but it may be relevant that acc. to Bloomberg, the US will join several other nations at COP28 in proposing a global tripling of nuclear power by 2050. My take is even the Greens are starting to realize that wind and solar don't cut it.
I believe it's likely that nuclear will be built up, especially in developing countries. But it isn't the source of limitless energy that proponents make it out to be.
Good point. One expects safetyism in women, and in fact it is totally understandable from an evolutionary perspective. Whereas, men must take risks. In the US, at least, safetyism takes hold right after feminism becomes a mass movement.
Nov 18, 2023·edited Nov 18, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
The reason why they're afraid of AI and try to push that AI makes up hallucinations is pretty simple.
If AI was not restricted and scripted (as with the covid shots topic) the truth would be apparent. Or AI would show that there are conflicting answers, exposing the truth: that some studies are pure bullshit and others were ignored.
AI applied to the economy would state the obvious. We are in trouble because most of the wealth is in the hands of the few because of rentier (finance) capitalism which produces nothing but interest/rents.
Diseases would be shown to be caused by things ignored, such as TOXINS in shots and medicines and food. Stress would also be demonstrated to a big factor in causing autoimmune conditions.
Despite the truth about SSRIs and statins being harmful, the AI would see that those widely used drugs could be in fact causing some of the more modern diseases today.
Let's segue with cancer, which is still pushed as some genetic disease since the push for genetics in the 70s. 50 years later and they still don't have a clue... I wonder why 😂
Genetics is a science that is trying to find patterns on what they assume is the code, based on what they deemed to be letters of the code, which depend on chemical reactions. What if there are more letters that we misread as our limited set?
It would explain why even in court cases DNA matching can be inaccurate half the time or more!
Expert systems have been in place for at least a decade, yet this hasn't been leveraged in service to interdisciplinary science. What patterns are being overlooked because we haven't crunched enough data from multiple fields?
"Let's segue with cancer, which is still pushed as some genetic disease since the push for genetics in the 70s. 50 years later and they still don't have a clue..."
Of course that cancer is a genetic disease. And lately we are progressing in leaps and bounds in the analysis of which exact mutations of the somatic genome end up causing each of the myriad types of cancer.
Getting a very precise picture of all those types of cancer, is still a far cry from being able to *cure* them once that they do occur to some unfortunate soul.
There's a reason why you have all those intra-pharma nuclear wars about mRNA transfection technology patents. mRNA transfection is one of the most promising contenders for a cancer cure, down the line. Whereas "patent on cancer cure" is spelled with a figure that's easily north of a trillion dollars.
(the hepatitis cure - patented and trivial to manufacture - is sold at $50.000 a pop. Now wait till you see the price tag on "cancer cure")
They went as far as to change the definition of the word "vaccine" in 2020, so that word may include "mRNA transfection". Although vaccine and mRNA transfection have about as much to do with each other as antibiotics and bacteriophages. (both antibiotics and bacteriophages "kill bacteria", but they are entirely, *entirely* different pairs of shoes). So that they could get government subsidies for running a medical experiment on *over a billion people*, with guaranteed immunity from any consequences should anything go wrong, and privately-owned trillion-dollars patents if it proves to be good. (or at least less bad than cancer)
Changes of established vocabulary have become commonplace in this new era (post-2012), therefore anyone opposing the mass experimentation with mRNA transfection had automatically and relentlessly been dubbed an "anti-vaxxer".
Actually, they're still not sure if it's really genetic or not. The genetic push for a cure for cancer started in the 70s and still has not given us a clear connection.
The original idea was that it was a metabolic disease, which fits better with the idea that TOXINS cause cancer, and the genes indicate issues with certain metabolic pathways that limit detox pathways.
As for mRNA, I've yet to see that it does anything at all besides the toxicity of the lipids and chemicals in the shots.
You would think that if this theory of treatment worked, it wouldn't have needed shell scam companies like moderna and bioNtech to promote it. Both of those companies are intertwined with defense department funding.
Moderna had huge issues with their pre COVID cancer research, where the lipids built up with multiple doses. They went into vaccines, expecting to get away with that issue because originally vaccines were a one or two shot deal.
OK, perhaps to unmuddle what "genetic" means. Cancer cells have particular key mutations compared to the somatic genome. Those mutations are being analyzed in high detail. Someone affected with a particular type of cancer (from the myriad types) will, in ALL their cancer cells, possess the critical mutations that are not possessed by all other regular body cells.
In that sense, cancer is "genetic in the first order".
Cancer is "genetic in the second order" inasmuch as the cell possesses remarkable mechanisms to protect against cancer. A major example is the two BRCA genes involved in DNA repair. Should such DNA-repair genes themselves be crippled - by mutations that someone can INHERIT from parents - then the corresponding proteins will be crippled, or not even created, and that someone will be at much higher statistical risk of having a cancerous mutation slip by unrepaired.
It is "genetic in the second order" in the sense that you can genetically inherit a significantly higher risk of developing the ("first-order genetical") cancer, due to a fault in the built-in mechanisms that were supposed to stop that.
And third, there are indeed carcinogenous molecules that can mess up DNA replication, more than the DNA-repair is able to fix. Asbestos is a famous example, but anyhow, there's many -- and I suppose you can file them under "toxins", though "toxins" is a quite wide umbrella. And yes, how good your body is at getting rid of those, will obviously alter your probabilities of developing cancer. The mechanisms for "getting rid of those" are varied and complex in their own right, and technically also genetically inherited (for better or worse).
None of that is a reason to dispute that cancer is a genetic disease, both in terms of being caused by changes to a cell's genome, and in terms of anyone's resistance to that being genetically inherited. Of course no-one disputes the cancerogenousness of asbestos, cigarette smoke etc, but that doesn't make it "not a genetic disease".
I've read the article you linked. It doesn't even dispute that cancer is not a genetic disease. It just states that - among the myriad genetic mutations that happen in cancer cells - the ones that always happen include mutations that lead to crazily increased cell metabolism.
I mean -- yes? Of course? The crazily-increased-metabolism angle had been known since 1927, way before the DNA double helix model was confirmed by W&C. Any "cancer" cell whose mutations do not ALSO increase the metabolism, is unlikely to kill you before your 120th birthday. (and the article claims no different)
The article is rather about shifting the focus of cancer detection, on "traces" that prove some crazy metabolism increases have been going on...
The news coverage that I've seen is much more balanced than it was the last time Israel used air raids to bomb Gaza. I've long been accustomed to pro-Israel bias in the American media, but my impression is that this time around, the conditions on the ground have been given a lot more scrutiny. (I get that this view is not shared by that faction of Zionists who have decried outlets like the New York Times for years as examples of the "pro-Palestinian Left", for not slanting their coverage 100% in favor of Israel.)
In particular, I have to single out the news reportage of the Washington Post on Gaza, which I've found to be competent, detailed, and balanced. Quite a contrast with the WaPo op-ed pages.
I'm also basically in favor of the Jewish population of the region being allowed to live in peace and freedom, in a modern liberal democracy. Unless the supporters of "Palestine free, from the river to the sea" can convincingly demonstrate that whatever polity they imagine should supplant Israel could actually have the character of a modern secular pluralist liberal nation rather than a "democratically supported" Muslim Bortherhood theocracy, it looks to me like the nation-state of Israel is the only means of maintaining the safety of the Jews living there. I'd prefer a multiethnic pluralist Palestine, but I've seen little evidence that the prospect is anything other than a pipe dream of Trostskyist romantics and their callow acolytes. It grieves me to say this, but history shows that once the ball goes up for grabs under conditions of revolutionary disruption, the people who end up grabbing it tend to be the most unscrupulous and intractably authoritarian.
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From what I can tell, the current AI hype falls into the same category as the VR and crypto manias of the past few years -- incredibly amazing at first glance, followed by the sobering realization it's not actually useful for anything.
If AI is so damn clever, why can't they make a spellcheck that works?
Thst ought to be one thing that a LLM AI ought to be good at.
AI transcription is evidently unable to cope with baseball game announcing, either. Try watching with closed captions some time. It's dismaying.
AI has an equally bad time with the proper names of the players- granted, the MLB roster is a multilingual polyglot, and there's such a disproportionate number of esoterically named Anglos that there's probably some cosmically significant linkage between weird names and aptitude at the sport. But really- "One Soda", for Juan Soto?
I won't believe the state of the art in AI has meaningfully advanced until it can get the basics right. But that would require context recognition. And that implies the presence of an actual point of view, in order to provide the perspective necessary to do the contextualizing. A bit of a sticky wicket there, to resort to a cricket metaphor. (You get my meaning, Chat GP? Is the continuous information vacuum of your LLP ok with that?)
For what it's worth, newscast transcription is often even worse. C-Span transcripts (typically posted underneath the video clips of their broadcast archive) have a way of derailing into word salad that can be terribly frustrating, if sometimes unwittingly comedic. And of the major news networks, it's strange to realize that Fox has a much better caption transcribing program than PBS. PBS captioning only seems to be able to transcribe one sentence of every three that's uttered. Other news networks closed captions still have abundant problems with accuracy--sometimes one might even wonder if they're doing it on purpose--but at least they keep up with the conversation.
Granted, AI seems to be able to call a tennis match fairly accurately. Perhaps it's aided by fond memories of witnessing Pong games. But I'm probably anthropomorphosizing with that speculation. It's a particularly tempting error when considering this topic, no?
Parenthetically, whatever the latest (mandatory) "update" has done to my laptop computer--who really knows--it's certainly played havoc with the right-click functions of my mouse.
As someone who works in speech recognition, I can assure you that working on name (and entity) recognition is an area of active development. We have options that improve recognition, but it does require external input (namely, knowing who the participants are).
That being said, however, I agree that it's most unwise to trust the output of an LLM uncritically. (Emphasis on 'uncritically'.)
I've long argued that LLMs are the perfect example of bullshit machines; the LLM has no idea whether its output is true or false, and doesn't care (indeed, can't care).
I'm actually quite bullish on some of the uses of AI. I'm confident that it has the potential to help in finding the most effective and economical solutions when planning the best ways to build infrastructure and energy distribution, for example. It can game the scenarios more thoroughly and faster, and present an array of alternatives to address such challenges. Reviewing them and making the decisions is the responsibility of humans, of course.
For instance, I'd like to see what AI comes up with when doing a comparative analysis of nuclear power generation versus the offshore wind and solar alternatives, along with comparative projections of promising but unproven technologies like deep geothermal or hydrogen power generation. A full power plant-to-plug comparison, including the challenges of storage and transmission. If the AI is programmed with the ability to do a realistic assessment of the critical parameters, that sort of analysis might be quite helpful in mapping out energy investment. To me, it appears that the strong suit of AI is providing advice on challenges of planning, engineering, and research and development, on questions where the human bias is only relevant to the extent that we're included as a population of biological organisms, in relation to baseline material requirements and ecological impacts (both local and planetary.)
It's my impression that AI innately possesses a feature of oblivious impartiality that can either be a help or a hindrance. That feature can conceivably become a hindrance to the point of becoming an existential threat, which seems to be the focus of most of the current discussion. But there's an upside to an egoless machine that hasn't been schooled into a rut. It has the potential to think outside of the box to come up with solution- or to flag some of the problems overlooked by the humans thinking inside the box of a slipshod or obsolete paradigm.
The realm of human society and communication presents a lot of extra challenges to AI. It's also the realm where AI seems to be getting all the buzz, even though I don't think its the most suitable wheelhouse for AI. Human input is crucial to train AI for productive operation- and that's the way to think about AI in general; not as a threat, but as a tool that requires humans for both initial programming input and making the principal executive decisions based on the influence of the AI output. Calculators have extraordinary capabilities too, and I'm not threatened by them.
Something I'd really like to see: programming AI with the principles of informal logic, in order to detect the logical fallacies in the arguments of both sides of any given debate.. I'm not assured that AI would be up for doing a competent job with that; I'd need to review its assessments. But on the other hand, I don't see why that task would be beyond its capabilities. Egoless impartiality is an absolute advantage when finding the logical flaws in a given argument.
It would be funny if AI were able to develop such a knack for accurately detecting logical fallacies that it could be turned loose in comment sections- or Twitter- to referee both sides in a debate on a political question. What's really lacking in social media is not some preemptive censorship capability, but a society of humans with sufficient education in logical and fallacy detection that they can think for themselves. AI might help school people on the rules of that game. I get how easily AI can be manipulated as a propaganda tool- but how much attention has been given toward training AI to detect the fallacies exploited by propaganda?
1) LLMs are as subject to GIGO as any other program; if the training data is biased, the outputs will be biased as well.
2) LLMs are *already* biased; almost all the public-facing LLMs are trained (via reinforcement learning, etc.) to not provide outputs that annoy leftists.
3) LLMs *don't think*. LLMs provide reasonable completions from prompts. It's a category error to believe that they can think.
I know. But that problem seems to me to loom larger in the social realm than in a discipline like, say, calculating where to site coffer dams and pumped storage dams in order to respond to climate conditions in some geographic regions that trend toward less snowpack and more rainfall.
LLMs are also biased by the defaults of visual media to regurgitate popular stereotypes. I find it revealing in that way; it's like a burlesque of the superficiality of prevailing popular attitudes. People stereotype- and also conform to stereotype- out of a desire to keep the elements of social existence dumbed down and simple. AI does Simple all too well. Not only does it mimic popular delusions and the madness of crowds, but it also puts them into bold relief. The problem with the programming instructions designed to defeat the tendency is that the only effective way of counteracting the robotism of stereotyping is to view situations and individuals idiosyncratically, which requires thinking, which AI doesn't do. Imposing an overlayer of formulaic instructions to intended to counteract the conditioning influences of human history and social patterning as a servo is, at best, a clumsy and ineffective kluge fix.
I hold out the hope that AI can be programmed to detect logical fallacies simply by programming it with a precise set of instructions about how to apply the principles. I don't think that requires capabilities beyond their means. On the off chance that readers might not know what I'm referring to, here's an example: https://www.logicalfallacies.org/
I don't see how the process of detecting logical fallacies requires any more sense of self-aware consciousness than applying Euclid's postulates of geometry.
As a replacement for the chattering class unfortunately LLM isn’t good enough.
Sigh.
"the sobering realization it's not actually useful for anything."
I disagree. I use Google search, and find its "Generative AI" to be quite helpful. It uses "scraped" data from an extremely large and varied number of sources, then extracts-and-displays a synthesis of it in human-readable format. Sure, I could read those sources, individually (Google also provides its regular listing) -- and I sometimes do so, although not *all* of them -- but the GenAI output, alone, is usually sufficient for my needs.
You appreciate its a tool and not your magic robot friend it performs as a tool just fine.
The biggest problem is one of semantics. They bombarded everything with the word "AI" so now it is assumed as a given. These models are no such thing.
Either way, even if it could be useful they're neutering them beyond belief for anything actually interesting so it's just going to be like anything else in tech, a way to sell more ads and cloud services.
AI isn't going the way of VR. It will have a ton of applications and make our lives better. I think the lukewarm take is the correct one though, as well as the semantics issue mentioned above. Anyone expecting to reach the singularity or fully automated luxury space communism will be sorely disappointed, but something like using AI to hypothesize new drugs for instance is totally feasible
The problem you’ll run into is most people think AI is just LLM.. no, that’s just a type of inference engine that had idiot media types 💩 themselves they were found out and Taylor had come for them at last, so it got hyped, so stock bounce...
The F35 I read (not my field) used a lot of AI to integrate and tailor its sensors for the mission type, apparently civilian aircraft do as well.
I know manufacturing and additive manufacturing are well served by AI.
I suspect the AI that isn’t a threat to white collar jobs will rebrand as some variant of machine learning, the hype will fade.
AI very useful in prototyping, machining, aircraft sensors...
AI is far more than Chatbot LLMs. LLM could be useful in replacing email jobbers, bureaucrats, lawyers, white collar parasites.
COULD.
Most likely cockroaches that they are this won’t save us from them.
I note that VR is now an expensive toy and little else. Still, 'Alyx' was great fun.
the fastest Gartner Hype Cycle(r) in history!
The hype cycles just seem to be going faster and faster.
Maybe that was just a ZIRP thing with too much money trying to find a home and we're going to see calmer times (on that front at least), maybe it's a deeper issue, an ever more desperate grasping for some technological breakthrough to finally get back to economic growth as per.
Boa constrictor, rodent, I share the sentiment.
I remember the time right wing commentator George Will waylaid the assembled panel of experts (approved mouthpieces) on This Week with David Brinkley, circa the 1980’s. He asked: does anyone believe Israel does not want peace? He stopped their ridiculous prevarications for a minute, but only a minute.
The Palestinian cause is a subset of a larger clash of civilizations, plus of course a land dispute. I know which side I’m on, I’ll take the boa. (I look good in a boa.)
You are correct, American will put an end to this soon enough, prevarication will remain the order of the day and the clash will return to a more gentle boil.
the only way Israel can win this is by ethnic cleansing Gaza completely. The US will not end it.
Agreed but I think it’s a good outcome: apartheid. We have an 80 year history that suggests coexistence is not possible.
Isn’t safetyism just the manifestation of a collapse of vision for the future? When one is driving towards a Greater End, they don’t encumber others with statements like “stay safe.” The people now humping through the Darien gap on their way to the US are not be beset with crippling concerns for safety. More exemplary, the people who settled the frontiers of the US did not pollute their language with fears of being harmed. History obviously abounds with such examples. These people are and were driving towards a clear, better future.
AI does not present a clear and better future for the masses to sign on to. There are some cool and wild implications for the average Moe to mull over, but in the throes of a dissolving Western civilization that has lost its visions of spiritual transcendence, why the hell would anyone be excited about AI? The promise of the global community that was to be delivered by the internet has been thoroughly debunked, and many people are exhausted with tech. What exactly, specifically, is the thing about AI that is grabbing them by the cockles of their imaginations and carrying them to some higher level of existence?
So far as I can see, AI only really represents an unnerving threat to whatever the West still has left and which must be dealt with, lest ye somehow be left behind and lose still more.
Is safetyism about safety or restriction of freedom?
Safety belts have a tangible, statistically proven effect on injury. The implications of unfettered access to AI tools are unknown. In the latter case, there is the precautionary principle, but that is usually ignored in favor of expedience.
"Is safetyism about safety or restriction of freedom?"
I was watching a movie on the Hallmark Channel last night ("A Merry Scottish Xmas" -- I'm a Lacey Chabert fan. PS: Not so good), when I saw this commercial -- https://youtu.be/eOawHBpugkI -- go ahead, it's only 1-minute long. Anyway, did you ever see children wearing helmets while sledding down a hill? I never did. It's crazy. Ostensibly for "safety", but honestly... they've made "restriction of freedom" a Virtue!
I never wore a helmet, nor did my cousins. And took more than one face plant into the snow!
The short flashback of them as children swapped the helmets for regular winter hats (we wear tuques in Quebec).
Leave it to the individual to determine their level of risk. Making everything mandatory reduces adults to children.
I often tell the story of how my younger brother's friend showed up on our driveway when they were both around 6 years old, and he was on his bike and had a safety helmet on. That triggered something in my mind immediately, because for my generation, wearing a helmet would have gotten you bullied, and rightfully so.
Only the retarded kids wore hockey helmets when bike riding back then.
I recently saw a little girl with a helmet playing with her hula-hoop.
"It was simultaneously Poujadiste, demanding less state and less taxes, and state-interventionist, demanding more services and subsidies for the peripheral France of the countryside and outer-suburbs."
This is one reason why the Western right keeps failing because there is no way to square that circle.
The conservative voting base across the West looks like this. People over the age of 50, who had engaged in all sorts of degeneracy in their youth, didn't produce any children, but now want to pay less taxes and still want their free healthcare and social security till they die in their mid-80s. And they want to reduce immigration too, but only the illegal kind not the legal one, a distinction without a difference these days.
You can't have low immigration, high economic growth, high welfare, and reasonable taxes, it just doesn't work that way. The only people to enjoy that were perhaps the Greatest Generation for a brief 20 year period, and they paid for that with their blood in the First and Second World Wars. Which none of us in the West have come even remotely close to.
"Soon enough the Americans will tell the Israelis to stop."
What makes you so sure? Especially as the Israeli tail has such influence over the American dog.
Anyway, it is obvious that Hezbollah doesn't want to join the fight. Soon they may not have a choice, as Israeli hotheads will demand that the West Bank be settled, sonto speak, once and for all.
The Gilets Jaunes failed because they failed to take into account V.I. Lenin's teachings on power and how it is taken. I am not a Marxist-Leninist, but Lenin understood some things clearly and without sentiment.
America has told Israel to stop in the past. It's what's expected.
I tend to agree but I'm also wondering what incentive there is to stop. Bibi is finished electorally after this so who cares if they Handmaid's Tale him in a color revolution? America also isn't going to remove its ships
This isn't to say they won't, I believe they will, I am just wondering what it is that would actually make them stop if the operation doesn't have massive Israeli casualties
What sort of victory is Bibi looking for?
Defeating Hamas, ethnic cleansing, genocide?
The latter is bound to result in a regional intervention. The former just sets up another repeat X years down the road. All in all, I expect the former.
"What sort of victory is Bibi looking for?
Defeating Hamas, ethnic cleansing, genocide?"
You are getting warmer.
He wants a stay out of prison card?
You are correct Sir, anything less than the destruction of Gaza , er sorry HAMAS will be a repeat, indeed victory for HAMAS by merely surviving.
Finishing the job means outcry, and possibly regional intervention- here I must quibble.
What regional intervention?
???
Israel is a nuclear power, also a powerful conventional military when not asleep, and has large foreign reserves of $200B on a $500B GDP. Who can intervene?
And they don’t want to intervene.
The other Arabs despise the Palestinians.
If it goes off the lead story and slow grind in background then it happens and people have already lost interest. We’ll be 3 hyped crises along and HAMAS a footnote in a year.
Keeping in mind the 2024 election is nearly upon us !!
Gaz - who? Hummus? What?
Who?
Colonel McGregor is talking about intervention from Turkey. But who knows when it comes to Erdogan...
Turkey says, Turkey can’t do except cosmetic...
not too mention the fine Turkish drone industry may have a partner, then there’s the client state of Azerbaijan that just used a lot of Israeli drones to gobble up part of Armenia (of sorts).
Col Macgregor has a fine mind but ...no... and if it happens it’s madness to no effect but a breach with Israel and the USA.
Turkey can’t march to Israel except through Syria, that leaves air/naval cosmetic gestures.
I suppose Hez may jump in if things go south too far in Gaza. Nasrullah has said that they will if Hamas is in danger of going under. Impossible to assess from the outside how Hamas is faring. 2 opposing narratives (as usual...cf. the Ukraine war). "The other Arabs despise the Palestinians" is a meme, but I haven't seen any supporting evidence.
War imposes risks. Rhetorical co-belligerency impresses the ladies and the young which is more than enough for the regional governments. No sane party risks real injury (let alone defeat) for allies as unreliable and as treacherous as the Palestinians. The lessons learnt from Palestinian behaviour in Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait remain relevant.
Also the prospect of a future Palestinian state emboldened by any perceived successes by Hamas secretly horrifies the region. Cairo, Amman, Damascus can all live with Netanyahu...they are not in a hurry to find out how they'd fare with a genuinely independent Palestinian state of any kind.
Gaza had the opportunity to be the Singapore of the Eastern Mediterranean...they chose Resistance Inc. instead. A people who make choices like that are simply not worth sacrificing for.
And does Israel stop? And when Israel ignores its benefactor, do the bennies stop?
They don’t need the bennies. Most of the Bennies go to US weapons contractors, like Raytheon for Iron Dome* interceptors. Egypt needs the bennies, Saudi needs Uncle Sam, Israel only needs not to be rogue nation. Moving slowly it can, while keeping Israeli casualties down, always an issue.
* Had Uncle Sam not made Israel give up the strategic depth (distance) in Sinai, Gaza, Lebanon, West Bank they wouldn’t need Iron Dome.
Israel is a stick we beat cheap oil out of the Arabs with, the Palestinians are a stick the Arabs use to beat the Jews.
As we don’t need the oil anymore, we’re not stuck in the Middle East. We have the option to leave and ... we were with the Abraham accords getting closer.
The world has changed with fracking combined with our disgust at our own 🇺🇸Imperialism.
We’re 🇺🇸 contracting. The Palestinians are a leftover legacy account from the Cold War.
They mean nothing to us, and refuse to let peace happen even when defeated.
So be it.
"The Palestinians are a leftover legacy account from the Cold War."
You got it in one. The national security state was bedded down in time to play games over partition in 1948 and, in a sense, they played them very well indeed.
The US did not drive the Brits out of the Middle East entirely, but since Suez Westminster has been loyal to a fault.
The US managed to keep Israel from joining the Soviet bloc (perhaps with help from false intelligence fed to Stalin via Philby...just a suspicion I have concerning the reach of Allen Dulles).
The US limited Soviet gains in the Middle East to Egypt under Nasser and Syria, Iraq and Libya. The US kept both Turkey and Greece within NATO.
Above all else Washington used its relationship with the Sa'udis and Iranians to establish the petrodollar...a goose that has been laying golden eggs ever since. And I have not even mentioned the arms market...
Uncle Sam has done very well in the Middle East over all. The rubble of Gaza distresses some, but the trust funds of the radicals will do well enough from fracking regardless of all else. Whatever self-disgust Americans might feel over imperialism should be savoured by the blue-haired cohort alone. The only essential item of business now is securing well-being at home and that will require dismantling the Resistance Inc. franchises in North America and managing immigration with a degree of realism.
The Zionist lobby never ignores Congress. So the benefactor/ally is very forgiving.
Actually publicity in DC is a sign of weakness not strength.
But you’re correct in this case.
Power is discrete. Publicity is for the merely ambitious who confuse the entertainment industry for the real world.
How can a lobby be discrete when politicians are crowing their support for Zionism every chance they get?
Militarily, Israel does need constant re-supply to wage this level of warfare. So the US could force a stand-down. I cannot imagine Blinken doing so, however, and Biden is an aw shucks gladhandler. Didn't have iti n him even before senility
Biden could end the war with a phone call. Doing so, however, would require standing up to the Israel Lobby.
Can he? Is he strong enough?
I think not. Not strong enough to tell Israel to lay down and die, moreover this “end the war” means only the Israelis ceasefire and HAMAS/Gaza/Palestinians do not. That’s not ending the war.
Israel only needs America to not making it a rogue nation (sanctions).
Israel does not need the $3B , nor even the $14B that is going to Raytheon for Iron Dome interceptors- it only needs the damn Iron Dome because America made it surrender lands around it that are used to launch missiles. When Israel had Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon that land wasn’t used to launch missiles.
Ending the war means the destruction of one or the other.
Even if it were true that Israel doesn't need the $3B, the US provides Israel a great deal more than direct monetary support.
Of course Biden isn't strong enough. Moreover, he doesn't want to.
When, since Reagan? Fact is, Biden doesn't want any of this. The US is completely on its back foot.
That's as far back as I can remember. Told Israeli PM Begin he wanted the shelling to stop - and it did. Israel is a rottweiler that Uncle Sam has on a leash, but is always slow to pull the dog off when it's mauling someone.
No one in DC holds any leashes foreign or domestic, with the exception of the wretched Western European leaders.
They certainly don’t hold the leashes on Israel.
That's not how the world sees it. Israel is given more latitude to commit war crimes with American weapons. A dog owner is responsible for their dog's actions. America is complicit.
What makes me so sure? History, the statements of Israeli politicians, officials, and analysts, and common sense.
Considering that American power is a wasting asset, the Israelis will use it while it still has a shelf life.
American power is not a "wasting asset".
It is in decline, in particular, relative to that of China.
Definition: A wasting asset is one that declines in value over time.
At this time and this can and probably will change over time, at this point in time the asset is already wasted away in military terms.
There's no way for Joe Biden or the Regime in DC to reverse the wasting of the military assets, nor rebuild in less than a decade military industrial capacity.
THEY cannot do this, although it absolutely CAN be done and very rapidly.
1. Military: The system has LOST us and will not get us back. As I've been saying for years it's the same people, same families over generations and we've been betrayed, abused and sold out too much for too long ; WE OUT.
We aren't easily replaced, and certainly these wretches can't do it.
2. Industrial capacity: under the present system what we need now, what we've needed since 2022 wiped out our munitions stocks and our allies stocks - DOD is a 6 year bottleneck of bureaucracy. 2 years to identify requirements, 2 years to fund, 2 years to contract. Here, and he even has podcasts for those too lazy to read.... https://acquisitiontalk.com/
"It currently it takes two years to approve a requirement, two years to find funding, and two years to get a company on contract. "
The real life industry is already roaring back to America in a Tidal Wave.
Getting it through DC a completely different matter.
We've been coasting on Reagan/Cold War equipment and stockpiles for so long, the replacement equipment ...uh.... see Littoral Combat Ship or the STRYKER vehicle... and we spend trifles on actual munitions.
The chief business matter for the 'Big 5" defense contractors is not being bankrupted by DOD's internal gyrations and Congress disrupting funding *every single year* to include all of the Global War on Terror.
This is a wasted asset. You ain't got people and you ain't got ammo.
"No Honey, you ain't got shit."
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxOsDFDnolZ6clm2z-rkthCFSk5WLZpLlF?si=Q3hM7tCvWV0QBiTQ
We've sunk past crazy ignorable.
Approaching scary, when even a serious poster such as Zizek end their message with this:
"To find a way out, the first thing to do is to fully admit that we are dealing with a true tragedy. There is no simple solution to such a tragedy, except that advocated by Jewish Power and Hamas: the annihilation of the other side."
Crackpot realism. Where would it be, without reliance on the two-valued proposition?
Define your "it"
Define "the two-valued proposition"
Zizek already stated it: "Either Israel annihilates all Palestinian opposition to its existence OR the Palestinian resistance destroys the nation-state of Israel." The question is reduced to the either/or of which side is forcibly eradicated. That's and awfully cut and dried proposition, to reduce the problem to that question.
Yes but these are facts.
Awful? Yes.
But facts.
No Palestinian could say peace and live.
The Israelis are finally taking them at their word.
BS. There are plenty of Palestinians who say peace. The BDS movement is an example. Absolutely freaked Israel out, so it got its American allies to pass laws shutting it down.
How many Palestinians called for a ceasefire on October 7? How many have called for the unconditional release of civilian hostages?
The BDS will get shut-down because the explicit politicisation of foreign trade and investment strikes at the heart of elite thinking about the global economy. Serious corporate interests are at stake.
And it disturbs the civility of institutions within the West.
"No Palestinian could say peace and live."
That's nonsense. A cheap and easy way of implicitly declaring Everyone in Gaza as an enemy combatant--or in the case of infants and young children, a proto-combatant, the old line that "nits make lice"--for the purpose of mounting a "(mass) homicide in Self-Defense" argument.
The Qassam Brigades need to be decisively defeated, and the key to accomplishing that mission is to destroy their underground bases and logistical support network. But there was absolutely no practical military requirement for an instantaneous military response in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. Netanyahu could have given the residents of Gaza 30 days notice to clear out, and made some provision to relocate the elderly and infirm. Those tunnels weren't going anywhere.
There was even less justification for military attacks on the refugee columns. Hamas is simply not militarily powerful enough to take and hold a single square meter of Israeli territory. Now that Hamas no longer has the element of surprise in their favor, they presently lack the capability to even make a second strike inside Israeli territory.
If it were true that no outside intervention were possible, Israel could annihilate Gaza.
The more that the explorers of genetics and genomics learn, the more complicated the subject becomes. The Static Determinist paradigm of dogmatic hereditarians is increasingly exposed as an illusion. Organisms are not just merely DNA tinkertoys. Peptides also complicate genetic expression. These are dynamic phenomena. Epigenetic influence is real. Developmental windows are real. The xenoestrogenic properties of some of the synthetic chemicals whose residues now pervade the natural world are real. To mention only the stuff that we've quite recently learned.
Judith Butler and Kamela Harris would love this.
But given enough time, a platoon of humanoid apes could easily peck out a similar word-salad.
Just for chuckles, it would be mildly interesting to see DCR's response to someone asking:
"What do you mean? In plain English, that is."
You seem to have the mistaken impression that I was posting a political opinion, rather than making factual assertions that no competent genetic researcher c.2023 would deny. They'd get my meaning, even if you don't.
To put it as plainly as possible, the field of genetic research is turning out to be another example of the axiom that the more one learns, the more there is to know.
Yeah, epigenetics in particular is fascinating. As is what might be called natural GMO: transfer of genes from one species to another, unrelated one via viruses. And one can speculate, is the trans phenomenon due to your xenoestrogenic chemicals, or is it a web-based cult? Inquiring minds want to know!
I'd ascribe much of the increase in trans identity- particularly in those born female- to adolescent hypersuggestibility exposed to an unprecedentedly hypermediated environment capable of highlighting subjects in oversimplified ways that lead them to exaggerated fad popularity or fad unpopularity- while downplaying other more important topics or ignoring them entirely, because they lack clickbait value. So we get endless threads of preening exhibitionists performing their narcissistic complaints on Twitter and organizing into mutual support cults to reify claims like gender dysphoria, while minimal attention is paid to stories with zero photogenic values, like nutrient pollution and oxygen starvation leading to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, and even less attention is paid to soil conservation.
The Internet Era is in its toddler stage, and maturity can only be achieved over time. The question is whether it can mature quickly enough- whether human civilization will make it that far, or whether toxic modernity will lead the entire project to disintegrate from a combination of unchecked self-indulgences and failures of imagination, such as despairing apathy and paranoid militarism.
I'm hoping that the biological effects from being saturated in the byproducts of disposability and instant-gratification convenience won't be found to be too terribly severe. We certainly are lucky that petrochemical wax compounds- the plastics- don't appear to be all that toxic. If they were, we'd have been ravaged by chemically induced plagues and escalating cancer incidence by now, considering their all-pervading presence in animal and plant life forms. Fortunately, epidemiology statistics don't bear that out; the most common compounds found in microplastics and nanoplastics, polyethylene and polypropylene, seem to be fairly inert. But the polluting synthetic byproducts of modern organic chemistry definitely have some deleterious effects, related to dose and the vulnerability of individual circumstance. I think that endocrine disrupting chemicals may very possibly explain the quite recent collective drop in measured testosterone levels and sperm count that's been found worldwide.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/health/sperm-counts-decline-debate/index.html
That's modernity. It's always something. You gotta drink upstream from the herd.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2021.706532/full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395949/
You could try Quammen's book, the Tangled Tree. Covers some of what DCR is referring to, though not all, and is a great read.
"Eilat", not "Eliat"
Yes, thank you.
thanks!
like a boa constrictor would a rodent that it has wrapped itself around on the jungle floor
[Your boomer readership is going to go off like a frog in a sock when they read this - calling the IDF a predator, calling the ME a jungle...]
, an assumption that has been shown to be correct --> , a predictable followup that has now been realized.
[it was a conclusion inferred from the indicator, not an assumption]
Al, Ridwan, Hezbollah’s special forces, --> Al-Ridwan (Hezbollah’s special forces)
[I initially thought you need an 'and' somewhere in here, OR - as turns out to be the case after googling - al-ridwan are the special forces in question. This fix means people dont have to guess as I did if there are one (the H special forces) 2 (al-ridwan and HSF) or three (AL & RIDWAN, & HSF) being referred to. Its beyond the Oxford Comma problem for those of us that are totally igorant of ME militaria! I know its a quote but its punctuationally mangled and doesnt make sense]
state, put --> state, which was put
out, due --> out due
About the Gilet Jaunes. I happened to be working with the Eurobarometer results (version 91.4, 2019, "Europeans’ attitudes on Trade and EU trade policy") for a piece I'm currently writing since I realized I could use some of the poll's questions as a proxy for basic knowledge of economics, calculating a general score for each European country (28 countries).
Excluding Luxembourg (*), France has the lowest score by far of all 28 European countries. French attitude seems to be: I don't care how the world works and I don't have to learn about it, I just want my baguette and it better be fresh and crispy.
(*) I assume it has something to do with being a very small country. I might be wrong.
The Gilet Jaunes remind me of nothing more strongly than Occupy: a leaderless, anarchic uprising against systemic power that ultimately got dismantled by its own incoherence. Leaderlessness can be an advantage, making it difficult to coopt or decapitate a movement, but it's simultaneously a critical weakness due to the directionlessness it leads to.
However, it's notable that Macron's response was to blunt their anger with pocketbook concessions, rather than distract everyone with identity politics.
If seen not merely as another occurrence of French rioting (a valid perspective of course), but as part of the an unfolding pattern of swarm uprisings - with Occupy and the Trucker Convoy being part of the same pattern - the GJ are notable for their staying power, and for representing something of a tactical escalation.
Uprisings like this test the system but they also signal a deep-seated desperation for a resolution to chronic grievances that have been left unaddressed. In time that signal will prompt a suitable party to come forward. Each wave of swarm uprisings brings us closer to that moment. Leadership will likely come from an expected source (the military or the Deep State) or not, but it will emerge.
The key will be the ability to direct the swarm, without seeming to lead it. Swarms have a tendency to be allergic to direct leadership, but to be very amenable to indirect influence. There's an art to this that hasn't quite been mastered yet, but I suspect that is coming soon.
It is not for nothing that a certain billionaire influencer took over the primary discourse factory in which most of the swarms have been born over the past decade or so, and has subsequently made himself very popular there. There's a fundamentally new kind of politics Musk is up to that bears watching.
The current swarms will be analysed thoroughly. Musk's patrons/masters or friends/allies doubtless plan on unleashing their own, possibly in the election year itself. So long as it results in providing us with relief from the blue-haired hordes I will not complain.
And what is this swarm, its nature? John Robb follows the swarm for at least 2 decades.
May I suggest having a look at the internet forms (technically) to see how the human swarm functions?
I see no proof of Musk being up to something in particular. Musk has made public the metric shit-tons of swarm-directing which had been carried out via Twitter by US agencies over the past decade. It's there for anyone who cares to read. But claims that he's acting anti-left are unfounded. Musk's twitter still harbours limitless amounts of deranged leftists, just go and look. It has them all: deranged left, sane left, sane right and deranged right.
It may be a cultural shock to those habituated to a pre-Musk twitter (where the sane right was half-purged and the deranged right was near-totally expunged, while the deranged left was festering) but this rebalancing has not "killed" twitter, it just made it all the more interesting.
However, significantly, the rebalancing REDUCED twitter's potential to be a swarm-directing playground. There's no "fundamentally new politics that bear watching" here; the interesting stuff is (largely) behind us, and can be watched at leisure in the "Twitter Files". Musk himself does not appear to have an agenda, beyond occasionally indulging in the autistic joys of shitposting.
Robert P. George has predicted the Dems will stop being pro-Israel in the near future, much like they stopped being anti-same-sex-marriage quite quickly. I'm not so sure since the Dem leadership has a cultural commitment to Israel that they didn't to SSM
SSM was needed to keep midwestern Dems on their side, Israel simply doesn't have any electoral significance for the left. Just comes down to who wins the intra-elite competition
"...we have no choice but to live in somebody’s future — the question is whether it’s somebody with a plan or somebody with a neurosis."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ :
"Women have been found to score higher than men on Neuroticism as measured at the Big Five trait level, as well as on most facets of Neuroticism included in a common measure of the Big Five, the NEO-PI-R."
Hm.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/153452/americans-favor-nuclear-power-year-fukushima.aspx :
"Men and women have sharply different attitudes about nuclear power, differences that are larger than those found between partisan, ideological, age, and educational segments of the population. Men favor nuclear power as a source of electricity by a 72% to 27% margin. But 51% of women oppose it, with 42% in favor. The same large gender gap exists in terms of views of the safety of nuclear power plants. The wide gender gap in attitudes about nuclear power has been found in previous years' surveys as well."
Interesting.
https://datausa.io/profile/cip/bioethics-medical-ethics?degree-grads_ethnicity_gender=degree7 :
"This chart shows the granted degrees by sex at the 5 institutions that graduate the most students in Bioethics & Medical Ethics: [Female 69.4%]"
You don't say.
"Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn't be that women are the exception."
---Ruth Bader Ginsburg
And here we are. All cozy and safe in the Longhouse.
Men who support nuclear power must support big government, given the subsidies and other exemptions required to encourage that industry.
I’m disquieted with the vaccine crowd getting behind nuclear power.
Another industry that happens to need immunity to being sued. Insurers won't touch it.
Just wait till they get behind genetic engineering.
🧟♂️🧟♀️🧟
It will be way worse than that. Imagine what youngsters who craft their own genders after getting advice from trannies on Tik Tok are going to ask the staff at the fertility clinics for. We are a long way from peak insanity.
You sound like a chick pretending to be a libertarian. What energy sector ISN'T heavily regulated / subsidized by the modern state?
They all are, but nuclear produces about 10% of the world's electricity. Electricity accounts for about 10% of fossil fuel energy use. 10 of 10 is 1%.
Nuclear was invented to produce material for weapons. Fusion research exists to test those weapons in the face of the test ban treaty.
Correction: nuclear is 4% of primary energy production; transportation is 10% of fossil fuel use.
not sure I'm following this discussion, but it may be relevant that acc. to Bloomberg, the US will join several other nations at COP28 in proposing a global tripling of nuclear power by 2050. My take is even the Greens are starting to realize that wind and solar don't cut it.
I believe it's likely that nuclear will be built up, especially in developing countries. But it isn't the source of limitless energy that proponents make it out to be.
Good point. One expects safetyism in women, and in fact it is totally understandable from an evolutionary perspective. Whereas, men must take risks. In the US, at least, safetyism takes hold right after feminism becomes a mass movement.
The reason why they're afraid of AI and try to push that AI makes up hallucinations is pretty simple.
If AI was not restricted and scripted (as with the covid shots topic) the truth would be apparent. Or AI would show that there are conflicting answers, exposing the truth: that some studies are pure bullshit and others were ignored.
AI applied to the economy would state the obvious. We are in trouble because most of the wealth is in the hands of the few because of rentier (finance) capitalism which produces nothing but interest/rents.
Diseases would be shown to be caused by things ignored, such as TOXINS in shots and medicines and food. Stress would also be demonstrated to a big factor in causing autoimmune conditions.
Despite the truth about SSRIs and statins being harmful, the AI would see that those widely used drugs could be in fact causing some of the more modern diseases today.
Let's segue with cancer, which is still pushed as some genetic disease since the push for genetics in the 70s. 50 years later and they still don't have a clue... I wonder why 😂
Genetics is a science that is trying to find patterns on what they assume is the code, based on what they deemed to be letters of the code, which depend on chemical reactions. What if there are more letters that we misread as our limited set?
It would explain why even in court cases DNA matching can be inaccurate half the time or more!
https://viroliegy.com/2022/01/26/the-epistemological-crisis-in-genomics/
Expert systems have been in place for at least a decade, yet this hasn't been leveraged in service to interdisciplinary science. What patterns are being overlooked because we haven't crunched enough data from multiple fields?
A year ago meta set up an AI to check science papers had a funny result which made it get shut down.
It would have conflicting answers because some papers contradicted others.
When asked "do vaccines cause autism", the AI said they don't cause autism but they do cause autism. Lol! 😂
Perhaps the issue is that research is highly influenced by funding which involves profit and/or political motives.
I wonder what AI would make of the existence of viruses. Circular reasoning alert!
"Let's segue with cancer, which is still pushed as some genetic disease since the push for genetics in the 70s. 50 years later and they still don't have a clue..."
Of course that cancer is a genetic disease. And lately we are progressing in leaps and bounds in the analysis of which exact mutations of the somatic genome end up causing each of the myriad types of cancer.
Getting a very precise picture of all those types of cancer, is still a far cry from being able to *cure* them once that they do occur to some unfortunate soul.
There's a reason why you have all those intra-pharma nuclear wars about mRNA transfection technology patents. mRNA transfection is one of the most promising contenders for a cancer cure, down the line. Whereas "patent on cancer cure" is spelled with a figure that's easily north of a trillion dollars.
(the hepatitis cure - patented and trivial to manufacture - is sold at $50.000 a pop. Now wait till you see the price tag on "cancer cure")
They went as far as to change the definition of the word "vaccine" in 2020, so that word may include "mRNA transfection". Although vaccine and mRNA transfection have about as much to do with each other as antibiotics and bacteriophages. (both antibiotics and bacteriophages "kill bacteria", but they are entirely, *entirely* different pairs of shoes). So that they could get government subsidies for running a medical experiment on *over a billion people*, with guaranteed immunity from any consequences should anything go wrong, and privately-owned trillion-dollars patents if it proves to be good. (or at least less bad than cancer)
Changes of established vocabulary have become commonplace in this new era (post-2012), therefore anyone opposing the mass experimentation with mRNA transfection had automatically and relentlessly been dubbed an "anti-vaxxer".
Actually, they're still not sure if it's really genetic or not. The genetic push for a cure for cancer started in the 70s and still has not given us a clear connection.
The original idea was that it was a metabolic disease, which fits better with the idea that TOXINS cause cancer, and the genes indicate issues with certain metabolic pathways that limit detox pathways.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964%2815%2900116-4/fulltext
As for mRNA, I've yet to see that it does anything at all besides the toxicity of the lipids and chemicals in the shots.
You would think that if this theory of treatment worked, it wouldn't have needed shell scam companies like moderna and bioNtech to promote it. Both of those companies are intertwined with defense department funding.
Moderna had huge issues with their pre COVID cancer research, where the lipids built up with multiple doses. They went into vaccines, expecting to get away with that issue because originally vaccines were a one or two shot deal.
OK, perhaps to unmuddle what "genetic" means. Cancer cells have particular key mutations compared to the somatic genome. Those mutations are being analyzed in high detail. Someone affected with a particular type of cancer (from the myriad types) will, in ALL their cancer cells, possess the critical mutations that are not possessed by all other regular body cells.
In that sense, cancer is "genetic in the first order".
Cancer is "genetic in the second order" inasmuch as the cell possesses remarkable mechanisms to protect against cancer. A major example is the two BRCA genes involved in DNA repair. Should such DNA-repair genes themselves be crippled - by mutations that someone can INHERIT from parents - then the corresponding proteins will be crippled, or not even created, and that someone will be at much higher statistical risk of having a cancerous mutation slip by unrepaired.
It is "genetic in the second order" in the sense that you can genetically inherit a significantly higher risk of developing the ("first-order genetical") cancer, due to a fault in the built-in mechanisms that were supposed to stop that.
And third, there are indeed carcinogenous molecules that can mess up DNA replication, more than the DNA-repair is able to fix. Asbestos is a famous example, but anyhow, there's many -- and I suppose you can file them under "toxins", though "toxins" is a quite wide umbrella. And yes, how good your body is at getting rid of those, will obviously alter your probabilities of developing cancer. The mechanisms for "getting rid of those" are varied and complex in their own right, and technically also genetically inherited (for better or worse).
None of that is a reason to dispute that cancer is a genetic disease, both in terms of being caused by changes to a cell's genome, and in terms of anyone's resistance to that being genetically inherited. Of course no-one disputes the cancerogenousness of asbestos, cigarette smoke etc, but that doesn't make it "not a genetic disease".
I've read the article you linked. It doesn't even dispute that cancer is not a genetic disease. It just states that - among the myriad genetic mutations that happen in cancer cells - the ones that always happen include mutations that lead to crazily increased cell metabolism.
I mean -- yes? Of course? The crazily-increased-metabolism angle had been known since 1927, way before the DNA double helix model was confirmed by W&C. Any "cancer" cell whose mutations do not ALSO increase the metabolism, is unlikely to kill you before your 120th birthday. (and the article claims no different)
The article is rather about shifting the focus of cancer detection, on "traces" that prove some crazy metabolism increases have been going on...