Military And Governmental Superstition About AI Is Killing Innocent People Right Now

OVER THE PAST year I've noticed an increasing number of those making pseudo-historical videos are obviously depending on AI to produce content.   My response to those is to click on those that look like they might be that kind of crap less and less but I still do on occasion.  One I clicked on a couple of days back was supposedly about Empress Elizabeth of Russia but which had many images entirely irrelevant to her and 18th century Russia, some of them images of Elizabeth I of England and clearly having something to do with England in her time.  Other  videos are even worse, mangling the chat-bot voice-over mixing all kinds of stuff together, using clearly inappropriate words as AI is quite likely to do and other stuff.  Maybe they've turned the production of this crap entirely over to AI, not even bothering to watch them before they're posted to get that monitization money from Youtube.   

I've noticed the same is sometimes true of those really annoying and unasked for AI "summaries" that now appear at the top of Google searches.   I hope Google soon either drops those or they give an opt-out feature.  Though I think it's very likely to twist the already twisted minds of a dangerously large number of the mid-brow who make up most of our so-called educated population.   The "information age" has produced an even lower percentage of informed People. 

But that's only relatively annoying and mostly innocuous. My doubts about so-called artificial intelligence increased about fifteen years ago when I first read about officials in the Pentagon anticipating using it for things like choosing targets to bomb and places to attack.   Well, that's part of what the Israeli government and its military are doing in Gaza, right now, wiping out entire neighborhoods because their computer conjectures that a Hamas militant might be in the general vicinity.  Which should be a war crime and, if it is, no one's doing much of anything to stop it.  

Human Rights Watch assessed four tools that the Israeli military has used in its ongoing offensive in Gaza related to military planning and targeting. One is based on mobile phone tracking to monitor the evacuation of Palestinians from parts of northern Gaza. Another, which the military calls “The Gospel,” generates lists of buildings or other structural targets to be attacked. Another, which the military calls “Lavender” assigns ratings to people in Gaza related to their suspected affiliation with Palestinian armed groups for purposes of labeling them as military targets. “Where’s Daddy?” purports to determine when a target is in a particular location so they can be attacked there.

Am I the only one who thinks the Israeli establishment is unusually cynical and callous as demonstrated in the names they give their engines of murder? 

Israel has a huge business in exporting its spying and repression technology to some of the worst regimes in the world,  that's something that its been doing since well back into the apartheid era of South Africa, the dictatorships in Latin America and Asia so I have no doubt that they would be even more willing to sell it to the American government, in fact they have been making a lot of money out of teaching military and control tactics to local American police agencies - remember that as you watch the Trump II era military-police tactics used against demonstrators and, who knows, even those who don't demonstrate against Trumpian fascism.   I doubt them using "artificial intelligence" would make them any less apt to kill and maim and terrorize people who are guilty of nothing more than demanding equality and democracy.  

The more general point is that if the Israeli regime is doing this you can imagine that other regimes in other countries are doing it - there are none so superstitious about the value of "AI" as those who don't have a clue about it but are sold it as being of benefit to them.  This is the new superstition, superstition with science and technology which is certainly going to be more dangerous because it magnifies and multiplies the power of those who choose to use it without much human intelligence or a shred of moral restraint.   Secularism is every bit as capable of producing superstition as the worst of any other aspect of human culture and ideology.   And, I'd argue, it's far worse because like science, secularism is divorced form any consideration of morality by common agreement. 

Mikołaj Zieleński - Magnificat

 

Warsaw Philharmonic Choir

Henryk WOJNAROWSKI, director

While Thinking About The Principles Of Kwanzaa

After Listening To Callie Crossley Last Night

AS THE BILLIONAIRE OWNERS of the "free press" join the other grifting billionaires in kissing Trump's ass AND PAYING HIM OPEN, OVERT BRIBES,  remember all those self-serving lines about the "free press" as the guarantors of American democracy which were generally lies in the past and are entirely lies now. 

I think we're finding out democracy is not the product of some kind of natural, inevitable evolution, it's not a product of alleged education and literacy.  It's not the product of ever expanding and increasing libertarian freedoms as those were dreamed of in 1960s era secularism and illusion.  Democracy is not about getting your own way, which is what most Americans seem to believe constitutes "freedom."   It certainly cannot survive in a country where the Supreme Court has declared money to equal "free speech" thus, with one ruling giving billionaires billions of times more "free speech" and so "freedom" than those who have little or nothing. 

It is now clear that democracy cannot exist with a billionaire-multi-millionaire class because it is inevitable that they will use such freedoms to corrupt a margin of Americans into either voting for fascism and peddling lies to enough of them to ensure that self-government is a pious fiction at best while being a total and obvious lie in reality.   Our choice is to either be rid of income inequality or be rid of equality and democracy,  that is the big, glaring, reality as can be read in those signs of the times I mentioned yesterday.

It may be incomprehensible to many why I rail a lot against the "civil liberties" industry, the big name civil liberties, especially "free speech" "free-press" presstitutes,  old line ACLUers, and the "liberal" "justices" and judges who have given the billionaires and their media a privilege to lie with impunity because it was their, not infrequently personally profitable service to the big media, the lying media, the Republican-fascist, billionaire and multi-millionaire owned media because they have  played as big a part as the billionaires and millionaires in corrupting enough People to produce the ever increasing disasters that have led us to Trump II - American Democracy Implodes Like His Atlantic City Casinos.   

The old secular liberalism and leftism betrayed the real American left which has always, for our entire history, been all about equality,  legal, social equality and economic justice.   It has been about telling the truth which is the enemy of the kind of privilege that is baked into the Constitution and which the courts, from the time of the Marshall Court on have expanded, though on occasion they would, in effect, permit such rights equally to the poor and destitute as they would to billionaires and millionaires, guess whose "equal rights" of that sort would prove to be the real ones.  

Reading Jeremiah and the other Prophets of the Jewish Scriptures,  their warnings of consequences for Judah and Israel that came with the abandonment of the radical egalitarianism of the Mosaic tradition,  I don't think we have any reason to believe that America is going to escape similar consequences.  I think we have every reason to expect such as will come will be far worse than the pillaging of the capital city and the exile of a few thousand aristocrats and royals - what the actual biblical Exile consisted of.  If, as happened then, America's presumed special status is going to be stripped away has yet to be seen.   

I think with, first, the imposition by the Supreme Court of Bush II with the disasters it instituted, especially in its invasion of Iraq with consequences still playing out right now, then the voters putting Bush II in power, even as the catastrophic policies foreign and domestic were known to be a disaster - then a mere eight years later Americans and our corrupt Electoral College giving us Trump I with its massive corruption and criminal insanity - costing hundreds of thousands of American's lives - to have Trump II a mere four years after that - after the most remarkable domestic policy success of the Biden years were rejected by the voters at the urging of the "free press" ,. . . with the world seeing how truly corrupt our media, our politics, our "democracy" has become, how easily gulled and led a majority of the electorate is,  they have certainly learned that America's best days are well and truly behind us and they will need to make other plans in the future.   

Our mass media, which now includes the Zuckerberg Face Book - he being one of the billionaires to kiss the ass of Trump - Twit's Musk who is about to strip the American treasury on the inside -  ABC - which caved to the tune of fifteen-million FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT TRUMP  and the freedoms to operate as they have been handed by the "civil liberties" industry and "liberal" and fascist Supreme Courts - proves that the First Amendment is so stupidly drafted so as to have always been a danger to equal justice, equal rights, equality and, so, democracy.   The United States has no hope of reaching anything like a stable, never mind progressing egalitarian democracy so long as those words remain unchanged, making it clear that there is no right to lie,  that the media is a corporate entity and, so, has no rights and that any privileges to operate require mandatory obligations to tell the truth and nothing but the truth,  America as America was alleged to be is over. 

America won't recover until a large margin of voters grow up and accept that a decent government and a decent society carries not only the necessity of knowing the truth that might, might make us free BUT ALSO THE MORAL OBLIGATIONS THAT COME WITH REAL COSTS IN THE IDIOTIC NOTIONS OF LIBERTARIAN "FREEDOM" THAT WE HAVE BEEN SOLD.   And I don't think that will come unless they realize that secularism cannot sustain that because secularism will always erode morals, even from those who may retain vestiges of such notions through socially inherited feelings about that.   Even a rational calculus that shows such decency requires morality to come about to start with and, even more so, to sustain it isn't enough.  You as well  as an effective majority have to really, truly believe you are consequentially obliged to practice that morality for it to really, truly, become reliable. 

I listen to those Black People who sincerely and joyously practice Kwanzaa  and the principles of it and sincerely envy them such an inspired season.  I don't think it would be good for white guys, such as I am, to break in on it because that would dilute it as much as if Christians started in on the Jewish holy days or appropriating other cultures' sacred times.  I mentioned here years ago, while reminiscing about my decades as a gay man, that I read a 1970s gay activist, a Quaker, saying that the "gay liberation" movement needed a Martin Luther King jr. and that it wasn't going to have one.   I don't remember his name, I doubt he is still alive, though he might be, but he was absolutely right.  I think the LGBTQ+ community - by which I mean those of us who are mutually committed to universal equality, not to the kind of rich gay and lesbian millionaires and billionaires and Trump ass kissers - would benefit from a similar list of principles and a similar period of organized promotion of them every years - "pride month" doesn't do it.   But, I doubt we're going to have that.  We could adopt that list of principles without coopting or risking appearing to appropriate Kawnzaa, it would be a pretty good list to go with. 

Ex-Republican-(allegedly non-fascist) Maryland Governor Larry Hogan

apparently mistook the constellation Orion for mysterious drones hovering over the east coast.  He took videos and posted them in a Twit.  I  looked and it was so frickin' obvious that I couldn't believe that so many allegedly responsible adults are too ignorant and stupid that they mistook some of the most obvious stars in one of the most obvious constellations in the night sky.  Apparently that's what most of the videos of the "drones" that the Republican-fascists on FOX Lies are rattling on about are. 

It reminds me of when I was obliged to visit an old-family, old fart who I really didn't like when he was hospitalized at the age of 84 - he was allegedly leaving some money to a non-profit I was on the board of - and he said he'd never really looked at clouds before.   The guy was a classics professor who, no doubt, had read all kinds of descriptions of the sky in classical and other lit but apparently he'd never bothered to look up at the sky above him even in his childhood.   He was a Republican, too.  I had to bite my tongue when he started talking about the politics - a real racist.  Maybe Republicans are just like that.  Neither seeing the sky nor the signs of the times.  

His supposed legacy to the non-profit never materialized, either.  It did cause us a lot of headaches as people wondered why the windfall he'd talked about didn't materialize.   He'd taught Bush I at some point in his life.  I really had to bite my tongue when he started going on about what a good family the Bushes were.   Criminals. 

The Israeli Genocide of Gazan Civilians Documented

 

You can read the report from Airwars on which Owen Jones based his commentary on here.   Keeping in mind that it only reports on a short period of time during the Israeli attack begun as a response to the October 7th massacre, the first 25 days of it.

Especially damning is this passage comparing the number of civilians killed in Gaza to that of the previous highest number they reported on when the US led coalition attack on Raqqa over a four month period and the battle of Mosul which had been the highest month long period they reported on. 

In 25 days of October 2023, civilian harm in Gaza occurred on a scale unmatched by any conflict previously documented by Airwars. This section will outline a number of key metrics by which such rates are measured.

When discussing rates of civilian harm, the most commonly used metric in public debate is the number of civilians killed in a particular period. Airwars found that at least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza between October 7th through the 31st. This number is only a minimum, with the maximum number of civilians killed reaching 6,668. It is also a known undercount as Airwars' work is ongoing, with additional civilian deaths from the period still under analysis.

This conservative figure (5,139 civilians killed) is already nearly four times the number of civilians killed in the most lethal month previously documented by Airwars: March 2017, where at least 1,470 civilians were killed by the US coalition in Iraq.

In the Battle of Raqqa, where the US-led Coalition fired 30,000 artillery rounds into the city over four months, Airwars documented 2,556 civilians killed by US coalition forces. 956 of these civilians were killed in strikes where attribution was recorded as contested, i.e. where harm may have resulted from other actors. Even taking this higher number of civilian deaths into account, it is still only half the number of civilians killed in 25 days in Gaza.

In his commentary Owen Jones points out that the accusation made by the Israeli government and its apologists that Hamas was using civilians and civilian infrastructure as "human shields" that Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth and that when Iran targeted the headquarters of the Israeli intelligence service and and military, located among civilians and civilian infrastructure, that no one talks about the Israeli government and military using Israeli civilians as "human shields."  He also notes that the Israeli military using Palestinian civilians, even children, as human shields during their attacks has been documented.   

Israel is exposed for what it is, certainly a genocidal apartheid state, what I think should be considered an apartheid democracy.   I have heard its democratic status given as a reason that the west must support it, no matter what, apparently, forgetting that just because they vote in the government that that exempts them from being held responsible for the crimes that government commits.  That is one of the worst examples of what giving a mere word that kind of absolute and unthinking moral authority because the Apartheid South African government was just such a democracy as were the American states which practiced and still do practice Jim Crow to maintain white supremacy.  Israel, both by Constitution, by law and by Supreme Court declarations is more overtly apartheid than even the American Jim Crow states were during the lynch-law period.   The "settlers" carrying out Israeli murders and terrorism and intimidation just as much as any Hollywood depicted lynch mob ever did largely with the state government's support and encouragement.  

With Gaza a lot of People are waking up to realize what I did during Israel's genocidal attacks on Lebanon decades before, it is an outlaw state cultivating and demanding the conditions for its support in the United States, Britain and other countries without which it could not maintain its apartheid system of rule and Lebensraum policy of expansion.   A large number of those whose eyes are opened about that are Jews, young and old and, as Mehdi Hassan has pointed out, like it or not that is an important thing.   

Zionism has been a disaster as many Jews predicted it would be in the early decades of the ideology.  They were right.  America has to stop its facilitating of the crimes of the Israeli government, military and the majority of Israeli voters who keep apartheid in power and its imperial expansion going.   It's not going to get better, it's going to be an even bigger blood bath than it is now.  

Without equality being the foundation of it, democracy is as capable as any other government of being evil, that's true of the United States under apartheid democracy as it is in Israel.   Calling unequal governance what it is is important, calling Israel an "ethno-state" isn't specific enough because the responsibility of the voters there, as in the United States which just voted in a white-supremacist government by democratic means, must be included in the label.   Holding a vote isn't nearly enough, without equality a majority can be as evil as a single despot.  In the case of Israel, they've kept Netanyahu in power longer than they have anyone else, knowing full well what an evil and corrupt person he is.  The majority of Israelis hold responsibility for what their elected government does as the majority of voters and those too irresponsible to vote against Trump do for what he's about to do, including giving the genocide campaigns of the Israeli government a free hand to kill and steal even more.