RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/beware-do-gooders

Gone are the days when villains dressed the part and Wall Street vampires suited up like Gordon Gekko. These days, an American who wants to avoid being swindled needs to watch out for the T-shirt-clad do-gooders spouting the proper politics and pieties while claiming that they only want to save the world. The recent collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire, FTX, fit the larger pattern: it was a massive financial scam marketed as a moral cause that got away with it by flattering the high priests of the press and offering elected officials promises of gifts and donations.

Before FTX, it worked wonders for Theranos, WeWork, and the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Millions and then billions of dollars were poured into corporate vessels promising change, their founders cozy with a media that long ago abandoned its role as a check on the nakedly self-promotional claims of the rich and powerful.

With the financial and philanthropic worlds now firmly wedded, there are even bigger bubbles yet to burst, like the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds that consulting powerhouse McKinsey estimated had a total global value of $2.5 trillion midway through 2022. The conditions that allowed for a $10 billion crypto empire to vanish into thin air have only become more conducive to the do-good grift, like a virus replicating itself inside a host’s body.

As a public face for the effective altruism movement, Bankman-Fried’s particular brand of swindle was different in detail but not in kind from the snake oil sold by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes was sentenced last month to 11 years for charges related to misleading investors about the fact that her $9 billion genetic testing startup was a fraud with no ability to do the things it promised. A similar pattern of financial swindling, albeit on a smaller scale, has taken place at the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. In a new lawsuit filed in September, more than 25 local BLM chapters sued the foundation’s current leader, Shalomyah Bowers, for allegedly “devising a scheme of fraud and misrepresentation” to siphon out more than $10 million from donor coffers. Bowers was brought into the organization by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors before Cullors stepped away amid her controversial spending of $3.2 million on four luxury residential properties. Clapping back at the local BLM chapters, Bowers accused them of perpetuating the “carceral logic and social violence that fuels the legal system,” for reporting his alleged grift.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/legalizing-pot-not-good-new-york-us

New York stinks of weed. Everywhere you go – theater lobbies, parking lots, construction sites, delis, public parks – you can smell the bitter aroma of pot. Does anyone actually think this is good for our troubled city? Or for our country?

Can you imagine China encouraging drug usage that can permanently impair the intelligence of young people and that saps the productivity of workers? It is absurd, and yet (mainly) Democrats in financially wounded cities and states have rushed to legalize pot, grounding their campaigns on three questionable arguments:

1. That the war on drugs and prohibition against smoking pot led to racial inequities, which could only be corrected through legalization;

2. That selling weed and levying hefty taxes on those sales would plug the budget gaps of profligate cities and states; and

3. That marijuana was no more harmful than alcohol and therefore should be legal.

Are these assumptions true?

The widely disseminated claim that millions of Black Americans are unjustly in prison for simple pot possession is a myth. A 2015 study showed that in the federal prison system, which in 2020 housed 226,000 people, more than 99 percent of those sentenced for drug possession had originally been accused of trafficking or other crimes, but had been allowed to plead down to lesser charges.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“The principle that the end justifies the means is in individual ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

The Road to Serfdom, 1944  Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992)

In a 1928 dissenting opinion, in Olmstead v. the United States, Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites everyman to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retributions.”

In 1928, Roy Olmstead was a suspected bootlegger. Without judicial approval, federal agents wiretapped his home. He was convicted based on those wiretaps. In 2016, Donald Trump was a successful real estate investor and entertainer. Politically, he was a novice. He was disruptive to establishment politicians, and to federal bureaucrats whose careers depend upon an ever-expanding government. Following his election, but before his inauguration, Senator Chuck Schumer spoke about Mr. Trump’s taunting the intelligence agencies: “He’s being really dumb…Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community and they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” A truth Mr. Trump was to discover. Those who used unlawful means to marginalize Mr. Trump did so because they felt that the end – the destruction of his political career – justified any means employed. However, as Theodore Roosevelt said in a speech in Chicago on April 10, 1899: “No man is justified in doing evil on the grounds of expediency.”

Over six years have elapsed since Mr. Trump won the Presidency. And we now know that senior executives in the FBI and the Justice Department were culpable in the “Russian collusion” story, as well as four years later being responsible for suppressing the authenticity of what was found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Ten years ago, Lois Lerner, then IRS Director, Exempt Organizations, singled out conservative organizations. These federal bureaucrats used illicit means to achieve a preferred political end. What they did was despicable. Will they be punished? Probably not, as long as mainstream media sees their role as propagandizers, rather than seekers of truth and disseminators of news.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2022/12/13/4-mind-boggling-technology-advances-in-store-for-2023/?sh=3bbc4431a40c

2022 was a transformative year for technological innovation and digital transformation. The trend will continue as the pace of innovation and development of potentially disruptive emerging technologies exponentially increases every year. The question arises, what lies ahead for tech for us to learn and experience in 2023?
While there are many impactful tech topics such as the Internet of Things, 5G, Space, Genomics, Synthetic Biology, Automation, Augmented Reality, and others, there are four tech areas to keep a keen watch on this coming year as they have promising and near-term capabilities to transform lives. They include: 1) artificial intelligence, 2) computing technologies, 3) robotics, and 4) materials science.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Since the HAL2000 computer and producer Stanley Kubrick provided a glimpse of AI’s independent (although nefarious) capability to independently think in the epic movie, 2001 A Space Odessey, we have been eagerly waiting for the emergence of artificial intelligence. We are now on the cusp of AI emergence and AI is no longer just found in science fiction movies. Elements that compose AI consist of machine learning, and natural language processing and are now a daily part of our lives. Today, AI can understand, diagnose, and solve problems — in some cases without being specifically programmed.
The focus and challenges of artificial intelligence are clear cut. AI systems seek to replicate human traits and computational capabilities in a machine, and surpass human limitations and speed. It is already happening. Artificial synapses that mimic the human brain will likely direct the next generation of computing. The components may differ, it may be analog or digital, and it may be based on transistors, chemicals, biological, photonics, or possibly quantum components.
Computers with AI have been predominantly designed for automation activities that include memory emulation, speech recognition, learning, planning, and problem solving.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/12/now-what/

The release of the Twitter Files, for the most part, confirms what Donald Trump and his supporters knew in 2020. Big Tech drastically suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden—his son’s overseas financial dealings and the Democratic Party’s plans to ensure Biden’s victory with an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots—before Election Day.

The series of posts by independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss reveal internal communications between top executives as they contorted company policy on the fly to accommodate the Democrats’ political motives. Taibbi kicked off the party on December 2 with a series of tweets detailing how Twitter banned the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and continued to defend the move even after some company honchos admitted it was indefensible. “By this point ‘everyone knew this was fucked,’ said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of . . . continuing to err,” Taibbi wrote while posting screenshots of chat messages between decision-makers.

Weiss followed up by outlining Twitter’s shadow banning—a practice that former CEO Jack Dorsey repeatedly denied—aimed at conservative influencers such as Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk in 2020. This built up to a fever pitch that climaxed on January 6, 2021, when a four-hour disturbance finally gave Twitter and other social media behemoths the excuse they had been hoping for to fulfill Big Tech’s dream of permanently deplatforming the president. “The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days,” Taibbi explained, referring to January 6, 7, and 8, the day Trump was banned. “However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.” The pressure campaign to boot Trump, Shellenberger further disclosed, came from both internal and external forces including “Former First Lady @michelleobama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/david-solway-2/2022/12/12/people-of-the-lie-n1652934

In several previous articles, I addressed what I believe to be the crucial issue of our time, namely, the institutionalization of the lie in culture and politics. The situation shows no sign of abating and indeed grows more alarming with every passing day. The integrity of the information we receive about domestic and world affairs has been degraded almost beyond recognition. Reality has been denatured. For the Lie has become a systemic and indelible part of public and institutional life. The dilemma we now confront, as D. Stephen Long points out in an important book dealing with the relation between relativism and authoritarianism, is speaking truth in a post-truth world.

But the problem goes further than relativism; rather, it involves a substitution of absolutes, of an assumed truth for a genuine truth, replacing objective fact and data with a new paradigm of subterfuge, fable, and casuistry under the rubric of “truth.” When lying acquires something like constitutional status, it becomes a phenomenon so deep it can be described, adopting the popular saying, as “turtles all the way down,” now the title of an indispensable new book on vaccine science and myth, which reveals “how ineffectively and dishonestly the COVID pandemic was handled.”

In fact, a climate of fraud and deception is now omnipresent in all walks of life and endeavor, personal and professional. As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes in The Mystery of Evil, power and institutions are delegitimated today “because the powers have lost all awareness of their legitimacy,” which is why “illegality is so diffuse and generalized.” In other words, lying has assumed the authority of law.

The “People of the Lie,” in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s telling phrase, are now everywhere to be found, inhabiting what we might call the “moral infrastructure” of our era. They comprise not only the elite or parasite class in the corridors of both elected and non-elected officialdom, the federal agencies, the administrative bureaucracies, the corporate world, academia, the medical and pseudo-scientific professions, the suborned media, the diverse nonprofits and aspiring Technates like the World Economic Forum, the radical feminist sorority, “Global Warming” propagandists, much of the judiciary that labors to pervert and annul prosecutorial ethics and legal obligations in our courts, but also the vast body of ordinary citizens whose lives and everyday practices have been infected by the virus of the Lie.