RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/05/how-ai-will-embolden-the-tyranny-of-big-tech/

The emergence of artificial intelligence marks the latest acceleration of the digital age. Like any revolution, this one has winners and losers and will likely transform the relationship between people and machines. It could also lend yet more power to Big Tech and their technocratic elites in government.

Just as the Industrial Revolution elevated manufacturers and their financiers over the old aristocratic classes, the current shift erodes the power of the large industrial, often unionised, corporations and hosts of smaller businesses, in favour of a small coterie of elite firms, which are aggressively anti-union and have an unprecedented hold on both the capital markets and increasingly the human consciousness.

In the past, a major tech breakthrough would have naturally created a market for upstarts. The first phase of the digital revolution in the early 21st century caught many larger players, like IBM and AT&T, flat-footed as firms like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook (now Meta) emerged, eventually well surpassing them in market value. These firms have now secured quasi-monopolistic control of everything from mobile browsers, operating-system software and online advertising sales. They also control two-thirds of the world’s cloud service infrastructure, which is critical for AI.

These Big Tech companies drive the economy, and with them the fortunes of the three-fifths of Americans invested in the stock market. About 60 per cent of the S&P 500’s gains for the year have been driven by just five tech companies – Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet (the parent company of Google). Altogether, seven tech stars, adding Tesla and Apple, account for a remarkable 30 per cent of the index’s total value, a domination almost unprecedented in market history.

These same companies are uniquely positioned to raise the trillions of dollars that are needed to develop AI capacity – at a time when cash for startups is at the lowest ebb in five years. Among the AI superpowers, there is only one relative newcomer, Nvidia. It started out mostly selling chips to the videogame industry, but its hardware has since become essential to the AI boom. Overall the field is utterly dominated by the top giant interests.

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-history-and-anti-history?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none. 

According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.” 

The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history. 

True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism. 

Podcasts are not reviving history, as is often claimed these days. They are mostly drowning it in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious.

I could see early on where this conversation was going. It’s the moment when Cooper offers his appraisal of the Jonestown mass suicide of 1978 as microcosm. A microcosm of what? Of the civil rights movement, of course. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-the-truth-about

Germany and its fascist allies started the war. They felt empowered to do so not because of supposed Allied aggression, but because of Western appeasement and isolationism.

In a recent and now widely seen Tucker Carlson interview, a guest historian named Darryl Cooper casually presented a surprising number of flawed theories about World War II. He focused his misstatements on the respective roles of Winston Churchill’s Britain and Adolf Hitler’s Germany—especially in matters of the treatment and fate of Russian prisoners, the Holocaust, the systematic slaughtering of Jews, strategic bombing, and the nature of Winston Churchill. 

Because of the size of the audience Carlson introduced him to, and because of the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods, his assertions deserve a response. 

On the Treatment of Russian Prisoners

It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941. 

The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East. 

The edicts variously targeted for elimination prominent Soviet officials, intellectuals, Jews, and commissars. Just as importantly, Hitler exempted German soldiers from any criminal liability in what was expected to be the mass killing of Russians and Jews in general. 

In Mein Kampf, during the lead-up to the war, and even through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact years, Hitler had planned eventually to invade Russia, destroy the Soviet Union, put an end to what he called Jewish Bolshevism, and annex and then eventually resettle almost all of European Russia. In part he was encouraged by the German success in briefly absorbing much of Western Russia in late 1917 and early 1918. 

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

When Marcellus utters Shakespeare’s immortal line, he speaks of the corruption that led to Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, being murdered. When Mr. Gingrich wrote the words in the rubric, it reflected his opinion that corruption, incompetence and dishonesty have come to characterize American politics. One does not have to be in accord with all that Mr. Gingrich believes to agree that politics in the United States has become polarized and that people, in general, have become disenchanted with those who labor in the vineyards along the Potomac. 

Complaints about politics and political leaders are as old as civilization, but they have reached new heights in the U.S., and, in fact, in much of the West. A PEW Research study, conducted a year ago, concluded: “Just 4% of U.S. adults say the political system is working extremely or very well; another 23% say it is working somewhat well.” Things have worsened since. On August 21 of this year Statista Research put the approval rating for the U.S. Congress at 16 percent. Keep in mind, this is despite the 118th Congress “being the most diverse Congress in American history.” Their report concluded that “nearly 60% of Americans have no confidence the parties can govern in a bipartisan way.”

When asked how they feel when they think of politics in the PEW study, 65% said they were “always/often exhausted”. Asked as to what words best described the current state of American politics, “divisive” and “corrupt” were the top choices. Members of Congress, especially those on the left, are famous for extolling wealth and income disparities. Yet, the median net worth of an individual member of Congress is more than five times the median net worth of American households. Wikipedia, in a list of presidents ranked by net worth, adjusted for inflation to 2022 U.S. dollars, shows that three of the last five U.S. Presidents head the list: Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. (George W. Bush is twelfth and Joe Biden is tied with Eisenhower for twenty-second.) Last on the list is Harry Truman, who famously replied when offered a corporate board seat: “You don’t want me; you want the U.S. Presidency, and it’s not for sale.” Today, everything in politics is for sale, including access.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-harris-admin-stonewalls-investigation-into-massive-aid-for-gaza/

The Biden administration has been pumping huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. This aid is being sent behind the scenes; the amounts are not made public. Congress did not give its approval for such amounts of aid, so much of which — as everyone now knows — ends up with Hamas, that routinely steals aid meant for all the people in Gaza. Now the USAID Agency is being investigated for its role in delivering such aid, but instead of handing over records requested by a government watchdog group, the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) about the huge amounts of American aid going to Gaza (and therefore, in significant amounts, to Hamas), the USAID is stonewalling, and refusing to hand over documents requested by the investigators. More on this stonewalling can be found here: “Biden-Harris Admin Sued for Stonewalling Gazan Aid Probe,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, August 27, 2024:

The Biden-Harris administration is being sued in federal court for obstructing an investigation into its behind-the-scenes efforts to inject unprecedented amounts of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and pressure Israel to end its war against Hamas, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA), a government watchdog group, sued the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on Tuesday for failing to hand over reams of internal documents about its diplomatic campaign to pump aid into the embattled Gaza Strip—goods that have been stolen by Hamas and used to prolong its terror campaign. The agency stonewalled the probe for nearly half a year, resulting in the lawsuit.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/two-cheers-for-the-first-amendment/

Americans who approve of government censorship and interference with social media in order to stop “fake news” and “misinformation,” should take a look at what’s going on in Europe. Recently Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, a social media and instant messaging service, was arrested by French judicial officials and charged with “complicity in distributing child pornography, illegal drugs and hacking software on the messaging app,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Those are serious crimes, and if Durov is proved guilty, worthy of condign punishment.

“But,” as the Journal pointed out in an editorial, “many suspect this [the charges] is merely a pretext because Europe is also imposing speech controls on other media platforms. France in 2020 sought to require sites to remove hate speech, though most of its law was blocked by the country’s top court. The European Parliament then stepped into the breach with its Digital Services Act, which compels platforms to curb harmful content, including so-called hate speech, disinformation and propaganda.”

Durov’s arrest comes not long after Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, threatened Elon Musk just before his live interview with Donald Trump on X, which has already been subject to “formal proceedings for dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of the measures taken to combat disinformation.”

As the Journal noted, “This is thuggish stuff.” Apparently, the Biden administration isn’t concerned about allied foreign nations interfering in American presidential politics. But we shouldn’t be surprised, given his administration’s security and investigative agencies’ collusion with, or strong-arming of social media companies to monitor and censor their users’ content.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/05/biden-confesses-to-a-big-lie-and-nobody-notices-not-even-joe/

You’d never know any of this if you relied on the mainstream press for news.

In a 19-word post on X this past Sunday, President Joe Biden admitted that he has been lying to the public for years. It didn’t make news, partly because Biden is now irrelevant. But it should. Because Kamala Harris is now repeating the lie.

“Since I took office,” Biden posted, “we’ve recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic. And added over 6 million more.”

Why Biden, or whoever on his staff was running his X feed, decided to post this on a Sunday is anyone’s guess.

Whatever the reason, it went almost entirely overlooked. We came across it courtesy of RedState, which highlighted the post, along with a response from the Trump campaign, in a story about Biden’s appearance at a Harris rally.

But it is a distinction Biden had never made in public before. He always says that his administration “created” 16 million new jobs in his first term, usually followed by “the most of any president in history.”

In the New York Times, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Rita Koganzon explains how university tendencies to baby their students have bred unruly protests like the pro-Palestine encampments:

Universities don’t openly describe students as children, but that is how they treat them. This was highlighted in the spring, when so many pro-Palestinian student protesters — most of them legal adults — faced minimal consequences for even flagrant violations of their universities’ policies. (Some were arrested — but those charges were often dropped.) American universities’ relative generosity to their students may seem appealing, especially in contrast to the plight of our imaginary waiter, but it has a dark side, in the form of increased control of student life.

If universities today won’t hold students responsible for their bad behavior, they also won’t leave them alone when they do nothing wrong. Administrators send out position statements after major national and international political events to convey the approved response, micromanage campus parties and social events, dictate scripts for sexual interactions, extract allegiance to boutique theories of power and herd undergraduates into mandatory dormitories where their daily lives can be more comprehensively monitored and shaped. This is increasingly true across institutions — public and private, small and large — but the more elite the school, the more acute the problem.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-harris-cant-lead-emboldens-enemies

President Joe Biden, fresh off an 18-day vacation, says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not done enough to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. He appears to blame Netanyahu for the cold-blooded execution of six hostages, including a U.S. citizen, as much as the Hamas thugs who pulled the trigger. That figures. While the president once vowed that U.S. support for the Jewish state was “rock solid,” more recently that support has crumbled as Biden has pushed for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, damn the consequences. 

When told of the hostage deaths, Biden issued a statement saying: “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.” We’ll see.  

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ faltering backing of Israel and pandering to the pro-Palestinian mob has hindered IDF’s aggressive hunt for the Hamas beasts who murdered some 1,200 innocents on October 7 and for the hostages held in Gaza.