[BariWeissSubstack] I was planning to publish a roundup today of the many thoughtful responses to Paul Rossi’s essay. I’m going to save that post for Sunday, because I was just sent this letter that has my jaw on the floor. It was written by a Brearley parent named Andrew Gutmann.
If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)
Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:
If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
I’m pasting the whole thing below.
Meantime, I’m going to ask Andrew Gutmann to join Paul Rossi and me for our subscriber-only conversation this coming Tuesday night. I hope he’ll join. Details about that event will be in Sunday’s post.
I promise: this newsletter won’t be exclusively about education. But my gosh is it a wild right story to follow right now. . .
See you Sunday.
April 13, 2021
Dear Fellow Brearley Parents,
Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child's education is irreparable.
It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley's antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.
I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.
I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country's history and adds no understanding to any of today's societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction.
I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand. Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley's oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies.
I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism.
I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners. They are an insult to parents and unbecoming of any educational institution, let alone one of Brearley's caliber.
I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought. And if Brearley really cared about “inclusiveness,” the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto “One Brearley,” instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.
l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests.
I object to, as we have been told time and time again over the past year, that the school’s first priority is the safety of our children. For goodness sake, Brearley is a school, not a hospital! The number one priority of a school has always been, and always will be, education. Brearley’s misguided priorities exemplify both the safety culture and “cover-your-ass” culture that together have proved so toxic to our society and have so damaged the mental health and resiliency of two generations of children, and counting.
I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums. I object to the censorship of books that have been taught for generations because they contain dated language potentially offensive to the thin-skinned and hypersensitive (something that has already happened in my daughter's 4th grade class). I object to the lowering of standards for the admission of students and for the hiring of teachers. I object to the erosion of rigor in classwork and the escalation of grade inflation. Any parent with eyes open can foresee these inevitabilities should antiracism initiatives be allowed to persist.
We have today in our country, from both political parties, and at all levels of government, the most unwise and unvirtuous leaders in our nation’s history. Schools like Brearley are supposed to be the training grounds for those leaders. Our nation will not survive a generation of leadership even more poorly educated than we have now, nor will we survive a generation of students taught to hate its own country and despise its history.
Lastly, I object, with as strong a sentiment as possible, that Brearley has begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think. I object that the school is now fostering an environment where our daughters, and our daughters’ teachers, are afraid to speak their minds in class for fear of “consequences.” I object that Brearley is trying to usurp the role of parents in teaching morality, and bullying parents to adopt that false morality at home. I object that Brearley is fostering a divisive community where families of different races, which until recently were part of the same community, are now segregated into two. These are the reasons why we can no longer send our daughter to Brearley.
Over the past several months, I have personally spoken to many Brearley parents as well as parents of children at peer institutions. It is abundantly clear that the majority of parents believe that Brearley’s antiracism policies are misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous. Many believe, as I do, that these policies will ultimately destroy what was until recently, a wonderful educational institution. But as I am sure will come as no surprise to you, given the insidious cancel culture that has of late permeated our society, most parents are too fearful to speak up.
But speak up you must. There is strength in numbers and I assure you, the numbers are there. Contact the administration and the Board of Trustees and demand an end to the destructive and anti-intellectual claptrap known as antiracism. And if changes are not forthcoming then demand new leadership. For the sake of our community, our city, our country and most of all, our children, silence is no longer an option.
#1
For the people who believe in a credential-based guaranteed success track, this all means nothing. If all they taught the kids was how to shoot up or make meth, their parents could still realistically expect that their kids will be automatically accepted into Ivy League schools and automatically hired to six figure jobs (mostly in gummint) upon graduating from that stage.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/18/2021 11:15 Comments ||
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#2
The value of every credential-based guaranteed success track is plunging day by day.
Posted by: Bubba Lover of the Faeries8843 ||
04/18/2021 11:52 Comments ||
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[NYP] CNN anchor Chris Cuomo said gun laws and police reform will happen when "white people’s kids start getting killed."
The host of "Cuomo Prime Time," who just last month claimed on-air to be "black on the inside," claims to have the answer on gun and police reform.
"Shootings, gun laws, access to weapons. Oh, I know when they’ll change," said the anchor. "[When] your kids start getting killed. White people’s kids start getting killed."
Cuomo at one point in the monologue attempted to affect the hypothetical accent of a confused white parent, asking:
"What’s going on with these police? Maybe we shouldn’t even have police," he said, before directly addressing the whiteness of his audience:
"That kind of madness. That kind of mania. That will be you. That will be the majority. Because it’s your people," said Cuomo, while looking into the camera.
Summary:
CUM-O is a race Pandering Sexual predator.
Who used and abused the Police as needed for political gain.
May he be voted out of office, stripped of Privileged Politician Police protection and have to wait 15 to 45 mins, like the rest of us, for the politically limited police force to arrive.
[UNZ] Here’s a phrase due for an airing: "asymmetry of indulgence."
That phrase was coined by conservative British journalist Ferdinand Mount. He was writing about how Leftist politicians get a pass, an indulgence, when they speak in the globalist-universalist diction of Karl Marx and Mao Tse-tung; but when a conservative dares to murmur that perhaps rampant multiculturalism is not a great idea, he is denounced as Literally Hitler.
Plainly we have an asymmetry of indulgence in regard to police shooting of civilians. The asymmetry was in exceptionally plain sight this week, after the shooting of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb.
The tiny minority of us whose memories stretch all the way back to early January could not help contrasting this shooting and its consequences with the death of Ashli Babbitt:
Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939 and won scholarships to Eton, Christ Church, Oxford and Vienna University. Novelist, The Sunday Times columnist and Conservative Party politician, Mount was head of the policy unit in 10 Downing Street in 1982-83, during the time when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and wrote the 1983 Tory general election manifesto. For 11 years (1991-2002) he was editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Today, he is a regular contributor to Standpoint magazine. He lives in London.
[Alt Market] It might sound like "US exceptionalism" to point this out (...and how very dare I), but even if the globalist Reset is successful in every other nation on Earth, the globalists are still failures if they can’t secure and subjugate the American people. As I’ve noted many times in the past, most of the world has been sufficiently disarmed, and even though we are seeing resistance in multiple European nations against forced vaccination legislation and medical tyranny, it is unlikely that they will have the ability to actually repel a full on march into totalitarianism. Most of Asia, India and Australia are already well under control. Africa is almost an afterthought , considering Africa is where many suspect vaccines are tested.
America represents the only significant obstacle to the agenda.
Conservative Americans in particular have been a thorn in the side of the globalists for generations, and it really comes down to a simple matter of mutual exclusion: You cannot have an openly globalist society and conservative ideals at the same time in the same place. It is impossible.
Conservatives believe in limited government, true free markets, individual liberty, the value of life, freedom of speech, private property rights, the right to self defense, the right to self determination, freedom of religion, and the non-aggression principle (we won’t harm you unless you try to harm us). None of these ideals can exist in a globalist world because globalism is at its core the pursuit of a fully centralized tyranny.
There are people on this planet that are not satisfied to merely live their lives, take care of their families and make their mark peacefully. They crave power over all else. They desperately want control over you, over me, over everything, and they will use any means at their disposal to get it. I would compare it to a kind of drug addiction; globalists are like crack addicts, they can never get enough power, there is always something more to take.
They tell themselves and others that they are "philanthropists", that "they know what is best" for the rest of us. They believe themselves superior and therefore it is their "destiny" to dictate and micro-manage society for the "greater good" of us all. But really, when we witness their methods it becomes clear that they have no noble aspirations. They have no empathy or honor. They don’t care about the average human being, or the environment, or the economy or society in general. They only care about themselves and their delusions of grandeur. These people are a cancer on the rest of civilization.
#2
The globalist are not paying attention. With the Fed and Congress creating an unending supply of 'money', it will present the opportunity for a run on the dollar. The usual modus operandi of our central government will be to exert more destructive controls, without addressing the mess they created, only aggravating the event. The one central element holding the place together will evaporate. The center will not hold. When that happens, the globalist will be face with an unimaginable circus of chaos they can not deal with.
#3
Some endeavours have no endgame. They just are. Remember the tower of Babel?
'...Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'
It is written that God looked upon this sad fascination with a heaven challenging utopia and sent confusion to sabotage the bastitches. I think He must have empathized with the human beings the endeavour was corrupting and abusing, building a thing that couldn't have an end.
God has always stopped the advance of such self elevated schmendricks. His ways are mysterious and when done it seems like a causal phenomenon; but it is Him, the Lord of hosts, who resisteth the proud.
#4
Maybe next time, we will do social distancing for real, as in shut down the failed urbanist model for good.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/18/2021 8:25 Comments ||
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#5
Conservatives will have to create a parallel society if their ideals are to survive intact. Parallel culture, schools, food production and distribution, parallel networks and power sources, parallel airlines and other transport and cargo delivery companies. Parallel universities and parallel employers of skilled workers and managers and professionals. Parallel licensing agencies. Parallel courts and law enforcement. Parallel health care system.
We can't fight the Deep State and its lapdogs in the State Media and Big Tech. The Fortune 500 are a lost cause. Our electoral system is a joke.
#8
I predict a ramp up fo the war on terror with talk of bio attacks to stoke fears and enable increased controls over the people. Possibly even a draft to send soldiers to Nigeria or somewhere.
#9
^ Jiggs seems to be focused on the culture, on society mainly not politics (I think).
Woke America isn't "totalitarian." It's surreal and oppressive, in-American etc but there are no gulags or book-burnings, and the riots have as usual been focused on urban shitholes. A Twitter mob is not the NKVD.
A lot of what we're seeing is just a ramping up of the usual power grabs and urban mayhem.
What's really new and different is that the Cultural Marxist bullshit and race-hustling has migrated out of the academy and into other sectors of society.
[Daily Caller] Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson called out America’s new ambassador to the United Nations for criticizing the U.S. and lauding activist Rev. Al Sharpton before the UN Human Rights Council.
"I’m kind of disgusted: Al Sharpton is on record as an anti-Semite, anti-white, anti-Mormon anti almost any particular group except his own," Hanson told Fox News’ "Tucker Carlson Tonight." "She should know that."
UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield recently called America "an imperfect union" and said it is has been "since the beginnings."
"I’ve seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles." She continued, praising Sharpton, "thank you for never backing down. Your lifetime of activism is an inspiration to us all." "But that thing you did with the Joooos and White Interlopers was a thing of beauty"
"The thing is the beauty of the civil rights movement is that Martin Luther King did not trash the United States," Hanson said. "He said, ’you people,’ being the white people, ’you created the Declaration and the Constitution, but you’re not living up to it. You did, the Civil War, the civil rights, we have to accelerate that process.'"
#1
She does know that, and it doesn't matter to her. Nowadays, everything goes and nothing matters - but power.
Posted by: Bubba Lover of the Faeries8843 ||
04/18/2021 12:00 Comments ||
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#2
It's now the Devil's Ball
America's UN Ambassador uses her podium to trash... the US
Police are criminals
Sharpton is not a race hustler but a hero and a brave champion of justice
A moron is president, a pr0stitute his VP
Black supremacists now sic the FBI, media jackals, Big Tech and corporate HR harpies upon followers of Martin Luther King, calling them "white supremacists"
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the singers, saints
There is a lovely two-tone bar graph at the link for those who prefer their data presented visually.
[ToloNews] The last two decades of conflicts in Afghanistan has taken tens of thousands of lives from civilians to security force members and from international troops to the Taliban ...mindless ferocity in a turban... In this report, TOLOnews has summed up overall casualties inflicted to all parties to the conflict as well as civilians in Afghanistan. The findings show that civilians have paid a high price for the ongoing war that started with the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001.
Civilians also paid a high price for living under Taliban rule, and for the Soviet war in Afghanistan before that. And during the Great Game years of the British empire... When exactly was Afghanistan a safe and peaceful land?
Figures by Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission indicate that 31,113 non-combatants were killed in Afghanistan in the past 13 years and 62,662 more were maimed.
#2
A swift Roman-style punitive expedition that wiped out 10,000 Taliban -- maybe with a few dozen JDAMs dropped over the course of maybe 72 hours -- would have been both more effective and more humane than yet another of our globalists' idealistic, bumbling efforts at nation-building
[AllAfrica] Institute for Security Studies: National and foreign forces deployed to fight terrorism in the Sahel are increasingly harming civilians. Figures from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) indicate that security forces caused more civilian fatalities in Mali and Burkina Faso in 2020 than violent mostly peaceful murderous Moslem groups or communal violence.
Things aren't getting any better this year. French Operation Barkhane, Chadian contingents of the G5 Sahel Joint Force and other national and international forces in the region have recently faced serious allegations of human rights ...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty... violations against locals. These range from rape and sexual assault to deliberate or mistaken killings of civilians during operations.
Continued on Page 49
Direct translation of an article at regnum.ru
Stanislav Anatolyevich Smagin is relatively young, but has already lived a meaningful life. The abundance of deeds and events, however, not only did not become an obstacle to his deep immersion in reflections on the history and modernity of our Fatherland, but added to them the most important quality: vitality. And along with vitality, as is always the case in Russia, pain. And this pain for our country and our people, passing from chapter to chapter of his new book [1], makes the author their own for all those who are just as sincerely sick of their fate. And we are ours for him.
Like everyone who was born in the very late, dying USSR, Stanislav Smagin in his youth, as he himself told me, experienced a variety of ideological and unprincipled influences of the 1990s, but soon found a worldview basis that was organic for a Russian person. The collective Crimea and the collective Donbass made it even stronger. However, not only they, but also many other things that happened to our Motherland in recent decades. Including - and by contradiction.
[The Published Reporter] SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Now that the putative Biden-Harris administration is going full tilt, as we catch our breath and reflect on what has transpired in our country, we would do well to consider the wider implications of the theft of this election. So let’s return to the scene of the crime—actually, to the scenes of the multiple crimes inflicted on our nation.
Election Theft Crime #1
By now we know about the Dems’ rampant and shameless vote fraud, and the gigantic CCP cyber attack on our election through Dominion and other voting machines. We have hard evidence of foreign interference in our election in the 270 pages of evidence compiled by attorney Sidney Powell, as well as a treasure trove of incriminating evidence recently made public by Mike Lindell in his documentary "Absolute Proof!" In that documentary, we actually got to see the forensic data, including computer time stamps, and all manner of specificity: from computer X to computer Y in this or that location, etc. The data entries are all unique, but they coincidentally all show the exact same vote shift: from President Trump to Beijing Biden. And we have paper evidence as well. You may recall that back in early January, Patrick Byrne—former CEO of Overstock who joined Sidney Powell and others to aid Trump in attempting to prove his election win—wrote about a shredding company given 3,000 pounds of ballots from Georgia to dispose of, pieces of which remained and were subsequently analyzed. In their midst, authorities discovered a shipping receipt...wait for it...from China! Of course, the ballots themselves were not legitimate—they were phony Chinese knock-offs, all marked for...guess who? Let’s call that Crime #1.
[ToloNews] During the last few years, Wazoo--both the southern and northern districts with this name--have been in the news for their residents’ powerful agitation against the government’s security policies (mostly on social media and international media, as Pakistain’s military has banned any mention of the area in the "mainstream media").
The area came into prominence in early 2018 when it emerged as the center of a bold indigenous political uprising against the "three Ds policy" (Death, Destruction and Dislocation) of the federal government toward the seven districts of what was known as the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), and six subdivisions in the adjoining districts known as the Frontier Regions (FRs).
The said area, which holds about 10 million Pashtuns, is ruled under draconian colonial laws dating to the British period and has mostly been used as a launching pad for war in Afghanistan for the last four decades. But the area known as FATA saw the most brutal repression of its entire history between 2002 and 2014 when it was ruled by the syndicate of bandidosDeath Eaters who launched a new war against the US-led international forces and the forces of the Islamic Theocratic Republic of Afghanistan.
Continued on Page 49
Long. Herewith the opening section — the behind-the-scenes details of events we watched from here can be read at the link, but get yourself a cup of your favourite beverage and a comfortable chair before you start, dear Reader.
[IsraelTimes] Under Netanyahu’s leadership, the Jewish state survived the difficult early years to come out on top as Iran and jihadists are on the defensive.
Ten years ago, in late 2010 and early 2011, the Arab world experienced a series of convulsions that tore apart the Middle East as we knew it. Starting in Tunisia, where a young fruit vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest corruption and police abuse, angry demonstrations spread throughout the region. Some of the world’s longest-ruling leaders were toppled within months. There was a sense of optimism, that the long-suffering citizens of Arab nations were finally rising up to demand basic human rights When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much... and dignity in secular, youth-led popular uprisings.
Observers in Israel were largely of a different mind. Tacit understandings and written agreements with Arab autocrats — demonstrably not with the masses — were long a foundation of Israel’s national security mindset. Now figures like Hosni Mubarak ...The former President-for-Life of Egypt, dumped by popular demand in early 2011... , who had maintained the peace treaty as eight Israel prime ministers came and went, were being pushed out, and Israel’s ties with the Arab world, both official and undeclared, were at risk of being undone by the Arab street that had never fully accepted them.
Unlike the wave of anti-Communist demonstrations that bolstered liberal democracy in the Eastern Bloc two decades earlier, in the Middle East Islamists would seize power from secular dictators, Israeli political and military leaders feared.
’’When some people in the West see what’s happening in Egypt, they see Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... 1989,’’ said an Israeli official. ’’We see it as Tehran 1979.’’
In many places, Israel’s fears became reality in short order. The Moslem Brüderbund and affiliated parties won elections in Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt. Protests spread across Jordan, with which Israel has had a peace treaty since 1994 that is vital to maintaining quiet in the West Bank and over the Temple Mount. Jihadists were pouring into Syria, filling the vacuum left by the collapsing Syrian army, which had maintained calm along Israel’s Golan Heights frontier for decades despite the enmity between the countries.
Israel was the big loser in what became known as the Arab Spring, argued both Israeli and international pundits.
A decade later — astonishingly — the headlines look very different. "Ten years on, the Arab Spring’s biggest winner is Israel," wrote Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer in December. "Why Israel is now delighted about the Arab Spring," reads a January Middle East Eye headline.
How did Israel manage to emerge from a complex, fast-moving, and dangerous upheaval as a "winner"?
Posted by: trailing wife ||
04/18/2021 02:03 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[4 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
#1
Even bungling can be made to look like the sharpest tactical chess game, after the fact. Diplomacy - especially dealing with rapacious predator communities not from our modern paradigms - is like playing go, baccarat and whackamole with a bit of dodgeball simultaneously. All the smart chaps in the world can't handle it on their own. Not without help from on high.
I believe it is only God and His angels that preserve Israel. He delivers their enemies into folly, and He gives the leaders wisdom at key moments. And courage; the rarest commodity in new world. He grants the Israelis courage.
'And shall say unto them, Hear, O Israel, ye approach this day unto battle against your enemies: let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terrified because of them; For the Lord your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.' - Deutronomy
And if God be for Israel, who will go against him, selah.
[American Greatness] In 1950, the brilliant British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing introduced what is now called the Turing Test. It consists of a human interviewing a person and a machine, trying to determine which respondent is the machine. For a machine to pass the Turing Test is considered a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. The test has been administered countless times to date, and while an indisputable machine victory hasn’t happened yet, computer scientists believe it will happen within the next few years.
Alan Turing believed if a machine could pass his test, it was thinking. But most experts do not define thinking and "consciousness" as one and the same. A machine that passes the Turing test is still a machine, an impressive calculator that imitates consciousness, but inside that big calculator, nobody’s home.
That’s hardly the end of the story, of course. In 1988, the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson published Infinite in All Directions, a wide-ranging discourse on humanity’s role in the universe. In his book, Dyson predicts that genetic engineering will enable manufactured organic minds that are merged with electronic components including AI, but inside their biological mental core, they will be alive and self-aware.
According to futurists ranging from Dyson and Ray Kurzweil to Elon Musk, a millennium from now, if not much, much sooner, only a small fraction of the conscious intelligent beings once known as humans will exist as humanoids we would recognize as ourselves. Others, to present a vivid example, could exist as the conscious brain of a starship, with nerves extending into every system of the craft, interfacing with the minds of similarly cybernetic passengers and crew.
That is the future, and perhaps the not-too-distant future. But what about the next 10 or 20 years? What’s going to happen between now and then? In both bioengineering and cybernetics, the possibilities are mind-boggling, too much to even adequately summarize. Nanobots. Artificial limbs, organs, and nerves. Brain implants.
Credible speculation is limited only by one’s imagination, and it’s happening fast. But what does it mean for society in the short run?
In America, the reality of AI running systems as mundane as a thermostat and as complex as an airliner or a power grid leads to something Victor Davis Hanson alluded to in a recent article in American Greatness, where he wrote, "In today’s age of computer-driven avionics, the prerequisite ability to do math, to know something about navigation, to understand computers, or to have the proper temperament to fly a plane doesn’t really matter."
#1
It is easy to determine whether its a computer or a person unless the computer lies. Simply ask the entity what is the square root of 64.352 divided by 23.22 squared x 12
#4
Every happily married couple or well-functioning team of humans is its own intelligence / conscious entity above and beyond its individual members.
Posted by: Bubba Lover of the Faeries8843 ||
04/18/2021 11:58 Comments ||
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#5
Dron, you've got some serious talent. Well done.
Posted by: Matt ||
04/18/2021 12:08 Comments ||
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#6
I suspect the first revolution will be biological. Billionaires will have access to tech that keeps them healthy well into their 100's while everyone else gets sick and dies as per normal. Normally this sort of thing would eventually trickle down to the masses, but I'm guessing not this time. It will effectively divide us as a species.
#11
#10 I cut my teeth on Kipling, my dear. And polished them here at Rantburg.
You may talk o’ gin and reefer
When you’re quartered in the eefer,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Pruitt-shot it;
But for online dramaturgy
You shall rant on Fair Rantburg-y
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
Though by Africa the AAWSAT editorialist means the Sahel, not all of the continent.
[ENGLISH.AAWSAT] No movement or group in history had indeed seen an alliance against it like that which faced ISIS, and here I am referring to the military, ideological, and the popular international coalition against. It is also that the group has died here or there, but it still exists, as an ideology and a force, swiftly seeking to rebuild its organizational structure wherever it gets the chance.
Despite the international security and intelligence cooperation, ISIS will continue to present a challenge to international will so long as the causes, incentives, and motives for this ideology’s emergence are not uprooted, not to mention its exploitation, through attempts at shifting balances of power in conflicts between foreign parties and states, as has happened in Syria and Libya. Distancing ourselves from simplification, we say that the issue here is bigger than the theories presented because the conflict is primarily intellectual. This means that the group may fall ill or become weak and debilitated at times, but it does not die or vanish. In other words, ISIS may disappear from the scene, and this has already happened. However, some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them... we won't be surprised when it emerges months or a few years later, and this is what is currently happening in some countries if we have to be honest.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
04/18/2021 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Islamic State
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[NYP] CNN anchor Chris Cuomo said gun laws and police reform will happen when "white people’s kids start getting killed."
[UNZ] Here’s a phrase due for an airing: "asymmetry of indulgence."
Ferdinand Mount
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
[ToloNews] During the last few years, 
[IsraelTimes] Under Netanyahu’s leadership, the Jewish state survived the difficult early years to come out on top as Iran and jihadists are on the defensive.
