Neurosymbolic Hybrids

 Gary Marcus argues for neurosymbolic hybrid AI approaches that combine LLM's for pattern recognition with symbolic reasoning for planning and generalization.  I've been on this page (as were most AI researchers then) since the 1980's.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/even-more-good-news-for-the-future

But why should I want to aid the supercop predictive thought policing future?

Erase what I just said.  Keep on doing it wrong.

Marcus presents papers showing that traditional approaches work better for very targeted problems, including protein folding and databases.

People forget about databases and think LLM must be the best for all sorts of problems because it can "think" across all boundaries.

Paradoxical Processes and Quantum Physics

 My experiments with random selection without replacement as an information processes reveal that what I call Paradoxical behavior is achieved with internal information loss, because internal and external losses may compound.  Seemingly simpler Truncating behavior seems to require injection of random numbers (as with dither in digital audio processing).

Starting with the hypothesis that Paradoxical processes are behind the strangeness of quantum physics, this suggests that contrary to the laws of quantum physics, in some cases there IS data loss, and that drives the strangeness.

And I see how this could happen.  What we know of as bosons (protons and neutrons) and leptons (electrons) could be complex structures built around and sustaining tiny black holes.  These black holes provide the "gravity" that matter has.  Meanwhile, the structure around the black holes keeps the black holes alive by capturing the Hawking Radiation and forcing it back into the holes.  That overall process is information losing.  Nothing but black holes can have an information losing character (like my Dumb process, information goes in but doesn't come out).  The information lost is the precise time, giving it a granularity, so they don't exist in continous time but leaps ahead, meaning some information states don't exist.  There is less information in the world than we think.  The effects of this are profoundly paradoxical.

What to think of Norman Finkelstein

I like reading columns and books written by Norman Finkelstein.  I like listening to him in interviews.  He's brilliant, he has an incredibly deep historical understanding, and he's one of the best, if not THE best, critics of Israeli propaganda ever.*

All that being said, I do not agree with Finkelstein 100%.  I never have.   And even then I may have missed a lot of things. 

I find him convincing on historical facts but not on current politics and strategies.  From the moment I heard him denouncing BDS on Democracy Now! a long time ago (perhaps 2016)  I knew we disagreed on that.  And he held up the two state solution as an "achievable" international consensus. I had long thought that impossible and even misconstrued.  It has seemed to me that the Zionist movement was committed to ethnic cleansing from the very beginning.  They wanted every else to leave Palestine so they could have it for themselves.  Zionists even often claimed there was nobody there. Anyone with access to books, old movies, or Wikipedia can see that is not true.  The history of Palestine is fairly well known going back over 2000 years.  There was never a time when it was not occupied by not just one but many groups.  It has always been a very busy and popular place centrally located to the world.

Finally, and worst of all, Finkelstein has consistently from 2012 onwards denounced the Palestinian refugee's Right to Return as being impractical, or politically impossible as long as there is an Israel.  He says that this being impossible, it should not be demanded either.  (Which all suggests he chooses not to imagine a time past the defeat and dismantling of Israel.  IOW, he is giving this a 'liberal Zionist' frame.  Most people now believe the defeat and dismantling of Israel is a prerequisite to peace in the middle east if not the world.)  Finkelstein doesn't defend his view in principle, except the principle of practicality, which he then claims all successful radical movements have all followed.  Well, I say this time is different in many ways.  Similar to global heating and mass non-human extinction, Israel is an issue to the entire world. It is a partner to US Imperialism in bringing the entire world to war.  (Which ironically was a basis of crackpot Christian Zionism.).  Therefore, and for many reasons actually, there is only one solution, "practical" or not, the defeat and dismantling of Israel.  (Another solution might be the defeat and dismantling of USA, which would probably achieve the same effect on Israel too.)

Though Finkelstein often sounds like the fiercest anti-Zionist I've ever heard, but you have got to listen very carefully to a few of his words which give the game away, as Tony Greenstein has shown in several masterful deconstructions over the years.

Tony Greenstein admires Finkelstein books the way I do, but has written several scathing critiques of Finkelstein's appearances and commentaries for the last 15 years based on the above and similar issues.  This is the latest one I could find: 

 https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2024/12/norman-finkelstein-was-so-stung-by-my.html

When Finkelstein calls Israel a "lunatic state" that sounds to me like he has now accepted that the reform and/or existence of Israel is unacceptable and that that only a single non-discriminatory state is possible.

But Tony sees this differently.  He sees Finkelstein refusing to call Israel a Zionist state, and therefore suggesting that Zionism is or at least at one time was possible and not "lunatic."  

Both Tony and I see Zionism as genocidal from the time when it was being conceived in 1897 at the first Zionist conference.  Zionists could only imagine ethnic cleansing the current inhabitants, not somehow cohabiting with them, and devoted much ink to defending what we now call "ethnic cleansing."  Tony and I see present day "Israel" as the embodiment of the original Zionist vision, not a pathological deviation from it.  It was pathological from the outset.

A neat distillation of Tony's 20 page post (!) is in his one one comment to the above:

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2024/12/norman-finkelstein-was-so-stung-by-my.html?showComment=1734556764761#c7642573257318051544

The problem with Norman F, besides the lack of any serious class analysis of the forces behind the Israeli state or imperialism, is that he is extremely mercurial and lacks judgement. It was obvious to anyone who had any understanding of Zionism and he should have done since his Ph.D thesis was on Zionism, that there was no way Israel would ever allow a Palestinian state to emerge.

Anyone with any sense of judgement would not have called BDS a 'cult' when it is clearly the chosen strategy of the solidarity movement. There are arguments as to how effective it really is etc. but there is no doubt that BDS activities in themselves help build the solidarity movement.

And why he chose to attack the slogan of the movement 'From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free' is beyond me. The fact that the British Government and Sue Braverman don't like it is reason enough to chant it. To say it leaves room for doubt and 'what about Israel' calls into question just what Norman's politics are really about.

As for no-one having read my book well of course I'd like it if far more people did but it has certainly played a major role in people seeing that Israel originated in the acceptance of anti-Semitism and that Zionist claims to inherit the memory of those who died in the holocaust are bogus and false.

Tony takes this personally perhaps, but we can't blame him.  Tony has written a much needed history book on how Zionist cooperated with Nazis in various ways even up to and during the Holocaust.  Finkelstein, an authority on Zionist books and seems to have read nearly everything about Zionism, dismisses Tony's effort as a non-book that nobody has read.

If Finkelstein has any issues with the facts in Tony's book, he should state them rather than smearing Tony as a non-author.  We should be comrades in the liberation of Palestine.  And why is Finkelstein smearing Tony in the first place?  Aren't they on the same side?  Well, no, as it turns out.  Only Tony is the true anti-Zionist.  Finkelstein is the practical man who refuses to imagine a world beyond Zionism, still clinging, by the longest imaginable thread now, to liberal zionism, and the usefulness of interational agencies, agreements, etc. (all of which have proven futile).  The present govnerment is insane, all the Jewish Supremacists in Israel are insane, but somehow sanity will be achieved, as in many other cases, first by being sure to make properly targeted demands and slogans.

[Satire: We demand no rape of Palestinian prisoners after 6 PM.]

Greenstein's denunciations of Finkelstein go back to at least 2012 when he wrote this post which is actually more thorough and principled, and less personal, so perhaps I should have linked it first.  (This is the one where he says Finkelstein was different 5 years prior.)

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2012/02/tragedy-of-norman-finkelstein-time-to.html

[More should be added here]

The latest flap concerns something far less important.  Finkelstein suggesting (I don't hear him actually saying it, but suggesting it) that Tucker Carlson's newfound critical voice against Israel is driven by antisemitism.

I think it's good that Tucker Carlson has taken this turn.  He has been doing a good job in his commentary on Israel and interviews of key observers.  I appreciate those as good things.  Meanwhile I do not endorse Tucker Carlson's worldview in toto.  He is a pro-capitalist and in my view a bigot.  But I can't much believe he is antisemitic per se.  He never says purely antisemitic things.  He was on Jewish Supremacist owned TV networks!  I think he like others is seeing the cost of Israel to the US.  And that it a good thing.  All sides need to unite to remove the Zionism from the government of USA.

Meanwhile, there is another thing which bugs me much more than Tucker Carlson's "conversion" on Israel.  And that is Conspiracy Theories.

Conspiracy Theories

When Finkelstein does engage the belief that Israel was behind the JFK assassination, he does so only derisively.  He points out that Kennedy ran on being more anti-Communist than Nixon.  

No theorists deny Kennedy's famed anti-communism, they typically say Kennedy had a change of heart after the Cuban Missile Crisis and/or The Bay of Pigs.  They point out that Kennedy signed order NSAM 263 on October 11, 1963 which would begin a phased withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam.  This order was reversed by LBJ immediately after the assassination.  Some claim it was "political,"  but it was classified Secret and not known to the public until after his death.

JFK demonstrated that he was not a committed cold warrior in two acts: refusing to send US bombers after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by CIA, and making a deal with the USSR to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy also gave many impassioned speeches regarding making peace with USSR.  It is true that by themselves, such speeches mean little.  But then we have the facts above which give them more weight.

I can see in the press conferences that Kennedy made after the Bay of Pigs that he is being attacked from the pro-war side by the press.  It's "why didn't you do this" and "why aren't you going to do that" and "how is this going to work."  In late 1963, Kennedy is widely seen as weak and especially on Communism to the point where in the still Cold War thumping USA it is widely believed he will lose the election in 1964.

Many conspiracy theorists and even the great Oliver Stone who made two movies about the Kennedy Assassination, didn't mention Israel.  Stone's JFK movies were funded by a well known Jewish Zionist.

And here we begin to see an issue with the Chomsky/Finkelstein critiques of JFK assassination theories.  A capable secret agency like Mossad would indeed produce limited hangout theories that point to everyone and everything but the one thing they want to remain most hidden.

It's actually much more logical that Israel had JFK assassinated than the CIA/MiC had him assassinated, for several reasons.

1) The MiC could simply 'wait out' Kennedy's eventual defeat.  JFK's tiny steps could be thwarted all the way until then.  Israel was on a roll and needed to get the bomb done now, no time to waste.  Kennedy was demanding inspections (and more I have heard, but that he was demanding inspections is well known) and was outspoken about preventing Israel from having the bomb.

2) A successor like Goldwater might be as disinclined to let Israel have the bomb as JFK.  LBJ was a long time proven Zionist supporter and currently owned too, probably the most Zionist owned of all, and especially after the election it seems, as proven by his non-response to the Numec thefts and the USS Liberty incident.  His last girlfriend is said to be a well known Zionist in Hollywood (after having separated from his Austin, TX girlfriend over the Vietnam War).

3) Ruby, a nightclub owner, was not CIA connected but he was Jewish Mafia/Lanksy connected.  As Oswald's assassin, Ruby was clearly involved.  It is said that Ruby himself once said he did it, "So the Jews wouldn't get blamed."

4) At least one Lansky mob shooter in prison for life has confessed to the job (I have the tapes from the most famous one, and he makes no mistakes from the known record).  Well known CIA clandestine operator E Howard Hunt made a deathbed confession (after a lifetime denial) that he was "there" (not specified) but not the actual shooter.  Meaning it likely was the mob guy, not the CIA guy, who made the shot.  EHH was probably there as backup shooter (among many), in case all the previous failed, he could take the worst angle.  Likely from the grassy knoll.

5) Lansky himself was barely mentioned in many pre-2006 accounts (as we'd expect from their being limited hangouts).  But he was The One who lost out biggest in Cuba, having reinvested his Las Vegas winnings, as "The Mob Accountant," in a new hotel in Havana.  (Played mostly historically as Hyman Roth in Godfather 2 and 3.). For that alone, he's be the biggest mob boss most likely to be involved.  PLUS, he had been well known to be involved with Zionists ever since shipping weapons to Zionist gangs.  Almost certainly he'd been in touch with Mossad ever since.  And he emigrated to Israel subsequently, though it didn't last.  One thing never mentioned in this is that he could never be worshipped as a hero in Israel for helping bring the bomb to Israel for many reasons, including that Israel (and the US officially) has never recognized that Israel even has the bomb.

6). I have heard that at least one early conspiracy author mentioned Israel if not as the key organizer.  But nearly all conspiracy theories have mentioned James Jesus Angleton, who was at none other than the Israel desk of the CIA.

7). The official story could hardly need more debunking at this point.  Johnson's committee was created by Johnson--himself a key actor--to give himself cover.  Warren begged not to be on it (and probably got favors for doing so and threats if not, in the Johnson fashion, Johnson needed a credible committee chair).  A likely conspirator committee member was the CIA director who had been fired by JFK a year before over Bay of Cuba--Allen Dulles, who famously had lunch with many witnesses before they spoke.  One, curiously, was Gerald Ford, a later President.  

Nixon, GHW Bush, and E Howard Hunt are all implicated as having been in Dallas.  GHW Bush had ties to the Bay of Pigs Invasion--his rig for 'Zapata Oil Company' very close to Cuba--was the very platform for the secret US invasion.

Oswald was not a professional shooter, he was a nearly professional spook asset who had been to Russia and New Orleans and Mexico City in that capacity, and also an FBI informant, an issue never addressed once even evaded (it was mentioned that Oswald was getting checks from the FBI), he had a infamously terrible gun bought more often for pranks, a terrible vantage point, and personally failed a nitrate test for any gun use.  Nitrate tests are no longer used because they tend to produce false positives, not false negatives.  Oswald himself said he had not used a gun at all that day and was a Patsy that the murders were being pinned on.  Political assassins often brag about their accomplishment and often kill themselves.  Oswald was never allowed to testify in his own defense, and his one allowed call (to a likely CIA contact) was intercepted and blocked.  He was killed after being in custody after only one day, by a Jewish Mafia connected friend of Meyer Lansky and nightclub owner who should never have had access to Oswald but was well regarded by the corrupt Dallas police.  Much of the original after death photos of JFK in the Parkland Hospital were lost, some of the key ones appear to be fabrications.  All Parkland doctors and nurses believed Kennedy was struck from the front, to explain this away 'confusion' is alleged by the Warren Commission and their defenders.  We only have the third coroners report, written a day after the first, with the first destroyed and the second burned.  The chain of command of the body of JFK was suspicious, it went with Johnson.  The final "autopsy" was done in secret under military command.  Congress itself declared in the late 1970's that a conspiracy was most likely involved, and they didn't have much of the information now public, especially some photos which are clear fabrications.  While USSR officially recognized LBJ, in secret they told all embassies that LBJ was a likely JFK conspirator, and USSR intelligence was among the best in the world.  Many witnesses said they heard many shots.  Many readings of the Zapruder film identify more than 3 shots, and the fatal one from the front (grassy knoll).  One of Oswald's best friends, and a longtime known CIA asset Russian emigre George de Mohrenschildt, who suggested the Book Depository job to Oswald (then in New Orleans) said Oswald liked JFK.  George was to testify before Congress for the committee investigating the JFK assassination, and was found suicided that morning.  He had testified a lot before the Warren Commission but only after talking to Committee member Allen Dulles.  Most reasonable explanation of Oswald's life is that Oswald was an informant who was most lately investigating assassination plots against JFK.  He was smart and cosmopolitan with a Russian wife.  Several of Oswald's reports went straight to J Edgar Hoover as unclassified under a twisted name (Harvey Lee) to avoid suspicion, about the risks in Dallas.  Hoover, another Kennedy hater and co-conspirator,  loved to keep tabs on everyone.

 Kennedy also was fond of mentioning the Palestinian Right to Return (or be compensated) as fundamental.  LBJ did not.  Kennedy was Pro Israel but he was also Pro Palestinian. 

More thinly sourced: Oswald had met and talked with Ruby--who was seeking a Kennedy assassin at the time.  Oswald refused the deal after Ruby refused to pay the money up front.  A Lansky associated prisoner serving life sentence for multiple shooting murders confessed to the murder of JFK, getting no known detail wrong.

Finkelstein didn't mention these things.  But, he mentions that Muammar Gaddafi said Israel killed JFK (very derisively, as if nobody should believe Gaddafi, while frankly Gaddaffi is seeming a more and more credible person and a victim of US Imperialism until his death from a US attack).

Finkelstein doesn't mention where Gaddafi got this idea.  He got it from none other than Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli whistleblower who also revealed the Israeli nuclear program.  Vanunu revealed that Israel was behind the JFK assassination shortly after he was released in 2004, and since then hardly a credible theorist has not mentioned Israel.

Vanunu is seen as pitiful liar by Zionists, virtually ignored by Western Media, but anyone who knows anything believes at least his original claims that Israel had created Nukes and was elaborately hiding the nuclear weapons program from US inspectors.  Why then not believe he was correct also that Israel was, because of the bomb, behind the JFK assassination?

Well, Finkelstein like Chomsky hides behind the academically and mass respectable (liberal) media mantra that conspiracy theories are crazy talk or foreign disinformation.

And it's sad, I think.  Especially when it is well known that Israel assassinated many other well known figures.  Assassination conspiracies are far smaller and easier to hide than say, conspiracy theories about the anti-usefulness of covid vaccines or faked moon landings.

It's interesting that while (known to FBI) many early conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination included Israel, few books made much of it, pointing in other directions.  (As I've said, we'd expect limited hangouts.) when key bits, Lansky being the big loser in Havana and a fellow Jewish mobster and night club owner with Ruby, were obvious as hell.  Just too Jewish to be mentioned.  THAT was the problem.

According to some Jews, even on the lefter JVP side, we should have theories about bankers controlling the world because that implicates Jews even if Jews aren't being mentioned and don't even control a majority of banking (though a very disproportionate amount).  

I suppose the same thing could be said about concentrated ownership in big media, we can't think about media controlling minds for nefarious purposes, since that would implicate Jews, who included most Hollywood media owners, producers and stars.  Hollywood is mostly Jewish and always has been.  Jewish Mafia too.  And much promotion was infamously through nepotism and mob-o-tism of which the Jewish mafia, including people like Bugsy Siegel, were involved.

Which gets to the point.  Excessive concern for the image of Jewishness inhibiting even our ability to think about wide pictures, and connect dots.  That's unacceptible to me.

I don't blame Jews in general for Zionism, though it's the crime of most Jews today.  It's a generalization unfair to the many courageous Jewish anti-Zionists like Tony Greenstein.

But I don't want fear of implicating Jews stand in the way of understanding how things work in general, and oppressive banking and media in particular.  Zionist media and banking concentration needs to be dismantled, if not capitalism itself.

And we know the bourgeoisie have many pow wows and perks.  It's a big club...  And Billionaire Jewish Supremacists and their courtiers have a big section in that club worth being aware of.

Even Tony Greenstein is derisive of conspiracy theories.  He denounces David Miller both as a conspiracy theorist and more as a plain old antisemite (I agree that some of Miller's statements quoted by Greenstein were antisemitic, but I agree with Miller that power networks do need to be understood and dismantled, and the term Jewish Supremacist is not antisemitic, it doesn't have to apply to all Jews any more than White Supremacist applies to all whites.  It's curious that Finkelstein views the term Zionist as mostly being used incorrectly (as if it could include some good people) and that  he prefers the term Jewish Supremacist for the insanity of Israel and Israel supporters, as if he doesn't want to give Zionism a bad name.

I do see a lot of antisemitic comments on X.  But not people I follow, and I've never myself seen David Miller make an actual antisemitic comment except as quoted in Greenstein's blog.  Likewise I have never seen Tucker Carlson make an actual antisemitic remark.

*Some say that Finkelstein's debunking of In Time Immorial (ITI) and Dershowitz is too technical.  In Dershowitz for example he found plagary.  In ITI Finkelstein found a few key falsified numbers.  Finkelstein is laser focused on such details and not the big picture ideas.  So for example he dossn't criticize Dershowitz for opposition to the Right to Return.  In my view, any thinking person ought find the ideas in ITI ridiculous to the point of insanity.  Endless evidence including documentary footage shows Palestine full of people going way back.  It was never "empty," and it has always been one of the world's most venerated places.  It only makes sense that the people there, the Palestinians, were the descendants of people who originally lived there at 0CE, their intermediate ancestors had just changed their religion a couple of times.  Only some of the people were in the levant were ever expelled by the Romans, and some converted to Jewish Christianity (or already were), (Roman) Christianity, and then Islam when it was convenient.  One doesn't need to prove the lack of a mass expulsion, that's the presumption for which considerable evidence is necessary for the contrary to be believable.  Though that threshold has long been passed by the Nakba and Gaza.  Jews today aren't even all the descendants of the original Jews as many Jewish descendants converted away from Judaism (and vice versa).  And intermarriage and false paternity.  Jewish Judeans were never the only ones in the Levant either, except during the era of the Maccabees when most were forcibly converted to Judaism, then you could say all of the Hasmonean Empire was Jewish by religion, but only part of it was Judean Jews, and the rest weren't much committed to it (either).  Jews were a sect that emerged among late Bronze age Canaanites who were not Samaritan or Phoenician.  As late as the 1950's mainstream Jewish organizations insisted that Jews were a religious group, not a 'Nation.'  Many Orthodox still do.

Conclusion

Norman Finkelstein has made himself into a limited hangout that represents the last gasp of liberal zionism.  One the one had he brings a wealth of historical facts and a very important debunking of Zionist lies, very useful.  On the other, he brings a denunciation of BDS, the Right to Return, and the one State of Palestine solution, as well as conspiracy theories at least some of which are likely true, like the conspiracy to kill JFK so that Israel could finish the bomb.

He has taken a lot of this from Chomsky, to whom he gives the highest possible praise.  Finkelstein is an independent person, but unshakable admiration for Chomsky has weakened his independence.  Chomsky, more like a true limited hangout, has similar strengths and weaknesses, but was also part of the ultimate western Zionist network of Epstein and himself a one time Kibbutz member.  Chomsky became most politically active in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, and never wavered from denunciating JFK conspiracy theories and Communism, which has been Zionism's biggest and most principled and consistent enemy.  Chomsky has weakened the enemies of Zionism for decades.  His Anarchism has been politically useless, and especially with regards to defeating Zionism.  He has created dissent in the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Movement by insisting on things like the Two State Solution, which was always fake.  (Word is that Chomsky's Universal Grammar is also useless.  It appears there are universal concepts, like one vs many, but not universal grammar as such.)

There is no doubt that Zionism must be defeated.  I too wished it weren't true, but there is now no question that it is.*  The defeat of Zionism requires that Capitalism and Jewish Supremacist power networks need to be dismantled.  Perhaps we should apply things like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in banking, media, education, and government to inhibit undue Jewish Supremacist control and influence.**  The very minimum we can do is boycott the worst Zionist offenders in solidarity with the Palestine Liberation Movement.

(*We must leave this determination to Palestinians.  The Palestinians alone must decide when to stop fighting Israel, since they are doing the fighting, and I'm just sitting in front of my computer.  They have my solidarity either way.  But I believe they are on this page, and so I am praising it as correct, but it is not my sacrifices that are going to make it happen.)

(**It's funny that Finkelstein (along with Trump) denounces DEI programs and other 'liberal' solutions as ineffective and counterproductive.  He me be right as far as he goes.  I'd agree that the abolition of capitalism, including the ownership of media and banking, would be the best solution, and given that were done, DEI might not be needed, etc.  It's best a bandaid for the fact that the means of banking and media production are privately owned.)

Like Trotsky and Trotskyites, neither Finkelstein nor Chomsky can be fully trusted.  That being said, and their weaknesses never forgotten, they make great entertainers and even educators within their known limits.

The exact same can be said about many of the people Finkelstein and Chomsky criticize like Tucker Carlson.

Interestingly, many right wing critics of Israel like Carlson and Meirsheimer believe US should focus on a bigger 'enemy' than Iran: China, and Finkelstein and Chomsky are also on the anti-China page, denouncing the fake "Uyghur Genocide".  Now the limited hangout of anti-Communist Israel critics is coming into focus.  Both sides are limited hangouts for people drawn to hate Israel and to direct them to hate China too.  China is a country Israel can never subvert, and a rival power to the one Israel depends on.  It is to Israel's interest to have China's progress derailed by the USA, as well as to that of US war planners.  So, all the limited hangouts can agree on that.

(Now you may ask, how do I have the balls to take on such heavies?  I'm just a guy lacking both credentials and experience.  I haven't written a hundred books, or even a few key ones.  Well, I have seen the high and the mighty fall to dust many times before, proving their critics right.  I have courage in my lack of conviction and comparative isolation.  At least I have the potential of thinking independently.  Perhaps I'm just another fool, but perhaps not.)

What to think of Stephen Colbert

 I've hardly ever watched Stephen Colbert's late night show, I'd seen him a few more times as the satirical character on Jon Stewart's show.  I only watched such things while staying with my sister and brother in law, who watched all the well known programs on CNN, HBO, MSNBC, CBS, and ABC.  I visited them for a week every year or two.  But after awhile, I got so pissed with such programs they never played them for me anymore, watching them behind closed doors if at all so as not to disturb me.

I got particularly upset after seeing how MSNBC personalities like Rachel Maddow were so anti-Bernie.  And then, right after the revelation of how the DNC had suppressed Bernie was made public, the very next day the entire dialog flipped to how Russia was influencing the election, based on claims which have been thoroughly debunked but Democrats refuse to let go of them.  This accomplished several things in one go.  And leading the pack with the new fabricated topic (which would dominate the airwaves of the most networks (except Fox) media (aka 'liberal' media) were just those stations and personalities.  It made me sick to my stomach.

To me it was all about changing the dialog from the way Bernie had been sidelined.

So I watched all the usual personalities on the late night shows.  And they all made me sick.   Don't even get me started on Maher, I hated him from Politically Incorrect which was as accurate title.  All except one.  That was Stephen Colbert.  He was very talented in avoiding all the cringy sermons and just hitting the jugulars.  I was sure that he was hired to do just that, within the bounds of 'liberal' corporate media like CBS.

I had remembered him from the right wing character he also played as Stephen Colbert.  He did it so perfectly, better than any real right wing character as he'd maintain the farce to the bitter end. 

It was hard to get used to him as host, but he was the one late night host I felt I could bear.  As I might do, he went for the big picture, not today's gotchas from partisans.  So he looked at Trump as Trump, not so much Russian Stooge or any of the partisan claims.  Of course that was too much for MAGA, so it's not surprising it ultimately led to...his show being ended, but it had a long incredible run.

None of which I ever watched by myself except the very last show, and it was great.

Now I see endless condemnations of Colbert not only from MAGA but from people I follow, fellow leftists.  He is castigated for his lack of 'confrontation' of such people as Kissinger.

But I see this in the context of his network CBS.  What Colbert did, dance around Kissinger's office, was far more entertaining and even challenging than anything done by the notably imperially sychophantic Face the Nation, who'd go after "important things" which were often as often as not rooted in nonsense, like the alleged rapes and baby killings* on October 7.

Colbert was our Court Jester.  And he did that job very well, as far as I have seen (which is 0.001%).  If he did not meet with Kissinger (btw, one of Hillary Clinton's best friends, Kissinger helped make Hillary into a Washington wonder girl just out of college) he wouldn't be suited for that job.

So I praise Colbert.  And he's the one of the very few talk show hosts I could have watched (I recall I liked Dick Cavett back in the day, not to mention Bill Moyers--one of my all time favorites).  But it may have been just as fine not to watch Colbert either.  I don't feel like I missed anything important, except his last show which I couldn't miss.  To do his job as well as he did, and he may not be the most honorable or knowledgable person in the world, but he was obviously a comedic genius, and a very sensitive one too, to be that good and still be on TV four times a week for eleven years, and occasionally even barb the President and other top dogs, so hard working too. 

He wasn't as great a comedian as, say, George Carlin, but George Carlin was only ever a talk show guest (most famously, 130 times with Johnny Carson, who was so "dumb" (his act) as to never be watchable even with smart ass Carlin).  Carlin was no where near as sensitive and thoughtful as Colbert.

(*No personal testimonies, videos, or hard evidence of rapes despite vast searching and endless propaganda to the contrary.  One baby was killed, "by accident".  Don't get me started on the official propaganda of "Russian atrocities" which are most often falsely labeled.  But that's all the sort of stuff your mind will be filled with on the 'serious' broadcast network news channels, which still have the largest audiences, need to the most advertising money to exist, and are heavily monitored and controlled by the powers that be.  Inevitably they are all about manufacturing consent for war.  It's better to watch their comedy shows, at least the best ones, if you can stand them.)

The only way AI can be for the common good

There is only one way to make AI work for the common good, and that is Communism.

There is a very similar set of issues wrt global heating.  Any solution to that at any time in our current trajectory (up, up, and over the cliff, crashing down, finally creating the next civilization) will require Communism, if not now then later, and the sooner the better.

Commanding Heights

I say Communism in the way that current Communist countries such as China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea understand it.  They recognize Communism as the movement created by Lenin and his successors known as Marxism Leninism.

Marxism Leninism has an evolving set of visions as to how to implement the best version of socialism, and it has varied from country to country, but Lenin's original concept still stands, the Central Committee of the People must control the Commanding Heights of the economy.

So that means that in China today there may be very rich people, and something akin to capitalism in operation, but they do not as a class control the direction of the economy. The People do.

Pure communism

There is a different notion of communism, the one with a lower case c, which represents the ultimate evolution of socialism, the one in which there is no oppression of any kind, including oppression from rentiers and capitalists and states themselves, and there is society of the kind envisioned by many spiritual leaders beforehand (including the Apostle Paul): "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs."  I read Marx as grinning while he says this, knowing the religious origin of it, and not at all suggesting this will be short in coming.  First the Communist movement to create it needs to come into power and then they will need to work over time to achieve it.  The Communist revolution would be short in coming, but the ultimate achievement of socialism it defined--pure communism--which would take awhile or perhaps even be a never ending pursuit--which is to say, an ideal.  I believe that ideals are quite often necessary to give us focus, and otherwise we have nothing to endlessly pursue.

Nikita Khrushchev predicted pure communism, as a stateless and even moneyless society, would be achieved by 1980.  Instead, or course, USSR went neoliberal under Gorbachev who weakened the state and authority and popularity so much by permitting market control and even unemployment so that that western backed puppet Yeltsin could take over and wreck it completely.

Pure communism is a dicey proposition for marxists of all kinds to talk about because it is an ideal, and marxism of all kinds claims to be about materialism, not idealism.  But I see the ideal there in the famous phrase (and that's about it).  And that is what marxism is supposed to be about ultimately, and preferably with no time wasted except for decency, achieving.  Existence without any kind of exploitation.  

"Realm of Freedom" were Marx's ultimate words in Volume 3 of Capital, as a society in which no one would have to work, but instead develop their own human energy towards that which they valued including art, science, philosophy, and self-actualization.

Wild West AI

Current AI is a perfect illustration of the problems with Capitalism.  All the big money wants to be the biggest money by owning the next big thing, and damn everything else, the people, the environment, communities, electricity, water, future jobs, wasted people power to better fix global heating, etc.

Even when many critics, like me and Gary Marcus and Cory Doctorow say it's really just half baked yet.

Marcus and I and many other say that AI needs symbolic reasoning and built in human-like ideas and even basic 'knowledge' in human-like form.  Neural networks by themselves are incomplete...and incredibly wasteful if expected to do everything we need.

Meanwhile China's slower paced rollout makes more sense.  And it is said their systems are much more efficient.

Debunking Israeli Propaganda about the Nakba

Mouin Rabbani does a good job calling forth the key evidence showing that the enduring Israeli propaganda about the Palestinian Nakba is untrue.

https://x.com/MouinRabbani/status/2055846805787517213

First it was debunked by Erskine Barton Childers, who examined radio archives maintained by intelligence services which showed no radio broadcasts from Arab States ordering Palestinians to evacuate.  It would have been completely illogical for them to do so.  (The next link requires a one pound minimum subscription to read.)

https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/12th-may-1961/9/the-other-exodus

Israeli historian Benny Morris debunked similar claims regarding the 1967 war, showing that there was no preceding attack by Arab states.

In 1948, there was an attack by Arab states, but only months after Palestinian refugees had already begun accumulating in their countries.  This was certainly not an attempt to "genocide Jews," nor was it a unified attempt to dismantle Israel, which some countries had already established agreements with.  They each had different agendas, but they all wanted Palestinians to be returned to Palestine.

The X thread above also includes Israelis attempting to refute these and other points, wherein you can see some lively debate.

Norman Finkelstein also debunks the Israeli propaganda, referencing Childers and Morris, in his marvelous book Beyond Chutzpah.

Collapse of Civilizations

 https://youtu.be/yV-Cwcy8K6A?si=fCrGnvzu50cZwlD2

Where the title says "identical" what the video actually shows are repeated patterns, not precisely identical but similar.

This time *may* be different, in that there is something like a global civilization, that includes "outsiders."  But likely it is going to be the Western Imperium that collapses first, then disasters of global heating will ultimately cause all to collapse.

Mor On AI vs Jobs

AI proponents claim that the history of increasing automation and productivity is that they result in more jobs, not less.

I'm not going to argue with that in general, though clearly automation has at many times caused difficult or impossible job displacement that many people have struggled to deal with.  So, while in the long run there may be more jobs, in the short run many people lose theirs, and as Keynes famously quipped:

“In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”

But even if past automation has ultimately been in some ways beneficial  to most people (probably not to the natural environment including most other species, and even many people, but in terms of 'jobs' and obscene wealth for the wealthy with a bit for some others near the top) and is often felt to be that way overall, I'm also going to argue that AI is Different.  Surely that is also what AI proponents claim.

I just argued for this essential difference in my previous post.  Previous automation systems have dealt with the heavy, awful, boring, and repetitive work, not the creative and thinking parts which people like and benefit from doing.  I have also argued that the Limits to Growth mean there is not enough there for AI to achieve the better world proponents imagine, and instead we'll be left with a cruel and sloppy world with most people making do with less.  Finally it seems that AI related layoffs are already occurring, the only this is probably the only way--replacing most rather than augmenting people--that the vast investment and justify itself to investors.

Knowledge vs Slop

Knowledge and Symbolic Reasoning

When people gain useable insights into the operation of the universe, such as Einstein's law of Special Relativity, they have encoded those insights into "knowledge" which can be efficiently (if not completely) transmitted to other people, usually by explanation.

Generally this means that they have encoded insights into a reduced symbolic form, like E = MC^2.

When neural networks learn information, it is encoded into vast numbers of coefficients.  This form of knowledge cannot be efficiently transmitted to people, and it probably does not match symbolic concepts people already have.  So LLM's implicitly learn how different words are used, without necessarily learning or using our general categories such as noun and verb (which may be the most intuitive to us even if they present troubling exceptions to LLM's).

AI is making us dumber

Proponents of LLM believe this is fine.  They want AI to deliver solutions.  They don't need AI to explain itself.  They feel that it is unnecessary for AI to help us learn how to solve problems for ourselves.  We stand on the shoulders of AI to do more.

But if AI is letting us solve problems without fully understanding them, then it is making us dumber.  The "solutions" that we are thereby creating might best be understood as slop (the word popularized by Cory Doctorow, who is an excellent critic of AI).

When you are a homeless person passing through a soup kitchen, they dish out slop.  That's fine because they have limited resources and limited staff and that is the only way they can feed so many people cheaply.  But when you are an aristocrat dining in a fine restaurant, or just a person who has enough time to do so, you want a carefully prepared meal, not slop.

Slop is perhaps unavoidable, but generally it is something we should preferably avoid.  Ideally everyone should have carefully prepared meals.  That's part of a quality life.

Resisting AI means we will not achieve the (alleged) productivity benefits.

But preparing slop makes us dumber.  Preparing meals carefully makes us smarter.  In the long run, this is more important than being "more productive."  It is much better to do less, and to understand what we are doing and learn how to do it better, than just to "do more."

Consuming more slop makes us poorer, not richer.  (Don't trust GDP and similar metrics here.  What is really most important is not how much we consume, or how much money circulates, but deepening our quality of life.)

We should seek to invent the technologies which make us smarter, not dumber.  Only by being smarter can we know and appreciate quality and how to get there.

Therefore, we should seek to build the society that makes us learn more, think, and create, not just dish out more and more slop.

Making people dumber and dumber is the quickest road to collapse of everything.

That also happens to be what you get by mindlessly raising "productivity."

"Higher Level" thinking

Proponents of AI think the sloppiness is fine and it enables us to think at a "higher" (more abstract) level while the AI does the lower level thinking for us.

But this higher level often becomes little more than BS and hand waving.

It is my feeling and my belief that the strongest learning comes from working things all the way through.  This is not a new idea.  Euclid famously told King Ptolemy I: There is no royal road to Geometry.

So when I build my programs, I do it this way.  I think problems through with paper summaries or diagrams first.  I think about the different kinds of ways they could be solved, and choose what appears to be the best one.  If it proves to have been a wrong choice, I flip to another one before I have written much code, if possible.  I build everything from the raw ingredients of my operating system and programming language as much as possible.  Only if things appear to be particularly tricky do I look for previous solutions (aka libraries) that I can use.  If fairly easy, I even reimplement the parts of those libraries that I need.  I rely heavily on built-in language features or libraries including things like associative arrays (aka hashtables) which are capable of dealing with many if not most hard problems.

I know this goes against the grain.  From the very beginning of my 39 year career in computer programming I was taught the mantra "Reuse."  But I reject that as a general rule for many reasons:

1) Learn (everything) by doing (everything).

2) Programs built upon combinations of even fairly simple libraries can become ever more impossible to fully understand.  Often different libraries do not intuitively connect with one another.  Then all your code becomes translating information from one library to another--very dull.

3) Copyright, patent, and similar issues.

During the whole process, even before starting to code, I start writing the user documentation as well.  This is invaluable in determining the fine details of the interfaces.  If something is hard to describe, it's probably not designed well either.

I don't create a 'detailed design' such as including all variables and data structures before coding.  That's basically humanly impossible.  When I was required to use a formal design process, most people could not actually perform a useful Design Review to being well into the coding process if not nearly complete.  As one of my colorful (and PhD) colleagues remarked, "We're supposed to do Design after Coding.  I prefer design while coding."

For over a quarter century, I've either written the documentation into the program itself, or straight into fairly simple HTML.  I like being that close to the metal.  I hate word processing programs.  I do all my editing in Gnu Emacs.

I've had some experience doing things other ways.  Java programming, for example, is traditionally done with the importation of dozens or even hundreds of libraries, with interactions so complex that fancy tools are needed to work out the ramifications and keep each library installed at a compatible version and all the interfaces correct for that version.  General code does little more than call one library after another.  This is the pinnacle of the "Reuse" concept.  I hated it.  It wasn't programming in my opinion, it was dishing out slop.

AI is a vastly greater extension of this.

Now I am very happy to be able to search the web to find code to solve each unfamiliar issue as it comes up.  I don't just cut and paste the bits of found (or generated!) code.  I read them and figure out how they work.  Then I write them into my program.  (My post-retirement program MakePlaylist was created exactly as described above, except I haven't written HTML documentation for it, only in-line documentation that gets spit out into help messages and full documents by built in program options.  But now I am writing HTML for a far more challenging project: a multivolume book about my life.  I can view the result immediate, and also apply simple pre-processing editors I have in mind, along with CSS which I haven't much messed with before.)

DO WE REALLY NEED MORE PRODUCTIVITY ?

Capitalists, oligarchs, and their high priests known as Economists insist that all good things come from increasing productivity.  But they do not.  Increasing productivity may mean more income for them, but lower quality of life for all as everything becomes slop, prepared and consumed mindlessly.

Now old fashioned machines and even automation may be just fine, when they do the heavy lifting and boring routine tasks for us.

But the creative and thinking parts are not only the parts we most like doing, they are also the parts that make us better when we do them.

Now suppose you are a departmental manager responsible for several projects.  You could either have project manager staff for each project, or do them all yourself with AI.

Having a staff working on each project means you can have informed feedback about the practicality of each project.  Doing it all yourself means you don't get that essential feedback.  It is an error of pride to believe that you don't need that feedback from another person.  The end result is slop which lacks humanity and depth, the hallmarks of great art.

It reminds me of the music created by electronic and automated music generation pioneer Raymond Scott.  Scott invented machines to do things like sequencing, pioneering devices that became very useful to many musicians.  For that he should rightly be honored.  But he invented these machines so he wouldn't have to work with other musicians.  The result in his own subsequent life's work is very lively music which is also very shallow. 

The world we want to construct is one in which each person contributes what they are best doing, which is quite often what they like doing best or something adjacent to it.  Turning all jobs into dishing out slop is exactly the opposite.

What we want to do is the thinking and creative parts, and have machines do the heavy, awful, boring, and repetitive parts.  That's what previous automation has done.

And in many cases still and forever, the best machines are machines custom built for their purposes.

In both shirts and intellectual products, hand made is best and always has been.

And it makes us better to make such things, at least so much as we find our calling in doing so.

Limits to Growth

Creating the supercharged high value worlds where most everything is done by AI that people just command, and yet everyone has a job doing something more to their liking commanding that AI, can only be possible by large amounts of growth, the kind of growth nobody is planning for anymore anyway.  It seems more that people are simply being laid off rather than retrained for even more creative positions.

We need to scale back our assault on the environment, including especially our consumption of fossil fuels.  But even generating electricity the very best and most environmentally friendly ways, with wind and solar, still has considerable environmental impact.  We need to use as little electricity as possible.  As little of 'everything' as possible in fact, except our creative minds.

Instead, as everyone knows, data centers of obscene size are being built with obscene levels of consumption of water and electricity--which were going to be if not already scarce anyway, and scarcer still going forwards.

And that's not even counting the environmental cost of the 'value' AI may be adding to society, if it were keeping everyone employed at an ever higher level.  Im not counting that because it's unlikely.

Even just the Data Centers being built are only going to bring on the collapse of everything faster, let alone the vast future of data centers planned and/or approved.

The environmental cost is another problem that AI can't solve.  Though if it were intelligent and free thinking it would tell people not to build any more data centers for a while as part of the solution.

But Again, AI is Slop

Many have written on this, including Cory Doctorow, Ed Zitron, and Gary Marcus.  The latest debunking of AI competence in programming is in a recent update from Gary Marcus:

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/misplaced-panic-over-ai-progress

I have strong feelings about this.

Programming is not just about writing code.  I had a lifelong career in computer programming, and was once even taught (in some software engineering seminar sponsored by GE) that writing code was 10% of the job.  Most was in specification, design, and testing.

I see the most fundamental thing in programming as understanding people.  Hearing what they want and understanding what they mean.  Understanding the people around them too.  Seeing the Big Picture of where this is going to fit.

Then finding a close working approximation of what they mean.  It's a delicate balancing act, also taking into account time and institutional constraints too.

Then understanding the problem space of computer programming languages, algorithms, and related concepts.

An appreciation of beauty, elegance, readability, and simplicity.

Finally, a desire to create something good.

While it may seem mechanical, programming is more of an art than most

engineering and mathematics.  There are endless ways of doing the same thing,

more or less, but some are better, and all depending on circumstances.  At best programmers are driven not just to complete jobs, but do them well.

Israelis on Raping Prisoners

 Clip from Israeli talk show has one Israeli, speaking in English, calling the highly documented rapes of Palestinian prisoners (now finally reported in NYTimes) a "blood libel", while the other Israeli, speaking in Hebrew, saying the only problem is that rape is not the official regulated policy of the state, so the rapists don't fear prosecution.

https://x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/2054466066894422508

I have already published several debunkings of Israeli claims about October 7.  Grayzone has some of the best.  Here is another one:

https://www.trtworld.com/article/18165357

Debunking claims about the Hitler-Stalin Pact

 https://x.com/pawelwargan/status/2053755272724615386

"God" and Amelek

 It was not 'God' (a monotheistic concept) who commanded Saul to genocide the Amalekites, it was YHWH, the god of the Hebrews, who later became conflated with El as polytheistic Yahwism evolved towards monotheistic Judaism.  Any modern person who takes this command to genocide as an example of superior ethics and morality is seriously deluded.  Whether this actually happened, or things like it, or not, Hebrews got what was coming to them several times over in the following centuries, and there are few Hebrews practicing Yahwism today.*  The Torah of the Second Temple era, compiled during the Persian empire, demanded that only the Messiah could rebuild a state for the Jews, and this was re-iterated after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the Talmud Three Oaths.  Anyway, there is negligible evidence that the Amelekites even existed in Saul's time, let alone that Saul organized 200,000 soldiers to fight them.  The Agagites, the alleged descendants of Amelekites, were a rival group in Babylon who hoped to exterminate Jews because Mordecai wouldn't bow to Haman.  Negligible evidence of that too.

[Posted to this thread, doubtful it won't be censored.]

*Or perhaps, Zionism is the re-emergence of Yahwism, a tribal rather than universal religion.

Claims and counter-Claims about Immigrant Crimes

A priori, it seems reasonable to believe that immigrants are less likely to engage in crimes (other than "immigration crimes" of course, though most immigration "crimes" are "civil crimes") because it increases the risk they would get caught and deported.  OTOH, some seem to believe that illegals are more likely to engage in violent crime because (1) they already broke the law/rules of immigration, and (2) they are darker skinned people (etc).  Some of that perception seems to come from racism and bigotry.

That legal immigrants commit less crime than citizens is rarely disputed by those examining the data.  The only question is with illegal immigrants.

CATO has written many articles claiming that illegal immigrants commit less violent crime based on actual data from Texas.  (I'll link one below.)

Now, you may dismiss CATO as a hack right wing organization with an "open borders" agenda because that suits their corporate sponsors who want cheaper labor.  And quite often, I do dismiss CATO's conclusions, and many of their comments even in these articles.  But I believe they are presenting the actual crime data here, and their articles on crime are widely quoted in the mainstream news media.  MAGA who are even aware of CATO say they have "gone communist."  That is not what actual Communists think.  

It's not surprising mainstream media quotes the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) much less, because that's a lefty union related organization worried about worker conditions, but they reach the same conclusions as CATO on crime rates.

The people like CIS and others I have seen who claim to debunk CATO on immigration have just as much of an agenda, as you can often glean by looking at their other articles.  In 2024, CIS claimed to debunk a popular 2022 CATO study used by many media outlets.

https://cis.org/Richwine/Catos-Brazenly-False-Claim-About-Our-Illegal-Immigrant-Crime-Research

I can't seem to find any CATO study from 2022, but they published them almost every other year it seems, including 2018, 2024, and 2026:

2018

https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-texas-illegal-immigrant

2024

https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-have-low-homicide-conviction-rate-setting-record-straight-illegal-immigrant

It might be interesting to look back at the CIS original research itself, rather than just their "debunkings" of CATO  Their original research looks as hacky, if not more, that that from CATO.

https://cis.org/Report/Misuse-Texas-Data-Understates-Illegal-Immigrant-Criminality

While CIS isclaiming CATO is fudging the numbers, guess what CIS is doing.  Fudging the numbers.  They are claiming illegal immigrant status is undercounted, but claim to have come up with a trick to handle it...the time required for greater convictions means a higher rate of correct identification in the most serious crimes.

https://cis.org/Report/Misuse-Texas-Data-Understates-Illegal-Immigrant-Criminalit

Which brings to my mind a problem with this whole category of studies.  What people are really interested in is not the rate of "convictions."  They are interested in the actual rate of crimes.  Now I believe it's virtually certain that illegal aliens have a higher convinction rate among those who actually did the crime.  They are much more likely to get caught because of racial bias and exposure, and more likely to get convicted because of lack of connections and representation compared with citizens, including being more likely to get falsely convicted.

Everyone knows by now most crimes are not even investigated, much less solved.  What happens is that people get caught in the "justice" system somehow, such as with an immigration violation, and then their prints and gun numbers can be run through the system.  Crimes without that kind of exposure never get solved.

Then of course well connected people can often get off, that too.  That would certainly affect the most serious crime convictions.  Everyone knows a good lawyer can get you off, but not so much a public defender.

All things considered, I believe the excess-conviction-rate-relative-to-citizens (ECRRC) is many times higher than 1, such as 3-20, dwarfing all the concerns of CIS and others (and, in fact, enabling their narrative)...

But then CIS numbers for the illegals in the most serious violent crimes also differ from everyone elses, including CATO and the NAS below.  So that's worthy of checking too.  It could be cherry picking somehow.

Possibly the most authoritative source we can have in USA is the National Academy of Sciences, which includes the most highly rated scientists in the USA, and all of their reports are peer reviewed.  And I can tell you because I've been in science that the NAS is politically diverse, it's not just "libruls."  Even academic science relies on scientific entrepreneurs who become Principal Investigators, they make a lot of money, and tend to be conservative, just like medical doctors.  And it's those "top" people who tend to get into NAS.  It's not just one party involved with appointing the people who appoint the funders of science either, and that determines who become the top Principal Investigators and who fall into other roles.

The NAS weighed in with a paper in 2020 showing that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

Now, of course, they used a "model" to determine the number of illegals in any of the crime categories because of the incomplete identification problem described by CIS.  A model that was peer reviewed and available to public (as is the PDF of the original paper here).

That's the standard scientific approach, and they haven't seen fit to update that research.  I note that it was published during the first Trump administration, and scientists are well aware of such things.

That seems to be that's the best we know right now.

And the most respected mainstream media outlets like the NYTimes and WashingtonPost and all such follow it, with exceptions exceptions (perhaps quoting CIS) for FoxNews and the like.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/29/truth-about-illegal-immigration-crime/

They link to CATO, CIS, and NAS.

Still, it's a measure of convictions, not actual crimes, which I think are far more undercounted for the citizens. 

Pressing the Red or Blue buttons

 Mr McBeast says you should pus the Red Button, Never the Blue Button.

I don't think the answer is obvious.  You'd want to do a poll to see what other people think, or be part of the "Blue Button" movement to ensure 51%, rather than treat this as personal choice which could be a big mistake.  Or (defending the blue button choice) you don't want to live in a world where half of the people could be wiped out for pressing the wrong button.

I'm don't worry about solving such problems.  Real life versions of Prisoner's Life dilemmas are never so clear cut.  There are limitations, subtle effects, etc.

Thus it is with most electoral voting.  I recognize the Reason editors choice (never voting) as reasonable but I have a somewhat different take.

In addition to "the result" which one has only an astronomically small (at least 1 in a 10 million or maybe 1 in a quadrillion) chance of affecting, there are "subtle" effects (which may be very personally meaningful):

1) A greater or lesser margin of victory has significance which communicates to politicians and voters.

2) Similarly, a greater proportion of 3rd party voters (with no appreciable chance to win) or non-voters has significance.

3) Changes or rates of change of party choice has significance.

4) Whoever wins is likely to be bought by some part of the ruling class.  In no case is there going to be an end to excess profits or needless wars or general enshitification.

5) Talking about your choice could have some influence on others.

6) Talking about your choice makes you a greater or lesser part of the virtual club of people you know.

7) Expressing your real feelings makes you feel good.

8) Early collapse may be better than later collapse, etc.*  There might be more survivors from an earlier collapse, etc

9) Movement building solidarity if you are part of a movement.

10) Voting against your usual party communicates dissatisfaction.  If it leads to a loss, that is a form of "discipline" which might force the party to be better, or go down the tubes and be replaced by a better one.  (Or worse, etc)

I've decided that in view of everything else, #7 is central and most important.  There's never a good enough reason not to vote for the candidate you like more than others, or dislike least.  And IMO that's the way voting should be.  It's both saying what you feel, and communicating it, even if not through the singular "choice" of an allegedly "winner take all" system.

So the Reason editor should vote for (I'd assume) the Libertarian candidate, unless they though the Libertarian party was taking a bad turn recently, then they'd abstain.

They shouldn't not vote just because the Libertarian candidate won't likely win.  (Unless the cost of voting were a significant factor.). That's giving up an opportunity to say what you feel and be a comrade with your closest movement.

Also, the chance that you could still be persuaded is another power you have.  So it's never useful so say what you would never or always do.  So "I'll always vote for the Democrat" means the Democratic party has no need to improve and will just get worse as it surely gets bribed mostly that way.  "I'll never vote for the Democrat" also means the Democratic party has no need to improve.  Better to make it conditional and say something like "I'll vote for a Democrat when they oppose the genocide in Gaza (or perhaps even just call it genocide)."

*Collapse could mean many things.  Such as ecological collapse or dissolution of the USA.  In general we want to put catastrophes as far off into the future as possible, but we have no way of knowing whether that will actually be the best for most people (or animals, ET's, etc)

LLM's vs Symbolic Reasoning

 I am not a fan of "AI." Ironically, I took a class in "AI" in 1983, and "neural networks" as the earliest versions of LLM's were called, were barely mentioned. We read and wrote programs in Lisp. I declined an offer to work in an AI lab in preference for more solid engineering of CAD/CAM, and later learned more about Neural Networks from an ACM lecture in 1986.  I generally viewed them as for perception only.  In 1992, I watched a PBS Nova presentation about the Cyc computer project, to compile all knowledge symbolically.  Much work was being done in Texas.  (Wikipedia doesn't show Cyc as having been updated since 2017.). That sort of thing was what I would have bet on.

I've always believed in symbolic reasoning to be essential, and now there are papers to prove it. LLM's can't solve simple problems because they lack symbolic reasoning and planning skills. LLM's are primarily good at pattern recognition, the original problem, since programs couldn't easily be written to understand things like speech or text. Symbolic reasoning can actually solve these problems, and uses orders of magnitude less energy to do so.

https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/even-more-good-news-for-the-future?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

The "Western World" has been essentially fascist since the 325 Council of Nicea

I very much liked the historical synopsis here, which is important to know. I didn't much like their conclusions. My conclusions are a bit different, Rome under Constantine become fascist, the fascism survived the collapse of Rome through Christianity, which was Rome's rule in disguise, and the fascism has barely been beaten back since, only to be even worse in some times and places. Still, I am interested in learning more about the other early christian books, perhaps more the the existing bible, but not necessarily other things.

https://youtu.be/WvjyKOD11hc?si=YsxZmrj3XN_wjbOR

I am not uninterested in the other "suppressed" books of christianity though.

It looks as if early christian synagogues were following something like the original rabbinic model, in which to be a rabbi you must simply be trained by another rabbi, and gain a following.  So the tendency for rabbis and early Christian leaders, who were for many early christians one in the same is to create divergence of positions, often adaptive, outside of a central authority.  Then in comes Constantine and Nicea and there is only one set of books, one set of rules, and from that "order" (which often was quite disorderly).

Even the reformation stuck with the same books, just with dispersed authority (before long we were back to something like the rabbinic model, except that any one any where can declare they've had a revelation, or just a new idea, and start a new church, they don't have to be trained by some earlier Christian Minister.)

But still, among MAGA "conservatives" and others, the idea that we must be a "Christian Nation" following essentially one set of books persists.  Thus the fascism is preserved.

At least at time of Constantine, the unity of belief system has seemed to be more orderly.  And in some way, it's just fine for both the rich and poor to be served by the same hierarchy, rather than have their own temples.

Asian societies differently achieved order by permitting the 'melding' of different religious beliefs and traditions.  So people could say they were both Christian and Buddhist.  That 'works' as there is no central authority on what Christianity is, although it is against many contemporary versions.

I think the melding tradition is better than the exclusionist one of the West.

Has David Miller gone over the edge?

 Tony Greenstein makes the case best that David Miller, an academic researching power relations who was dismissed from Bristol University in UK for alleged Antisemitism in 2021, then fought to reverse this and won in 2024 on the point that anti-Zionism is not Antisemitism, has gone past anti-Zonism now and is clearly antisemitic.

Tony makes the case well, and I agree that many of Miller's recent statements are clearly antisemitic, and this is not a good practice for the Palestine Solidarity Movement to follow.  However, at the same time, I disagree with some of Greenstein's statements which (weirdly for him) seem to minimize the power of Zionism and the Israel Lobby as distinct from imperialism in general.  For example, Tony says flatly:

I explained that Zionism was the creation of British imperialism and Christian Zionism not Jews.

That's laughable.  Is Tony saying Zionist Jews like Lord Rothschild, for whom the Balfour Declaration was written, was a victim of British Imperialism?  As was Herzl?  No, Zionist Jews were involved from the start, pushing the Zionist project forwards even before British Imperialism got involved, though much of Zionist success was from their ultimate alignment with western imperialism, which in some cases had included them already.

Tony seems to feel that when you don't mean the collectivity of all Jews you must not say Jews.  But this feels ridiculous after awhile.  Must we say that the Empire State Building was built by some humans.

The murderous genocidal and apartheid state of Israel is the sad result of many things, including both Western Imperialism and Jewish Zionism*, even though Jewish Zionism was fairly fringe for a long time, but not so fringe as not to have included leading figures like Rothschild and Brandeis.  In the beginning, Jewish Zionism was a bourgeois Jewish (oh, excuse me, some bourgeois Jews) movement, one that some wealthy Jews saw the most potential in, and many middle and working class Jews were afraid of, but by 1900 over 100,000 Jews were members.  That wasn't just global bankers.  Perhaps most working class Jews were afraid it would be an excuse for deportation to Palestine, but others saw it as something that might be useful for others.  Despite the scriptural prohibitions, many Jews felt that some Jews might need it some day, so adopted a "let them do it if they want to" non-Zionist posture.  Anti-Zionism was the bigger thing, but it did not include all Jews, many were non-Zionist and some were Zionist.

We should not ignore the fact that some Jews, Zionist Jews, have been actively promoting a state of genocide and apartheid since at least 1890 and ultimately got most other Jews to buy in.  This gave and still gives Western Imperialism a huge boost for many bad deeds related to Zionism.  Jews are all over, richer than average all the way to the top, well organized, politically plural, and smart.  Few other Imperialist visions have such a solid base of support, at least if it's just money and votes and not western lives (and even a few of those can be ignored by a compliant media).

I myself had avoided using the term Jewish Supremacism feeling that it could be interpreted as antisemitic.  But then, lo, I heard none other than Norman Finkelstein giving a short briefing on why that term was superior to anti-Zionism.  What Zionism means, exactly, is not well enough defined, Finkelstein declared.  Meanwhile everyone understands what Jewish Supremacism means.

Did Zionism ever mean (as apparently some like Chomsky (a Kibbutznik in the 1950's) a socialist state in historic Palestine with equal rights for all?

I almost find it hard to believe that someone as smart as Chomsky couldn't see from the history of Zionism that this was never the case for the actual Zionist movement, though it may have been a pipe dream for some very closeted left leaning Jews.  (And I know how my own thinking has rotated 360 degrees or more over my lifetime, so I'm willing to accept youthful ignorance.). 

And I felt at first that Finkelstein was doing some covering for the likes of Chomsky (who Finkelstein counted as a friend).  I still think that Zionism is the word we in the Palestine Solidarity Movement must use.  Zionism is a specific and extreme manifestation of Jewish Supremacism, and the one we must unite to dismantle.  Otherwise, whether Jews feel superior to others is not of much importance, unless there is specific nepotism or discrimination that violates the law, notions of fairness, etc., above and beyond what is otherwise apparent in capitalist society.

I have not seen important cases of Jewish Supremacism distinct from Zionism that need social movement opposition (though the broad Jewish Zionist ownership of media in the US, UK, and Australia is troubling and apparent chokehold on US political parties is also troubling, notably they are everywhere and ALWAYS linked to Zionism rather than anti-Zionism).

I did however take the cue from Finkelstein that Jewish Supremacism wasn't just an antisemitic slur, and I can now accept it as such, but I will continue using the term Zionism which I believe is well enough defined by the movement Herzl started and Israel continues.

In general I do not believe anyone needs protection from racial slurs as such.  Free Speech extends to the point of imminent lawlessness.  People need protection from objective and material things: murderous gangs, discrimination, occupation, theft, fraud, and needless war.

If it didn't miscolor the Palestine Solidarity movement, I'd be inclined to let David Miller's errors slide.  Such as they are, I believe they warrant condemnation and not yet banning or disconnection.  Like many others, Miller may still have interesting things to say.  No one is 100% correct and even 10% is good enough to be useful if you know what you are dealing with.

But this gets back to a broader point.  Though most Zionists are always perfectly clear about their intentions, there are also Mossad or Zionist spies, assets, and similar infiltrators who may sometimes appear to be something different from what they actually are.  At what point do we suspect infiltration?

It should never be on the basis of being Jewish because that is ethnic discrimination pure and simple.  Despite Zionist claims, many Jews are anti-Zionist, and this was even more true in the distant past, and becoming more true again now.

I believe in the authenticity of the views expressed by Finkelstein, JVP, and even Chomsky who was a friend of Epstein**, and in most cases accept them as my own.  There might be a shill or spy here or there among such groups, as in all political groups, but the groups as a whole are not operating to undermine Palestinian solidarity.  Groups that give visibility to the Palestinian cause are not helping Zionists and not the kinds of things Zionists would create.  At most they would might try to infiltrate and control them however.  (In fact, JVP was not always anti-Zionist.  After they changed their posture to anti-Zionism in 2019, a significant percentage of members left.  It would be hard to believe the shift to anti-Zionism was an expression of Mossad control.)

Furthermore, any organized spy agency was assets of many kinds.  Mossad might even find it better to go under cover of Zionist arabs and Christians, even islamic radicals like ISIS and Al Qaeda.

I think the best starting point is always to assume people are being honest and forthright, as most are.  Even a few errors are admissible.  Only a long pattern unforced errors and bad faith arguments reach the point of serious suspicion where you would openly discuss such things.  It's also good to realize that even Mossad has finite resources and isn't everywhere and always.

Trust no one, but appear to trust everyone unless there is good cause not to. (That's the only way someone as paranoid as I am can survive.)

One place where I see Miller as having gone over the edge is casting aspersions on groups like JVP and Jewish anti-Zionists without sufficient evidence.

(*Nowadays many will point out that Christian Zionism began before the modern Zionist movement.  And there are now more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists.  While it is true that Christian Zionism is a thing which makes it possible for the likes of Trump to win elections, I do not believe it has the same power as Jewish Zionism.  For Christian Zionists it's a theological concern, for Jewish Zionists it's personal, family, tribe, etc.  And the Jewish Zionists and Israel Lobby and Jewish Zionist media are far better organized, lavishly funded by wealthy Jews, etc.  Ironically, the historic and official theology of Judaism in both Torah and Talmud opposes Zionism, mere mortals must not create a Jewish State, but Zionists paint over that with romantic feelings and talmudic arguments.)

(**Chomsky was clearly saying a lot of things about Israel which Zionists would not want to be said.  But I also think that both he and Finkelstein have a tendency to dismiss "Conspiracy Theories" too casually.  There are concrete reasons to suspect that the JFK and RFK assassinations were aided by Zionist groups and that those assassinations worked to Zionist's benefit.  Even 9/11.  These could have been elite intelligence and/or mob conspiracies, only a small number of Jews participated, not Jewish-supported mass movements like Communism and Pride that antisemites like to harp on (and BTW Communism, Pride, and masturbation aids are good things).  Zionists have a well documented history of assassinations and perfidy--and there's no reason to believe USA would be immune.  I believe it was his continual denunciation of conspiracy theories like these that put Chomsky into Epstein's network.  Zionists and Israel liked that part of Chomsky's influence.  But they were legitimately Chomsky's own views, and they even now have the greatest academic respectability.  But we also need people who honestly explore power relations, the other side of the debate, and it has little been done for obvious reasons.  The delicious irony we know now is that Chomsky, while denouncing secret Jewish networks as a means of control, was himself in the most notorious one.  We need a David Miller but with a bit more discernment than he's had recently.  We also need good conspiracy theorists.  Contra Miller, Jewish anti-Zionism is real and we need good Jewish Anti-Zionism for many reasons, including that Jews--and former Jews--are good at communications and media, and ultimately it is Jews who must most be convinced that Zionism was a terrible wrong turn for Jews, sold to them by the Jewish Zionist hucksters and western imperialists.  They almost certainly will eventually be convinced by the implosion of the Zionist entity, but sooner is better for everyone.  Just showing Jews how popular anti-Zionism is among other Jews is a good first step.  Zionists clearly seek to suppress anti-Zionist protests everywhere, not amplify them.

Meanwhile, I am open to the possibility that, following Chomsky, too many anti-Zionist jews have become too much opposed to power, network, and conspiracy theories, and that could suggest Chomsky or Zionist mindshare if not influence.  Miller himself is wrong to discount the Zionist lobbies.  It's quite simple, you influence the selection of the politicians through a powerful lobby, then the politicians control the selection of cabinet members themselves being under the influence of the lobby as well as the control of certain oligarchs (in Trump's case, they're all Zionists), then the cabinet members control the State Department, etc.  Zionists don't have to "infiltrate" the State Department under false cover, they own the top guy.

One thing that could help with undue Jewish saturation in certain industries is DEI.  Funny that Trump once agreed with Mark Levine that he was our first Jewish President.)

"Jewish Supramicism" doesn't mean that all Jews are Jewish Supramacists.  Just like White Supremacists doesn't mean that all Whites are White Supremacists.  What it means is that some Jews take their Jewish identity as a basis for a supremacist way of thinking, as exemplified by Nazism and Zionism.  And that supremacist way of thinking always leads to a physical and ethical disaster.

Tony Greenstein doesn't think 'supremacism' was what many early Zionist Jews were feeling.  They were thinking of some kind of 'escape' from antisemitism.  But it was supremacist because it views other places as 'empty' and therefore ripe for settlement, not seeing the people already there as having important reasons to be there too.  In effect, we have more important reasons to be there than they do.  This takes many forms, from Golda Meier's "there are no Palestinians" to the claim that "God promised this land to us" or "We are the indigenous people" (which are, curiously, inconsistent notions, and both wrong.  After they got many things wrong, God told Jews that they must wait for the Messiah.  All available evidence suggests the Palestinians are more closely descended from the Levantine population of 0BCE and before than "Jews", the isolated Samaritans most closely of all.  Most modern Palestinian Muslims are descended from Judeans of 0BCE who converted to Christianity and then Islam when convenient to do so.  Not all of the people in Judea were ever expelled by the Romans, it was mainly the soldiers and elites in and around Jerasalem who were expelled.  Since then, modern Jews have picked up a lot of European and other ancestries, diluting their original Judean ancestry.  Meanwhile, virtually everyone in the west has some Judean ancestry by conversion, intermarriage, or false paternity because of all the generations that have transpired.  The claim that you own a place because your ancestors did has widely been regarded as ludicrous, except by Zionists.). 

Not only does the Talmud specifically state that Jews must not create a State or mass migrate to historic Judea, but much of the Talmud is devoted to the questions that arise when you are a minority ethic population in diaspora.  Talmudic Judaism is fundamentally about being cosmopolitan.  There is no other way to "heal the world."  Call that edict 'supremacist' if you like, I agree that in principle it could become paternalistic, but it's not Supremacism.  'Healing' is not displacement, war, apartheid, genocide, etc., or anything done for just us.  Healing means we help others make their lives better.  Capital S Supremacism views other's lives as insignificant, "we are the victims," so others can be displaced, dispossessed, or even killed without remorse, as we see today.  Meanwhile, the principle of hospitality, of treating others as we would like to be treated, is fundamental to Judaism.  Not only does Judaism forbid murdering non-Jews, it requires Jews to save the lives of non-Jews except when  it would be necessary to break one of 3 other commandments: murder, adultery, and idolatry, but not including the Sabbath. It is required to break the Sabbath to save anyone's life.  Zionism is the antithesis of Judaism.

How did Persia become Iran...it always was

 https://youtu.be/MfWiqXcOQJI?si=ng7P0vnd6ZRBSnuW

Capitalism is Talmudic

 I have in several previous posts debunked the various popular misquotations of the Talmud that make it sound beastly racist.  I even link to a worthy translation of the Talmud.  I accept the general principle proposed by liberal advocates of the Talmud that it is intended to show how to be perfectly fair to non-Jews and more than fair to fellow Jews.  On the face of it, this doesn't sound unreasonable (though it may differ from both Torah Judaism (not Yawhism of course, but Judaism as interpreted roughly from the Second Temple until the Macabees) and Christianity, which were intended to be universal creeds to be spread to all nations of the world, as well as many other religions which have a universalistic view).

But as even Marx noted the similarity, Talmudic Judaism is really what enabled Capitalism.  The ideal Capitalist is "perfectly" fair to workers and consumers (to be "competitive") but more than fair to stockholders and top managers.  That's the idea, the "profit" flows upwards to the tribe.  It was even the deviation of Talmudic Judaism from Christianity that at first made western "banking" possible.  And the Christian elites thrived on banking, getting Jews to do the very thing that Christianity forbade (and still should, actually).

So from banking, which does not share its profits from borrowers with the borrowers themselves (as would be required by both Christianity and Islam), which owns titles to things, which people can only acquire through paying off debt, it seems a short logical step to owning the titles of Corporations (which actually started out as a quasi-government thing) and, voila, Capitalism.

 (When I say "Talmudism" I mean the extreme version of Talmudic Judaism that over-emphasizes "adherence" to the Talmud, accepting even the racist parts, while ignoring anything incompatible.  Zionists are the best example.  It is alternatively possible to have a liberal or left view of the Talmud as a interesting and even useful but flawed document in the history of the Jewish tribe/faith, still be a modern Jew, and accept the very faultlines of the Talmud I am describing here.  Some contemporary Jews reject the Talmud completely.  The "fairness" goal the Talmud ostensibly has is essentially impossible, either you have universal fairness to all or you don't have fairness at all, even the smallest gap in fairness level is the path to supremacism and apartheid, as is now proven by Zionism...and Capitalism. The Talmud was never (except in the Three Oaths about prohibiting men from creating a Jewish State) intended to represent the "Word of God" but the arguments of some ancient scholars who were probably wrong about many things (Aristotle was also wrong about very many things) preserved to show the structure of "reasoned" and very detailed (aka legalistic) arguments, and give students something to argue about, but not necessarily proscribe the outcomes of those contemporary arguments.  I can see that debating some of the arguments in the Talmud could be educationally valuable.)  

(It has generally been my personal experience that Jews have treated me not just fair but more than fair even though I am not Jewish.  Those of my ancestors who were presumably Jewish converted to Christianity many generations ago and I am generally perceived as having mostly Scandinavian ancestry, which means nothing special to me.  I identify first as a Communist and second as an Atheist.  At the same time, I feel I am philosemitic, I especially admire contemporary anti-Zionist Jews for their courage and other-centering, and I myself look slightly Jewish as opposed to purely Scandinavian--I was once smeared by an antisemite like a Jew.  There is an argument that Zionism should not be understood as a manifestation of Jewish Supremacism but as Western Imperialism.  I see it as both.)

No Starving in USA ?

Many seem to think there is no hunger in USA.  According to the best sources, the malnutrition death rate in USA is over 3%.  This is nominally higher than many third world countries (though the data is not strictly comparable due to different methodologies).

 

10/7 was a LIHOP

There is now a mountain of evidence top Israeli leadership knew about the Hamas attack on 10/7 and deliberately did many things to ensure it happened and was as deadly as possible (including IDF slaughtering 100's of Israelis under Hannibal Directive) in order to justify a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.  The next day Israel was ready with many false claims including the Mass Rape story.  It was a "Let It Happen on Purpose (LIHOP)."  Some even believe it was also a Make It Happen on Purpose (MIHOP), but no open evidence has been presented.  (A MIHOP would mean Israel infiltrated and influenced or triggered Hamas to attack.)

https://x.com/RecTheRegime/status/2043105119424631279