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

Was Putin's Dacha Attacked

 I did repeated Google searches tonight getting only the story that the CIA had determined reports that Putin's dacha were attacked by Ukrainian drones (which Putin called Trump personally to complain about, though they had all be intercepted without reaching their target) were fake, and an alibi to stop negotiations.  Google AI consistently got this result, without qualification, pointing to the original December CIA result.  Somehow, however, I discovered a story from February in which Russia finally handed an actual guidance mehanism from one of the Ukrainian drones, saying their specialists had proven it was targeted at Putin's residence.  https://tvpworld.com/90849562/-russia-shows-us-proof-of-ukrainian-attack-on-putin-residence-

The Plot to Overthrow the Islamic Republic

https://x.com/NuryVittachi/status/2039179026221412863

The plot was:

1) Insurrection under the banner of "protests" (the actual number killed on all sides was around 3000, following the insurrection by over 50,000 foreign armed and coordinated insurrectionists which destroyed 700 shops, 300 ambulances and busses, 414 civil service buildings, 750 banks, and 350 mosques--strange for supposedly Muslim protestors--and not one synagogue), with US backed NGO's claiming that

30,000 or more peaceful protestors were massacred by the regime, and such false claims and decontextualization saturating the western world.

2) Fake peace negotiations (in which Iranians offered to give Washington nearly everything it claimed to want, especially including all their nuclear material, but the deal was not taken).

3) Surprise attack on 40 members of the Iranian government, including the negotiators.

4) Amidst the ongoing chaos, install the puppet king.

US intelligence knew this plot would not work, but Trump believed those who presented it to him, including Mossad directory David Barnea.

What actually happened, predictably, was that this all (and the attacks last year) galvanized public support for the Islamic Regime like never before.

After the plot failed, US found itself in an unwinnable illegal war of choice.

Update: The NYTimes has now reported how Trump and Netanyahu listened to Mossad over big TV screens, pumping how easy it would be do regime change by killing off top leadership.  Scott Ritter reported that US Intelligence reached the opposite conclusion, that regime change could not be so easily done.

Scott Ritter analyzes War on Iran on April 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DtpqA1FeTo&t=1s

Delcy is NOT a traitor to the Bolivarian Revolution

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/03/the-weight-on-delcy-rodriguez/

War on Iran

 This one by Ritter is essential.  Like every one I'd had time to look at since US started the war.

https://www.youtube.com/live/OtAj89I_yjw?si=8-euKiLwuRn4VluZ

Restoring Definitive Properties

The ultimate conclusion of Quantum Physics, that properties don't exist until they are measured, makes all the preceding 'requirements' of a valid physical theory (say for example symmetry) risible.

I am with Einstein in believing this is impossible.  Einstein penned the 'EPR Paradox," but then after his death Bell created Bell's Theorem, which proves that properties are either non-local, or don't exist until they are measured, proven by endless entanglement experiments by Physicists.

Looking at the math, I suggested what we might have is a 2D universe, that might make the Bell inequalities equal.  So rather than there being hidden properties, as Einstein imagined, with more information, there is actually less information than we think there is.

To make this work, the 2-D ness of the quantum domain would have to somehow, that I couldn't explain, give rise to the 3D universe we experience.

Anyway, from the 3D perspective, a 2D universe does represent non-locality!

Well, now I have a different explanation, from a particular sampling problem I've been looking at, where you have samples of samples.  Rather than the utility of information being asymptotic, at some point the value of information will be negative, worse than presuming no information at all.

That produces both the seeming truncation effects of quantum theory, as well as Bell Theorem results.

Well what is the sampling here?  I imagine it like this.  Imagine that we 'see' only particular frames of a very high speed movie.  We are sampling the true universe.  We might or might not be in the same position in each natural bundle, if there is any such thing, or exactly the same number of frames apart, but it's easy enough to see the issue if we are always exactly in the same position, the first frame of each bundle.

Now further assume that this is not necessarily true of photos we generate.  They may actually start in some frame other than ours, so by the time we measure them, we catch them at some frame which is not in series with the starting one, offset by a particular number of frames.  That would be true of their entangled photons as well.

So that's one possible explanation of entanglement and all that.  There's another more hand waving one.  And that is to note how the standard deviation of a sample is divided by N-1 and not N as for a population.  And yet they otherwise look like identical data, the same number of objects.  That also means that number when you have just one element isn't 0...it's indeterminate and 0/0.  Basically it goes wild as you approach 1 in the sample of a sample.  It has too high of a kurtosis to be useful statistically.   Other statistical processes work like this as well.

These are both kinds of non-locality.  But kind of in reverse.  We aren't experiencing the full spacetime that exists.  Just a sample.  We jump from one frame to another with a lot in between.

There might be other ways of applying the sampling thing, I'm still working on the math of it.

The key problem with Artificial "Intelligence"

It is ludicrous to think of the current LLM based approaches as a stepping stone to General Artificial Intelligence.  But even if it were, this would not be a magic bullet to save human civilization or anything like that, except the reverse.

The Problem of Human Civilization is not "lack of intelligence."  The core of the problem is lack of wisdom, which is something altogether different and mostly orthogonal if not oppositional.  One key part of wisdom, for example, is self-restraint.  While Intelligence tells you how you can conquer the world, thereby enabling and encouraging you to do so, Wisdom tells you it would not be a good idea.

Humans developed to capability to harness natural forces, and as a result have been digging their planetary home into total disaster.  This is a problem that is most accurately diagnosed as Too Much Power with Too Little Wisdom.  Intelligence is merely a form of power...albeit a foundational one which makes most others possible.  Throwing more power into our flaming cauldron will only make the flame hotter and likely melt the vessel.

And this is before we even get into another more commonly discussed problem: Who own the AI and what is it used for?

It's clear that AI is owned by the oligarchs and pathocrats and will be used, as every tool in their hands is used, to oppress and further enslave if not murder everyone else.  The biggest first use is targeting "enemies" in protests and war through AI firms such as Palantir.  It only goes downhill from there.

Our human "intelligence" is only small part of our set of long evolved capabilities. Nervous tissue is not necessarily superior to silicon for computation or anything else, except that nervous tissue as part of evolved organisms has been trained for hundreds of millions of years.  Even our individual 'training,' being thrown into this world and having to somehow adapt to both it and our long-evolved selves, is something that cannot be replicated even by reading all the books in the world.

Both this evolution and this training can impart at least small amounts of wisdom.

Our intelligence and other capabilities have limits which effectively enforce their wiser usage, as more reckless usage is unsustainable.

Those are precisely the kinds of limits some hope to superceed with AI.  But it is those limits which also require and therefore enable a degree of wisdom.

The wiser course is to embrace limits and live within them.  Machines can help us get our dishes clean, and that's nice, but what the main course is is up to us.

To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.*

(*Commonly attributed to Limits-to-Growth luminary Paul Ehrlich, it may actually have been penned by columnist Bill Vaughan, who was paraphrasing Agatha Christie.)

What about Artificial Wisdom?  There have been lots of attempts to get there through things like meditation, reciting phrases, reading religious books.  Of course, there is no such thing, but you could hardly do better than randomly selecting a page from Tao Te Ching every day.  It is not going to answer all of your questions, but that is in the nature of Wisdom.  It is limited, but that is exactly what is required for limited beings like us anyway.  Unlimited wisdom is something we can't process.

This post was inspired by a talk on transhumanism, which sounds abhorrent to me.

There is no need for this at all.  As Uber has proven, human drivers can be cheap because people need paid work.  Why is there such a great "need" to replace them with AI?  You don't need to go everywhere you can think of going.  Doing so is a waste of time and physical energy.  Having to pay someone for something is a way of preventing over usage.

Why Capitalism causes Imperialism

Here's the nutshell version of why capitalism causes imperialism, and I've never heard it explained more succinctly before:

https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/2031488536487006608?s=20

The full version explains more, showing how Capitalism is fundamentally antidemocratic and keeps us from producing the things we actually need, extending this argument to the environment and AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU1QdQsjGpM&t=1s

King Donald takes on Iran

 Ritter is not always right.  But compared to western mainstream media, Ritter is at least as good or better.  So this is very worth watching, and especially his denunciation of Trump and the state of our Republic.  It's all exactly how I feel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIFUDkHRNTk

Here's a later and much longer report from Ritter

It's no wonder Trump is making greater and greater threats.  If you were just listening to mainstream Western Media, you wouldn't see the need.

Jeffrey Sachs has called this war World War III.

Iran has always been a most likely candidate for when it starts, representing the most powerful resistance country to Israel.  It was the last one on the Neocon hit list given by Wesley Clark.  Libya was a pushover, Syria was a great candidate for aided sectarian takeover.  Iran is pretty much the immovable object.  One of the oldest civilizations on earth, ironically the one that once most aided if not birthed Judaism.

May this be no more harm to Iran and the end of US Imperialism instead.  

That would best be accomplished with a US turn to Communism (see next essay) which can better support a more self-sufficient society and also the transition to a more self-sufficient society.

And we were of course going to "choose" the President (largely influenced through Zionist owned media) crackpot enough to launch a major attack on Iran, since that has long been the Israeli demand (in the very person of Netanyahu).

Milkfat

Studies have failed to consistently confirm that dairy fat is bad for you, with some suggesting that it's good for you.

Article suggests that butter is probably still bad for you (it's just all saturated fat) but there's scant evidence for that either.  (I've cut out butter, but I daily consume several teaspoons of cream--which I think is healthier and tastier.  All the rest of my considerable dairy intake is non-fat.  I use olive oil for all other purposes.)

It was saturated fat from meats which is the troublesome one.  But the harm of that has probably also been overstated.

Sugar and it's disorder Metabolic Syndrome (Type II Diabetes) are leading factors in the research I have seen.  Sugar is not going to be proven healthy, except in tiny amounts promoting hydration (which is healthy).  The Sugar industry funded the research that led to blanket condemnation of saturated fats, which are typically a secondary concern.  This led to a generation of low-fat products with extra sugar and soaring diabetes.

I'd call into question the entire HDL/LDL cholesterol theory too.  Research I've seen suggests these are fairly unimportant, and insignificant for people over 65.  And yet, there's now a whole industry related to this, at least two of my senior friends with very healthy diets are statin taking statin drugs.  (I took statin drugs for 15 years while I was still working and eating very unhealthy amounts of fat and sugar and not getting enough exercise either.  In those conditions, statins could be marginally helpful overall, I believe now, but probably not others).  I see this as an example of over-medication.  Older people actually need to consume more fat (also protein and calcium) per kg of body weight for regular body maintenance because it's used less effectively.  Old people have a strong tendency to get too thin and weak because they don't bear this in mind.

People imagine heart disease as a simple accumulation of fatty stuff eaten, but that's not at all the case.  Some with the highest saturated fat intakes may have the least issues.  It seems most likely now that heart disease is some sort of regulatory failure or autoimmune disease and may be related to subclinical infections that flourish in the environment of sugar, metabolic disease, and stress, with fats being only of secondary or tertiary importance.

It's easy to find lots of correlations around the illuminated lamp pole of things you can measure easily.  Especially when there are areas like sugar and stress that are blacked out by the Sugar Industry and Capitalism.

Glyphosate

Glyphosate (the original herbicide in Roundup, now only in commercial versions) is defended here:  The actual evidence for harm to humans is thin.  It is also somewhat biodegradable.  However it is used in such vast quantities that I'd still be worried and it is destructive of all plants until degraded.

Don't Fight. Love!

Not fighting for anything is perfectly fine in my book.  Not fighting for something evil is even better.  Love, solidarity, and resistance are the most ethical tools, and the only ones that goodness will ever demand.

I wrote this on a thread showing multitudes of Jewish anti-Zionists protesting against Israel.  These scenes are real (confirmed by Grok).  I've seen many other (often mind blowing) protests and gatherings by anti-Zionist orthodox Jews (filling giant stadiums, dancing with joy while burning Israeli flags).

https://x.com/voiceofrabbis/status/2026493784004194644

It should also be noted that deep leftist (Socialist and Communist) Jews have also always opposed Zionism.  Only bourgeois liberals and conservatives were sucked in.  (And perhaps a few anarchist romantics, like the young Noam Chomsky, though it's hard to see how someone so rational and intelligent could have been so fooled.)

I was replying to a Zionist on that thread who wrote criticizing these anti-Zionist orthodox Jews.  She wrote, "Orthodox Jews don't believe in fighting for anything.  They were the first to bard the Umshlagplatz and walk peacefully into the "Showers."  Sabras fight for their country, and defend Israelis, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim."  I'd also argue with the veracity of that claim, Zionists fight for Zionists and persecute or slaughter everyone else.  And this includes the persecution of anti-Zionist Jews in their midst.

(And perhaps murder too?  It is interesting that the Jewish temple in Australia that was bombed in 2025 was also an anti-Zionist synagogue.  Why did the bombers pick that one?  It's already well known that a Muslim was one of the key defenders.)

What then would I say about noble "defenders."  I can't think of any such in US history, US was born in genocide and has spent most of it's existence fighting imperialist wars.  I might well have been better off born in the lands of my ancestors, including Norway.  But there are some I'd consider noble, like the Vietnamese, defending their homeland first against French imperialists and later US imperialists.  What about them?*

I still believe that goodness does not demand killing other people.  There is no cause, even personal self defense, defense of children, defense of Country (ie regime) which goodness demands killing other people for.  One can be a conscientious objector to the very end, and I believe that's perfectly fine, even probably the best option always.

But I would hold that goodness turns a blind eye to limited violence and murder which are done in the name of honorable self defense--including defense of one's own life and 'country'--assuming you or they are not engaged in commensurate evil as well.  So, at best, goodness neither celebrates nor condemns honorable self defense.  Because we live in our own self-justifying information bubbles, it can be a tough calculation to apply violence when and only when it is ethically permissible.  Goodness does not require that we be capable of such calculations.  Meanwhile, conscientious objection is always good, and I believe it is always the best approach.  We don't need to put our stamp on the world.  The world will evolve just as well without such stamps, even if they are honorable ones.

(*The Vietnamese example is the best one, and there are many others clearly similar to that.  I would go further and argue that the Russian Invasion of Ukraine was also done in justifiable and honorable self-defense of Russia and Russians in formerly Russian territories, while Ukrainian fighting for Donbas and Crimea and NATO membership is not, it is an extension of Western Imperialism.  As I said, these calculations can be difficult, but that's the way I see it.  Pure goodness would neither praise nor condemn Russian self defense, but I am not pure goodness and I see Western Imperialism as the ultimate evil of our time and so I praise Russia for resisting it.)

Epstein's Biggest Crime

 In my book, Epstein's #1 crime was that he was a spy for CIA, Mossad, and many uber Zionists.  He ran a honeypot, as well as a friendly concierge service (always willing to help out friends as only a billionaire could do) to help friends of Israel and keep them in the fold.  He was originally set up by an uber Zionist billionaire, Les Wexner, precisely for this purpose. Then later he represented  (officially--he had power of attorney) the Rothschild family (the surname mentioned more than any other in the Epstein Files.  The Rothschild family is so Zionist that the Balfour Declaration itself was a letter written to Lord Rothschild.). There was nobody better better than Epstein at being the speed dial of everyone important or well known.  He'd get you one way or another, and with the photos to prove he did.  This was his most criminal work precisely because Israel is a state of genocide, endless war, and endless global manipulation.  It doesn't get worse than that.  Of course Epstein could never be charged with such a crime in the West which is firmly in the grasp of Zionism.  It would never be a media sensation here.  Well, it got some notice, except they claim he was a Russian Spy.   Anything but CIA and Mossad.   Western Law Enforcement doesn't step on CIA and Mossad.

FAIR has a useful article contrasting how media reports Epstein's ties to Israelis differently than his (far fewer) ties to Russians.

But when I suggest such things, some people rise up and shout, "But what about the sex crimes!"

Contrarian (and now Epstein defender) Michael Tracy is a good read on this.  He's a very careful and nit picking journalist.  I'm not necessarily saying his view is complete, he has many blinders, and we have completely different takes on this overall.  He's written this ostensibly to defend Noam Chomsky, but using that to unwind the sex scandal part of the entire Epstein story in very nit picking precise terms.

I think exaggeration of the sex crimes is key to obscuring Epstein's true role.

Consistently calling him a pedophile*, which has a very well defined meaning which does not actually apply to Epstein, makes him sound like a out-of-control pervert, ie "lone nut."  In reality, he was a very much in-control pimp of minor teenage girls for "massages", as he would have to be to run a honeypot entrapping powerful men over the longest possible period of time.  It is quite possible over time it evolved, and NYTimes describes it, into a concierge service. one way or another, he was a high powered friend and fixer for the friends of Israel.

In 2008, Epstein accepted a plea bargain in which he confessed to having sex with a 17 year old girl on the eve of her 18th birthday.  She  had been giving him $200 massages while he masturbated himself for almost a year, that has always been his standard practice.  His Florida conviction was for Soliciting an Underage Prostitute.  In the light of that one particular crime (many others had been alleged but the government chose not to prosecute) his light sentencing doesn't seem that out of line.  This is the only sex crime Epstein has ever been convicted of.  It's an offensive offense, but it's not incredibly deviant or destructive.  As Noam Chomsky observed, he served time for his offense and has been returned to society a free man.

(Epstein's widely documented as claimed preference was for 14-18 year olds.  Pedophilia is technically attraction to the pre-pubescent.  This is the kind of crime that priests are often accused of.  Epstein's attraction is better described as Ephibophilia.  Attraction to post-pubescent minors 14-19 is called ephibophila, and 13-14 is called Hebephilia, though the latter term is most rarely used.  These could be considered less "deviant," even "normal," in fact there is no mental disorder classification for them.  Meanwhile the Age of Consent is socially defined, and it determines legality of sex with minors.  US States range from 14-18.  In the world at large, 14-16 is the most common range.  In China, it's 14.  In Cuba, it's 12.  This is not to say that what works in Cuba would necessarily work in Florida, where the Age of Consent is 18.  It both is and should be socially defined.  French Existentialists including one Feminist signed a petition to eliminate the Age of Consent entirely in the 1970's.  In principle, for the greatest personal freedom, the age of consent should be as low as possible.  That isn't the only consideration however.  Epstein personally argued it should be 14, which he felt had a historical basis, as it actually does.)

However, unlike Tracy, I have absolutely no problem at all with the final charge that the US Attorney had given Epstein in 2019 and for which he was awaiting prosecution in federal jail.  It fits my model of him (above) completely.*  And it fits completely all the Epstein files we've been allowed to see.  And what was that charge?  Minor Sex Trafficking.

(*Of course the FBI also "found" that no other men were involved.  In effect, denying it was a honeypot, or could even be.  Well, since the honeypot involved CIA and Mossad, of course they would do that.  I take the FBI denial, amidst all the circumstantial evidence to believe he was doing just that, as proof.  This is how I differ from Michael Tracy above, he lacks imagination to see how CIA and Mossad would operate, and the FBI will steer clear of anything involving them, and the mainstream media would forward the FBI denials unquestioned.  We can see in the Epstein Files at least one Confidential Human Source who concluded precisely that Epstein was operating an intelligence honeypot.  Tracy also denies hidden cameras, and virtually everything Virginia Giuffre said--indeed FBI concluded she was unreliable and never relied on her and she has herself had even officially retracted some stories.  But there is much more evidence of hidden cameras than just the words of at least occasionally perjurious Giuffre.  And the fact that there is no evidence of the Kompromat...of course, that would always be whisked away immediately to its sponsors, and even if some did fall into FBI hands they could be demanded to disavow it by CIA.  Tracy just doesn't seem to get how it works.)

There is no evidence that Epstein used physical force.  His primary tool was offers of money and modeling jobs.  There is perhaps only one claim, never heard in court, that Epstein made a threat (Jane Doe # 2).  But since minors are involved, any transportation with the intent of doing prostitution automatically becomes Trafficking even without physical force or threats.

Now, this is not to say at all what it was like with other men Epstein and Maxwell provided to other mean for "massages."  This whole enterprise wasn't merely to gratify Epstein, he was generally masturbating himself anyway, but to entrap other rich and powerful men, and it was exactly at the right level of criminality to be extremely embarrassing and beyond the pale (admittedly large) of the people on top.  

See the level of outrage at Prince Andrew for (allegedly--an absurdly thin pretext here as there were many gold diggers after Epstein too) observing, along with many others, some 6-7 yo girl get shocked by UK grand madame Ghislaine Maxwell...now his actual arrest cites financial manipulation--that might be more easily established).   Or better yet, the outrage at many many people who nobody accuses of engaging in sex related activities with, for merely associating with that horrible "pedophile" Epstein, who was a very rich and generous philanthropist and helper to his friends, concierge to the ruling Zionist class and leading friendly celebrities.

Most sources say he and his assistants (mostly Ghislaine Maxwell) recruited girls as young as 14, which is consistent with Epstein's stated beliefs that sex with teenage girls 14 and up was not immoral. 

Did Israel let Epstein go?  If they did, it proves nothing, perhaps he'd become inconvenient from too much exposure, perhaps he was even stepping slightly out of bounds.  He'd also backed the wrong horse with Ehud Barak, who was (superficially anyway) conciliatory towards Palestinians compared to Netanyahu.  Netanyahu takes this as proof Barak was working for Russia, though Barak once served as Netanyahu's Defense Minister during the era of Mowing the Lawn in Gaza.

We've seen what happened to a series of people who had been solid Zionists but stepped slightly out of bounds, including JFK, Paul Wellstone, and Charlie Kirk.  If Epstein did no such thing, then it's possible he was rescued and replaced with a dead body double rather than suicided, and he could be still alive and well in Israel today.  All we can be fairly certain of is that he didn't kill himself.  Why should he?  That wouldn't be like him at all.  He was a high flying fixer who solved every problem.  This missing prison video is just enough to explain either hypothesis.  It's not at all surprising he should come to either of these ends.

Who was Epstein working for?

Epstein was obviously working for Israeli and US intelligence.  So it's not surprising that the increasingly irrelevant western mainstream media--owned and operated by US intelligence and big money zionists--is now trying to pin it on Russia.  This misinformation reaches an older generation, mostly over 60 now, that refuses to believe anything else for news.

Alon Misrahi gives a great synopsis here.  And here.

If Epstein had any dealings with Russia, and he tried, they related to helping western backed opponents to Putin, one of whom we know Epstein was friends with.  Epstein had to struggle to get a Russian visa.  His friend Mandelson tried but failed to get a Russian visa for him.

Meanwhile, Epstein's friends were all Zionists, mostly with Israeli dual citizenship.  Ehud Barak was one of his best friends.  Alan Dershowitz was another.  Epstein stated he represented the Rothschilds.  He helped to mediate deals for Israel.  Epstein frequently used the word Goyum to refer to anti-Zionists.

Wexner, who made Epstein rich, was an uber Zionist who ran a big Zionist lobbying operation.  Epstein's wife was daughter of Israeli superspy Robert Maxwell.

And during Epstein's career, what did Russia get from it?  Russia has only sunk into pariah status in the west while Israel has become more and more untouchable even by the media even during a historic genocide which continues today.

Epstein's mission was accomplished and handed off to Palantir which keeps track of special people.

Western media is more and more proving itself to be a laughing stock.  And that is good, because they've been doing this kind of misdirection for a long time and I hope others will see that more and more.  Such as the fake 'Russiagate' scandals, and all manner of the like, going back 100 years or more, many of which "Liberals" and even "Conservatives" in most cases still take as inerrant truths.  If Russia were as powerful inside the US as Israel, there'd be laws against such knee jerk Russophobia, people would get kicked out of jobs in government and education, etc.

It may be worthy of note that Epstein's "conviction" for pedophilia is rather thin.  His one and only one conviction, part of a plea deal, was with regards to a 17 year old girl who had been working for him for about a year.  She had consensual sex with Epstein just once and on the eve of her 18th birthday.  She did not want to be involved in his prosecution and has never sued Epstein.  Florida is one of only a few US States that has an age of consent at 18, most states put the age of consent at 16 or 17, and most countries in the world set it between 14 and 16.  

Nothing else like this has ever been established in court.  All of those who have sued Epstein admit to having misrepresented their ages to him (which is not a legal defense, but often serves as a deterrent to successful prosecution so authorities usually look for "easier" cases not involving misrepresentation).  Girls coached other girls to lie to him about their age precisely because Epstein himself did not want to be having sex with underage girls (bad for his business) and he asked their ages.

Now, Epstein himself, actually operating a Mossad Honeypot to initiate and entrap western elites, would likely have been more careful than many of his friends.  Merely operating such a "massage" service for elites with flown in minors would have been highly illegal even if Epstein himself never enjoyed the benefits.  Many others, we might well guess, could have.

But I see Epstein's greatest criminality as more being Zionist spy and kingpin than pedophile.  Zionism is Genocidal, that's an absolute, while Age of Consent is socially relative.  And without all the bogus religious moral-speak, when and if it is devoid of other crimes Prostitution is merely another form of Wage Slavery that reactionary societies, as ours is, have made illegal rather than properly regulate.

I feel that same way as I do about Chomsky toward other Epstein friends who were not part of his sex club, like Woody Allen.  Their greater crime was not being friends with a pedophile, which isn't a crime by itself at all, but being part of a central Zionist influence and control network through which Israel supporters have kept policy on track for some time, at least 1964 or so, and now increasingly speech too. 

In Chomsky's case, further denying that Zionists or the Israel Lobby are important in western politics, US policy being only determined by US military and economic needs, he endlessly intoned.  It all becomes very suspicious now.

He's smart enough to know what he was doing here.  That's how he got "universal" recognition as west's greatest intellectual, even in the New York Times, which did shun him for awhile.  By deflecting away from Zionist networks, dismissing conspiracy theories in general (which tend to tilt more towards Zionists nowadays) including JFK's assassination, as well as heaping ire on many of empire's enemies (such as Gaddafi and Assad).   He ultimately served elite interests, while condemning them at the same time, by steering clear of certain things.  Especially Zionists, by moving the blame to the US military and weapons gifts and sales (needless to say, we should be maximally protesting that, as it is "our" responsibility, he was right about that, but keeping our eyes open is important too).  Chomsky was also very anti-Communist.*

By being friends with Epstein, Chomsky shows us he was part of the club.  And he was allowed to be the West's Leading Intellectual precisely because he was right at the edge of the permitted spectrum of opinion, with many he got ideas from being beyond that edge and who are more suppressed.  No one was necessarily telling Chomsky what to think, but he rose in stature and exposure as he continued to tell a cooperative story, with just enough deflections.  Not surprisingly, Epstein did him many favors.

And so on, for all the Epstein friends.  By being his friend, doors were opened for them, and cameras entertained for Epstein, and tapes sent to Mossad.  Not to mention files accumulated by FBI, including prepared by Confidential Human Sources who concluded Epstein was a Spy working for Israel.

Who is the new Epstein?  Funny you should ask.  Epstein himself was prosecuted, incarcerated, and suicided under his first Administration.  That's how mob rule works.  How did the New Epstein get that position?  Much like the old one, bending over for the right people, especially big money Jewish Zionists like Miriam Adelson, just as Epstein had his Lex Wexner.  There may be some shift in the Means and Methods, but the New Epstein has an even larger circle, which includes his kids.

bernard, the proprietor of the virtual online bar known as Moon of Alabama makes some "clarifications" and "corrections" along the lines of Michael Tracy above in the context of defending Noam Chomsky and blasting his newborn critics.  I agree it is not technically correct to call Epstein a Pedophile and especially not a Convicted Pedophile.  His conviction, for which he served a short prison sentence in which he was notoriously allowed to leave 16 hours a day, was for Soliciting Prostitution from someone under 18 (with a separate count of Soliciting Prostitution, which is something I don't feel should be illegal at all, just regulated).  The girl involved had worked for him since she was 17, giving him massages while he masturbated, but never actually having sex with him.  The actual sex occurred on the eve of her 18th birthday, and it was consensual, and she never wanted to testify against him (though I might also note that it sounds exactly like statutory rape, of which he of course was not convicted, this being a plea deal he accepted).  These offenses were nothing like "pedophilia."  In these individual acts, Epstein was a law breaker, but not a "monster" or "pedophlle."

The monstrosity creeps in in the incredibly large scale of sex trafficking, which nearly everyone believes happened, and included many world leaders (though at various times the FBI said there was "no evidence" of a honeypot for world leaders, and it seems Michael Tracy believes the FBI on this, but others ask why should they should believe the FBI on this when they often don't believe the FBI on a lot of things, and it's reasonable to believe FBI steers clear of anything that smells like CIA or Mossad work, and various people even in the files and elsewhere have said as much).

So, a correct term would be Alleged Sex Trafficker and I see the more punctilious media use similar terminology.  THAT was what Epstein was ultimately charged with in 2019, and which he never stood trial for, by either being shuttled away into permanent hiding somewhere out of touch like Israel by Mossad agents, or suicided.  NOBODY believes he took his own life, though in JFK Assassination style, none of the mainstream media will confess to that, they all parrot that official story.  But surely by 2019, FBI had enough documentation and will (under his onetime-best-friend-now-enemy President Trump) to go with it, and we are seeing much of it right now, so saying Alleged is almost just a formality.  So I'm ok with calling him a Sex Trafficker without the Alleged.  BTW, Epstein could have served life in prison for this.  The same is true for Ghislaine Maxwell, who in many accounts was the key director of this whole operation, finding and coaching girls and testing enjoying them herself.

And Sex Trafficking of underage minors is not a good thing, there being power imbalance and all that, even if it's fairly remote from the immoral grotesquerie of Pedophilia.  But notably, having underage prostitutes is still something bad enough to destroy the reputation of any person with great social stature.  Not all are wrapped in unstainable Teflon as Trump seems to be among his base.  So it's at the perfect level of criminality for a long running Honeypot (which the FBI continues to say there isn't evidence for, and of course they do).

(*Chomsky was opposed to Marxism-Leninism, the defining view of capital C Communism.  This is the declared view of the USSR (of course) and also China, Cuba, and Vietnam.  Chomskyians would prefer to describe his position being opposed to Stalinism, of course it was Stalin who coined the term Marxism-Leninism to describe the principles of the USSR and what he adhered to, by pulling the correct bits of Marx or Lenin for any occasion.  But Communists like Michael Parenti claimed Chomskians opposed really existing revolutions and resistance to empire, while demanding impossible ideals he freely admitted were not achieved in USA.  Chomsky mostly described himself as Anarchist the idea that the state is the mother of all crimes and we'd be better off without states...which happens to be the end goal of Marxism-Leninism as well...but in the meantime we have Communism in a few Countries.  In the forseeable future anarchism is usually either useless violence, useless passivity, or romantic idealism.  I see Chomsky as romantic idealist both with regards to Anarchism and his original conception of Zionism, which certainly could not have been reasonable in hoping for a Palestinian/Jew stateless paradise in Palestine in 1953, and especially one that would arise other than by Marxism-Leninism.  Romantic Idealism is the perfect basis for gatekeeping on the left end of the political spectrum.  Also true of Trotskyism, ISO, and similar movements, who have often served as left gatekeepers keeping as many as possible away from Marxism-Leninism--which basically the revolutionary practices which actually work.  More often than not, Social Democratic states have slipped backwards into Neoliberalism, the dominant economic paradigm of the capitalists states today.  Only Communist states are immune to abusive Finance Capitalism.  All it really takes is running the banking system in the public interest, as China does now, and not abolishing everything private.  Lenin had that vision too, and he famously said the people should control the Commanding Heights.)

Update:  Epstein nominally worked for the people who Israel was created for (the Balfour Agreement was written for Lord Rothschild).

https://candeloro.substack.com/p/the-name-that-appears-12000-times

Addendum:

Here is the famous Miami Herald article written in 2008 about Epstein (updated 2026).