Dégringolade

author:     VN Alexander source :  Off-guardian 2023 was the year that an artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT-4 spectacularly passed the Turing Test. For a hundred million users, interacting with the Chat bot was indistinguishable from interacting with a human being. The bot appeared to be able to understand questions and reason out competent answers.  Although its replies were sometimes vapid and sophomoric, that may have made them seem even more convincingly human. ChatGPT is capable of processing text inputs (prompts and commands) and outputting text whose patterns have a high statistical probability of occurring after such prompts. Its apparent intelligence is a kind of magic trick insofar as the product seems similar to human reason, but it is really high-speed, brute force statistical pattern matching of words in specific contexts. (How human reason works differently will be the subject of a future essay.) Nevertheless, the impressive performance stok...

By John & Nisha Whitehead November 07, 2023 “We’ve got to face it. Politics have entered a new stage, the television stage. Instead of long-winded public debates, the people want capsule slogans—‘Time for a change’—‘The mess in Washington’—‘More bang for a buck’—punch lines and glamour.” —  A Face in the Crowd  (1957) We are one year out from the 2024 presidential election and as usual, the American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can solve the problems that plague us. Yet what is being staged is not an election. It’s a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, and a bamboozle, and “we the people” are nothing more than marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls. We’re being duped into believing that this mockery of a choice between two candidates who are equally unfit for office actually translates to having some say in how the government is run. To the contrary, this particular con game i...

...that, according to yet another real alpha-man of the people who, I’m sure, can feel your pain as much as he can feel the pain of those "pampered  Palestinians," and intends to do no less than unite us all, same as Bernie, Trump, Biden, Obama, et al., so that the ruling class—his and their class—can more efficiently eat all of our collective working class' lunch, or the little that's left of it....the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. X: MarioNawfal, Pampered Palestinians X: Gykiwi03, Epstein's Pampered Perverts' Paradise And no, it’s not his dynastic family clan and those like them and the privileged—often above law—ways of his cosmopolitan neo-aristocratic class that repulse this virile, political garden-variety moral gnome. No. In his garden-world it’s the latest iteration of "the wretched of the earth," the Palestinians, who offend this him and his class' finely tuned sensibilities. His animals, his vacations, his ...

By Ramzy Baroud Source :  GlobalResearch March 24, 2011  Palestine’s Political Landscape: History and the Role of Hamas “Now it is time to naturalize the flow of history,” wrote Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs (British Guardian, March 16). The process of naturalization is now underway in the region Davutoglu refused to describe as the Middle East (arguing that the term is “orientalist”, and preferring to call the region “West Asia and the south Mediterranean”). Davutoglu is one of the most articulate and passionate Turkish politicians of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Along with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül, he has labored to naturalize the flow of history in Turkey, sidelining an incessantly intrusive military, and forging links between regions, cultures and competing political thoughts. While the mission was and remains arduous, it has successfully led to the emergence of a unique Turkish political thought – proud of its roots, y...

 

  Media stakeout by Vassily Nebenzia, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, on the situation in Gaza and Israel.

 Source:  Antiwar.com b y Alexander Cockburn CounterPunch , April 3, 2000 I  got an invitation to speak a couple of months ago from an outfit called antiwar.com, which is run by a young fellow called Justin Raimondo. "Antiwar.com is having its second annual national conference March 24 & 25, and we'd like you to be the luncheon speaker," Raimondo wrote. "The conference will be held at the Villa Hotel, in San Mateo (near the airport). The theme of the conference is 'Beyond Left & Right: The New Face of the Antiwar Movement.' We have invited a number of speakers spanning the political spectrum. Confirmed so far: Patrick J. Buchanan, Tom Fleming (of  Chronicles  magazine), Justin Raimondo (Antiwar.com), Kathy Kelly (Iraq Aid), Alan Bock ( Orange County Register ), Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), representatives of the Serbian Unity Congress, and a host of others." Raimondo seasoned his invite with a burnt offering, in the form of flattery, always pleasing ...