For those who hate autocomplete, read on.

Quote:It was early last summer. My wife was at an airport. The weather was hot and her shuttle bus was late. She was texting with a family member who had come down with a cough. The family member had taken a COVID test and reported to my wife that it was negative. My wife, returning to the topic of her stressful day, typed the words “I need a,” intending to write “I need a drink.” But the autocomplete feature on her phone, interceding at the speed of thought – of artificial, digital thought -- offered another suggestion: “I need a booster.”

The nightmare is all right there, if you unpack it: The unsought programming of human behavior by pervasive, everyday technologies controlled by deceptive, obscure external actors. They’re deceptive, in this case, because autocomplete is sold as a kind of extension of your will, frontrunning your most probable verbal choices in order to save you time and ease your writing. The feature is not sold, so far as I’m aware, as a life coach, a public health aide, or a physician. But it had behaved like one that day, and my wife, who notices everything, had caught it – she even took a screenshot. When she told me of the incident, it confirmed an emerging feeling that my own texts were often interrupted by digital guides less interested in finishing my thoughts than in foisting on me their own. Strangely, the unusual suggestions were of a sexual cast sometimes – “orgasm” seemed to have popped up several times; not a word I tend to use in texts – which is why I remembered the occasions. Still, I couldn’t cite one in detail. Going with the eerie flow of life in a mediated, moderated age, I’d chosen to ignore them. I’d let them pass.

It’s choice we face constantly these days, particularly in our dealings with technology and the information flooding through it: Should we indulge our suspicions about the machine and the whole murky power complex it represents, or should we dismiss them, in some cases or all?

The argument for repeatedly dismissing them – because they are aroused repeatedly – seems to me to grow weaker by the day, if it is even an argument at all. To return to my wife’s “I need a booster” experience, which may seem minor in isolation but is enormous if treated as one instance of something that very likely happens countless times a day and for an unfathomable range of motives, not many people I know would advocate for phones which plant hypnotic prompts in users’ heads during their innocent conversations with relatives, under the cover of helping the user type. The partisans of covert mind control are still quite few, I like to think, even when the cause in question is popular. The party of thoughtless quiescence in such matters is vast, however, and it rarely defends its inaction. It’s rarely asked to.

Maybe it should be held to higher standards. Just last week, two troubling stories circulated about the secret workings of social media. Facebook, we learned, has been compiling posts which it deems “anti-government” and forwarding them to the FBI. To judge by press reports, these allegedly subversive posts included ones which questioned the results of the 2020 election, but they weren’t limited to such. How the posts were identified remains a mystery – algorithmically, through key words, or in some other way? – but the facts the operation occurred and that ideological filtering of posts is deemed so reliable by Facebook’s managers that they treat it as a form of legal evidence, is startling enough. Meanwhile, over at Twitter, we were told by an in-house whistle blower testifying before the senate, at least one Chinese spy was on the payroll. Other security lapses were also alleged. “It’s not farfetched,” the whistle blower asserted, “to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the senators inside this room.”

Old news, I hear readers thinking. But it is new news – new news which explicitly confirms long-held suspicions of a general kind. And, for other observers, of a definite kind. They thought ahead, saw patterns, warned us of them, and urged on us a host of actions, from denouncing these services to cancelling them to calling for them to be to public account. Which is starting, however feebly, to happen. Not because of the quite people but the loud ones.

These excitable thinkers would be the “paranoid,” or so they’re often designated by those whose habit is to watch another amusing video when it’s shown that Tik-Tok, for example, logs its users’ every keystroke, collecting passwords and heaven knows what else and passing them along to hostile powers. They would be those who, on reading of my wife’s text, would leap to speculate on the implications of an AI-driven program to mold the thoughts, and ultimately the actions, of the human race. The entire race, I say, no less than that, because it is the nature of “paranoia” that its reach exceeds its grasp. Not content to dwell on individual cases, it strives to explore, to extrapolate, to guess, usually in the negative. It entertains the possibility that the anonymous lords of auto-complete might someday trade spooky nudges for bold directives, overriding or even supplanting our weakened wills. By then, we may not possess wills, nor desire them. Too disruptive to the training process.

To voluntarily run such bleak scenarios inside one’s busy little brain is thought to be unhealthy by the experts. Therapists call it “catastrophizing.” They are given to writing prescriptions for the condition. In extreme cases, they view such thinking as evidence of schizophrenia, for which an oft-used medication is a pill with the trade name Abilify. Last week, on my Twitter feed, I saw an ad for it – for a special version of the pill which contains, get this, a tiny transmitter which relays physical data to smart phone apps. The transmitter not only tells the phone (or several phones, if the patient “authorizes” them) if the pill has been swallowed, it also discloses how long the patient has “rested” recently and how many steps they’ve taken. Fascinating. Fascinating that big pharma should seek to implant tiny monitors in people whose illness is often marked the delusion that they have tiny monitors inside them.

But I digressed. Or did I? The topic was paranoia, its pros and cons, and the question I was driving toward is whether it’s tantamount to a duty now, at least for those who pretend to think at all. To learn about a psychoactive drug that broadcasts Bluetooth signals to nearby phones, and then to remember we live in a society of medical mandates with penalties attached, and to further recall that the data on one’s phones is subject to scrutiny by spies and cops, should require of an even an amateur intellectual a measure of cautionary creative inference. What’s the alternative, really? Deep sedation? How much more unconsciousness can you take, and how much more of it should we take, who don’t wish to wake up shuffling along in surveilled, entranced submission to whoever’s doing our thinking for us?

Do your duty, I say. Be responsible. Be paranoid. The future intends to complete itself without you, and if you don’t like it, you may need a pill – which you may be unable to refuse. Go crazy now, on your own terms, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll have some say over how crazy you’ll be driven then.

My personal belief is all planets are but eggs for a species to develop, "the species hatches and moves out into the universe or ceases to be." Plenty of species have become extinct and anyone who thinks it can not happen to the human race then they have not looked at the history of Earth.

The Nevada Triangle and 2000 crashed aircraft

Tucker connects the dots on much of our history and IMO is worth a listen and your time.

Well, it's only taken me a few decades!! LOL but I am now officially a recording artiste.

Long Story Short - I was invited into the recording studio just before Christmas, to record "Something Unsaid" an old original song that I co-wrote with a friend of mine at least 25yrs ago!

That song has now been recorded and mixed, and I've just finished making the music video (myself) on a budget of.... zero! LOL

The music video Premiere is taking place at 19:30 (7.30pm) GMT tomorrow (Fri 20th Jan) on Youtubby!



So, if you're around and you'd like to be a part of music history!!! ROFLMAO Grab a drink and Join me there for the big launch Party.

Cheers!

G

Quote:CONFIRMATION: LISTENING TO A PROGRAM CALLED SENTIENT WORLD...

It has been almost ten years since I have blogged about this subject, namely, "Sentient World Simulation."  In case you missed that blog and that subject, here is the link

In that blog, I indulged in a bit of high octane speculation about what such a computer program simulation of the entire world might be capable of doing interesting, intriguing and perhaps even unusual data correlations between unusual things:

Quote:But behind it all, there is another possibility that lurks, one I suggested in Babylon's Banksters: the ability to figure out the relationships between celestial geometry and human behavior.  Recall, for a moment, that both ancient Egyptian and Babylonian sources indicate that their astrological observations were taken over tens of thousands of years... in other words, if taken at their word, they were suggesting that an enormous stastistical database was compiled. Astrology was the result, which, without that database, was merely a "pseudoscience," with the "results" being passed down to become the qualitative "science" it is today, sans the data that had been compiled.

Since we like to indulge in high octane speculation here, then suppose for a moment that these various hidden programs were also being used to find and collate such correlations. It would mean, quite literally, that "econophysics" would be given a component from celestial mechanics... it would become a real though obviously deeply hidden "astrology".  Now let's extend our speculations a bit further. Suppose, in compiling such correlations, that another set of correlations were examined, namely, those between celestial mechanics and actual astrological texts, beginning, of course, with the various Egyptian and Mesopotamian records that are still extant.  In such a case, the program would perhaps provide insights into the original basis of the origins of astrology, of human history, and of those civilizations' claims for having been compiled over thousands of years. It would be, in other words, a way of verifying their own statements that they were legacy civilizations, declined civilizations, from something far more ancient and advanced.

But now with the following two articles, shared by V.T., we're in a position to expand that speculation of ten years ago rather dramatically, because the idea of a world computer simulation, in which every person becomes a "node" in a database, is back, and with a vengeance. And with its reemergence, comes a confirmation of a speculation I've voiced many times in the past few years. The articles, while somewhat dated, are important, because they confirm a wider and deeper high octane suspicion I've advanced in the years since my original blog about the subject appeared in 2013 :

Quote:Sentient World Simulation and NSA Surveillance – Exploiting Privacy to Predict the Future?

Quote:Understanding and Countering Sentient World Simulation

Why are these two articles significant?

As I said above, it's because they can be taken as confirmation of a wider speculation I've advanced over many interviews and appearances on various podcasts and radio shows; I've advanced the hypothesis that with computers running more and more programs affecting daily life - consider only their presence in equities or commodities markets, or an even more glaring example, the recent failure of the FAA's flight computer system that literally grounded all flights in the USA - that the possibility arises that the "elites" running western civilization lemming-like off the cliff are perhaps doing so in response to what a very sophisticated and complex A.I. program might be telling them to do. Being the fundamentally stupid, immoral, and godless people that they are, they are only too happy to follow the dictates of their real God: computer code, and "science," and a false "omniscience" that it gives them, all of which is of course programmed by humans.

That thesis, I suggest, has been confirmed in spades by the two articles. Consider this statement from the beginning of the second one:

Quote:The Pentagon is running an artificial intelligence (A.I.) program to test how people react to propaganda and strategy of tension. The program is called Sentient World Simulation[/url] (SWS). Defense, intelligence and homeland security officials are constructing a parallel world on a computer that agencies will use to test propaganda messages and military strategies.

With this “God Tier” technology, if the user wants to bring about a certain event, he would already know how the masses would likely behave. It features an avatar for each person in the real world that’s based upon data collected about us from records and the internet.

The core of the data collection is the smart phone, which will be ramped up with 5G technology. Avoid both.

The first article, while concentrating initially on Edward Snowden's claims, also comes to more or less the same conclusion:

Quote:Amidst all of the publicity surrounding the leaks, journalist Christopher Ketcham (who previously won acclaim by covering the tragic events on 9/11) released a relevant new article discussing the secretive exploits of a governmental unit which gathers boundless amounts of information on Americans. Ketcham details programs by the government designed to fight crime by predicting criminal behavior before it is committed and to predict behavioral responses to propaganda and government-inflicted terror.

Both programs rely on keeping tabs on citizens and gathering data by tracking phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks, GPS tracks, Internet searches, Amazon purchases and E-Z pass records.

The program based out of Purdue University’s Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation Laboratory is titled Sentient World Simulation (SWS). This 9-page PDF released by Purdue itself describes the project in adequate detail.

The simulator has taken the spying that Snowden publicized, one step further. The program has amassed databases so profound they can now look so deep into a person’s life they can predict their thoughts and future actions with relative certainty. Although this system is incredibly intrusive and raises many moral concerns, it provides valuable insight into questions which could be extremely beneficial. It’s unclear as to weather all the private-sector efforts towards transparency (including some noteworthy AI projects at Microsoft) will have any effect on the direction and intensity of public-sector surveillance.

By gathering enough intelligence SWS is capable of producing realistic simulations of various different scenarios such as natural disasters, foreign and domestic attacks, resource shortages, and hazardous economic trends. The program, once finished will utilize the information from its colossal database to create these hypothetical situations, predict possible outcomes, and test the effectiveness of various responses. Researchers hope the system will be able to provide effective answers to complex questions which baffle the most skilled thinkers and will create more efficient methods of responding to catastrophes.  (Emphasis added)

So there you have it. Not only is Fedgov@corruption.com spying on everyone, it is doing so to compile massive databases to make generalized predictions, and from these, to formulate specific courses of action under particular circumstances, and more general policy.

There's a dire implication in all this, an "extrapolation" that confirms my suspicions about Mr. Globalooney actually "listening" to A.I.s and computers: if you're wondering why the leadership of the west - the Baal Gateses and Hochklaus von Blohschwabs and the whole viper's nest at Davos - looks and sounds completely nuts, advocating inhuman and - let's call them by what they are - ultimately nihilistic policies, this is why.

Before we leave this subject, V.T. shared one more article, which itself contains further links to articles on this precise topic:

The DoD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth

Post article: The Giza Death Star

Quote:Menticide: Don’t Fall Victim to Mind Control Technologies & Techniques

We come full circle with Sentient World Simulation (SWS), a programme that pools all the intelligence collected about you. SWS uses that information to simulate and predict how you would behave under certain social conditions, such as civil unrest, economic shocks or environmental catastrophe.

But it goes much deeper. The SWS was developed with military money at Purdue University. It creates a digital mirror-image of the real world, including you and me: our streets, towns and even the weather. In order to anticipate how we would react in real life, programmers do things to the digital us: cut our power supplies, simulate weather disasters, crash the economy, etc. This is useful for counterinsurgency planning and market prediction.

Another competitor enters the brain-chip race.




Inner Cosmos Raises $10 Million To Treat Depression With BCI Implant (Forbes)

Quote:Brain Chip by Inner Cosmos Enters 2nd Human Trial to Cure Depression, A Competition to Neuralink

California-based Inner Cosmos has successfully developed and implanted a penny-sized brain chip in a patient to cure depression and will be starting the 2nd human trial in February. As per Inner Cosmos, depression could soon be treated using the “digital pill” as a brain implantation that delivers electrical pulses to the regions of the brain affected by mental illness.

CEO of Inner Cosmos, Meron Gribetz, was diagnosed with ADHD at age 10. The diagnosis was the reason for his interest in neuroscience. He said, “The world is in a state of severe disorder, and the effects are being felt by millions leading to surging levels of depression.”

The Inner Cosmos brain chip has two parts: an electrode and an external prescription pod. The electrode is implanted under the scalp, and a prescription pod is attached to the head to power the device. In March 2022, the company gained permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to carry out patient trials with their technology.

A fairly simple outpatient operation can implant the tiny electrode into the cranium, and the procedure only takes 30 minutes. The implant targets the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for 15 minutes each day, the part of the brain responsible for processes like working memory, abstract reasoning, and motor skills.

The second human trial, if successful, can pave the way for more advanced treatments in neurosciences.

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Perhaps this thread should be called everything you never knew about a cord of firewood.

First of all, let's avoid any confusion about a full cord of firewood and a face cord (aka a Rik).

A full cord is a stack of wood that measures 8 feet long by 4 feet high and 4 feet wide.

A face cord, also know as a a Rik, is one third of a full cord and normally measures 8 feet long, 4 feet high and 16" wide.

Technically this pile of fire wood could be a solid block of wood, or nearly so if you had a cord of firewood that was cut like lumber. However, a cord of firewood could be a stacked pile of logs cut to 8 foot, or more normally logs cut to 16" (that maybe be split).

A piece of fire wood could be cut to 16" or as much as 24" with the shorter pieces for wood stoves and fireplaces and the longer ones for outdoor wood stoves. Regardless of the length of the cut wood, it has to conform to the dimensions of 8X4X4 to be a full cord of wood.

Now, most fire places and indoor wood stoves are designed for 16" pieces of firewood, and so most cords are based on pieces cut to 16" (incidentally most general purpose chainsaws have 16" to 18" bar lengths).

The 16" length log or split piece of firewood stacked to 8' long and 4' high is one third of a cord. Three rows of 16" pieces stacked this way equals a cord and is the most normal way a cord is cut and stacked.

Now a typical wheelbarrow has a width that is around 16" and will fill with 16" pieces of firewood to a stack that roughly equals a 16" cube. 3 wheelbarrows tall is 4 feet and 6 WBs long is 8 feet, so one third of a cord (aka face cord or rik) equals 18 WBs and a full cord equals 54 WBs.

Now if your pieces of fire wood are split in around 6" diameter, a wheelbarrow will hold around 24 pieces or three arm loads of around 8 pieces each or around 432 arm loads per cord.

With my little indoor wood stove, I will burn 2 wheelbarrows of firewood in a 24 hour period on the coldest days, or around 60 WBs a month, so a little over a full cord. Usually it is less.

I can cut around 7 wheelbarrows of 16" pieces on a single tank of gas in the chainsaw that will last me just under an hour of cutting. In about two hours I can cut enough wood to last a week, of course you can add a couple more hours moving and stacking it. That means after around 8 hours of cutting and that much more time moving and stacking, I have a full cord of wood. I burn an average of 6 cords per season that adds up to close to 100 hours cutting, moving and stacking fire wood or around 12 eight hour work days.

For around two week's worth of work days I can have heat for the entire winter. I haven't included the hour each day I take doing more splitting, moving and stacking wood into the house, but I consider that a daily chore, rain, snow or shine.

My open 8' pickup bed won't hold a full cord if tightly stacked but I think it holds more like half a cord loosely stacked.

Eisenhower delivers TV farewell warning against "Military-Industrial Complex," live from Oval Office, tonight Jan 17, 1961, three days before handing Presidency to JFK:






Eisenhower's close aide and friend General Andrew Goodpaster told presidential historian Michael Beschloss in 1982 that President Eisenhower had originally planned to warn against the "Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex" but concluded that it would be "too provocative" to include Congress in this indictment.

Here is the most crucial passage of Eisenhower's "Military-Industrial Complex" speech of tonight 1961 (reading copy he used for TV):



Eisenhower's warning against "Military-Industrial Complex" was largely (an unheeded) warning to JFK, who had campaigned in 1960 claiming that US suffered from a "Missile Gap" (it didn't) and needed big increases in military spending.

War is a racket.

Quote:JFK’s War Against the Military Industrial Complex

A question I often receive in response to my articles and books on the Kennedy assassination is: What difference does it make? The assassination took place almost 60 years ago.

My answer: Look at three things: (1) the current budget of the military-industrial complex; (2) the perpetual foreign-policy crises into which our nation has been plunged; and (3) the totalitarian-like, dark-side powers wielded and exercised by the national-security establishment, none of which can be reconciled with a genuinely free society.

Congress recently awarded the military with a budget of $839 billion, which was several billions more than what President Biden had requested. That’s a lot of money. And it all comes out of the pockets of the American people.

Look at the foreign-policy crises and chaos since the end of the Cold War. The Persian Gulf War, deadly sanctions against Iraq, terrorist blowback, the global war on terror, the deadly and destructive invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran, Kosovo, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, sanctions, embargoes, and now, once again, China and Russia.

Consider the dark-side, communist-like powers wielded by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA: torture, indefinite detention, mass secret surveillance, secret prison camps, military tribunals and state-sponsored assassinations.

Why does the Kennedy assassination matter? It is a virtual certainty that none of that would be happening today if Kennedy had not been assassinated. That’s one big reason why the Kennedy assassination still matters today.

Quote:

Albuquerque police on Monday arrested the man they say is the “mastermind” behind a recent string of shootings targeting Democratic lawmakers’ homes.

The suspect, Solomon Pena, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for office in November, has made repeated claims that the election was rigged and appears to have attended the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in Washington, D.C.

Around 3 p.m. APD’s SWAT team swarmed a condominium complex near the ABQ BioPark Zoo to execute a search warrant. They made announcements for Pena — who they said may be armed with a firearm — to surrender as drones flew overhead.

Within an hour officers had arrested Pena, who is accused of paying four men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators, Police Chief Harold Medina announced Monday evening. Investigators also believe Pena was present for at least one of the shootings.

One of the four men Pena is accused of hiring, Jose Trujillo, is being prosecuted federally on drug trafficking and firearm charges but the names of the other suspects were not immediately released.

Pena ran unsuccessfully in the House District 14 race and claimed on social media he should have won the election. He also visited three of the targeted officials’ homes unannounced in November complaining the election was fraudulent and should not be certified.

The break in the case came after the shooting at Lopez’s home.

More than a dozen shots were fired after midnight on Jan. 3, and police received a ShotSpotter notification.

Medina said responding officers found shell casings, but didn’t immediately see any damage.

The state senator who represents District 11 later reported that a bullet struck the ceiling of her daughter’s room. She had awoken to gunfire and felt material falling from the ceiling.

Then, 40 minutes after the shooting, Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputies pulled over 21-year-old Trujillo, who was driving a Nissan Maxima registered to Pena.

Deputies arrested Trujillo on an unrelated warrant, and during an inventory of the car found 800 fentanyl pills and two guns, a Glock handgun with a drum magazine and an AR pistol.

The shell casings found outside Lopez’s home were tested at APD’s crime lab, and they matched the confiscated weapons, police said.

Timeline

• On Dec. 4 around 4:41 p.m. eight shots were fired at County Commissioner Adriann Barboa’s home in SE Albuquerque. Barboa said bullets went through her front door as her family was preparing to celebrate Christmas.
  
• On Dec. 8, Rep Javier Martínez reportedly heard gunshots outside his home near the North Valley and, after the investigation was announced a month later, found damage “presumably from gunfire” to the house.
  
• On Dec. 11 in the early morning gunshots were fired at County Commissioner Debbie O’Malley’s home in the North Valley and more than 12 bullets struck the house.
  
• On Jan. 3 just after midnight, eight shots rang out at Rep. Linda Lopez’s home in SW Albuquerque. Lopez said that three bullets went through her daughter’s bedroom as the 10-year-old slept.
  

Failed GOP Candidate Arrested For Gunfire At Dem Homes - ShotSpotter assist