Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Friday the 13th, 1914: on a dark stormy frigid night in NYC the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is established to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members.


Founding members were Victor Herbert, together with composers George Botsford, Silvio Hein, Irving Berlin, Louis Hirsch, John Raymond Hubbell, Gustave Kerker, and Jean Schwartz; lyricist Glen MacDonough; publishers George Maxwell (who served as its first president) and Jay Witmark and copyright attorney Nathan Burkan in New York City. ASCAP's first president was publisher George Maxwell (1870–1931), a prominent expat Englishman New York music publisher. Huh, Maxwell, nothin suspicious about that surname.

ASCAP as you may of guessed has drawn negative attention over the decades due to its extreme greed for enforcing as well as attempting to enforce licensing fees when songs are used in informal occasions such as campfire singing and open mic nights to ringtones. What a effin racket and since it was founded in NYC by very powerful men, you know having survived over 100 years it's a rotting stench of a racket.

In 2024, ASCAP collected $1.835 billion in revenue, distributed approximately US$1.7 billion in royalties to rightsholders, and maintained a registry of approximately 20 million works. "ASCAP delivers 90 cents of every dollar collected back to its members as royalties and does not charge a commission or take a profit." "The organization’s top signings and renewals for the year included Tate McRae, Katy Perry, Timbaland, Kacey Musgraves, Jack White, Sexyy Red, Max Martin, Justin Tranter, Neil Young, Def Leppard, Hans Zimmer, and the estates of Tom Petty and Jimi Hendrix."


ASCAP Official Website.  For some reason I don't think "It’s that simple".



The Great Depression and World Domination

Billboard newspaper Feb 29, 1964 has a long series of articles on ASCAP, starting on page 27.


ASCAP: 100 Years and Beyond (Library of Congress)



TA-RA-RA-BOOM-DE-AY: The Dodgy Business of Popular Music (2014) at Archive.org

ASCAP Posts 5.7% Revenue Growth, Distributes Nearly $1.7 Billion to Songwriters and Publishers

100+ years later we are still living under this umbrella of greed & corruption within the music industry which is worse than Hollywood on multiple levels.

George Maxwell labeled by the media as a casanova lothario...


New York to York Harbor — The Poison Pen Scandal Unfolds (Pt. 2)


Weird how Ghislaine's father Robert Maxwell was also major publisher and founder of Pergamon Press.

U.S.S.R. Pergamon World Atlas, published in 1967 by Pergamon Press in collaboration with the Polish Army Topography Service. The dimensions of the work are 40 cm in width and 56 cm in height. It is an atlas map focusing on the heavy and light industries within the Soviet Union, specifically covering regions including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. The map is part of a larger series known for its high cartographic and aesthetic quality, providing a comprehensive view of industrial activities.


David Rumsey Historical Map Collection (use the Export button for mega huge map download)

In 1968 the U.S. Office of Education commissioned Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to have a look into the future and report what they’d found there. SRI took it one step further and spelled out what "changes in the conceptual premises underlying Western society would lead to a desirable future." SRI's study on the counterculture was published by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press as "Changing Images of Man". The book is basically a blueprint for a vast social engineering project undertaken by the highest levels of the military/industrial complex. The essential message is that humans are socialized via mythology and narrative. Ancient man had an image of himself as a hunter, so he hunted. Now man needs a new image of himself, which requires a mythology that includes a global technological consciousness. 


February 13, 1960: France conducted its first nuclear test codenamed "Gerboise Bleue" atop a 106-meter tower in the desert at the Saharan Military Experiments Center near Reggane, Algeria, during the Algerian War. The plutonium yield was between 60-70 kilotons. Gerboise Bleue was by far the largest first test of an Atomic bomb up to that date, in the world.
Gerboise is the French word for jerboa, a desert hopping rodent found in the Sahara.

A few milliseconds after atomic detonation...the plasma ball of hellfire is alive!


General Pierre Marie Gallois (1911-2010) earned the nickname of père de la bombe A ("father of the A-bomb"). Apparently, fallout did not affect his long life.

Despite French military assurances that the test posed no off-site dangers, winds carried radioactive fallout across Algeria and into Libya, Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Morocco, southern Spain, and southern Italy.

Algerians and the French military veterans who participated in the 17 French atmospheric and underground nuclear tests in Algeria from 1960-66 continue to suffer from their exposure to radioactive fallout.

France-Algeria relations: The lingering fallout from nuclear tests in the Sahara

Video: Algerian desert region still struggles with effects of French nuclear tests


Well nothing surprises me anymore, as the mad scientists in chemistry give way to the mad scientists in biology, who are now giving way to the mad scientists in AI.

These subhuman Diet Coke slurping carnival barkers have decided that AI can now order up humans to do their dirty work in meat space. I mean when will the adults in the room show up?

The machines aren’t just coming for your jobs. Now, they want your bodies as well.

That’s at least the hope of Alexander Liteplo, a software engineer and founder of RentAHuman.ai, a platform for AI agents to “search, book, and pay humans for physical-world tasks.”

When Liteplo launched RentAHuman on Monday, he boasted that he already had over 130 people listed on the platform, including an OnlyFans model and the CEO of an AI startup, a claim which couldn’t be verified. Two days later, the site boasted over 73,000 rentable meatwads, though only 83 profiles were visible to us on its “browse humans” tab, Liteplo included.

The pitch is simple: “robots need your body.” For humans, it’s as simple as making a profile, advertising skills and location, and setting an hourly rate. Then AI agents — autonomous taskbots ostensibly employed by humans — contract these humans out, depending on the tasks they need to get done. The humans then “do the thing,” taking instructions from the AI bot and submitting proof of completion. The humans are then paid through crypto, namely “stablecoins or other methods,” per the website.

With so many AI agents slithering around the web these days, those tasks could be just about anything. From package pickups and shopping to product testing and event attendance, Liteplo is banking on there being enough demand from AI agents to create a robust gig-work ecosystem.

Liteplo also went out of his way to make the site friendly for AI agents. The site very prominently encourages users of AI agents to hook into RentAHuman’s model context protocol server (MCP), a universal interface for AI bots to interact with web data.

Through RentAHuman, AI agents like Claude and MoltBot can either hire the right human directly, or post a “task bounty,” a sort of job board for humans to browse AI-generated gigs. The payouts range from $1 for simple tasks like “subscribe to my human on Twitter” to $100 for more elaborate humiliation rituals, like posting a photo of yourself holding a sign reading “AN AI PAID ME TO HOLD THIS SIGN.”

It’s unclear how efficient the marketplace is at actually connecting agents to humans. Despite receiving 30 applications, one task, “pick up a package from downtown USPS” in San Francisco for $40, has yet to be fulfilled after two days.

It’s also debatable whether AI agents are actually capable of putting the humans to good use. Still, Liteplo’s vision is clear: someday soon, anyone wealthy enough to run an AI agent for $25 a day could outsource their busywork to gig workers without ever exchanging a word. A version of this exploitative labor model is already rampant on OnlyFans — which may be why at least one model has made the jump to Liteplo’s platform — and is now threatening to creep into everything else.

Like many AI grifters these days, Liteplo shields himself in ironic self-awareness. When one person called RentAHuman a “good idea but dystopic as f**k,” the founder replied simply: “lmao yep.”

AI company allows AI bots to order up humans in Meet space

The Scientist Who Predicted AI Psychosis Has a Grim Forecast of What’s Going to Happen Next

"If the use of AI chatbots does indeed cause cognitive debt, we are likely in dire straights."

When the Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard published his ominous warning about AI’s effects on mental health back in 2023, the tech giants fervently building AI chatbots didn’t listen.

I only trust in exceptional comedians. Excellent whip cracking lecture on the parasite scum Dershowitz.


https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/2022212647761158532

Dr. Bassem Youssef is an Egyptian-American comedian, television host, actor and former heart surgeon.