Faker, Faker, Monkey-Maker
Spring – Wk 5: I'm Not a Luddite—Just Picky | What Has Four Thumbs and a Neocortex? | The Fire Extinguisher Fairy Tale | IBM's Mass Debater
I'm Not a Luddite—Just Picky
Technology is A-okay with me. Human beings can't be truly human without some tech involved. Not really. Campfires are great, spears are great, woodstoves are better, and shotguns are the best. A hairless ape with no flames and no weapons is just a funky monkey with no grub-a-dub. Ya dig?
But don't try to feed me that factory-made fungus yogurt or some CRISPR-bred disembodied rump roast. I'm not cool with that shit, Silly Billy.
The thing is, there's tech and then there's tech … if you know what I mean. There's good ones and there's bad ones—those you bring home and those you just leave at the store.
Without tech innovation, there would've been no imprinted clay tablets, and ultimately, no printing press. There’d be no worn copies of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, or PKD's VALIS, or Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles. That means no midnight page-turners. No psycho-linguistic trances under a tree on a sunny day.
Then again, with no tech innovation, we wouldn't have tasteless e-reader versions, either. There'd be no tech companies tracking and manipulating the public mind. No smartphone-addicted dinner dates. No literary two-way mirrors.
Still, if it's all or none, I'll take my losses. Better to have a book in hand and a chip in the brain than to hear your tribe's shaman rattle off the same tale for the millionth time.
I mean, something had to give.
So—no, I'm not a Luddite. Not 100%, anyway. I'm just picky, with a touch of paranoia.
———
What Has Four Thumbs and a Neocortex?
A human-macaque chimera. Try saying that three times fast.
What the fuck is that? It’s a nake ape mixed with a monkey.
On April 15, a US-Chinese team from the Salk Institute in California announced they’d brought three human/monkey hybrids to life. These genome-tweaking mad scientists took a tray of macaque embryos, injected them with 25 human stem cells apiece, then let them simmer.
Of the viable hybrids, 129 perished in their test tubes. The three scrappy survivors were allowed to gestate for 20 days before being aborted and tossed into a pot of bio-waste stew.
In the near future, scientists hope to use similar chimeras to grow various fresh organs to harvest for human use. Thank God for Scientism.
The team's research paper was published in Cell here
———
The Fire Extinguisher Fairy Tale
Boy, I bet NYT-readers and CNN-viewers feel silly right now for believing that ridiculous fire extinguisher story. It turns out Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes after all—as his family suggested in the beginning, and as various dissident publications have long maintained.
If your preferred media outlets will drop a whopper that big to peddle a defamatory “deadly insurrection” narrative, just imagine what else they've been lying to you about.
The razor-sharp Glenn Greenwald explains:
It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick's skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died — and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible.
As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick's own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media's claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.
But the gruesome story of Sicknick's “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous...
Read the rest of Greenwald's account here
———
IBM's Mass Debater
One thing I love about Jews is they love to argue. Jewish people are so argumentative, they often joke that if you ask two Jews a question, they'll give you three opinions. They're so argumentative, a loose Hebrew translation of Israel is “bickering with God.”
Well, thanks to a team of IBM scientists working out of Haifa, Israel, soon every conceivable argument will be settled faster than you can say kvetch. Once their AI argument machine is perfected, even the most stubborn rabbi will be left speechless.
You can't reason with evolution, man. It just happens.
Love 'em or hate 'em, we all know flesh-and-blood “mass debaters”—the Scots-Irish drunk at the bar, the the espresso-addled postmodern problematizer, the dim alpha dawg who acts like facts don't matter if he just yells louder. But the game's changing, and anthropoid mass debaters are about to come up empty-handed. Soon, artificial intelligence will be beating their meat-based cognition on a quantum level.
Enter IBM's Project Debater—the premiere robotic Mass Debater. This AI-powered argument generator is one well-oiled machine. It'll toss a Google on your face before you even think to whip out your smartphone.
The Mass Debater's grip on the data is so tight, it's liable to blow its own fuse.
The Jerusalem Post reports:
Project Debater told its human counterpart, "I heard you hold the world record in debate competition wins against humans, but I suspect you've never debated a machine. Welcome to the future." ...
The system can analyze upwards of 400 million newspaper articles in just the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee! From that database of information, Project Debater fishes out texts that discuss its desired topic, are "argumentized in nature" and support its side of the debate.
Programmed into the system is also a "collection of more principled arguments that try to capture the commonalities between the many different debates that humans are having," he said. "It looks for the most relevant principle arguments." ...
[IBM's director of research] excitedly announced at the debate that such progress in the machine's human-like relatability "can really tell us about human thought and expression – and it's this world that is most interesting to us at IBM research. We believe there is great potential in having artificial intelligence that can understand us. The more transparent and explainable we can make AI, the more we can trust it – and the more we can rely on it to help us make better decisions."
That’s all a bunch of fluff, though. Like any self-respecting contrarian, the IBM Mass Debater isn't trying to raise public intelligence so much as make others feel deflated. With hard data in hand, there's no need to satisfy anyone else.
Humans evolved to explore truths together, in the flesh, but that means nothing in a technetronic age. Scientific Truth is One—consensus reality is just a simian circle jerk.
Real people need each other. The Mass Debater was programmed to please itself. It may get lonely at the top, but that won’t stop this machine from taking care of business.
This made the rounds on GAB today. https://gab.com/ElanaFreeland/posts/107174807123392268
AI kicks off the 10min critical summary of a globalist mindset. 'Do as I say not as I do', makes for lousy parenting, which is the only voice of authority that matters, outside of God the Father Almighty. BVMary said, "Do whatever He tells you." Christ said, "Do as I have done." Full stop.