I’ll be pretty much out of contact for a few days. I’ll approve comments as I get to them, so be patient. There’s certainly no shortage of things to discuss.
TTG
RSS- Russia can lose this war by Timothy Snyder
- Inaugural crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner
- Orangutans and traditional medicine
- Tatarigami’s assessment of the situation at Chasiv Yar and Ocheretyne
- Open Thread – 1 May 2024
- Barbara Ann on The Great Taking
- William Eaton and The Battle of Derna
- The battle for Ocheretyne
- Supreme Court oral arguments to be heard on April 25 about presidential immunity for official acts
- Nasa’s Voyager-1 sends usable data from deep space
Looks like the Lions will be heading to the Super Bowl.
Fred, as a Lion fan from mid ’50s on, my hopes will be with the team as they play out in SF.
I must admit tho that I had kinda given up on the Lions over the past couple decades. I wud tune in for some games just to watch Sanders, Stafford, and Johnson do their individual “Hall of Fame” caliber play.
Interesting that in Lions ’57 NFL Championship year they played 49ers at the old Kesar Stadium. At halftime 49ers were leading quite comfortable.
The walls separating the teams locker rooms were thin and the Lions could hear the 49ers boasting about the cars, etc they would be buying with their winners $$.
That made Lion players such as Alex Karas so livid that they charged out into 2nd half and won the game.
Lions then went on to NFL Championship game to crush Cleveland Browns
Long suffering Lions fan myself, and would love to see a super bowl appearance, but, to be honest, not sure the Lions can overcome San Fran this Sunday.
But maybe…just maybe
C. S. Lewis popped up on an earlier thread so I thought the Committee may enjoy a few quotes from The Abolition of Man (1943):
Lewis describes here the logical end point of what we call ‘progress’; transhumanism and the enslavement of Man by a tiny minority. I’d perhaps update “eugenics” to “technologies of control”, but otherwise this eighty year old work seems more relevant today than at any point in the last 80 years.
This is wonderful -right?
China – Surveillance state or way of the future?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSU_Xes3GQ
That’s that old creep Plato and his “Guardians”. I didn’t know C S Lewis had brought it more up to date. The abolition of Free Will, the dream of the prog through the ages. “My Kingdom is not of this world” should be sufficient rebuttal of the heresy.
But our current Guardians do seem to have got the bit between their teeth, and would impose their version of heaven on our world if they could.
Girkin AKA Strelkov reputedly sentenced to four years in prison for dissing Putin and the SMO. Some in the OSINT twitterverse are wondering if he will end up in an arctic work camp? Or be sent to the front in Ukraine as cannon fodder like the many other prisoners in Russia.
https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1750580621435367894
For the birds
He lived in a shed
Out the back
A cupboard and bed
Door painted black
Sometimes I heard him
On an old piano
Singing a hymn
Through the window
Birds sitting on the wire
Would gather around
A feathered choir
That carried the sound
To those far away
Who were in need
Had fallen by the way
Those who believed
With it being another of them there Presidential election cycles we’re likely to see a third anniversary repeat?
https://turcopolier.com/biden-in-kyiv-ttg/
It has been said, ‘third time’s the charm’ doncha know …
One thing I have grown more and more certain of is that, Zelensky’s determination to stay in the fight until the very last American dollar is spent is too too reminiscent of too many US politicians.
(Howdy y’all of my pals)
JK/AR
All that you believe
All the sides that you take
All the wars that you fight …
…
All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come
…
And if you don’t fight this, you fight yourself
And if you think you are smart
…
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
Us & Them
hahahahahaha!
Ukraine lost. Russia wanted the eastern side because they spoke Russian. They got it. Time to move on. I know this is uncommonly difficult to accept but that is what happened. No ghost of Kiev, no full frontal assault is going to change this fact. Accept it and move on. Your tax dollars can be wasted on another war or, this one. Who cares when you’re bankrupt and can print. Keep printing. Should be fun.
Helps protect Crimea too, which the neocons always wanted to take “back”.
Kharkiv, Izium, Maripol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and many other cities in eastern Ukraine have a majority of Russian language speakers. Even the ethnic Ukrainians living there spoke Russian as their primary language. And yet Putin has destroyed those cities and killed tens of thousands of those Russian speaking civilians. He continues to do it in Kharkiv and Avdiivka with artillery, rockets, airstrikes and missiles.
Those Russian speakers want nothing to do with Putin or the Kremlin and do not want to be part of Russia. They have a much better life and higher standard of living than the citizens of Russia (or they did have before Putin started killing them in order to ‘liberate‘ them).
In the US, the Spanish speakers in San Antonio, Alberquerque, Tucson, & East L.A. don’t want to be forced into becoming Mexican citizens. Except perhaps for a few los estúpidos who dream of resurrecting and expanding an Aztlán empire.
Putin wanted Ukraine because he wanted their industry and agriculture. Even to this day he still steals their grain. He hasn’t yet benefited from their industrial base because in the occupied lands he destroyed it.
leith
“Putin has destroyed those cities and killed tens of thousands of those Russian speaking civilians. ”
can you give a source for those figures ?
For a moment there, I thought you were talking about Gaza where tens of thousands of civilians have indeed been killed by US bombs and in very short amount of time.
Wiz –
Wiki listed at least 26,785 civilians killed in Volnovakha and Mariupol. Their source I believe was a November 2022 BBC article that cited local authorities and evidence of mass graves.
It also listed 1699 confirmed civilians killed in Kharkiv as of December 2022. But shelling and missile attacks have continued on Kharkiv in the year after those figures were published. What is the total now?
Those figures do not include other Russian speaking areas of Ukraine.
The number of wounded civilians I haven’t seen. But I’d bet they are much larger.
Torture? Head of regional police Volodymyr Tymoshko reported a year ago that they found many torture chambers in the liberated areas of northeastern Kharkiv. He described detention conditions of civilians as “inhumane,” and many had been given electric shocks or had their fingers broken. 78% of the people there in Kharkiv speak Russian as their primary language. Or they used to, now they are learning Ukrainian. And they’re speaking a pidgin-Ruskrainian while they learn. Kinda like Spanglish.
Leith,
In those cities in CA NM TX they don’t want to fully assimilate either.
Fred –
Some of those Spanish speakers in the SW were here before the Mayflower.
As for not fully assimilating, that’s not just them. So doesn’t or didn’t every other ethnic or linguistic group in America. Birds of a feather… the old saying goes. It’s still true. The melting pot is more like a chunky mulligan stew. Some of my Irish cousins still live in majority Irish neighborhoods in Southie or Charleston. The same with some family in French-speaking communities in northern Maine. There are Chinatowns, Little Saigons & Little Manilas throughout this country. Plus Arabtown in Detroit, Little Kurdistan in Nashville, Little Odessa in Brighton Beach & Little Armenia in LA.
The only fully assimilated Americans I’m acquainted with were educated in public schools and spent at least four years in the military at duty stations far from home.
leith –
I have been to Ukraine and I have been to Russia and you have your metaphor backwards. Russia is USA and Ukraine is Mexico. Now, if Ukraine is allowed to join the EU that will change everything … but that has not happened yet.
I’m sorry, I mistitled my Pink Floyd song. It wasn’t Us & Them. I have repeatedly stated that I believe the wars underway, Ukraine and now Israel, are meant from the start to grow. The correct title is: “Brain Damage / Eclipse” even better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z39KZAryzk
The hahaha pertains…
What Do You suppose C.S. Lewis saw going on in 1943..When He Connected
“Nature” to the Abolition of Man..? Mother Nature..? The Enviroment..? Most certainly…Nature Has Always Played a Role..In Mans Conquest of Man…
Most Dramatic in The Americas…and How The Aztec,,Inca,,Olomec..Mayan People….
Created Rematkable Cultures all over the Americas…In Jungles..Rain Forests..Lush Land,,,Irrigation..Cultivation..Crops…Industry..Technology..Many Consider AI…and Alien.. God Culture Rulers..One King..Blood Sacrifices…(Always..Blood Sacrifices) …and Millions of Highly Skilled Workers..A Wonderland..,Connected to Asia..?
Even Beyond…Sumeria…Babylon…Asia..Persia..on Many Levels…and Yet..They are
GONE…Looted..Pillaged….Plundered..Destroyed…Out Smarted..Left to Go back..
To Nature..
Nature Wins..Every Time…Every War..All Traces,,Gone..All BodiesGone.
…Since The Great Flood..and
with Every War…Nature Wins..The Bugs Win..Proganda Wins.. So Mans Fate…Now…Lack of..Resources..Material..Reason…Dignity..Integrity..
So AI and Technology..Will Be The New Gods..of Influence..Propoganda..
Brain Washing ..in every Culture Existing..It will just Be Nature.
.Powered by Every
One who Can Plug it..Into Thier Control..and Your Brain..Omega Man.. and Exodus..
Kein Butter..Kein Brot..Auf Wieder Sehn…Mench…1943……2034..
Jim
jim..
The book’s subtitle was “Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools” and Lewis begins by critiquing a recently published text for the teaching of English (in England of course, but the significance was universal). Probably the most famous quote from Abolition.. is
The text Lewis critiques teaches children that concepts such as beauty are entirely subjective and Lewis saw this as a slippery slope to the destruction of all traditional values, with the results he describes. How far we have traveled since. Kids now are taught critical theory, intersectionality, that the very reality of their gender is not objectively fixed and that views divergent from Authority is something called “misinformation”.
In 1943 the theory (and practice) of eugenics was very much in vogue. Associations with Nazism discredited eugenics, but the concept of modifying/conquering our own nature has returned big time with the advent of the transhumanist technologies so beloved of the likes of Yuval Harari. At the risk of becoming a Great Reset bore I will say it explicitly: The GR is the final conquest of Nature/Man Lewis was describing. The whole intent is to hand unimaginable power to a tiny minority who will thereafter have the capability to condition we serfs/slaves as they see fit. Revolution will become impossible. The very concept of liberty will be forgotten – educated out of us.
I appear to be among a very small minority who see the magnitude and significance of the threat. This conquest has been decades in the planning and indications are the attempt will be made soon. I make no apologies for trying to bring the greatest evil mankind has ever faced to people’s attention. I’ll desist if TTG asks me to.
Barbera Ann..
Thank You…So…Having No Background on C.S. Lewis..but understanding of what else you wrote..and agreeing with
your Points..
..I Did a Wiki Background on C.S. Lewis ..and His Irish Roots…Parents..Education..Fascination with Nature..Animals..Nordioc Lore/Folk Tales…Icelandic Myths..and Storys..
Angelican Pastor Father..Grandfather. ;;Sick..Dying Mother..
I Connected with What He experienced as a Child..Emotions..Love of Reading…Writing..Love of Nature..I was much the Same..Reading in my Bed with a flash Light Since My Earliest Memorys..
His Move to England..various Schools..Influencers..until Wounded a Officer in the Trenches of WW1..getting Woulded,,
Later Relationships..with Writers…including JRR Tolkin….
Lord of the Rings..Hobbits..Magic…I Read Every Book..
Also..The Sciences of Then..The Polotics of Then..The Bizzare Medical Genetics Tampering..and Exterminations..Not just Nazi..But Communist Too…Death Camps all over..Racial.,,Social..Class Extermination..
Now..Its all Reversed EuGenetics ..Anti Traditional Anti Value Based..Anti Family…Perversion..Given Power..Covertly..
NOT Overtly ,,,As Applied Last Century ..on Beyond…As Colonel Lang Often Exposed…and Commented on..Even The Cult Like Rituals..of Modern Religion..
Yes…I Knew That the “Nature” Part of C.S. Lewis..Would Apply to Human Nature..And Thats Why..One of My First Poems..
was about How..Shape Shifter Satan..Temped In in the Garden of Aden..and the Follow Up,Conversations ,With God..
I Agree..We Are Seeing..The End of This Adventure..The Gathering..and the Ring..of Evil,,Back in the Furnace of Hell..
Exactly as Described in The “Great Book..”..In Digital Color..
jim
Barbara Ann,
I agree with you on the GR, so, as Sheriff Bart said in Blazing Saddles, “Keep the faith brother”.
BTW, took your suggestion on writing that book. Got sidelined a bit by family commitments butam back at it. Will sadly miss Pat’s suggestions on how to write accents of a unique dialect.
You too my friend, good luck with the writing.
Just like …explain this
Qatar has a big American military base and it funds hamas.
Anyone wonder about this arrangement.hmmm
They fund all sorts:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_and_state-sponsored_terrorism#:~:text=A%20small%20part%20of%20ISIS,bank%20account%20to%20finance%20AQI.
The Qataris and the Saudis funded the Jihadists we used when we were attempting to destabilise Syria. “We” being the western countries generally – including Germany, I was surprised to find out. Surprised because I had always thought the Germans were on the Nie Wieder kick so were the good guys. Ah well, there’s one born every minute so I was in good company.
A very tangled web, when it came to using Islamic terrorism in pursuance of our various foreign policies, 9/11 being the worst example of blowback but plenty others. Ours being the Manchester bombing.. As for Hamas, this was a movement overtly promoted by Netanyahu to derail the PLA. That backfired too. Israel also supported the ISIS enclave up on the Golan heights.
Brzezinski kicked off the practice of using Islamic terrorism in the Carter years. Said afterwards it was a small price to pay for getting the Soviets entangled in Afghanistan. Regarded it as a triumph and attributed the fall of the Soviet Union to the move.
We’ve been at it ever since. Can’t beat a bit of good solid fundamentalist Islamic terrorism if you want to destabilise this or that country. The deal in this case was that the Saudis and Qataris did the funding and we did the arms buying and supplying.
Might I correct an error? PNA or PA.
I had a dream about the manchester bombing a few days before it happened.Nova music festival and bataclan concert.Vegas concert
Blowback
So 7/10 is a the other side of the coin,a backblow
Backblow.
Hey I have come up with a new word…..backblow
.
While there are many concerns people have,
this is a big one for me, as an American:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/jpmorgan-ceo-jamie-dimon-warns-us-driving-toward-cliff-debt-snowballs
I hear people in America advocating for two things:
1. Spending more, more, more on health care.
2. Spending more on foreign involvements.
Wars in the Middle East and Asia have a total cumulative cost to the U.S. in the trillions.
Our conflict with Russia over who controls Ukraine, and other issues, is costing significant money.
All these are totally optional, and add to the national debt.
No matter how committed to the situation in Eastern Europe are,
I urge you to ask yourself “Is it really worth it?”
TTG I hope you’re having a good time away. Well deserved, if so! Er, a fragment fell to the bottom and escaped. Only four words this time. You couldn’t …
English Outsider
Thnks TTG. Afraid I came straight in from work and didn’t check that at all as carefully as I should have done. Still reads like nonsense. Hoping it’s OK to resubmit and have done.
Responding to the question is it (the Ukraine war) worth it:-
It’d be worth it if four conditions were satisfied:-
1. That we had the military and economic power to enable our proxies to win.
2. That our proxies had a more or less normal government.
3. That we could be sure the Donbass and Crimea would not be subject to ethnic cleansing were we to win.
4. That we had genuine grounds for fearing a Russian invasion after our defeat in Ukraine.
That’s looking at the affair as an ordinary voter. Since none of those conditions are satisfied there’s nothing in it for me.
Looking at the affair as a politician, I could see a lot of pluses in victory against Russia. Though the downside is so catastrophic, as we’re finding out, that even were I a politician I don’t think I’d have wanted to have anything to do with this venture unless I’d been dead sure at least condition 1 was met.
Given the state NATO’s in we never had the military clout necessary to defeat Russia or to help our proxies defeat Russia. The sanctions war was self-evidently doomed to failure from the start – as many in Washington and Berlin/Brussels were warning at the time, and is even more doomed to failure now.
One can only assume that some madness seized our respective politicians back in early 2022. Common enough, that, but what I still find difficult to get my head around is how easily they fooled We the People into going along with this dumb venture.
I used to believe We the People were a bit more savvy than that.
Note. “… how easily they fooled We the People into going along with this dumb venture.”
Maybe not such a mystery. A current sample of one of the many videos out by the British press:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFIzJjP2YfI
3 million plus subscribers. Similar outlets also have large numbers of subscribers and views.
In contrast, a current video from a commentator/news aggregator with a different take. I think the two videos came out within a day or so of each other – this one I found is from today:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFIzJjP2YfI
207K subscribers, the bulk of them I’d guess not from Europe.
No contest. One can adapt the old tale of a couple of Russian generals making their way through the ruins of Berlin. “By the way, who won the information war?” “Oh, no question about it. They did. Hands down,”
So that’s the mystery part solved of how the politicians and their information warriors – “journalist” is solely a courtesy title for most of them – got us to go along with this venture. They lied like troopers and it was their lies got the circulation. But Lincoln never said you could fool all the people all the time. And if you could, you can never fool reality.
Uh, those two links to YouTube videos seem to be identical.
Mr Harbaugh – thank you very much. The second one was supposed to be this one –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=028HrtF0Iu4
Contains ads that my adblocker can no longer block. Presumably that’s now standard but it is possible to skip them.
Today, I bring the funk, by which I mean Defunkt. I am mostly a lyrics guy, but you can’t argue with the funk, and why would you want to anyway?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you “Mind Control” by Defunkt.
https://youtu.be/IoeFqNtkzXc?si=xNODkDH0ZbqS-SQ-
sorry for the double post…
I am not knowledgeable at all about AI,
but think this article by Will Hurd
about the need to think about how its development should be regulated is worth reading:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/30/will-hurd-ai-regulation-00136941
Some real issues there.
Not clear what the best solution is, IF one exists.
Keith Harbaugh
I’m all for AI regulation, so long as it takes the form of a Butlerian Jihad. It is our only hope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian_Jihad
AI proper as exemplified by Alphago or the current LLM frenzy, ChatGPT and all is not that much of a problem, it is not autonomous and does not interfere with the mind and consciousness (what theists call the “soul”).
Musk Neuralink directly tinkering with the brain is where the real danger lie.
There is no lack of “mad scientists” to pursue this kind of goals, always with the pretense of doing good like curing cancer and aging.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full
Barbara Ann,
You mean AI won’t be defeated by simple logic bombs like on Star Trek (the original series)?
Fred
There are rumors AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is here already. It will be soon in any case. How anyone in their right mind can think we will be able to control something with reasoning powers far in excess of the human mind and which can think 10,000 times faster than us is beyond me.
James Lovelock was of the view that a hyper intelligence may want to keep us around as pets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novacene#Benevolent_cyborgs
“I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do” – HAL 9000
Barbara Ann,
I’ve used what might be called AGI a while ago. It deployed a thousand agents, as they were called, out into the wild and returned to report and be debriefed on their finding and reasonings. I never feared this AI tool. Maybe it’s because I know the inventor, but pulling the plug always seems to an available answer to an AI that appears to get too big for its britches.
“I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.” – HAL 9000
Barbara Ann,
Twitter Bots, e-girls, and META’s whatever are already ‘influencing’ every generation from the Boomers on. But I for one trust all those H1B visa holders, they know exactly what they are doing, and who-whom too.
@Barbara Ann
Unfortunately AI will be welcomed by the very people it will dehumanize:
https://twitter.com/philosophors/status/1753075227536609412
jld,
As proof, just look at how so many people in this world has become melded into their smart phones.
jld,
Just to give us even more nightmares…
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musks-neuralink-has-implanted-its-first-chip-in-a-human-brain-whats-next/
I have a hunch not a lot of people are going to cue-up to have one of Elon’s chips implanted in their brain…but ya never know.
The Davos crowd discusses AI:
https://www.politico.com/sponsored/2024/01/as-ai-ascends-davos-leaders-take-on-trust-and-transparency
“Since the roll out of AI-powered chat bots, AI has developed a major trust problem among the public.
The majority of Americans said last year that the risks of AI outweigh the potential benefits, and in the EU,
Europeans were overwhelmingly in favor of restrictions around its use to protect jobs and privacy.”
the asymmetry of Ukraine’s navy vs Russia’s has been a serious problem.
for Russia.
https://youtu.be/mX1Gwk0qkV8
Ready for the Chinese New Year?
Get in the mood by watching a Lion Dance:
https://youtu.be/Bs0GuU0cUtw?t=2m