Photo: Ludd, drawn here in 1812, was the fictitious leader of numerous real protests. Granger Collection, New York.
The question is, To be or not to be or not to be …
(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet)
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Rolling out Smart Phone City, our 51st state’s govenor, Zelensky: Here, highlights from Lily Lynch’s recent blog: Ukraine’s ‘state in a smartphone’.
- Notice the language — run like an IT company, Smart Phone city, exporting digitalization, you only need two seconds to become an entrepreneur’ and ‘30 minutes to found a limited liability company;
- to ensure widespread adoption of the app, the government produced a miniseries with well-known Ukrainian film stars – creating what Fedorov calls ‘the Netflix of education’, particularly for those in rural areas and the elderly;
- Diia eVorog (‘eEnemy’), civilians can use a chatbot to report the names of Russian collaborators, Russian troop movements, the location of enemy equipment and even Russian war crimes. Such reports are processed through support services at Diia; if deemed legitimate, they are submitted to the headquarters of the Ukrainian armed forces. At first glance, the interface looks like a video game;
- that positions Ukraine as a technological powerhouse forged in war;
- it was announced that by 2030, Ukraine intends to have become the first country to go entirely cashless and have a court system governed by AI;
- As Zelensky noted at a recent Diia Summit, ‘A computer has no friends or godfathers, and doesn’t take bribes’;
- Residents of Diia City will also benefit from a ‘flexible employment model’, including the introduction of precarious ‘gig contracts’, hitherto nonexistent in Ukraine;
- Power announced that an additional $650,000 would be provided to ‘jumpstart’ the creation of Diia-ready infrastructure in other countries. On Tuesday, Power said these would include Colombia, Kosovo and Zambia;
- When the Clinton State Department introduced the notion of ‘digital diplomacy’ – with one senior advisor telling NATO that ‘the Che Guevara of the 21st century is the Network’ – it already rang hollow;
- It reflects the impoverishment of the Western liberal-democratic imagination, unable to deliver a convincing or desirable vision of the future, on- or offline;
- IT is about freedom’, the narrator says. ‘All you need is a computer to invent a great variety of things.’
Lynch: “Wearing the Silicon Valley uniform of blue jeans, a T-shirt and a headset mic, strutting the stage like he was delivering an impassioned TED talk, Ukraine’s 31-year-old Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov explained the many features of the country’s pioneering mobile application. Thanks to Diia, he said, Ukraine would be run less like a country and more like an IT company, soon becoming ‘the most convenient state in the world’. USAID Administrator Samantha Power echoed this aspiration, noting that Ukraine – long known as the breadbasket of the world – was now ‘becoming famous for a new product … an open source, digital public good that it will give to other countries’. This would be achieved through the transatlantic partnership between the two nations. ‘The US has always exported democracy’, Fedorov said, ‘now it exports digitalization.’
When Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president in 2019, he promised to transform Ukraine into a ‘state in a smartphone’, making most public services available online. A digitalization agenda of this kind was virtually unprecedented, dwarfing ‘e-Estonia’ in both the speed of its rollout and the scale of its ambition. The programme’s crown jewel was Diia, launched in February 2020 with ample support from USAID. US funds reportedly amounted to $25 million for ‘the infrastructure underpinning Diia’ alone. Additional grants have come from the UK, Switzerland, the Eurasia Foundation, Visa and Google. The app is now used by some 19 million Ukrainians, about 46% of the country’s prewar population.”
The question is: Our we all part of this conspiracy? We use this fucking electronic computerized typewriter with millions of gigs of storage, and tied to the fiber optics, trolling the vast world wide net of information, so are we too the enemy? We communicate with cellular phones, so are we feeding the monster, the ghosts in machnines, the ghosts of the CIA and Mossad and MI6 who want us all handcuffed and monitored? We have our medical information Zoomed at home, and we bank on line, take Snap Shots of old fashioned checks to deposit, so are we responsible for our imprisonment?
We laugh at the Chromebook jokes our k12 students make. We love Hobbits in the next and next Lord of the Rings, and drool over Cruise and his CGI pecs in Mission Impossible streamed on our tiny black mirror at bedtime while asking Alexa the best place to get Civet feces washed coffee. Are we the enemy?
We all pay for this gulag creation, from IRS chasing small potatoes like me, to the big bad killers of Julian Assange. We all have our nano-breaths fogging up our black mirrors that are now part of the Zelensky’s wet dreams of tracking us ALL. First, try it in Estonia, Moldovia, Ukraine, then, the world!
Here’s a hell of a deal for USA taxpayer LLC, CIA: For $1 put in, $15 coming back.
It’s open, in the air, Wiki-CIA-Pedia: “In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability. The name “In-Q-Tel” is an intentional reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond.
In-Q-Tel has stated that the average dollar invested by In-Q-Tel in 2016 attracts fifteen dollars from other investors.”
It is a fascist’s, oligarch’s, racist’s wet dream:
I just do not think most radicals and revolutionaries and anti-imperialists and those for Russia’s right to defense, peace, accords, treaties, independence, get it, get how overarching these madmen and madwomen are, with their armies of nerds, eggheads and academics and STEM gurus. Watch this shit storm:
For ZioAzovUkrainians, this is reality: eVorog (‘eEnemy’), i.e. RUSSIANS (or anyone looking beyond the dirty tricks of Mossad and DARPA and Blackrock and Tel Aviv, London, Brussels, DC) are THE enemy, and will be blasted on a computer video game app that ties into the security-finance-survelliance state actors, including Google-JP Chase Morgan-BlackRock-Blackstone-Vanguard!!!
Then after the app IDs us, well, then, send in the cocaine cowboy clown’s assassin drones, or just old fashioned black-booted SS or IDF or SBU kicking in the door and targeting with the latest Israeli-made sniper weapon.
From Lynch:
When Russian forces destroyed numerous TV towers, Diia launched broadcasting services to ensure an uninterrupted stream of Ukrainian news sources. Ukrainians can also register destruction to property from Russian military strikes, which the government says will guide the country’s post-war reconstruction. Beyond the introduction of these useful wartime services, Diia has rolled out an array of ‘civil intelligence’ features. With Diia eVorog (‘eEnemy’), civilians can use a chatbot to report the names of Russian collaborators, Russian troop movements, the location of enemy equipment and even Russian war crimes. Such reports are processed through support services at Diia; if deemed legitimate, they are submitted to the headquarters of the Ukrainian armed forces. At first glance, the interface looks like a video game. Icons are illustrated as targets and army helmets. After users submit a report about the location of Russian troops, a muscle-flexing emoji pops up. When they submit documentation of war crimes, they click an icon of a drop of blood.
You have to take a short leap from Ukraine to the WEF, Fourth Industrial Revolutionaries, Transumanism Backers, and understand how the Power of AI to Control Us all is their goal, but we have to leap backward in order to look at why leadership is so disconnected, so transhumanist, so censorious, so Farenheit 451, so Brave New World, so Lord of the Flies, so 1984, so eugenics drenched. These people are in their own world, but their polarized colored glasses and Stem cell smoothies are killing us, even those of us who believe in full stop/time out/precautionary limits on their machinations, on their scientific disgust, on their world of more and smaller and quantumized this and nano-tech that, CRISPR-flogging us all into oblivion.
These people, the policymakers, CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, they live in their own smeared up bubble of hubris and hasbara. They are the Frankenstein masters.
And that propensity is particularly dangerous when leadership groups have become both selfish and short-termist. There really was once upon a time some people who went into government service for the service part, and not for the revolving door and networking. There was also a time, before the rise of global elites, where the powerful had ties to particular physical communities and some took interest in their betterment. In other words, while there were plenty of self-promoting and mediocre people at the helm, there were often enough in the room who were concerned about long-term risks to put a check on the worst behavior. (“US Geopolitics: Believing Impossible Things”)
There are no ethics, really, when the stage is set at places like CIA-DARPA-DoD-FinTech Stanford, or name the one of a thousand universities, even community colleges:
(Introductions by Professor Rob Reich, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and grad student Margaret Guo end at 13:52.) Twin revolutions at the start of the 21st century are shaking up the very idea of what it means to be human. Computer vision and image recognition are at the heart of the AI revolution. And CRISPR is a powerful new technique for genetic editing that allows humans to intervene in evolution. Jennifer Doudna and Fei-Fei Li, pioneering scientists in the fields of gene editing and artificial intelligence, respectively, discuss the ethics of scientific discovery. Russ Altman moderated the conversation.
This corrupt Big Time Stanford U, and the rottenness of the Prez: Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne is in hot water.
These high-tech, anything goes in science corrupt folks:
Since last fall, allegations of image manipulation in scientific papers for which Tessier-Lavigne is listed as an author have spurred questions about his decades-long scientific career. While members of Stanford’s Board of Trustees and several outside legal and scientific experts review the claims of scientific misconduct, Tessier-Lavigne has remained at the helm of one of the world’s premier research institutions.
His unusual position as president-under-investigation mirrors an unusual public-relations approach. Instead of staying silent, as many embattled leaders do during an investigation, Tessier-Lavigne has vocally defended his actions, criticized the student newspaper in harsh terms, and cast himself as a faculty member first and president second.
Some experts in higher ed and science have raised their eyebrows at the president’s tack. In embracing a defensive posture, critics say, he may have compromised his role as a community leader.
So, some egghead with the all that AI love and the other egghead with all the valorizing of CRISPR, they have zero weight in a discussion on the ethics of their Frankensteins, their creations, but in the world of controlled oppositions, controlled MSM, the media spinners in Academia who never scratch truth or rebelliousness, with of all of those secret private security bullet proof legions protecting bankers, millionaires, billionaires, the lot of them at Davos or Aspen, we will never get what we need — real debates with real revolutionaires, whether the beautiful people do or do not call us all Luddites.
Here, from the Stanford student newspaper, god love them:
Meanwhile, Tessier-Lavigne continues to evade questions. After a recent event with Colombian president Gustavo Petro, Tessier-Lavigne was approached by a Daily reporter about his research. To two questions, Tessier-Lavigne responded with silence: “Why did you publish Alzheimer’s research you knew wasn’t reproducible?” and “What was the decision-making process behind not retracting that paper?” To a third question, “What do you have to say to people who are wondering why there are so many allegations of research misconduct from your lab?” Tessier-Lavigne told the reporter, “very nice to see you and look forward to corresponding.” (source)
There are so many studies on this fact, how research is not reproducible. And, the solution to this? Yep, AI: Currently, researchers that have the most-cited or most popular studies in “high-impact” journals get rewarded — even though the methods may not be reproducible. In a recent piece in Issues in Science and Medicine, former Lown Institute VP Shannon Brownlee and National Institutes of Health researcher Bibiana Bielekova propose using machine learning algorithms to identify articles by their rigor, reproducibility, and societal impact, rather than their popularity or number of citations. This could incentivize better research methods while illuminating future research paths that are most likely to bear fruit.
Science as ideology. We think we follow science, but we are following blind ideology. Academic research has many problems. One is the replication crisis starting around 2005. In medical and biological sciences, 85 percent of research papers are not replicable/reproducible.
Did we overreact to “the virus” in 2020? Did we march out mRNA too quickly? Or, were those mRNA “things” way advanced in the pipeline? Well, it was in the plan. And if you put “it” (“Event 201” … or … “Moderna as already working on mRNA corona before 2019”) in a search box in Pharma-CIA-FinTech-DARPA Google, you will get pure deniability:
In October, 2019 Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who, together with his wife (now ex-wife), runs the richest and most powerful foundation in the world, co-organized a simulation exercise on a worldwide corona epidemic. Videos were posted documenting the exercise. Find them. Gates now denies such an exercise ever took place.
Why? On April 12, 2020, Bill Gates said in an interview to the BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
This is the same person who, just six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, organised a series of four role-playing simulations of a corona pandemic with very high-ranking participants. Event 201 was a simulation of a corona pandemic conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in October 2019.
Participants from the private and public sectors were presented with a scenario, not unlike the one that has unfolded in reality, and discussed what needed to be done. There are official videos of the four meetings and a best-of-video scenario presentation and discussion by the participants, who are members of a pandemic control council in the role play.
It is true that if a little less emphasis had been placed on opinion manipulation, more attention could have been paid to health and economic policy. One of the four meetings was entirely devoted to this. But health and economic policies did get discussed. Gates can hardly have forgotten that.
The video on control of public opinion is the most interesting one, as it helps to put in perspective the efforts in this regard, which we are currently experiencing. One participant tells us that Bill Gates is financing work on algorithms which comb through the information on social media platforms to make sure that people can trust the information that they find there.
And the Chinese participant, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control muses about ways to counter rumours that the virus is man-made. Remember, this exercise took place in October 2019, before the current pandemic broke out. (source)
So are we “anti-science” and “anti-knowledge” and “anti-civilization” if we QUESTION from the bottom of our intellects? Luddites? Am I blind?
Am I a Luddite: According to an article by Richard Conniff:
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
The original Luddites lived in an era of “reassuringly clear-cut targets—machines one could still destroy with a sledgehammer,” Loyola’s Jones writes in his 2006 book Against Technology, making them easy to romanticize. By contrast, our technology is as nebulous as “the cloud,” that Web-based limbo where our digital thoughts increasingly go to spend eternity. It’s as liquid as the chemical contaminants our infants suck down with their mothers’ milk and as ubiquitous as the genetically modified crops in our gas tanks and on our dinner plates. Technology is everywhere, knows all our thoughts and, in the words of the technology utopian Kevin Kelly, is even “a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.” Who are we to resist?
“The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives.” (source)
Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.
— Thomas Carlyle (source)
