Israel and Iran 

by | Apr 15, 2024 | geopolitics, Iran, israel, Uncategorized

The West has been attacking Iran for defending itself and its allies since the early 1950s. To understand the issues between the two countries we have to go back to the roots.

1. ⁠The Zionist occupation of Palestine and the displacement and oppression of the mostly Muslim Arab population since the 1930s. Iran sees itself as one of the few active protectors of Palestine. Its funding of Hamas and Hezbollah are all about supporting the Palestinian fight for freedom from occupation and oppression. Here’s a recent quote from the Iranian FM: “The current crisis is rooted in the occupation of the Palestinian territories, displacement of its original inhabitants, organized killings and terrorism, looting of natural resources, apartheid and systematic discrimination and continued aggression on al-Quds in the last 75 years.”

2. ⁠Israel’s role as a US proxy in the Middle East. Ever since the US covertly overthrew the democratically elected PM of Iran, Mossadegh, in 1953, the Iranians haven’t trusted the US, the UK (who started the coup against Mossadegh over control of Iranian oil reserves, which is what is driving everything), and their allies. And with good reason. The US funded Saddam Hussein’s brutal ten year war with Iran in the 1980s, to try to overthrow the second Iranian Revolution, and have done everything they can to cripple Iran’s economy ever since through sanctions and black ops (eg Stuxnet and assassination of various nuclear scientists).

Every time anyone from the West points the finger at Iran as being the instigator of tensions without also acknowledging this history, they are selling you a fairytale.

A Million New Everythings

by | Apr 14, 2024 | nanotechnology, singularity, transhumanism

If people like Altman, Musk, Kurzweil, Hassabis, Huang, etc, are correct, then in the next 5 years (and possibly much sooner) we will start to have AI agents that are smarter than any single qualified human expert in every domain – every branch of science, medicine, comp-sci, etc.

And one of the biggest implications of this, as Altman has been pointing out, is a world where we have a million new experts on every topic, available to analyse and interpret the results of existing experiments, to conceive of and run new virtual experiments and advise humans on how to run physical experiments in the lab, then analyse those results.

And yet, outside of the occasional article in the MSM and forums like reddit, I don’t think see much discussion about this potential reality.

What does the world’s response to climate change look like when we have a million new virtual climate scientists?

What does health care look like when we have a million new virtual doctors and lab technicians?

What does mental health care look like when we have a million new virtual therapists?

What does cold fusion research look like when we have a million new virtual scientists working on that?

What does AI look like when we have a million new virtual AI programmers working on that?

What does a million new experts mean for Nano tech?

For Space travel?

For Robotics?

For Education?

For inequality in capitalism and the future of money?

What happens if AI-jet-powered science quickly helps make K. Eric Drexler’s visions of nanotech come to reality and we have nanofabricators in every house and suburb to make most of our daily food and material needs from waste products, and robots, their components made in nanofabs, to make anything requiring large-scale assembly? What happens to the cost of productions when anyone can make their friend their own nanofab and robot assistant with their own nanofab and robot?

Where are the politicians, journalists and social scientists who are discussing this in the mainstream?

There is a lot of talk about the threat of AI, either by bad actors or it becoming sentient and going all HAL2000.

But what about the age of miracles? How are we preparing for that possible eventuality in the next decade?

Using ChatGPT to Analyse The News

by | Apr 5, 2024 | Culture Jamming, israel, Lifehacks, Politics, propaganda, US politics

One of my hobbies at the moment is to use ChatGPT to help me analyse the news. I imagine this will be come pretty standard in the near future, and there will be better tools to use. At the moment it seems the ABC has blocked ChatGPT from reading its articles, so I have to copy and paste the article into GPT. But then I run a couple of prompts to get it to breakdown the story for me. My basic objective is to get GPT to act as a second brain, helping me uncover the biases in news stories and highlight the gaps in the coverage.

Here’s GPT’s analysis of a recent ABC article about the US and Israel. It gave the original article a rating of 6 our of 10 for journalistic quality.

Why the USA is Terrified of China

by | Mar 27, 2024 | geopolitics

If you want to understand why the USA is terrified of China, trying to slow it down with a trade war and banning it’s social media apps, it has less to do with “national security” and mostly to do with R&D expenditure. Have a look at the way China’s R&D has grown in the last 20 years. In 2000, their R&D was about 1/10 of the USA’s. Today, they have nearly caught up (although private R&D in the US continues to keep them ahead). And there are no signs of China slowing down, either, with a goal of a 10% YoY increase declared at the latest “Two Sessions“.

The US National Science Board recently warned that “China has now surpassed us in STEM talent production, research publications, patents, and knowledge-and technology-intensive manufacturing… China has set the goal of being the world’s leading S&E (Science & Engineering) nation and these NSB reports demonstrate that the United States is on the verge of allowing them to realize that objective. We already see this in artificial intelligence, where China out publishes us, has more patents, and produces more students than the United States.”

What happens when most of the latest technological innovation is coming out of “Communist” China?

The CIA in Ukraine

by | Mar 1, 2024 | Uncategorized

For the people who still believe Ukraine wasn’t a threat to Russia before the 2022 escalation of hostilities, this story in today’s AFR points out that the CIA were in Ukraine from 2016 (and I’d guess a lot earlier than that).

The AFR says: 

It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different US presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.

The listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a CIA-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border. 

About 2016, the CIA began training an elite Ukrainian commando force – known as Unit 2245 – which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence.)

So the CIA has been building secret bases and training a commando force on Russia’s border with Ukraine – and we’re to believe Russia was expected to do nothing? Ukraine may not have been a full NATO member in early 2022, but they were NATO-adjunct,  already being used as a tool of the US against Russia’s interests in many of the same ways as they would be when became a full NATO member.