I have long been of the opinion that Google’s old motto was merely lacking in the proper punctuation. Whenever a Google employee thought, “Should I do the right thing?”, they looked to the company motto for their answer: “Don’t. Be Evil.”
– Anon
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February 24th, 2024 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Dear Mr MacFarlane, In general, I am a fan of “The Orville” the soft science fiction series of which you are the creator and star. The other day I watched Episode 5 of Season 2, “All the World is Birthday Cake”. During the course of my viewing I said some things about your work as the writer of that episode that I now regret. I said that the crew of the Orville had no cause to sneer at the inhabitants of Regor 2 for their unscientific beliefs, given that their own protocol for First Contact with an alien species seemed to be to sashay in to the welcome banquet and start quaffing, without having done the five minutes of research necessary to find out the basic organising principle of the aliens’ society. As this reviewer said, despite possessing advanced computers and translators and all that, the crew “blindly go in, interfere in their culture and cause animosity between the Orville and a first contact species”. Not just animosity towards the Orville, either, the Regorian species is now hostile to the entire Union. I also said that there was no way that two supposedly elite officers of the Planetary Union like Bortus and Kelly Grayson could be so stupendously foolish as to try to escape from that prison camp where they were being held. What on Earth or off it were they trying to achieve? Where did they think they would go? Both of them were visibly aliens, the only two aliens on the planet! How did they think being outside the camp would improve their situation? Surely they would have known that by far their best chance of freedom was to sit tight and wait for Captain Mercer to get them freed by diplomatic means or by the use of the Orville’s superior technology. And after all that gushing about what a joy it was to welcome a new species to galactic society, Grayson and Bortus straight-up murdering a bunch of prison guards came as a bit of a surprise. Yes, they had been unjustly imprisoned and treated badly, but (I asked sarcastically) would Mr MacFarlane recommend that Americans unjustly imprisoned in foreign jails today should grab a gun off a guard and start shooting to kill? Bang goes the last chance of ever persuading the Regorians to reconsider their rejection of contact. The Regorians were perfectly justified in sentencing Bortus and Grayson to death. In fact they should have gone ahead and executed them both even after the “new star” appeared, to save the Union the trouble. Mr MacFarlane, I admit with shame that I insulted your skills as a scriptwriter. I made remarks to the effect that it was completely implausible that people who were depicted as having gone through a rigorous selection process to get the positions they occupied could be so lacking in forethought, so stupendously arrogant, so utterly stupid. I humbly apologise and withdraw that untrue statement. In that respect your script was entirely plausible. Elite people at the top of their profession really can be that stupid. Take those highly educated, highly paid software engineers working for Google, for instance. The “most powerful company in the world” created and launched an AI called “Gemini” that would produce images of people in response to text requests. Imagine the ingenuity that goes into creating such a marvel. But because they are woke, Google told Gemini to make sure that the people it portrayed were anything other than white males. All that concentrated intelligence, and they still didn’t see what would inevitably happen next… → Continue reading: Seth MacFarlane: An Apology February 24th, 2024 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you asked the man or woman on the street whether they think we should have a ‘national conversation about the future of money’, they would probably say something like: ‘Yes, we need to talk about how we can have more of it.’ The Bank of England, however, has a different discussion in mind. It seems to be growing ever fonder of the idea that we should have this ‘national conversation’. But what it wants to talk about is not increasing wealth; it is ‘the future of payments’ (code for introducing a Central Bank Digital Currency or CBDC, the ‘digital pound’). The Bank of England, you see, lives on a rather different country to the rest of us – one in which the pressing economic problems we face are not to do with inflation, interest rates, quantitative easing, or overleveraging, but to do with how we pay for things. In the version of Britain which it inhabits, we have the national bandwidth to devote major resources to the designing of a ‘future payments ecosystem’ so that the UK can ‘remain at the forefront of payments technology’, and we also need to do this as a matter of urgency. Read the whole thing. February 14th, 2024 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Washington, D.C. jury has found that conservative writers Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg defamed climate scientist Michael Mann. The jury deliberated for close to a full day before reaching its decision. At issue were two blog posts, one by Steyn and one by Simberg, comparing the investigation into alleged academic misconduct by Mann, then a Penn State professor, to Penn State’s handling of Jerry Sandusky, the school’s former head of athletics who raped and molested children. “If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up?” Steyn wrote in his post, which quoted Simberg’s. February 9th, 2024 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
But the proposed UK law would go beyond just FaceTime and iMessage to encompass all Apple products. Earlier in January, civil liberties groups including Big Brother Watch, Liberty, Open Rights Group and Privacy International, put out a joint briefing opposing parts of the bill. The groups said they were concerned the proposed changes would “force technology companies, including those based overseas, to inform the government of any plans to improve security or privacy measures on their platforms so that the government can consider serving a notice to prevent such changes”. They added this would be “effectively transforming private companies into arms of the surveillance state and eroding the security of devices and the internet.” January 30th, 2024 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is c. 7 years old, but it is quite marvellous and a tribute to the great tradition of engineering in Sweden. A video done by a Swedish chap who built himself a pulse-jet powered sledge or ‘ice boat’ to run around on frozen lakes. It is basically a V1 doodlebug-type engine on a frame, with some seats and steering. What strikes me is the need for some form of suspension. I have set the video where it has its first ‘ice road test’.January 28th, 2024 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I hear the faint chink of the penny dropping at Guardian. This profile of misinformation specialist – read that job description as you will – Kate Starbird is predictably fawning, but they seem distinctly anxious to get across the idea that she and other misinformation specialists are no longer going to behave in the way they did in the last few years: ‘Stakes are really high’: misinformation researcher changes tack for 2024 US election
That is censorship. One can argue that it is justified censorship, but it is censorship.
The Guardian’s writer, Rachel Leingang, has phrased that last sentence so that it could easily be read as saying the whole of the phrase “the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech” has the status of a mere allegation, a question yet to be decided. I hope Ms Leingang will forgive me if I clear up that potential ambiguity. The U.S. courts may or may not rule that the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the censorship happened.
Hear that? They’ve changed now. Censorship was so 2020. They aren’t going to do that any more. Probably. January 2nd, 2024 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
This post is reposted from a source I do not trust (Double Down News) by a person I do not trust (Dr Susan Michie, adviser to the SAGE committee and literal communist) on a topic (the Israel-Hamas war) where AI-generated fakery is rampant. Remember the six-fingered Palestinian child? Closer examination give yet more causes for doubt – the bizarrely elongated finger on the left hand of the soldier second from the left, the way that, perhaps in compensation, the right hand of the rightmost man seems to have no fingers at all. There is something wrong about the bipod of his rifle, too. The angle of the windows on the left of the picture looks off. The flame coming out of the window is too neatly defined. But what interests me is that I thought “AI-generated” before I looked closely enough to see any of that. Possibly the thing that tipped me off, if I am right at all, was that all the elements of the alleged photograph looked exposed to the same degree, when one would think that the glow of the flames would dominate. Even that form of words, which I got from my husband, is more explanatory than whatever it was that screamed “fake” to me. That said, this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer. December 30th, 2023 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Now, remember. This study — and all the news reports about it — constantly reassures pharma bigwigs and depressed jab-takers that there’s no evidence of adverse effects from the random ‘nonsense proteins,’ the randomized proteins that 25% of their transfected cells are now making. Nothing to worry about! But check out this very telling quote from one of the study authors, Anne Willis, who is a very upbeat kind of lady. She found that the problem just creates a very exciting opportunity for jab makers to fix it: (Professor Anne Willis, Director of the MRC Toxicology Unit) adds it is very exciting that there is a way to fix the issue, which “massively de-risks this platform going forward”. Screech! Hold on, wait just a minute! Slam on the brakes for a second. If fixing the issue “massively de-risks the (mRNA) platform” … that means … there are massive risks to be fixed. And that quote, ladies and gentlemen, gave away the entire game, right there, and showed us what the study authors are really thinking. December 8th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are so far down the slippery slope of “having not been allowed to speak the truth about science because it must be subsumed to ideology” that re-entry into any sort of objective assessment is going to be incredibly jarring. The foundations of modern technocracy are invalid and if your stock in trade has, for decades, perhaps centuries, lain in deriving authority and influence from peddling uncriticizable frameworks to induce others (and perhaps yourself) to inhabit hallucinations. this return to reality poses grave threat to currently ascendant political & ideological power bases. This, of course, dovetails right into the heart of the omnipresent octopus of the government industrial censorship complex, the other group deeply insistent on getting to be the one who decides what’s true and what may be spoken. it too fears unmoderated content perhaps above all else as unfettered facts are technocratic kryptonite. November 20th, 2023 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ten years and ten days ago, the sadly missed Brian Micklethwait wrote this: “What if there is a real collective disaster?” Brian quoted this article by Paul Murphy which said that the response of governments and the scientific establishment to what they saw as the global warming crisis had “destroyed the credibility of all involved” and “greatly weakened the world’s ability to recognize and respond to a real threat should one now materialize.” Brian added,
“An unfree society may be great at imposing immediate unanimity, but what if what it immediately imposes unanimously is panic and indecision?” There could scarcely be a better description of the response of the UK and the Western world as a whole to Covid-19. Masks are useless! Cancel that, masks are compulsory! Herd immunity! Cancel that, vaccines are compulsory! Lockdown! Cancel that, ‘Eat Out to Help Out’, er, cancel that, back to lockdown! November 15th, 2023 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
This article about “climate fatigue” by Francesco Grillo is one of the better arguments I have seen in the Guardian on the topic: “Climate fatigue isn’t a sign that Europeans are in denial – it’s a sign of their fear”. It starts very much in the usual fashion:
I am suspicious of that claim that the decline in European popular support for climate measures “has little to do with” many Europeans ceasing to believe in the seriousness of the claimed coming catastrophe. It has lots to do with it, obviously. If the people of Europe still held the same level of belief in the imminence and severity of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) as they did five years back, their support for drastic measures to head off this disaster would also be at the same level as it was then. They don’t and it isn’t. Their increased scepticism is justified. A great many predictions of doom have failed to come to pass. Click on the word “CAGW” to see relevant past posts by me and others on this blog going back more than two decades. I will restate my own opinion: that anthropogenic global warming probably is occurring but at nothing like the apocalyptic level claimed. Angela Merkel would have been better off saying, “Wir schaffen das” about climate change. However honesty compels me to say that some of the decline in belief is motivated by people finally having twigged that the bill for Net Zero will not ultimately be paid by the infinitely absorbent corporations and governments of legend, but by them. When people drop a luxury belief because it ceases to be a luxury they can afford, they do advance towards reason, but not by means of reason. Sometimes that’s the best we can hope for. It’s not like the prophets of doom are immune from motivated reasoning themselves. The point is that Europeans have realised, correctly, that if we actually do all that the Greens want us to do, it will impoverish us. If we do a quarter of what the Greens want us to do, it will impoverish us. That would be bad, even from – or especially from – the point of view of people worried about climate change. Impoverished societies cease to care about the environment. This is why I said that Mr Grillo’s article is one of the better ones I have read in the Guardian. They are not usually so honest about the cost:
And
November 11th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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