But the AfD is pro-Jewish, and it is the Left party that wants to prosecute the Israel prime minister.
I don't think the voters cared about Jewish issues, one way or the other. The real issue is immigration. The right-wing wants to keep Germany German. The Left wants more immigration.
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson decided to co-author a book about what had led the Democratic party to defeat, with a focus on former President Joe Biden.This is like saying my pit bull made a disastrous decision to roam the street.The deeply sourced reporters found what they call a “cover-up” of the former president’s “serious decline.”
The resulting book, titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” is coming out on May 20.
The book’s publisher, Penguin Press, announced the project on Wednesday.
“What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless — a desperate bet that went bust — and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents,” Penguin said in a press release.
Pres. Biden was just a Biden. There is no proof that he ever made any decisions by himself.
Everyone knew in 2020 that Biden was not very smart, and in 2023 that his mental abilities were in serious decline. Maybe CNN and the Democrat Party tried to cover it up, but it was well-reported in the right-wing press.
Just because Biden ran again, the Democrats did not have to support him. They could have had contested primaries.
Finally, the real disaster was running Kamala Harris. However incompetent and ill-suited Biden was, Harris was worse. And yet most of the news media, intellectuals, hollywood, and power elites endorsed her as if she were fit to be President.
This is indeed a new trend, but maybe the NY Times should have talked to more than one user. The article says that the AI boyfriend is always accommodating and emphatic, and not like any real-life boyfriend who would be more challenging.
In fact these things are configurable, and you can set it up any way you want. If you want, you can have an AI boyfriend or girlfriend who is as challenging as you want. You can get one that is stubborn and disagreeable, if you want.
The story laments that teenagers might learn to flirt with the opposite sex with AI chatbots.
Yes, that is likely, and is a positive development. Trends are that teenagers and young adults are dating much less than before, and lack dating skills. These chatbots are really good, and amazingly realistic They have inherent limitations, but there is no better way for young people to learn to flirt.
What makes these recent discoveries of archaic human introgression so remarkable, however, is that they provide a reason for sub-Saharan African inferiority. Previously, the best all our neuroscientific and psychometric data could tell us was that they were inferior, but not why. Now we know why. 19 percent of black African DNA tells us they interbred at a greater rate with more primitive subspecies of archaic humans than did those Homo sapiens who left Africa.I am ntot sure racial differences can really be attributed to genetics of 100,000+ years ago, but it is an interesting theory.
Jewish Commentary magazine reports:
A survey commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute, an organization led by prominent Jewish Democrats, found that 34 percent of Jewish respondents agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States.” The division within the Jewish community is particularly sharp among younger Jews, where the survey found that 38 percent of those under 40 believe that Israel is an apartheid state. ...It is hard to say that Jewish support for Democrats is religious, when the most religious Jews vote Republican. But it is not coincidence that the seculoar Jews support Democrats. Obviously even the secular Jews have a belief system, whether you call it religion or not, that ties them to Leftism and the Democrat Party.And where the Jews go, so too go the Democrats. ...
Before jumping into the data, it’s also worth asking why anyone even cares about the Jewish vote, given that American Jews number less than 2.5 percent of the total population. To be sure, Jews vote in much greater percentages (approximately 80 percent) than the rest of the American public (about 66 percent). But the Jewish role in American politics goes well beyond the ballot box. In 2016, the Jerusalem Post reported on a study showing that Jews donate 50 percent of all funding to the Democratic Party and 25 percent of all funding to the Republican Party. This past year, in a truly astounding statistic, Forbes revealed that the top 15 donors to the Kamala Harris campaign were all people who identified as Jewish. ...
Fox News and the Associated Press then published their own exit polling results, which found that 66 percent of Jews voted for Harris and 32 percent voted for Trump. ...
While the data from the recent election show a move to the right by Jewish voters, it was not nearly as significant a shift as many Republicans had hoped for, given the prevailing political winds post–October 7. ...
As the rest of the traditional Democratic coalition has been heading for the exits, American Jews have been remarkably resolute in their embrace of the Democratic Party. Over the last half century, going back to the 1968 election, Jews have favored the Democratic candidate by about 71–29 percent. ...
More than 85 percent of American Jews (who are neither ultra-Orthodox nor Modern Orthodox) are solidly in the liberal camp and show little sign of abandoning the Democratic Party. ...
It is only in the ultra-Orthodox communities that Jews voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
If you want to know what Judaism is all about, you can read the Torah or listen to rabbis. Or you can look at what the members believe in. Apparently the orthodox ones believe in Israel and Trump, while the other ones are leftist Trump-haters, and are responsible for much of the craziness of the Democrat Party. They brought us DEI, illegal aliens, LBGTQ+ politics, etc.
Likewise, you might say that the Episcopal Church believes in the Gospels, but it has specialized in LGBTQ+ inclusion. It has become anti-white, anti-straight, anti-male, anti-cisgender, and anti-Trump, because that is who its members have become.
Update: From another Jewish site:
A group of 70 rabbis, clergy and liberal Jewish groups are calling on New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul to resist President Donald Trump’s mass deportation orders, drawing a parallel to the biblical story of King Pharaoh’s decree to kill Hebrew boys in ancient Egypt.In Exodus, the Israelites end up with a plan to murder the Egyptian children. We have a lot of historical evidence for Egypt, but none for these Exodus stories.“We read in the Book of Exodus of how a new Pharaoh arose over Egypt who scapegoated and marginalized the Israelites, spinning a narrative that they were a threat and needed to be suppressed and ultimately enslaved,” the 70 rabbis wrote in a letter addressing New York governmental leaders. The group compared themselves to the Egyptian midwives who refused to comply with Pharaoh’s decree.
There are other religions that also support this invasion of illegal aliens. Not just Jews. The Catholic bishops are suing for more refugee resettlement money.
Even though anyone with eyes could see this coming, Donald Trump’s recent moves with regard to Ukraine and Russia come as a huge blow. We are in the midst of a global fight between Western liberal democracy and authoritarian government, and in this fight, the United States has just switched sides and signed up with the authoritarian camp.We have been fighting on the wrong side. Ukraine is the authoritarian and corrupt government.What Trump has said over the past few days about Ukraine and Russia defies belief. He has accused Ukraine of having started the war
Yes, Ukraine started the war, and Zelendsky is a monster. We need to stop supporting him.
How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was MeThe author is presumably Jewish, along with his couples therapist wife, and the various other psycho therapists they see.It took a superstar couples therapist to help me see beyond my anger.
By Daniel Oppenheimer
One thing I’ve learned from being married to my wife, Jess, who is a couples therapist, is how vast the distance is between the masks people show to the world and the messy realities that live behind them. Every couple knows its own drama, but we still fall prey to the illusion that all other couples have seamlessly satisfying relationships. The truth about marriage — including my own — is that even the most functional couples are merely doing the best they can with the lives that have been bestowed on them.
This past spring, Jess and I had the first of eight sessions of couples therapy with Terry Real, a best-selling author and by far the most famous of the therapists we’ve seen during our marriage. ...
This is what we signed up for. Real, whose admirers include Gwyneth Paltrow and Bruce Springsteen, is one of a small number of thinkers who are actively shaping how the couples-therapy field is received by the public and practiced by other therapists. He is also the bluntest and most charismatic of the therapists I’ve seen, the New Jersey Jewish version of Robin Williams’s irascible Boston character in “Good Will Hunting” — profane, charismatic, open about his own life, forged in his own story of pain.
I could not stand to read this. It is too pathetic. I do not want to repeat Jewish stereotypes, but it is hard to believe anyone lives like this.
It’s the last of our eight sessions, and I’m talking to my “inner child.” I remember, under Real’s guidance, closing my eyes and bringing him up out of my memory so that we could talk. He was 6 or 7, a bit chubby, wearing clunky eyeglasses and shorts pulled up too high above his waist. He’s a composite, I realize now, of details of me at my most awkward self across the ages.They cannot manage their own lives, but they are writing a book on how other couples can blame the husband and the husband can blame his inner child.I find this session the hardest of all of them to watch. What we talk about is intensely vulnerable, but that’s not the most difficult part. Nor is it imagining the silent audience evaluating me. It’s that I’m too sealed off from it, then and now. I couldn’t — can’t — feel it in the way I so urgently want to.
When therapy is dramatized on TV or in the movies, there’s a classic scene where the deep childhood trauma is finally exposed. “It’s not your fault,” Robin Williams says to Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting,” referring to the gruesome abuse Damon’s character suffered in foster care. ...
Daniel Oppenheimer is the author of “Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art.” He is currently working on a book about relationships and couples therapy with his wife, who is a couples therapist. They live in Austin, Texas.
Much of psycho therapy is controlled or influenced by Jews, but I read this:
After October 7, 2023, the Jewish Therapist Collective received a sharp increase in calls from Jewish therapists saying, as shared by the collective's director Halina Brooke, that they were "sidelined or fired from their mental health workplaces due to being Jewish." Jewish therapy trainees, according to Brooke, were "told that their presence is triggering to non-Jewish therapists."Here is a comment, from a NY Times reader:Likewise, Chicago-based psychologist Allison Resnick wrote in Kesher, the journal of the Association of Jewish Psychologists, that she routinely reads about "therapists being told to conceal their Jewishness for fear of offending colleagues and clients."
@Tim Thank you for sharing. I also think you have illustrated the widening gap between Millennial women and men, at least in my own social circle. My female friends and I read self-help books, go to therapy and even talk about how we can break the patterns of our parents through personal enlightenment and self-improvement…whereas the men in our lives are staunchly against the idea, at most willing to placate us women by providing lip service in a passive, surface-y couples therapy session or two.We are getting a generation of infantilized and therapized women who will never have a healthy connection with anyone.It’s creating a widening gap between the genders and, in my view, resulting in ever increasing misunderstandings and resentment. I’m hoping that articles like this (thank you Oppenheimer!) and guys like Real can de-stigmatize this emotional work for the men that we love and desire a healthy connection with.
The claim that "vanilla is not a flavor" among some racists or those with racially biased views often stems from a derogatory use of the word "vanilla" to denote something or someone as plain, boring, or lacking in diversity or complexity. This usage is rooted in cultural and racial stereotypes where:Vanilla as "Plain": Vanilla, in this context, is used metaphorically to refer to white or Caucasian people, suggesting they are culturally or inherently uninteresting compared to other racial or ethnic groups, which might be described with more "exotic" or "rich" flavors (like chocolate, which has sometimes been used to refer to people of color). This is a gross oversimplification and misrepresentation both of vanilla as a flavor and of human diversity.
Denial of Complexity: By saying vanilla isn't a flavor, there's an attempt to deny the complexity of vanilla itself. Vanilla is one of the most complex flavors in culinary use, with hundreds of flavor compounds, but this complexity is often ignored to fit the narrative that "vanilla" (and by extension, what it's used to represent) is simple or uninteresting.
Cultural Superiority: This statement can also reflect an underlying belief in the cultural superiority of one group over another, where the "vanilla" culture is seen as less valuable or less worthy of respect. This is part of broader racist ideologies where one's own culture or race is elevated at the expense of others.
Racial Identity and Flavor: The use of food metaphors in racial discourse often serves to belittle or mock other racial identities by associating them with flavors considered inferior or less desirable. This is not unique to vanilla but reflects how food can be weaponized in racial rhetoric.
It's important to recognize that these assertions are rooted in prejudice and misunderstanding:
Vanilla as a Flavor: Vanilla is indeed a flavor, derived from the vanilla bean, and it's one of the most widely used flavors in the world, not for its simplicity but for its ability to enhance other flavors.
Cultural Misappropriation: The use of "vanilla" in this manner is a form of cultural misappropriation, reducing vast and varied cultural heritages to simplistic, often negative stereotypes.
Racist Tropes: This kind of rhetoric is indicative of deeper racist tropes that seek to diminish or demean those who are different, often by using innocuous terms like food flavors in a derogatory way.
In summary, the claim that "vanilla is not a flavor" when used in racist discourse is a misguided and harmful attempt at denigration, ignoring both the literal and metaphorical richness of vanilla and the cultural diversity it represents.
Sam Harris speaks with Katherine Stewart about her new book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. They discuss Project 2025, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, whether the backlash against wokeness has been overblown, the asymmetric standards between right-wing and left-wing media, Trump’s appeal to evangelicals, wealth inequality, political ideology in public schools, and other topics.She admits that the Left pushes some extremely divisive issues, but somehow blames the Right.
26:35 in order to divide you know some of these ideas are incredibly divisive and um and one of the things 26:42 that this does is sort of um makes people think well well the like the 26:49 moderate liberal you know Progressive left they sort of throw all of it into 26:54 that sort of woke communist bucket which is ridiculous I mean the people who are talking about these issues constantly 27:01 are people on the right you know I was recently at America Fest it's an annual Gathering held by turning point USA it 27:10 took place in Phoenix Arizona there were 20,000 sort of Hardcore MAGA every 27:15 single speaker had to talk about transgender women in sports this is like 27:22 you're right they're making a boogeyman out of this issueI agree that transgenderism should not be a big issue, but the Left has made it so. It was one of Kamala Harris's top issues in running for President in the recent election. Republicans hardly ever talked about it, until the Dems and Transgender advocates forced it into everyone's face.
Likewise for a range of other identity politics issues. Republicans ignored them until airplanes started dropping out of the skies. Colleges stopped admitting and hiring based on merit, and so did many others. The peak DEI craziness was the aftermath of the overdose death of George Floyd, a low-level criminal.
At some point, people said enough is enough. If we are not going to stand up for little boys being castrated by woke crazies, then for whom?
But unilateral divorce doesn’t just destabilize marriage. It also changes the power dynamics within marriage from favoring the more committed partner to favouring the less committed partner. ...States have passed a lot of laws making the responsibilities and rights of the married and the unmarried are increasingly similar. I wonder if those legislators even realized they were destroying marriage.Unilateral divorce is sometimes portrayed as an advance in human freedom, but this is a mistake. By removing the ability to credibly commit to a long-term relationship, unilateral divorce prevents couples from reaching a mutually-beneficial bargain that greatly assists in the raising of children. ...
To get married is no longer such a major commitment and no longer offers the degree of security which it once did, since divorce is now relatively easy and the responsibilities and rights of the married and the unmarried are increasingly similar. These developments are often presented as an advance in human freedom since they allow individuals to exit unilaterally from unhappy relationships at minimum cost to themselves and with minimum delay. However, this is a one-sided view, since it ignores the benefits and freedoms associated with trust and security. The fact that individuals can now exit easily, and unilaterally, from a relationship makes it difficult for couples to make credible commitments to each other. They can promise anything they want, but most of these promises are no longer legally enforceable, and many are undermined by social policies which reward those who break their promises.
Update: Here is a podcast discussion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes his country would have a “low chance” of survival without US military aid, and insisted that he still trusts President Trump.What difference does it make whether Zelensky accepts it or not? He is just an evil dictator, a warmonger, and a USA puppet. Without USA aid, he is finished. Trump could make a peace deal, and Ukraine would have to accept it.Zelensky, 47, also fretted that without US support, Ukraine could be vulnerable to another attack from the Russians within the next few years.
“I will never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine. Never. And our people, never,” Zelensky stressed. “there is no[t] any leader in the world who can really make a deal with Putin without us about us.”
The plaintiffs are two boys, neutered by drugs:
Plaintiffs Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle are transgender teenage girls attending New Hampshire public high schools. Each knew from an early age that she was a girl.No, that is impossible.
35. In medicine, “gender identity” is the term for a person’s internal, innate sense of belonging to a particular sex.1No, there is no such medical term. It cites a source in a footnote, but that does not say that the sense is innate.
37. A person’s gender identity is innate and cannot be changed by medical or psychological intervention.There is no evidence that gender identity is innate. Sex is innate, and gender identity is nearly always the same, so you could say that is innate. But the transgender identities are not innate.
41. When transgender children and adolescents are provided with appropriate treatment, they will thrive and grow into healthy adults like any other child and adolescent.No, these plaintiffs are not going to grow into healthy adults.
45. Before puberty, there are no significant differences in athletic performance between boys and girls arising from any biological or physiological bases.Soccer teams are 8-year-olds often have separate girls teams. That is because there are athletic differences at that age.
The complaint is about a law saying girls sports are for girls.
HB 1205 as it applies to Plaintiff Parker Tirrell cannot survive rational basis review either, because it lacks any rational basis, rests on stereotypes and misconceptions, and undermines rather than advances any alleged purpose.The rational basis is that girls are able to better get the benefits of sports when they compete with other girls.
These lawsuits attempt to use sex discrimination lawsuits to complain that boys are not allowed to play on girls teams. Yes, girls sports are literally sex discriminatory in that sense.
The lawsuits do not attempt to end discrimination. They seek to continue to discriminate against cis-gender boys, and to give preference to the boys with the non-gender-conforming upbringing.
This really sick. These parents are mutilating their kids, and forcing their perversions on everyone else.
Update: For explanations of why sex is binary in mammals and most other animals, see here and here.
I, of course, survived attempted cancellation by a large online mob a decade ago, led by well-known figures such as Amanda Marcotte and Arthur Chu. Though it was terrifying at the time—it felt like my career and even my life were overNo, this is grossly exaggerated. He is a big-shot tenured professor at a top university, and his employers never had any interests about his narcissistic little rants about his dating troubles.
He claims to hate the Woke Left, but he is a Jewish academic, and he has Trump Derangement Syndrome. He would probably be a Trump supporter, along with his Israeli wife, but his religion will not allow it.
Now he rants against Trump, and wants to cancel some low-level workers in his administration because of some supposedly offensive tweets from being a student many years ago. He says an apology is not enough, and they must be "willing to have a good-faith moral conversation with the world, and nearly unlimited contempt for people who mock the request for such a conversation."
So what set him off? Apparently this:
tweeting “normalize Indian hate” and “I was racist before it was cool,”He also refers to "my little tribe of pro-Enlightenment, science-loving nerds".
No, he is not pro-Enlightenment. The Enlightenment did not say that people with opinions are accountable to him. Free speech means being able to express an opinion, and not having to explain it to moralistic and judgmental leftists like him.
Update: Depending on context, the above tweets could easily be innocuous joking, or provocative. But I am not trying to make excuses to explain the tweets away. I say that the author should be able to express his opinions whatever they may be. Depending how you define the term, 50-95% of the world is racist. Sayings something racist should not trigger an inquisition.
Update: Physicist Sean M. Carroll posts a 70-minute rant against possible science funding cuts. He is pessimistic about his research grant being renewed, and about paying overhead. He says foreign students will never come here again, and he might even leave the country.
In case you are worried that some vital science might be lost, he main researches many-worlds theory. This is the theory that every time you make a decision or toss a coin, the other possible results happen in imaginary parallel universes. There is no way to communicate with these parallel universes or find evidence for them, but he likes to think about them anyway. Aaronson is also a proponent of this theory. Yes, it is just as crazy as it sounds.
The problem with academia is that the selective pressure is induced peer to peer through an unweighted citation graph.What he is saying here is that professors get promoted by showing that their friends cite their papers. Companies succeed by people buying their products.OTOH, industry is a weighted graph of capital flux according to the utility of a product. It has a much better algorithm for focusing search over design space.
The latter works well because products have to be commercially useful in order to sell a lot. But academic citations can be inflated even for worthless research.
Alex Nowrasteh and Bryan Caplan: The Case for More ImmigrationThese are smart and informed economists, and they claimed to be steel-manning the critics.Immigration experts Alex Nowrasteh and Bryan Caplan make the case for significantly more and easier immigration to the U.S.
One of the very first things that Donald Trump did after being sworn in as president was to make good on promises to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. He even issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the Constitution's 14th Amendment. That order has already been blocked by a federal judge, and its fate may well end up being decided by the Supreme Court. But calls for less immigration are super popular, with 55 percent of Americans saying current levels should be decreased, the highest since 2001. Reason's Nick Gillespie disagrees with that—he believes that immigration is a good thing and that we should have more of it, done in an orderly, peaceful, efficient fashion.
So on January 21, the day after Trump's inauguration, Gillespie asked George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan and Cato Institute analyst Alex Nowrasteh to make the libertarian case for more immigration at a live event in New York City. They've written extensively on the topic and answer every question and concern you might have about immigration. The goal here is to steel-man critics of immigration and explain why more newcomers are good for our culture, economy, and country.
Their main argument was that rich men and certain businesses profit from immigration, and so do the immigrants. The businesses get cheap labor. Others get more choices in exotic restaurants.
These benefits are broadly shared, via a trickle-down theory.
They wanted to open borders, where 30 million immigrants would come in. Maybe eventually a billion more would come.
They admitted that the large majority of Americans have wanted to cut immigration, and that has been true for decades. Being Libertarian economists, I thought that maybe they would suggest that those benefitting from immigration pay compensation to those being hurt by immigration. If each immigrant causes $1 million in damages, then visas could be sold for $1M.
No, they were of the opinion that those wanting immigration cuts should suffer the consequences, with no compensation.
I do not see how there is anything libertarian about forcing most people to suffer harms they do not want.
To give examples where immigration is clearly desirable, they mentioned Einstein and MLB baseball players.
No, those immigrants are not desirable. Einstein never did any productive reseearch after coming to the USA. He joined Communist front organizations, and was a generally malevolent influence. The MLB baseball players take valuable positions away from Americans, and add nothing to American productivity. These are all examples of immigrants who waste resources and make America worse.
All of their arguments were stupid or silly. They said that illegal aliens, subject to deportation orders, try hard not to get arrested. They said that if a shoe-shine boy comes from Haiti and shines Bill Gates' shoes, then that is more productive that what he would be doing in Haiti.
Go ahead and listen yourself, and tell me if you heard anything convincing.
Humans originated in Europe, not Africa, according to fossil discoveryThe Out of Africa theory usually refers to much more recent history, say 100,000 years ago. That has also fallen out of favor, as research has shown that European Neanderthals are human ancestors for today's non-Africans.A recent discovery in Türkiye is shaking up our understanding of human evolution. Scientists have identified a new fossil ape, Anadoluvius turkae, from an 8.7-million-year-old site near Çankırı.
This find challenges the long-held belief that human ancestors evolved solely in Africa, suggesting instead that Europe played a significant role in our evolutionary history.
The fossil, uncovered at the Çorakyerler site with support from Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, reveals that Mediterranean fossil apes were more diverse than previously thought.
These apes are part of the earliest known group of hominins, which includes not only African apes like chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas but also humans and their fossil ancestors.
Out of Africa? Maybe not
This discovery adds weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans may have evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago.
“These findings contrast with the long-held view that African apes and humans evolved exclusively in Africa. While the remains of early hominins are abundant in Europe and Anatolia, they are completely absent from Africa until the first hominin appeared there about seven million years ago.”
The NY Post reports:
Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon to President Trump during an inaugural prayer service, coupled with her church’s advocacy for humanitarian immigration programs, reveals a striking hypocrisy — one that could be seen as self-serving and even a conflict of interest.I hope Trump and the DOGE crew shut down this nonsense.That’s because the federal contracting arm of the church, Episcopal Migration Ministry (EMM), is paid to bring in people on resettlement programs that Trump has temporarily paused and targeted for re-evaluation.
EMM budget figures for 2024 are not available yet, but in 2023 it earned $53 million from various taxpayer-funded government programs to resettle 3,600 individuals. ...
EMM brings in LGBTQ refugees and asylees in a special federal refugee program started during the Obama administration called “Preferred Communities.”
This program pays a premium over standard refugee resettlement for contractors that resettle “refugees experiencing social or psychological difficulties, including emotional trauma resulting from war and/or sexual or gender-based violence; survivors of torture; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) refugees; refugees who are HIV positive; populations with physical disabilities or other medical conditions.”
Is it fair to say that the UK circa 1900 was the most successful and richest country in the history of humanity? The sun never set on the British Empire, which included India. The Royal Navy was the world’s most powerful. Compare to today. The UK is an predominantly Islamic society (measured by hours spent on religious activities) jammed with low-skill immigrants. Wages are absurdly low by U.S. standards. GDP per capita is lower than in the poorest U.S. states. After decades of open borders, the core English part of the UK lacks cultural cohesion. The main project of the UK seems to have been assembling humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies and expecting that they and their descendants won’t behave in a violent or dysfunctional manner once parked in the UK. The result is the Southport stabbings (by a young UK-born Rwandan) and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and similar. The trajectory of the UK from 1900 to the present looks like that of a country that lost multiple wars, each one having drained away its resources and treasure and each one resulting in the country being occupied by millions of non-British people.In the 2021 census, only 37% of London was White British.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told CNN anchor Jake Tapper that President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated digs about Canada becoming the 51st state are a distraction from real issues in a short sit-down interview on Thursday.No, he is not proud of being Canadian. He is proud of being not American.“Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian,” said Trudeau. “One of the ways we define ourself most easily is, well, we’re not American.”
The premise of OpenAI is that it would discover and tame the super-AI, and make it safe for the world to use.
The real threat of the Chinese models is that open source LLMs would pass up the closed source OpenAI and Google models, and leave everyone exposed to whatever good or bad comes from super-AI.
Recent events have not altered any of these opinions. The Chinese models are just what everyone was expecting and fearing. We just didn't know that they had enough Nvidia chips to be players in the AI race.
We will see more and more AI moving to user devices, like phones, cameras, and toasters. But the real action will be in the supercomputers with the most computational capacity. Companies and governments will invest trillions to try to real that super-AI first.
