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  • Sandbox – 31aug17

    [Wow, the last one really filled up.  Here's some fresh sand to reignite a closer examination of the ongoing polls that portend so much about President Trump.  To that we can add the fascinating new cause celebre of diagnosing the man's mental health.  I personally appreciate readers' updates on local fire news.  Thanks.  gjr]

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  • The Wall – Why Would Mexico Chip In

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 30 August 2017.]

    Lately, among all the other lambasting of President Trump relating to a flood of new happenings, the notorious border ‘wall’ between the US and Mexico has again surfaced in the news.  The major points of interest in the wall should be how well it will work, how much will it cost, and whether Mexico would chip in to build it.

    First, let’s disabuse ourselves of the political cartoons depicting a high solid wall with periodic armed watchtowers stretching across the mountains and deserts of the American southwest.  Anyone with an ounce, OK, make that two ounces of brains knows that the real issue here is border porosity.  There is not going to be a wall, per se, stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.  Instead, there will be added barriers of different kinds, new sensing devices, more border patrol observation posts, high tech drones with infrared cameras, and the inevitable vehicle patrols to stop the illegal entrants.  After all is said and done, our concern remains the resulting porosity defined by the number of illegal aliens, many carrying cartel drugs, who still make it through every year.

    Mexico’s decision to contribute to the wall’s construction hinges on the effects of a porous border on their economy, the political optics already in place, and the country’s notoriously corrupt government.  Ultimately, as we all understand, it will come down to the money.

    (more…)

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  • Democrats, as they see themselves (updated)

    [This piece of Democrat worldview showcased in their booth at the recent Nevada County fair is both illuminating and informative.  They see and experience not what we see and experience, but tacitly admit that they have no "working Democratic message"   Also note that Republicans have "the power to prevent minorities from voting in more than two dozen Republican controlled states." – can't make this up.  Emphases in the original.  gjr]

    IN SEARCH OF A WORKING DEMOCRATIC MESSAGE

    Suggestions for Effective Communications @ Fair

    “Try to find common ground and emphasize that regardless of differing perspectives, we all want this country to succeed. For example, we all want gun safety, whether we’re NRA members or not; availability to good medical care, whether we support ACA or not; a healthy environment, whether we view the Centennial Dam as the way to go or not. Find terminology that connects rather than separates”.

    This quote is from the Directions for Volunteers at the Democratic Booth, and it goes to the core of the dilemma we find ourselves in. Even politically interested people seem unaware of the gradual changes that have turned the Republican Party from a basically positive force since its birth as the anti-slavery party and certainly through the Eisenhower years to a reactionary power committed to rolling back our social safety net and our infrastructure. The Tea-Party/Trump faction has gone even further and seems intent on bringing us back to the time of the robber barons of the 19th century.

    It is simply not true to say that the current right-wing Trump Administration wants gun safety, good medical care available for all, and a healthy environment with clean air and water for people as we can see from their actual policy choices.

    The facts are that Republican policies over the last decades have been to weaken and work against affordable health-care, a well-functioning social safety net, good environmental policies, infrastructure investments, and have worked on behalf of large corporations and against lower and middle-class Americans, and we need to be steadfast in pointing this out at every turn. We should do this in a factual and controlled manner, but accepting the lies of right-wing wishful/knowingly false thinking puts us at a huge disadvantage where uncommitted voters may conclude that even Democrats believe there is no real difference between the two parties, affirming the general and widespread disinterest for politics by average voters in this country.

    Both Democrats and mainstream media have been very neglectful in not seriously challenging the blatant myths and untruths peddled by the right-wing that has taken control of the once decent and honorable Republican Party, and now our beloved country. I believe that our primary message should be that the right-wing now controlling our country is fundamentally different from not only Democrats, but traditional Republicans as well. In fact, many of the main principles from the 1956 Republican Party Platform are remarkably similar to those of Democratic Party Platforms during the last many decades. So when people complain that “we are so far apart” it is not the Democrats that have moved substantially. It is the Republican Party that has been hijacked by forces that are committed to destroying the very fabric of the civilized and advanced society that both parties built up over more than a hundred years, including the Progressive Era, the New Deal Era, and the Civil Rights Era.

    I believe this is the message that all Democrats should be able to agree upon, and I also believe it is the one that has the best chance of overcoming the advantages the right-wing currently has with control of all branches of government, unlimited corporate funding at their disposal, and the power to prevent minorities from voting in more than two dozen Republican controlled states.

    By Richardt Stormsgaard 

    [update] And here’s how the Alt-Left wing of the Democratic Party sees the world.  As made clear by the husband/wife team of Distinguished Professor (I kid you not) Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dhorn, founder of the Weather Underground of the 60s, who are still there in the spirit and enthusiasm of today’s young communists who continue to dream of “free love and free land, free food and free housing, (and) dancing in the street”, and await their opportunity to co-opt or join Antifa to again mount the barricades and make it so.  Here is a snootful for your reading pleasure.

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  • Max Tegmark, welcome aboard!

    George Rebane

    The Singularity must really be near when we have MIT physicist Max Tegmark climb aboard with the spate of science and industry luminaries who have recently discovered that intelligent machines will someday surpass humans, will systemically displace human labor, and (in a TBD form) will become the dominant lifeform on Earth.  Dr Tegmark has just published his epiphany in Life 3.0, and joins Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, … in spreading the news of the incipient Singularity to the general public.  Of course, none of them dare call it Singularity; for if they did, then it would instantly identify them as Johnny-come-latelies.

    For those of us in the field, as recorded herein, the possibility of Singularity has been known for at least thirty years (and more decades in science fiction).  And science savvy entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil (now at Google) and Jeff Hawkins (founder of Numenta the developer of hierarchical temporal memory) have long staked out businesses that are pioneering the only branch of computer science that promises to deliver the Singularity – systems that are capable of learning from vast amounts of data present in their ‘environments’.  Here I don’t want to revisit the ‘learn vs program’ debate on the path to super-intelligence other than to say that the ‘program school’ of computer science has woefully been the dragged anchor, diverting resources from the ‘learn school’ which now finally dominates the field of AI.  All of the above people and technologies have been introduced and discussed here over the years (see RR’s Singularity Signposts section).

    Deep learning is the label given to the latest generation of massive artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have learned to do amazing feats requiring intelligence and cognitive processing.  Most of these feats already far surpass humans’ ability to do the same tasks.  And what is happening today in the field of deep learning will literally blow your mind, in the sense of blowing it away as redundant, in the event that you decide to compete with it in the workplace – this brings to mind the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man (here).

    Companies large – e.g. Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba, … – and small are racing to integrate deep learned AI into their operations and products at breakneck speed.  The heads-up companies are launching in-house education and training programs to introduce deep learning to their technical and management staffs.  As an example, I can modestly cite my computer scientist son-in-law Roland Fernandez at Microsoft Research who has co-developed and operates that company’s online course in deep learning (q.v.).

    What the sclerotic (‘programming school’) side of computer science did not realize for some decades, with some still in their benighted darkness, is the message Dr Kurzweil has been telling (preaching?) to people for years – that technology is advancing exponentially.  The programmers could not conceive that very soon there would emerge computers and databases that are large and fast enough to implement ANNs with thousands of layers that learn to ‘instantly’ manipulate millions of parameters in tasks like voice understanding, image recognition, medical diagnosis, concurrent large cohort control, and on and on.  And that’s just today.

    For more on Professor Tegmark’s new book, I bid you read the excellent review ‘When Machines Run Amok’ by Frank Rose.

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  • Male/Female Brains – different?

    George Rebane

    Here’s the latest little piece of reportage on a very uncomfortable topic for progressives – clinical and physiological differences between men’s and women’s brains.  In ‘Do Men and Women Have Different Brains?’ with tagline ‘A controversy sparked by a Google memo brings up an old question: What role does biology play in personality and behavioral differences?’ we have a report of researchers Dr Daphna Joel, et al at Tel-Aviv University gingerly tiptoeing through the tulips in their ‘Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic’ to conclude –

    Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.

    This conclusion does its best to buttress the politically correct assertion that cognitively men and women are essentially identical, and most certainly clinically so, thereby seeking to debunk once more ex-Googler James Damore’s notorious memo (here) about men/women's cognitive and behavioral differences in the workplace.

    Dr Joel and colleagues attempt to convince us through their research that there is no discernible difference in the observable FUNCTIONING of the male/female brains.  What I’m willing to bet the ranch on is that if the raw MRI data gathered by the team were appropriately labeled, that a deep learning algorithm could be easily developed that would have no trouble telling the difference between the sexes’ brains.  Furthermore, I believe it would be very difficult to get government funding to do a similar body of research gathering only EEG data to submit to a deep learning program, because the results will most likely turn out to corroborate what Nicholas Wade documented in A Troublesome Inheritance (here).  And that is a big no-no.

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  • iGeners – when you thought it couldn’t get worse (updated 26aug17)

    George Rebane

    Time for a short update on our generational tailspin.  A new body of research has just been published on iGen, the latest generation of Americans.  iGeners are the young people born in the 1995-2012 interval.  They are the ones following our infamous millennials born 1977-1995 whose aggregate predilection toward dumbth we have been following for the last several years (here, here, here, here).  Well, it turns out that the latest bunch out of the womb are giving the millennials a run for their money.

    Dr Jean Twenge (psychology professor at San Diego State) has been doing the research and published her most recent findings in iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.  Actually, “the generation after the millennials loves smartphones, avoids books, craves safety and doesn’t tolerate intolerance” reports Christine Rosen in the 23aug17 WSJ (here).

    IGeners_2017These young people, in the aggregate, have an interesting departure in their values and worldviews than those who came before, including an “aversion to adulting”.  In their tolerance of almost everything else, what they are more likely to do than their predecessors is “to support restricting speech”.  Here they seem to have a pretty draconian bent, opining that professors who even utter one incorrect (intolerant, insensitive, …) word should be summarily fired, and students who also trip up in a similar vein should be expelled.  According to Dr Twenge, “This is the dark side of tolerance; it begins with the good intentions of including everyone and not offending anyone but ends (at best) with a reluctance to explore deep issues and (at worst) with careers destroyed by a comment someone found offensive and the silencing of all alternative viewpoints.”

    iGeners are now the generation of snowflakes that totally embrace ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and such.  For them these are “not fringe ideas but those embraced by the majority of iGeners.”  In their daily round they prefer virtual relationships to real ones, they read less than even their predecessors, and most certainly less than the so-called GenXers and Boomers.  And here’s the kicker – their academic skills lag behind those of millennials “by significant margins” and they are “less informed” about current events.  By any comparison they make the “dumbest generation” look smart.

    So here is what the one-two punch of union public schools and social media have produced in a progressive politically correct world.  According to Dr Twenge’s research, the iGeners are not a happy bunch.  “On the contrary, the more time they spend online, the worse they feel.”  The iGeners are “at the forefront of the worst mental health crisis in decades, with rates of teen depression  and suicide skyrocketing since 2011.”  And this cohort of new voters will determine your civil rights, disposition of private property, generation and distribution of wealth, and how America will deport itself among nations.  All of this complex output promises to be based on even less input than evinced today by the millennials.  Oh my.

    [26aug17 update]  And then there is this timely and apropos contribution from Ramirez.

    Ramirez_170825

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  • Sandbox – 25aug17

    [Well, that last sandbox sure got smelly in the end.  My bad for letting it linger.  Perhaps we can try to raise the level of discourse on this one.  Would love to see some dialogue on 'Trump divorces GOP Congress' and its implications for legislation and 2018. gjr]

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  • Scattershots – 21aug17 (updated)

    George Rebane

    Remember how all the country got gruberized on Obamacare into such a state of dependancy that to this day no one has been able extract them from that calamitous benefit?  Well, turns out that ol’ John got caught doing some fraudulent billing for consulting work he was doing for Vermont.  But not to worry, the state’s AG will not pursue the MIT healthcare bamboozler under the Vermont Civil False Claims Act if Gruber just promises to go away and not ever come back.  He’ll just wait until the next Dem is in the White House ready to get the gruberized version of single-payer onto the books. (more here)

    We enjoyed the Nevada County version of the eclipse this morning.  Jo Ann and I prepared our instrumentation to witness the celestial spectacle – I with my two sheets of paper with one having a pinhole in it, and she with a more interesting multi-image display on her sheet of paper with her Colander Camera.  I also noticed that our trees eagerly participated in the event by casting countless crescent filled shadows as the moon covered more than half the sun’s disk.

    Eclipse_2017C

    NASA’s attempts to present live coverage of the solar eclipse were priceless exemplars of government in action.  It was hard to imagine how many more ways one could screw up the presentation of a simple and predictable event for which there was an infinite time to prepare.  They could have done better contracting out the production to a teenager with an iPhone on FaceTime.  As an alternative to images of the proceeding eclipse, the NASA bureaucrats were convinced we wanted to see talking heads spewing endless repetitions of pabulum from different parts of the country, including the launch of some camera-equipped weather balloons, which event was televised by only showing the back of the heads of two NASA worthies while they watched and marveled at the balloon’s ascent of which the viewers saw nary an image.  You can’t make this up.  Two and a half centuries ago our Founders were familiar with this kind of bureaucratic mis-functioning, and therefore gave us a Constitution that was supposed to give government a minimalist role in the lives of a free people.

    [update]  President Trump has pulled the plug on Operation Choke Point.  You remember the 2011 Obama program to sic his DoJ on businesses he didn’t like, from gun shops to coal-fired power plants.  And oh yes, he also pulled the plug on the Federal Advisory Panel on Climate Change.  Seems these guys have been mixing a bit too much conclusive politics with tentative science.  For some reason our friends on the Left don’t seem to acknowledge such things as accomplishments of this administration.  (more here and here)

    President Trump’s speech made several things clear on Afghanistan; one of them being that he realizes we need to keep troops in world hotspots for a long time if we are to maintain our position as the world ‘white hat’ hegemon.  But what no one seems to have picked up is that we are again in the business of fighting a tactic – terrorism – and no longer an enemy – fundamental Islam – that uses terror as one of its tactics.  Fundamentalist Islam never came up in his speech.  Do we again believe that so many young people all over the world give up their comfortable lives and willingly sacrifice themselves in the name of something called ‘terrorism’.  I don’t think so.  We will never successfully fight an enemy that we cannot recognize. 

     

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  • Sandbox – 21aug17

    [So much going on – today's solar eclipse (protect them peepers), growing echoes of Charlottesville, President Trump reveals what next in Afghanistan, and Islamic terror now regularly arising out of indigenous populations, and more …  gjr]

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  • The conundrum of culturally cohesive communities (updated 22aug17)

    George Rebane

    Cultural cohesion has been the propensity of humans living together for millennia and perhaps longer.  The clear and simple dictum is that people like to live with people who share their social values and view the world pretty much as they themselves do.  The benefits of such communities is both manifest and manifold because it engenders mutual trust and even affection as it lets people work without having to constantly watch their backs, and therefore specialize, knowing that there is a reliable clientele for their product or service.  Promoting this paradigm has been one of the foundations of RR and part of my personal belief system (more here).

    People with limited ability to nuance concepts mistake the promotion of cultural cohesion with a childlike understanding of simple black/white alternatives.  For them, if you like cultural cohesion, then you are probably a racist who doesn’t tolerate the existence of other cultures.  It’s as simple as that.

    (more…)

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