Prepare for the Weirdness
September 23rd, 2019Earlier today, when I sat down in front of the computer with a cup of coffee, I had a flashback to Joe Biden’s recent bleeding eye incident.
An ancient Hunter Thompson essay, Prepare for the Weirdness, came to mind.
“What would Thompson think about these times?” I mumbled to myself.
These times.
Which reminds me, it’s Fall where most of you are reading this.
Harvest time.
Via: ESPN:
“Something is happening here,
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?”
— Bob Dylan
No sir, not a chance. Mr. Jones does not even pretend to know what’s happening in America right now, and neither does anyone else.
We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look super weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane. … We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused.
The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.
The Autumn months are never a calm time in America. Back to Work, Back to School, Back to Football Practice, etc. … Autumn is a very Traditional period, a time of strong Rituals and the celebrating of strange annual holidays like Halloween and Satanism and the fateful Harvest Moon, which can have ominous implications for some people.
Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. Debt collectors are active on old people and fleece the weak and helpless. They want to lay in enough cash to weather the known horrors of January and February. There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of school children in the football months. Pre-teens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized Perverts.
Most of these things are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly — but at least they are Traditional. They will happen. Your driveway will ice up, your furnace will blow up and you will be rammed in traffic by an uninsured driver in a stolen car.
But what the hell. That’s why we have Insurance, eh? And the Inevitability of these nightmares is what makes them so reassuring. Life will go on, for good or ill. The structure might be a little Crooked, but the foundations are still Strong and Unshakable.
Ho, ho. Think again, buster. Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once-reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in. … There is a Presidential Election, right on schedule, but somehow there is no President. A new Congress is elected, like always, but somehow there is no real Congress at all — not as we knew it, anyway, and whatever passes for Congress will be as helpless and weak as Whoever has to pass for the “New President.”
If this were the world of sports, it would be like playing a Super Bowl that goes into 19 scoreless Overtimes and never actually Ends. … or four L.A. Lakers stars being murdered in different places on the same day. Guaranteed Fear and Loathing. Abandon all hope. Prepare for the Weirdness. Get familiar with Cannibalism.
Good luck, Doc.
Facebook to Buy Startup for Controlling Computers With Your Mind
September 23rd, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Facebook Inc. agreed to acquire CTRL-Labs, a technology startup that is building software to let people control a digital avatar using only their thoughts. The world’s largest social network is paying between $500 million and $1 billion, according to people familiar with the deal.
The closely held four-year-old startup, which has dozens of employees and has raised tens of millions in venture capital, uses a bracelet to measure neuron activity in a subject’s arm to determine movement that person is thinking about, even if they aren’t physically moving. That neuron activity is then translated into movement on a digital screen. Facebook declined to comment on the price of the acquisition.
New Crime in Britain: Eating Meat?
September 23rd, 2019Via: Telegraph:
Eating meat could be banned like smoking, one of Britain’s foremost barristers has predicted, as he called for the offence of ‘ecocide’ to be introduced to prosecute those who damage the nature on a massive scale.
Michael Mansfield QC warned that the farming of livestock for meat was destroying the planet and called for legislation to criminalise those who cause global warming and the wilful destruction of wildlife . In a message delivered at the launch of the Vegan Now campaign, which encourages people to stop eating meat and dairy, Mansfield said he had a ‘single message’ to make ecocide a crime.
How Afghan Opium Poppy Farming Has Grown
September 22nd, 2019Mission accomplished.
Many articles on Cryptogon about this.
One of my favorites: Afghanistan: Planned British Covert Operation Included Training in “Farming and Irrigation Techniques” for Taliban Fighters
Via: BBC:
The US has spent $1.5m (£1.15m) a day since 2001 fighting the opium war in Afghanistan.
Sacramento McDonald’s Tries to Drive Homeless Away with Siren
September 22nd, 2019Via: CBS Sacramento:
A Sacramento McDonald’s is going to extremes to curb outside loitering. It’s playing a loud, strange sound on speakers outside the restaurant.
The property at 30th and K streets appears to be a popular homeless hangout site.
The siren is intended to annoy and reduce the number of people standing around the outside entrance, but some people aren’t going anywhere.
According to the city, the sound levels are legal.
The effort to clear out homeless loitering could backfire. Some McDonald’s customers tell us they’ll just eat a much quieter location.
The Time When A Burning B-52 Nearly Caused A Nuclear Catastrophe “Worse than Chernobyl”
September 22nd, 2019Via: The Drive:
Nearly four decades ago, a U.S. Air Force B-52H bomber, armed with eight nuclear-tipped AGM-69A Short Range Attack Missiles and four B28 nuclear gravity bombs, burned for hours at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. Years later, despite previous assurances that the risk of a nuclear accident had been low, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a key U.S. nuclear weapons research and development facility, testified that the incident had actually come very close to being “worse than Chernobyl.”
Mystery Towers Going Up All Over Cincinnati Area
September 22nd, 2019These towers are going up and the cities don’t know which companies are building them? This is incredible.
Via: WCPO:
But the FCC allows these towers to go in with almost no local approval. The FCC and FAA claim there are no proven links between 5G cell service and health effects, and say local residents have no reason to fear these new towers.
But Hamilton County Engineer Ted Hubbard told us a few months ago that even he, and other county officials are left in the dark.
“The ownership is a big question,” Hubbard said. “And I have asked that. We are having a hard time finding out who actually owns it.”
That means no one has publicly stated who owns the mysterious Cleves tower, or any of the others popping up across the Tri State. It has no company name on the base.
A Verizon corporate spokesman, David Weissmann, confirmed to WCPO that the company is installing 5G towers in the Cincinnati area — as he says one of the 30 cities that will soon have Verizon 5G service.
However, he said the strange Cleves tower “is not Verizon equipment.”
Epstein’s Process: When You Are In, You Can’t Get Out
September 22nd, 2019Via: Miami Herald:
“He would find out they have no home, no car, that they need a place to live, and he would provide a place to live,’’ Edwards said. “He can get you to the best doctors. Sometimes he would do that and sometimes he wouldn’t do that, but the promise was real because as soon as you walk into his house and see there are legitimate cooks, chefs, and assistants, everybody catering to him — it gives this air of legitimacy. I mean, everybody in this whole entire mansion can’t possibly be running an illegal sex trafficking operation, right?”
…
“There were doctors and psychiatrists and gynecologist visits. There were dentists who whitened our teeth. There was a doctor who gave me Xanax. What doctor in their right mind, who is supposed to protect their patients, gives girls and young women Xanax?’’ Giuffre said.
Ransome said at one point when she was on the verge of a breakdown Epstein sent her to a psychiatrist to whom she confided about the abuse. He did nothing except put her on lithium.
“I find it so funny with all these people, after Jeffrey was arrested, saying ‘we didn’t know — we didn’t see anything,’ ” Ransome said.
“Robot Priests Can Bless You, Advise You, and Even Perform Your Funeral”
September 22nd, 2019You head on down to your local Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise, hoping for a pleasant sermon from a robot that looks like it stepped out of Ghost in the Shell, but you find that there have been…
Upgrades.
Here’s Geordie Rose talking about, “These things that we’re summoning into the world now.”
Via: Vox:
A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. But Mindar comes with some … unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters.
Mindar is a robot.
Designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, the $1 million machine is an attempt to reignite people’s passion for their faith in a country where religious affiliation is on the decline.
For now, Mindar is not AI-powered. It just recites the same preprogrammed sermon about the Heart Sutra over and over. But the robot’s creators say they plan to give it machine-learning capabilities that’ll enable it to tailor feedback to worshippers’ specific spiritual and ethical problems.
“This robot will never die; it will just keep updating itself and evolving,” said Tensho Goto, the temple’s chief steward. “With AI, we hope it will grow in wisdom to help people overcome even the most difficult troubles. It’s changing Buddhism.”
Google Research Paper Claims ‘Quantum Supremacy’
September 21st, 2019The paper was posted publicly by mistake and then removed.
Via: Fortune:
In what may be a huge milestone in computing, Google says it has achieved “quantum supremacy,” an experimental demonstration of the superiority of a quantum computer over a traditional one.
The claim, made in a new scientific paper, is the most serious indication yet that the promise of quantum computers—an emerging but unproven type of machine—is becoming reality, including their potential to solve formerly ungraspable mathematical problems.
…
The experiment described in the paper sampled randomly generated numbers produced through a specialized scenario involving quantum phenomena. The researchers said they determined that their quantum computer beat regular computers at the task, which involved calculating the output of certain specialized circuits.
“While our processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task,” the researchers said.
