Category: Geopolitics

How I try to stay informed…

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Since the news business has changed from reporting to profits, keeping eyeballs is what it is all about. 

Fox found this out after they accurately reported that Trump was projected to lose Arizona. Tucker Carlson then ranted about how their viewership was going down, along with the stock price with which he was richly compensated. He understood that their viewers were  there to hear what they need to believe. And if they didn’t get it, they would move to Newsmax, Onan and other alternative news sources that would feed the beast.

Rush Limbaugh always understood that and bragged that he was an Entertainer. Are you entertained?

For any democracy to it operate efficiently, it needs an informed electorate. So how do you sort out the news from the fire hose of information flow these days?

1)Realize that your. 00001 experience of the world contributes to 80% of your worldview. Approach your understanding with a scientist skepticism that he’s always willing to accept that he could be wrong.

 2)Intentionally expose yourself to opposing views. We don’t like to do this because it makes us uncomfortable. Over the years I have developed a diversity of writers that I follow on the hellscape that is Twitter. Most of us don’t have a luxury of time to do that. It’s not easy being free, when you don’t have an emperor to make all the decisions for you.

3) Turn off the Crisis News networks . If there isn’t good video footage, or if the victim isn’t attractive, you won’t hear about it . Just like the print media, television is all about eyeballs. Now there are live news events that television coverage excels at. Television Studios nowadays don’t need to wait for their cameras to warm up to go live. Walter Cronkite had to wait to give the world the shocking news about Kennedy being shot in Dallas.

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Credit CBS via Landov

4) Read some news sources from outside the United States bubble. Here are some free websites that also have free apps for your handhelds. 

A good one to see the southeast Asian perspective on the world is the Asia Times  https://asiatimes.com/

Also, try the Arab news source https://www.aljazeera.com/

France 24 for another perspective https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/

The Guardian is one of the few British rags that isn’t just a tabloid http://thrguardian.com/

If you can afford subscription the Financial Times, The Week, The Economist, Wall Street Journal and NY Times will cover a lot of area.

A great little tool that I use is an aggregator that ranks stories by their number of hits in real time. Bookmark this handy page

https://www.memeorandum.com

5) Last, but not least, Social Media is just that and not a source of verifiable information. Outrage and anger build engagement. Realize that you are being baited with these emotions to click on their stories.

Why You Should Care Who Wins the AI Race.

Will the Server Farms of today turn into Server Cities to supply the Fifth Industrial Age’s insatiable drive for more computing power?

Or will it be like the Main Frame Computer being overtaken by the PC?

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the ENIAC in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL).

But nowadays the PC in your hand, i.e. your cellphone, offloads it’s computing load to more powerful computers at a server farm. A server farm is actually a large number of PCs hooked up parallelly. All that data has been harnessed in Large Language Models (LLM) to train Artificial Intelligence (AI).

By winning the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Britain was able to produce the ships and tanks that powered their Empire. Whoever wins the AI race (the Fifth Industrial Revolution) will dominate this century and maybe beyond. This thoughtful interview will brief you on the implications of our ongoing competition with China and why we should win, except for one caveat –

this idea of “temporal claustrophobia,” where the Kaiser, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany all convinced themselves they were at a high watermark.

Jeffrey Ding

ChinaTalk

GPTs and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers

“Economic power is the most fungible and transferable currency.”

JORDAN SCHNEIDER

 AND 

RYAN HAUSER

JUL 10, 2023

Jeffrey Ding is a professor at George Washington University and the creator of the ChinAI Substack. He argues in a recent paper that great powers must harness general-purpose technologies if they want to achieve global dominance.

In this show, we discuss the historical underpinnings of that argument and apply it to AI today — drawing out policymaking lessons spanning centuries of technologically driven great power transitions. We also get into:

  • Why long-term productivity growth is driven by the diffusion of general-purpose technology, and what makes this so crucial for great power competition;
  • Historical lessons from the UK, Soviet Union, US, and Germany illustrating the cultural and policy roadblocks to tech diffusion;
  • The importance of decentralized systems, and how this helped America win the Cold War
  • Why China’s diffusion capacity lags behind its innovation capacity, and how America should avoid getting locked into any one technological trajectory.

Co-hosting is Teddy Collins, formerly of DeepMind and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jeff-ding-on-us-vs-china-ai-and-lessons-from-past/id1289062927?i=1000612569365

Midjourney: “Technological Diffusion in the Style of Traditional Chinese Art, City, Society, Schools, Different forms of Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Scrolls, the Printing Press, Computers, Smart Phones”

Click on the 2 page to read the whole interview. It is worth your time to learn about what will undeniably will be the defining driver of our age.

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How Xi is Preparing China for War

Kyle Bass has been a long-time China hawk. in this lecture he reveals some very disturbing trends in China’s plans to recover Taiwan. It is going to be hard to deter this determined emperor. He has became a one-man-show, with no dissenting voices to council him. This is a very dangerous situation and one that I’m not sure diplomacy can resolve.

Just as our oil blockade forced Japan to desperately attach Pearl Harbor, we declared war on China with our October 17th microchip ban. I doubt the current American public’s willingness to run a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, like we did during the Russian blockade of Berlin during the Cold War.

Such an humiliating defeat would further embolden the Coalition of autocrats and become the beginning of the end of the dollar as the world’s Reserve currency and the substantial benefits that confers on us.

Zhou between Kissinger and Mao

When Premier Zhou Enlai was asked by Henry Kissinger what he thought of the French Revolution, he calmly replied “We’ll have to see”. Except for brief periods in history, autocracies (kings, emperors, dictators) have ruled our world. The Chinese take the Long View that this current aberration of History, with concern for freedom and human rights, will eventually revert to the mean again. And they will be here to push us back to those prevalent dark times.

Kyle’s presentation includes 3 sections:

1. Military force readiness & preparation

2. Changes to the legal system & infrastructure

3. Financial market movements & wartime planning

Here is his opening statement…

Take the time to watch the rest of this sobering assessment with the link below.

https://www.hudson.org/events/china-prepares-war-timeline-miles-yu-kyle-bass

I guess this is what Europeans really think of us…

At least when Buzzfeed asked AI to come up with what Europeans imagined what people from each State in America to look like. The images were created in Midjourney the best text to image AI out there so far. The result wasn’t pretty.

Following the alphabet number 1 is Alabama

Number 2 is Alaska

To get the rest click on this link to BuzFeed

https://buzzfeed.com/daves4/european-ai-american-list

You won’t believe how bad the corruption is in the Russian military.

Things really started to go downhill, when they cut back the compulsory draft from 2 years to 1 year. This interview from a former officer is mind-boggling. Download this PDF file to read it.

ThreadReader_0_secretsqrl123_1673035946034450433Download

Why Not Being Able to make Alliances Destroys Aspiring Autocratic Empires

Russia is the last Colonial Empire; having conquered, at one time or another, most of her neighbors, many of whom are still subjects. China is the latest wanna be colonial power with their floundering Belt and Road initiative. This article points out a fatal flaw in their plans for world domination that has reoccurred throughout history.

China and the Alliance Allergy of Rising Powers

Maasai Are Getting Pushed Off Their Land So Dubai Royalty Can Shoot Lions

Tanzania’s government wants big tourism money. Herders don’t want to lose their livelihood

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-05-23/maasai-getting-pushed-off-their-land-so-dubai-royalty-can-hunt-lions?sref=Ff6DENEe

A friend from Tanzania had this response to this outrage…

Started Last year, they started moving villages out of the reserve when they have been living for 100’s of years, some refused and had to be moved by force. Very Sad story, and not the first time. They even had big middle east military plane suspected to be loaded with wildlife for Zoos in Emirates.

T.I.A (That Is Africa)

Critics have argued that the Tanzanian government doesn’t want Maasai herding cattle where safari-goers expect to see giraffes and elephants.

As noted in this Bloomberg article

Scientists insist proper land use planning could have helped avoid today’s conflicts, and conservationists say photographic tourism concessions would bring far more money into the state budget than hunting, leading to suspicions that the corruption uncovered in 1996 and 2017 persists. 

One Masai, who has an Economics degree pointed out that…

Uneducated Maasai women have few options beyond marriage, and in polygamist societies, that often means as a second or third wife. Since women in such situations compete for status by having more children, “if you want to depopulate this area, just educate every Maasai girl to university level,” he says. “It’ll be solved in 15 years.”

The Brutal Unspoken Mafia Prison Rules that Russia Lives By

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/16/russia-prisons-wagner-group-ukraine-crime-culture/

The criminals that ran the black market during the Communist days, came to power during the chaos of the 1900s, during the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

In November 1996, to consolidate his power, Putin and his friends founded the Ozero Cooperative, which bonded together oligarchs and the  mafia families. Over the many years of the state within the state that was the gulag system, a bizarre caste system arose in the prisons. At the bottom of the cast where the so-called Roosters. Recruiting these Untouchables into the Ukraine “Special Operation” has upset this brutal hierarchy and troop morale.

The lowest caste, and the one that every prisoner fears degradation to, are the roosters, also known as the “offended,” the “pederasts,” or the “downcast.” That is a position to which it is extremely easy to fall down to, but one that you can never climb up from. They’re forced to do all the worst jobs—such as cleaning the cell’s latrine, washing everyone’s underwear—because no, your average Russian prison does not have any washing machines—and often serving as sexual slaves. They also get the worst sleeping spots in the cell, usually next to the latrine.

A rooster  is untouchable outside of sex. One is not allowed to share anything with a rooster except as a payment for services—not only is it taboo to touch them, but also anything that they have touched, as that instantly moves one to their caste. Their kitchenware is explicitly marked as such, for one, and whenever transferring cells, they’re supposed to publicly announce their suit status and move in with “their own” accordingly.

. Gay and transgender prisoners are automatically placed among the roosters, but so are those who foolishly admit to having given oral sex to a woman—an act that, as among the ancient Romans or the modern Italian mafia, is seen as fundamentally impure.

A rooster’s status is truly miserable. It’s driven many people to suicide and made people so miserable that they used to rebel and intentionally touch blatniye inmates as a last attempt of revenge—sure, they would be instantly killed by other inmates, but the prisoner who previously belonged to the higher caste would instantly be a rooster inside the prison system and out, and would never be able to move upwards in the hierarchy

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Russia’s Nukes Probably Don’t Work — Here’s Why

https://wesodonnell.medium.com/russias-nukes-probably-don-t-work-here-s-why-bd686dec8b6

Lack of Maintenance Like the Rest of their Equipment

6 min read

An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test at 1:13 a.m. Pacific Time, Oct. 2, 2019, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The test demonstrates the United States’ nuclear deterrent is robust, flexible, ready, and approximately tailored to deter twenty-first century threats and reassure our allies. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Staff Sgt. J.T. Armstrong) Public domain

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a curious thing happened: Putin’s modern, lethal fighting force turned out to be a broken-down, two-bit shadow of its former self.

There are many reasons for this, but the biggest seems to be unbridled corruption at a level that shook even the most hardened analysts in Western defense intelligence.

Particularly egregious was the poor maintenance on display with most, if not all, of Russia’s war machines.

Looking back now, with the benefit of time (and watching Russia flounder around in Eastern Ukraine for over a year), it’s easy to see how funds intended for operations and maintenance might have been diverted.

Hell, this story of a Russian army commander stealing engines from Putin’s prized T-90 tanks is a perfect example.

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