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Open thread 11/21/22 — 31 Comments

  1. This is a subject that interests me and I have tried reading David Chalmers’ works thereon. But Chalmers, like other experts in the field (Searle, Annika Harris, etc.), are atheists, and are strongly influenced in their views and theories by their unbelief. So: does anyone know of reputable theorists in the field who are not atheists? Thanks in advance for your whatever info you can provide in this regard . . .

  2. Bill Barr is not a serious or an honest man. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/ill_barrs_latest_antitrump_diatribe_explodes_the_myth_that_hes_a_wise_man.html

    The populist support for Brexit had nothing to do with Trump. The populist movement in the US to oppose elites who suppress workers and abuse the Constitution isn’t dependent on Trump either.

    It seems everyone, including both Trump and his insane haters in both parties, is confused about this.

  3. IrishOtter49, try Paul Davies.

    I fall into the Wigner camp on the possible role of consciousness in resolving the Von Neumann chain. There’s some really interesting speculation happening. First with Robert Epstein and his idea of the brain as transducer: What if the brain is not a self-contained information processor? What if it is simply a transducer of a more pr evasive “consciousness”? Then add in the Chalmers and McQueen idea (I’m just now working my way through that paper…it is heavy going) of a “continuum” of
    ability to tap into this “consciousness” by the level of ability of information processes a brain is capable of. All very interesting stuff and fun to consider.

  4. phyicsguy:

    Thanks, I’ll have a look at Davies. As a person of [Catholic] faith, I find discussions of consciousness by atheists sorely and vastly lacking — like a ballerina with only one leg.

  5. They have that crypt keeper as health director ferrer who isnt even a doctor

    Real consciousness is probably something outside current technology

  6. That it is an intriguing notion so its the software not the hardware that matters

    Consciousness being the software

  7. I don’t see why there’s anything special about consciousness and quantum effects. This to me looks like a game of telephone that got started sometime in the 1940s with science popularizers. People are trying to load the equations up with all these meanings in English that aren’t present in the math.

  8. “Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says his life became a ‘living hell’ when he challenged Dr. Fauci over 2020 COVID lockdowns”—

    I sympathize with him, but he does not recount any harassment from faculty or administrators at Stanford, just cold indifference. The cold indifference is not good, but you can find much worse out there.

    Recall at this time the writings of the late Phillip Johnson contra government funding of scientific research. They were spare but persuasive. Prof. Johnson was legal counsel to Dr. Peter Duesberg, AIDS dissident.

  9. If there is a Consciousness, is it aware of itself? Does It know the quantum guys are poking around?

  10. @ Mike Smith > “The amount of hypocrisy pertaining to global warming if off the charts!”
    Thanks for the link to your post. Great pictures.
    I also use the Glenn Reynolds Crisis Maxim to judge all climate change hysterics.

    I found your other post, short as it was, to be quite alarming.
    https://www.mikesmithenterprisesblog.com/2022/11/storm-warnings-one-of-issues-with-wind.html

    As wind farms continue to grow, meteorologists lose our ability to see storms in more and more areas.
    This is the Vance AFB radar during last Monday afternoon’s snow. Where you see black, that is the ground clutter system attempting to deal with regular ground cutter and wind farms. The latter is nearly impossible to deal with.

    And, yes, if it was an approaching tornado, we would not be able to see it.

    I grew up in Tornado Alley (Texas Panhandle), and that’s a very seriously concerning observation.
    What are meteorologists doing to get around that problem?

    If you add the stealth twisters to the chopped birds, the wind farms are adding up to a Perfect Storm.

  11. @ om > those were amazing recreations! What a feat of technical skill.
    They reminded me of the living pictures on the walls of Hogwarts!

  12. @ stan > “Bill Barr is not a serious or an honest man.”

    Thanks for the link; Andrea Widburg is always a pleasure to read.
    What she said about the Mar-a-lago raid is important, but mostly a rehash.
    One of her commenters, however, posted something that was news to me — although I suspected something like that might happened, as there was never any serious way for Barr to make the declaration he did so soon after the 2020 election.

    Douglas W Johnson
    I was excited when Trump appointed Barr to take over the DOJ, but most accounts, Barr was a conservative and impeccably decent and honorable man. Sadly, time proved just the opposite.

    Peter Navarro recounts an encounter with AG Barr. Following the democrats’ Big Steal Operation of November 2020, Navarro had quickly assembled affidavits, claims, videos….the great evidences of the fraud and marched into Barr’s office.

    Following Navarro’s presentation, Barr told him that he felt the DOJ should stay out of it, that it would be best left to Trump’s campaign organization to fight this further.

    Four days later was when Barr made his public appearance to say that the DOJ had looked at the charges of a stolen election and found no evidence! That was nothing but deep state BS. That story told me all I needed to know about Barr and now over the past year as he cuts Trump’s throat every opportunity, the man shows his true colors.

    I do remember reading about the Navarro Report when it was published in 2020 (all three parts), but hadn’t heard that he took his preliminary findings to Barr.
    (Still looking for a link on that.)

    https://electionfraud20.org/navarro-election-report/

    I note that a search for the Navarro Report turns up the expected Left-wing Media “fact checks” — which don’t actually address any issues, but mostly just sling mud and call him bad names.

    The mildest critique was from Newsweek: “Navarro’s conclusion was based on allegations that had already been debunked and tossed out of court in dozens of Trump campaign lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results in several swing states.”

    However, we don’t have to rehash the debunking of the debunkers here.

    PS – This “fact check” also repeats the familiar boilerplate, but since their assessment of his credibility contains this section, maybe they aren’t so great on any of their “analysis,” given that Navarro’s “errors” are among the now-retracted oopsies of the last few years.

    https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/navarro-report/

    Although not related to the Navarro Report website, Peter Navarro also frequently promotes Covid-19 conspiracies and falsehoods such as providing misleading information regarding Hydroxychloroquine “Navarro Doesn’t Give Full Picture On Hydroxychloroquine”. He also promoted the falsehood that lockdowns will kill more people than the virus. In general, The Navarro Report and Peter Navarro frequently promote false and misleading information that is not credible.

  13. In re jumping to conclusions and boilerplate media narratives – somehow this phrase is now obligatory in any election story with disputed results, even though the AG in Arizona thinks there is plenty of evidence supporting Lake’s claims.

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaign/arizona-kari-lake-hobbs-governor-trump

    She claimed, without evidence, that half of the voting centers that opened for the first time on Nov. 8 were “not operational” or had “significant failures” and that voters affected were “overwhelmingly” hers and used that argument to justify refusing to bow out.

    https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/21/arizona-ag-demands-maricopa-officials-answer-for-reportedly-mixing-counted-and-uncounted-ballots/

    … among other things.

  14. “She claimed, without evidence, that half of the voting centers that opened for the first time on Nov. 8 were “not operational” or had “significant failures”…”– Barnini Chakraborty, Senior Investigations Reporter

    What a lazy excuse for a reporter! There was a time when an “Investigations Reporter” would actually– you know investigate to find out the truth or falsehoods of the claim.
    It was more like 60%, not half, if he’d bothered to do a modest amount of investigating!
    I think a better job title would be “Senior Propaganda Reciter.”
    Just disgusting.

  15. “According to an affidavit report by Mark Sonnenklar, a roving attorney with the Republican National Committee’s Election Integrity program in Arizona, he and 10 other RNC roving attorneys reported their observations and those of Republican observers at vote centers on Election Day.”

    “The 11 attorneys visited 115 out of the 223 vote centers in Maricopa County on Election Day and found that 72 of them (or 62.61%) “had material problems with the tabulators not being able to tabulate ballots,” Sonnenklar reported, “causing voters to either deposit their ballots into box 3, spoil their ballots and re-vote, or get frustrated and leave the vote center without voting.”

    All Barnini Chakraborty, Senior Investigations Reporter had to do was ask.

    https://justthenews.com/maricopa-county-follies-affidavits-detail-ballot-shenanigans-arizonas-largest-county

  16. deauragatypes == daguerreotypes, I presume.

    Ummmm, on Windows Chrome, it’s in the dictionary… 😉

    I thought I knew how to spell it, but I just selected it from the words offered after a right-click.
    😀

  17. Open thread — interesting posts — provocative questions.
    Number One.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/twitter-controlling-the-content/
    By ANDREW STUTTAFORD (not one of their knee-jerk anti-Trump posts)

    He first quotes Yoel Roth at the NY Times: “In the days following Mr. Musk’s acquisition, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a key ad industry trade group, published an open call to Twitter to adhere to existing commitments to “brand safety.” It’s perhaps for this reason that Mr. Musk has said he wants to move away from ads as Twitter’s primary revenue source: His ability to make decisions unilaterally about the site’s future is constrained by a marketing industry he neither controls nor has managed to win over.”

    But what, I wondered, is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media? Given the slippery ways that, in this age of euphemism, the word “responsible” can be used, its appearance within the name of “global alliance” raised a red flag.

    Click on GARM’s website:

    GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a cross-industry initiative established by the World Federation of Advertisers to address the challenge of harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising…

    As of November 2019, GARM is a flagship project of the World Economic Forum Platform For Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture.

    Ah, the World Economic Forum: Davos! Klaus Schwab!

    And down the corporatist rabbit hole I go:

    WEF:
    Together with members and partners on our Media, Entertainment and Sport platform, through initiatives like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, we are aggregating solutions to major industry disruptions while driving greater social cohesion and helping companies remain accountable to the global social good.

    Companies should be accountable to the law and to their shareholders, but, as so often, WEF’s stakeholder capitalists throw in something else, accountability to a “global social good” defined by the unaccountable and, to most of us, unknown.

    Follow through with another click here, this time to a page that explains the WEF’s “Platform for Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture.” (Nothing ominous about that!) There you will read that

    media companies and organizations are uniquely positioned to leverage the scale and reach of their platforms for positive societal impact on key issues such as Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), equality, justice, sustainability and societal wellbeing.

    Somehow, I just knew that those would be “key issues,” and that harnessing the media toward pursuit of a “positive societal impact” (as defined by yet more of the unaccountable and unknown) would be another objective.

    Today’s corporatism is what it is.

    All this seems like a long way from where this post began — the controversy over Musk’s running of Twitter — but it is a reminder that, in an age where corporatism is on the march, even something as routine as an unwillingness to alienate advertisers can involve issues that run far deeper than anything that Don Draper or, for that matter, anyone who cares about free speech or even democracy would have recognized as worthy of the slightest consideration.

    Musk is charging into a minefield.

  18. Number Two.
    From Mike Smith, one of our commenters.
    https://www.mikesmithenterprisesblog.com/2022/11/why-do-you-think-biden-wanted-87000.html

    Why Do You Think Biden Wanted 87,000 Additional IRS Agents?!
    From Instapundit: [Mark Tapscott posting]

    DEMS PREPARE IRS TO CRUSH EVANGELICALS: Buried in the laughably titled “Respect for Marriage Act” now before the Senate are provisions authorizing the IRS to jerk tax-exemption from any church or non-profit social service agency that refuses to support the LGBQT agenda regarding marriage.

    What will come in the months following enactment will be a swarm of gay couples demanding that evangelical pastors perform wedding ceremonies that many of them will refuse, as a matter of faith, to do. There will similarly be gay couples demanding that religious-based adoption agencies that only match orphans with intact heterosexual couples abandon their beliefs.

    In other words, the full force of the federal government is being prepared for the assault on tax-exempt churches and church-related social service agencies that liberals have dreamed of ever since Jimmy Carter failed effort in 1977 to do so woke up millions of evangelicals to their obligations as citizens to be involved in the public square.

    It won’t be just evangelicals, it will be Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and anyone else disagrees with leftist orthodoxy.

    Elections have consequences — which is why the D’s are trying to rush this through in a lame-duck session before the Republicans take over the House.

    There is a little doubt the courts will overturn this but in the meantime it will cause the defendants a fortune to fight these persecutions (which is what they will be). Remember, the defendants will be spending their money while the prosecutors will be spending our money — with zero consequences for prosecutorial misconduct.

    Biden and the D’s are on a dangerous path. I’m hoping some of the less radical Democrats think this through before voting “yes.”

    Even if Brandon loses some Dems, he seems to have plenty from the GOP to take up the slack.

    I’ve seen lots of Dueling Pundits arguing either that the continued protections for Religious Freedom are quite adequate thank-you-very-much, and others (such as Tapscott & Mike) that there are enough loopholes and backdoors that the Democrat prosecutors and judges could manage to convict anyone they wanted of breaking the law.

    Tapscott is quoting from his lengthier post here.
    https://pjmedia.com/culture/marktapscott/2022/11/18/biden-democrats-moving-to-ban-traditional-marriage-advocates-from-the-public-square-n1646900

    And links this source:
    https://heritageaction.com/key-vote/key-vote-no-on-the-respect-for-marriage-act

    I’m not seeing any direct links to the alleged tax-exemption-jerking provision, so I will reserve any other comment until that can be established or refuted.

    Update from the Instapundit post, a video which I have roughly transcribed:
    “Sen. James Lankford explains in detail why Respect for Marriage Act threatens religious liberty”
    At about 3:50 he lists the institutions opposing the Act — and says they’ve actually read the bill instead of just listening to the debates about it. Intent is not the same as text, and the words of the bill matter. The title of Section 6 says “No impact on religious liberty” but the protections are only for ordained religious leaders, and limits the individuals otherwise protected. Sponsors of the bill told him that they specifically intended to exclude private individuals or business owners. Section 7 supposedly covers all other areas, but the qualifiers that might remove any real protections will have to be adjudicated later. We have had only 72 hours to clarify the bill, but now that debate has started all amendments have been cut out. That tells me that these are not “mistakes” in the drafting, but purposeful confusions. After Obergefell, Obama admonished everyone to recognize sincerely held differences of opinion; now Democrats are saying, “Never mind.”

    He doesn’t quite accuse Biden Inc of saying, “If you like your church, you can keep your church,” but he comes close.

    From the Instapundit post, a possible solution to the alleged provision:

    TheEmpororsNewClothes • 3 days ago
    I say get rid of all tax exemptions: universities, schools, hospitals, non-for-profits charities (a.k.a. Democratic party operatives), unions, and churches. They should be the minimum 15% like the Democrats want corporations to pay. If they don’t like it, then they should try to elect politicians who support lower taxes and limited government spending.

    Notice how the list of tax exempt support Democrats? So eliminating tax exemptions will take money away from Democratic contributors.

  19. Number Three – American Thinker had several good posts up, but this brings up an immigration “program” I had not seen before.

    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/joe_bidens_sneaky_new_alternative_immigration_program_escorts_tens_of_thousands_of_migrants_in_from_mexico_work_permits_in_hand.html
    by Monica Showalter
    First she quotes The Center for Immigration Studies’s Todd Bensman:

    Twice a day, seven days a week since September, Mexicali city officials working closely with Biden’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection, on a secure shared “CBP-ONE” online platform, select hundreds of people a month for their escorted government-to-government handoffs through the land port of entry to Calexico, Calif. Once the Americans check their paperwork, they legally [AF: I would have put that in sarc-quotes] admit intending illegal border crossers like Nicaraguan Maria Esperanza Diaz Ruiz, 42, into the U.S. interior under a questionable authority known as “humanitarian or significant public benefit parole.”

    They are free to start new lives under the benefit, with work authorization and the right to apply for asylum part of the package.

    Then continues, including further quotes from Bensman’s post (see link below):

    Border-based NGOs help migrants get their documents and sob stories ready for them so that when U.S. officials come looking for migrants to bring in, they are ready to make their asylum claims, and will get free transport without having to pay cartels for that, as well as instant work permits and public benefits, such as “free” American health care. Bensman reports that the Biden administration isn’t saying how many they are letting in this way, but the evidence suggests it’s already tens of thousands.

    This explains why there have been recent reports of new stationings of personnel at the border as if a new hiring binge is going on among Border Patrol and other agents, even as Biden administration by policy has no intention of stopping any of the migrants.

    So now they’re not just letting anyone in, unvetted and unknown, but bringing them in, and well ahead of those attempting to immigrate through a legal process, which costs those migrants thousands of dollars, involves waiting for years in line, and comes with no benefit package the illegal migrants get. For those who might have been planning to emigrate to the state legally, they’ve just been notified that they’re on a fool’s errand — migrating illegally is where the results are.

    As for whether this has anything legal about it, well, it certainly doesn’t conform to the Constitutional authority for Congress to set immigration law.

    Joe Biden’s got his own “alternative immigration program” as Bensman puts it, an apparent offshoot, bigger and better funded, than a previous report last June of Border Patrol agents going into migrant shelters to recruit single moms for entry into the U.S. Now they’ve gone industrial scale, bringing them on in without any consent of either Congress or the people who must live with the results of mass illegal migration from more than 100 countries around the world at a time of recession and coming job losses as well as high inflation brought on by government spending. The migrants have told Bensman that things have never been better now.

    Too bad there’s a price for this and Americans here are going to pay it, powerless to stop it unless an incoming Congress cuts that funding off immediately.

    Bensman’s post, which is very detailed, with interviews from people using the program and information on the many places where the illegals are being ferried into the US by the Biden administration:
    https://cis.org/Bensman/Legalizing-Border-Crossing-All-Next-Stage-Bidens-Migration-Crisis

    This looks to be part of a purposeful strategy to create work-arounds to court-ordered expulsion policies but also to reduce politically painful illegal crossing statistics by channeling ever more people through these legalized crossings. While neither DHS nor the White House has publicized this legalized entrance program,DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly telegraphed it in his oft-stated intentions to create “legal pathways” as part of the administration’s overarching “safe, orderly, and humane” vision for southern border immigration.

    Were the escort hand-off system continue to expand and become the norm, it would create economic and security incentives for even more to come. First, port escorts eliminate the need to pay thousands of dollars to Mexican cartel smugglers for the right to cross, providing a powerful financial incentive. Second, immigrants allowed in this way avoid criminal dangers in northern Mexico while they wait inside a shelter system that provides for all their daily needs.

    The system benefits open-borders advocates and the Biden administration too, pleasing immigration doves in the Democratic Party who demand unimpeded cross-border travel and an end to immigration enforcement. But mainly, the numbers of legal hand-off crossings don’t add to the politically problematic apprehension statistics that worry some Democrats.

    After all, technically, this could no longer be called “illegal immigration” if it’s been made “legal.”

    And, even better for politicians and for hopeful migrants heading north, this kind of entry happens out of sight of news cameras, and therefore remains out of the public mind.

    Bensman notes that, although the migrants are not paying the cartels for passage, the administrators at the shelters and along the way are taking “tribute” for their assistance.

    I suspect we won’t see a report on this in the Media anytime soon.
    I wonder if Governors Abbot and DeSantis and Ducey (AZ, for a while longer) know about this. If Newsom of CA does, he probably supports it.

  20. Number Four – Elon may not yet have completed the transition from the Old Twitter Regime.
    https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/twitter-locks-out-citizen-free-press-after-video-obama-claiming-democrats-control

    The video, posted to the Citizen Free Press Twitter account, showed Obama at a 2008 rally at Kent State University when he was then the Democratic presidential nominee. A questioner in the audience had just asked Obama to “reassure us that this election will not be rigged or stolen.”

    “Well, I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we’ve got Democrats in charge of the machines,” Obama said, after which the audience applauded.

    Obama went on to note that “whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to, you know, tilt things in their direction,” with the candidate arguing in favor of a “voting rights division in the Justice Department that is non-partisan and that is serious about investigating cases of voter fraud.”

    The founder of Citizen Free Press, known mononymously as Kane, said on his personal account that the CFP account “was mysteriously suspended for the tweet.”

    In addition to suspending the main account, Twitter locked other users out from sharing or commenting on the offending tweet.

    I still remember reading stories about that.
    No wonder Biden felt like he had to claim his voter fraud organization was better: had to one-up his former boss.
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/10/24/in-senectus-veritas/

    Obama was such a conniving liar.

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