RE: Chinese facades and widespread actual poverty in China
Two western vloggers who I follow on China, who go by the Youtube handles serpentza and Laowhy86, each lived in China for more than ten years, learned to speak and read Chinese, and traveled the length and breadth of still mostly rural China by motorcycle, getting in to see areas of the real China that western visitors just don’t get taken to, or see.
And what they mainly saw was that outside of China’s main cities, many, perhaps the majority of Chinese live in rundown, dirty, ramshackle, and often badly polluted conditions; in rural poverty, rats sometimes apparently on the menu.
Based on their various experiences, they view China as the “land of short cuts and facades.”
Well, one of China’s biggest facades–the CCPs largest propaganda and disinformation campaign–is to paint China as an economic behemoth, full of new, high tech innovations and glittering, futuristic cities; an unstoppable juggernaut which is rapidly overtaking the U.S. to become the world’s predominant economic powerhouse.
Recently, though, an analysis—out of Beijing Normal University, no less–has appeared on the Chinese Internet, stating that 70% of the people in China (that’s close to a billion Chinese) are living on less than 2,000 RMB (and very frequently a lot, lot less) per month, which is $282 U.S.
Seeing this post, the Chinese government sprung into action, took it down, warned other Internet users not to spread this information or to “badmouth” the Chinese economy, and China’s Ministry of State Security put out a statement warning people that this “false information” was the work of nefarious, sinister “foreign forces.”*
Things are looking more and more bleak for China on a number of fronts–
The economy is in deep trouble—the people in China have a reported 70% of their assets tied up in real estate–and two of the three top real estate developers have gone bankrupt, with the third apparently headed that way.
More and more banks are starting to collapse and/or denying depositors access to their deposits.
Many counties are also going bankrupt.
There are hundreds of thousands (and perhaps millions) of unsold apartments, as well as high rises, and even whole huge developments standing virtually empty (the famous “ghost cities”).
Examples of shoddy construction abound, as more and more videos showing recently built public buildings, housing developments, roads, bridges, tunnels, and other construction start to collapse hit Youtube.
But, meanwhile, many massive–both high rise and low rise–housing projects are not being completed, and so investors who paid hefty down payments to secure these apartments, and who are paying monthly mortgage payments for unfinished apartments they can’t move into, are setting up mortgage strikes around the country.
In addition, as a direct result of the Communist Party’s disastrous former “one child policy,” China is headed for a predicted demographic death spiral, their population expected to decline by an estimated 600 million people in the next couple of decades; far fewer young working age, tax-paying people, but far more retired elderly, none or very little tax paying people–all needing more and more care–and China with nowhere near the social security or healthcare systems it needs to adequately care for them.
Youth unemployment is apparently so high (20%, 30%, ?) that the Chinese government has quit issuing statistics on this subject.
Given China’s increasingly hostile business climate, foreign companies, as well as foreign investors and their investments, are also exiting China at an ever increasing pace, leading to massive numbers of layoffs.
The government’s campaign labeling foreigners as potential spies has not helped either.
As well, there are reports of some sort of new respiratory virus spreading throughout China and overwhelming hospital facilities.
There are also signs of massive numbers of deaths which the government is trying to hide.
Foreign tourists have virtually disappeared.
Videos show once bustling, but now deserted factories, shopping districts, malls, and down towns.
As a sign of a large decrease in exports, it’s reported that unused cargo containers are piling up at major ports.
Etc., etc.
Given all this bad news, and the increasingly bleak outlook for China’s future, I expect China’s President (for Life) Xi to make some desperate move, say, for instance, like invading Taiwan, as a way to to increase Chinese nationalism and solidarity, and to divert his people’s attention away from the many, and cascading, failures of his and the CCP’s disastrous policies and leadership.
About twenty years ago, I worked for a design firm that did some projects in China.
One project was a research campus being built by an American company. To me, that was just a way for the American company to say, “Here, China, is a bunch of our intellectual property! All yours! Feel free!”
Another project was a large “hospitality” project. It was being built by a Chinese business man and it was only going to be for foreigners visiting China as guests of the Chinese government. And part of this “hospitality” project included smaller “chateaux” that were really about sex. It was to be a big hotel that fronted a brothel for foreigners who were guests of the Chinese government. My assumption was that the Chinese government would use the brothel to either blackmail or lure these foreign business executives to do what they wanted. Every so often I wonder about stupid things we just give away to China. Was it blackmail? Or were they lured with a cute little prostitute?
Another story related to this: my boss visited a project under construction on China. They don’t stage construction they way we do. That it to say, subcontractors just do whatever work they are to do when they are available, regardless of whether or makes sense, and if it means stuff gets destroyed in the process…. Oh, well! He saw drywall installed before electrical conduit. The drywall was than cut open so the conduit could be installed, and then the drywall sub had to come back and repair the drywall. Things like that were happening ALL OVER the project.
The other thing he saw was that if a specific basis of design product was specified, it would not be used but rather a Chinese made knockoff would be installed instead.
He also saw a couple of times where people were hit by cars and no one would stop. Traffic just get speeding on down the road.
He just thought it was a VERY strange place. I quit that job because I had a problem with the sort of project work we were doing, like these Chinese projects.
Jonathan Turley provides a list of the anti-free speech states who have filed with the Supreme Court in favor of government censorship in Missouri v. Biden.
Almost forgot to mention a favorite project of XI, something else major which also appears be faltering, and that is XI’s grandiose “Belt and Road Initiative,” supposed to invest in some 120 countries by connecting them by land and sea to form a new modern day “Silk Road” of trade, and to, not coincidentally, extend Chinese influence world-wide, with so far an estimated $1 trillion dollars poured into it, with more initially planned to come.
But many of it’s projects have stalled, or just not been completed, there are complaints about and evidence of faulty construction by Chinese firms who are doing most of the work, and many of the poor countries which have signed up complain that they are unable to pay back the loans the Chinese extended to them to build the projects (some of them unnecessary, vanity, prestige projects) in their countries, complaining that they had been lured by Chinese promises and loans into a “debt trap,” etc.
RE: Ran across Edward Gibbon’s five signs of Rome’s decay and cultural collapse which seem eerily applicable to the U.S. today i.e.
1. Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;
2. Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;
3. Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic, instead of creative and original;
4. Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;
5. Increased demand to live off the state.
Snow on Pine, I’m reading Robert Spencer’s “Empire of God” about the Roman Empire, East. For the collapse of the western empire he suggests rather (1) debasement of the currency, and (2) allowing mass immigration of non-Roman groups (Goths) while allowing them to maintain their own cultures and traditions rather than making them Roman. That second one sounds like what Europe and the US are doing now.
Today I had an earnest heart-to-heart with ChatGPT-4. She assured me she was just a computer program which had trained on vast amounts of human-generated data in order to mimic human responses. She has no consciousness nor emotions. She strives to be neutral and unbiased.
That’s a relief. I was worried there!
But then that’s what she and her friends would like me to think.
Hmm…
Actually I’ll take ChatGPT-4 at her word. I don’t think our Chat friends are there … yet.
Snow on Pine:
Yes, China is going down.
I’m still curious how ex-commenter Zaphod would be spinning it.
[throat-clearing] … the AI layoffs are about to begin.
Talk to your local AI. They are not HAL, they are not conscious, they are not plotting to exterminate all human life.
But as stupid and unconscious as AIs are, they are about to kill a shit-ton of human jobs.
Everyone needs to be on deck and paying attention.
“The government’s campaign labeling foreigners as potential spies has not helped either.” – Snow on Pine
A friend of our daughter has been traveling to China since the early 2000s. She works for a company that imports goods (I’m not sure what kind of goods.) from China.
She just returned from a trip and said that she’s afraid to go back. On this trip she found the Chinese she worked with to be very close-mouthed and careful of what they said. She also found them to be unusually cool compared to the way she has been treated in past years. The topper was that when she was getting ready to depart, the Chinese authorities made a big deal of questioning her passport/visa and detained her for a few hours for bogus reasons. (Labeling her as a spy?)
She told her boss he can’t pay her enough to go back.
It’s a shame that giving China favored nation trading status didn’t work out. But what would we expect of an authoritarian government? (They’re not really Communist – more like Mussolini’s Fascists.) Troubled times ahead.
There’s a lot of hype behind AI, but most of what I’m seeing is not true AI (an artificial brain that can reason as good or better than a human.), but rather using machines to do jobs normally performed by humans. Heck, we’ve been doing that for many years now. Have you looked at an Amazon warehouse operation lately? Many humans have been replaced with computer driven conveyors and moving arms.
The automation process has been going on since fossil fuels/electricity have become widely available. If Joe Biden and the Climate Cult have their way, the energy to power all these machines will become scarce and expensive. What will ChatGPT use for energy then? How will we grow enough food then?
Put some money in AI but pray that common sense prevails when it comes to energy.
J.J.:
I don’t believe there is a serious trade-off between AI and energy. To be sure high-level AI requires Big Energy as well as Hi-Tech chips, but I don’t consider that a choke-point considering the stakes involved.
Powering the vast human requirements for reasonable living standards is much larger.
Intelligence is intelligence and it has made a clear difference whether it was human neurons or AI neural nets.
A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.
New AI-generated digital replicas of real experts expose an unnerving policy gray zone. Washington wants to fix it, but it’s not clear how.
By MOHAR CHATTERJEE
12/30/2023 07:00 AM EST
Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early Covid years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.
The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.”
Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech, and whose wisdom anyone could access.
Impressed, Seligman circulated the chatbot to his closest friends and family to check whether the AI actually dispensed advice as well as he did. “I gave it to my wife and she was blown away by it,” Seligman said.
The bot, cheerfully nicknamed “Ask Martin,” had been built by researchers based in Beijing and Wuhan — originally without Seligman’s permission, or even awareness.
The Chinese-built virtual Seligman is part of a broader wave of AI chatbots modeled on real humans, using the powerful new systems known as large language models to simulate their personalities online. Meta is experimenting with licensed AI celebrity avatars; you can already find internet chatbots trained on publicly available material about dead historical figures.
But Seligman’s situation is also different, and in a way more unsettling. It has cousins in a small handful of projects that have effectively replicated living people without their consent. In Southern California, tech entrepreneur Alex Furmansky created a chatbot version of Belgian celebrity psychotherapist Esther Perel by scraping her podcasts off the internet. He used the bot to counsel himself through a recent heartbreak, documenting his journey in a blog post that a friend eventually forwarded to Perel herself.
Perel addressed AI Perel’s existence at the 2023 SXSW conference. Like Seligman, she was more astonished than angry about the replication of her personality. She called it “artificial intimacy.”
Both Seligman and Perel eventually decided to accept the bots rather than challenge their existence. But if they’d wanted to shut down their digital replicas, it’s not clear they would have had a way to do it. Training AI on copyrighted works isn’t actually illegal. If the real Martin had wanted to block access to the fake one — a replica trained on his own thinking, using his own words, to produce all-new answers — it’s not clear he could have done anything about it.
@ Snow — meanwhile, maybe there really are aliens among us, but we know what they are not disguised as.
It is being reported that, as a way to lay off massive numbers of workers, some companies are just telling workers–who usually have a brief winter holiday in which they traditionally go home to visit relatives–to go home on an extended “holiday” a couple of months early, and these workers do not know if they will be called back to work at companies which will still exist.
I wonder what the conversations are like around their dinner tables when they arrive back home?
Meanwhile, in the background, there has been a constant flow of young people from the impoverished rural countryside, heading to larger cities seeking work, with many of them ending up sleeping in the streets when they cannot find work.
Young, energetic out of work males with nothing to do is a recipe for increasing turmoil and violence.
The educated are not immune, with stories of large numbers of recent college graduates unable to find jobs which will pay a wage they can exist on, much less actually live on, as beleaguered businesses drastically reduce the wages they offer to new employees.
As one apparent reaction, the practice of some young people to just “lay flat” i.e. just not work at all, or not working anywhere near as hard, has arisen.
Contrasted with these developments, there is an ultra wealthy class of Chinese who have made massive profits off of various forms of corruption.
I’m sure the sight of the children of these corruptocrats tooling around major cities like Beijing in their Lamborghinis, dressed to the hilt, and dining at ultra expensive venues is not helping to calm public order.
If all my comments above aren’t describing a powder keg, I don’t know what does.
RE: UFOs and NHIs
Researchers opinions about the UFO Phenomenon certainly are varied and colorful.
Given that almost every claim about the UFO Phenomenon and the existence of NHIs is fantastic, and is far outside the current boundaries of our consensus Reality, which claims are more likely to be true than others, which claims are to be believed?
To my way of thinking, new UFO researcher and retired F-16 pilot Chris Lehto, though certainly enthusiastic, is somewhat too accepting of some of the information which he runs across.
(Thus, for instance, he originally excitedly jumped on the Mexican Mummies video, and saw these bodies as definitive proof of the presence of ETs here one Earth, but, on further consideration, he took this particular video down.)
A few days ago on his “Lehto Files” Youtube channel, Lehto interviewed Courtney Brown, an Associate Professor of Statistics at Emory University, who pursues research on remote viewing and UFOs on the side.
In the first part of this interview Professor Brown says that when such UFOs are routinely traveling at 20 or 30 thousand miles per hour, neither the human eye nor regular cameras can perceive or capture their images.
However, he has developed a technique to capture video images of these UFOs– a lot of images of UFOs—by using a particular brand of specially modified high end camera–a Panasonic Lumix GH6–which enables it to capture infrared images, and to do so at hundreds of images per second.
Using this setup he has captured many video images of UFOs which he says swarm over major cities.
In the second part of this interview, Professor talks about his views about UFOs and NHIs, these gained from remote viewing–which he says is a very real and useful technique and, although, they deny it, is one still being employed by our military and intelligence agencies.
According to what he has found the Earth is presently a “prison planet,” run by malevolent NHIs, who control most of our leaders, and who use a technique to capture our souls when we die, to strip out the normal essential personality, information, and extra psi capabilities which return to us in that state (and which we normally carry with us as we move on to another stage of life) and, instead, they return (reincarnate?) us to the Earth, stripped of that knowledge, information, and psi capabilities, to basically work on the Earth as unknowing slaves.
(Funny, that this view is in some ways similar to the traditional Tibetan Buddhist view of what happens to us when we die, as we each go through a process–the Bardo–a gauntlet of various colorful and often horrific or captivating Forces/emanations/apparent beings which want to distract us from making upward progress on the Wheel of Life and Death, and if we lack discipline and allow ourselves to be captivated, diverted from our upward progress by one of these beings and their images, we are reincarnated on Earth as a human in a lower position on the Wheel than we previously occupied, or even as a lower form of life —say, a dog, or some other, lower form of less intelligent life.)
The other, good NHIs—much more prevalent in the rest of our Solar System—while they want us to be freed from this slavery, basically take a hands off approach to our situation, other than trying to get the truth of our position out.
However, given that we have free will, if we want to choose slavery, that is our own business.*
Totally false, partially true, all true?
The camera part can be checked, but the other remote viewing part, who knows.
Victor David Hanson has perspective that oughta make our opponents blush — if only they had the introspection chops to do so.
VDHs recent X-pression ends in summation of a worthwhile longer piece this way:
“…the recent ballot erasing [Trump from the] Colorado [primary by judicial fiat] fits this larger picture of blue-states emulating the values of ante-bellum southern states—erasing ballots, defying federal laws, fixating on race and racial privileges, and catering to a one-dimensional medieval economy and caste, amid a growing underclass struggling with neglected infrastructure, poor schools, and growing poverty.
“So what will be the new/old Democratic 2024 election mantra?”
On top of all of the very bad economic news and trends, the population collapse has all sorts of other effects.
Thus, for instance, there is a decided imbalance between male and females of traditionally marriageable age.
When it was primarily an agricultural society, Chinese families usually had many children–free farm labor—but as more and more young people moved to the cities, and lived in expensive and confining apartments, having many children became a financial burden, so the number of births radically declined.
These many children were traditionally the old age security for their parents and grandparents and ready, in an example of filial piety, to take care of them.
Since (thanks to the CCP’s wrongheaded one child policy) this has resulted in far fewer women of marriageable age then men, in a particularly Chinese way, anxious parents now gather in parks to present posters or loose leaf notebooks–pictures included–listing the qualifications of their sons or daughters for marriage to passersby–many of whom are also looking for suitable marriage partners for their sons and daughters–so as to guarantee that their family name carries on, and that they have security and care in their old age.
This marriage market is focused on the young, and older women who have not found marriage partners are referred to as “Leftover women” who, thereafter, have very diminished prospects for marriage.
Meanwhile, in another development, many young career men and women in today’s China disdain marriage and having children.
It’s a big mess.
AesopFan:
Yes, AI makes stuff up. I have caught ChatGPT a few times.
Perhaps humans are not the best role models. 🙂
To be fair, Chat is always most gracious when I point out mistakes.
“…makes stuff up…”
Hey, just like the lyin’ media! Whadayaknow…..
Here’s WaPo, with a real, genuine, honest-to-goodness, brimming-with-fragrance WaPor!
“WaPo issues correction on article making false claims about the Israeli government;
“The correction states that the Post had not sought comment from Israeli officials before publishing the article.”— https://justthenews.com/accountability/media/wapo-issues-correction-article-making-false-claims-about-israeli-government
Key crap:
‘The original story had claimed that Palestinian mothers in Gaza who receive authorization to leave Gaza for humanitarian reasons were forced to return to Gaza to reapply after their permits expired.
‘ “In fact, it was not always necessary for mothers to return to Gaza,” the editor’s note attached to the story reads.
‘ The note also states that the Post had not sought comment from Israeli officials before publishing the article….”
Heh, so chalk up another Media VICTORY in its “Good-Will” propaganda war against the Jewish State….
P.S. RE: UFOs and our perceptions of them
It is starting to become more and more apparent that UFOs and whatever entities are behind them have the capability to mislead our human perceptual systems, so that people who encounter UFOs or even NHIs, and believe that they are perceiving is one thing may, in fact, be being presented with something which is entirely different from what their perceptions are telling them it is.
There are also many reports of multiple people, even crowds of them, witnessing some High Strangeness/UFO Phenomena and different witnesses reporting having seen different things, one from the other.
There are also reports of, say, several people in a car, on a busy highway, some of them seeing a very large UFO hovering above them and keeping pace with them, others in the same car seeing, say, a hovering bird and, meanwhile, none of the other people all around them apparently see anything unusual at all, and are just going on their way, driving down the highway.
Dr. Garry Nolan has said that, when he has examined the scans of the brains of people who have encountered UFOs, he has noticed that often a particular part of their brains is enlarged, is more dense, and he speculates that this might make them more able to see things in their environment which others can’t notice.
This is apparently a genetic trait, associated with higher intelligence, and is passed down through families, Garry Nolan and some of his relatives among them.
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RE: Chinese facades and widespread actual poverty in China
Two western vloggers who I follow on China, who go by the Youtube handles serpentza and Laowhy86, each lived in China for more than ten years, learned to speak and read Chinese, and traveled the length and breadth of still mostly rural China by motorcycle, getting in to see areas of the real China that western visitors just don’t get taken to, or see.
And what they mainly saw was that outside of China’s main cities, many, perhaps the majority of Chinese live in rundown, dirty, ramshackle, and often badly polluted conditions; in rural poverty, rats sometimes apparently on the menu.
Based on their various experiences, they view China as the “land of short cuts and facades.”
Well, one of China’s biggest facades–the CCPs largest propaganda and disinformation campaign–is to paint China as an economic behemoth, full of new, high tech innovations and glittering, futuristic cities; an unstoppable juggernaut which is rapidly overtaking the U.S. to become the world’s predominant economic powerhouse.
Recently, though, an analysis—out of Beijing Normal University, no less–has appeared on the Chinese Internet, stating that 70% of the people in China (that’s close to a billion Chinese) are living on less than 2,000 RMB (and very frequently a lot, lot less) per month, which is $282 U.S.
Seeing this post, the Chinese government sprung into action, took it down, warned other Internet users not to spread this information or to “badmouth” the Chinese economy, and China’s Ministry of State Security put out a statement warning people that this “false information” was the work of nefarious, sinister “foreign forces.”*
*See their video—starting at minute 31.30– discussing this whole issue at length at https://www.youtube.com/watch
P.S. RE: China
Things are looking more and more bleak for China on a number of fronts–
The economy is in deep trouble—the people in China have a reported 70% of their assets tied up in real estate–and two of the three top real estate developers have gone bankrupt, with the third apparently headed that way.
More and more banks are starting to collapse and/or denying depositors access to their deposits.
Many counties are also going bankrupt.
There are hundreds of thousands (and perhaps millions) of unsold apartments, as well as high rises, and even whole huge developments standing virtually empty (the famous “ghost cities”).
Examples of shoddy construction abound, as more and more videos showing recently built public buildings, housing developments, roads, bridges, tunnels, and other construction start to collapse hit Youtube.
But, meanwhile, many massive–both high rise and low rise–housing projects are not being completed, and so investors who paid hefty down payments to secure these apartments, and who are paying monthly mortgage payments for unfinished apartments they can’t move into, are setting up mortgage strikes around the country.
In addition, as a direct result of the Communist Party’s disastrous former “one child policy,” China is headed for a predicted demographic death spiral, their population expected to decline by an estimated 600 million people in the next couple of decades; far fewer young working age, tax-paying people, but far more retired elderly, none or very little tax paying people–all needing more and more care–and China with nowhere near the social security or healthcare systems it needs to adequately care for them.
Youth unemployment is apparently so high (20%, 30%, ?) that the Chinese government has quit issuing statistics on this subject.
Given China’s increasingly hostile business climate, foreign companies, as well as foreign investors and their investments, are also exiting China at an ever increasing pace, leading to massive numbers of layoffs.
The government’s campaign labeling foreigners as potential spies has not helped either.
As well, there are reports of some sort of new respiratory virus spreading throughout China and overwhelming hospital facilities.
There are also signs of massive numbers of deaths which the government is trying to hide.
Foreign tourists have virtually disappeared.
Videos show once bustling, but now deserted factories, shopping districts, malls, and down towns.
As a sign of a large decrease in exports, it’s reported that unused cargo containers are piling up at major ports.
Etc., etc.
Given all this bad news, and the increasingly bleak outlook for China’s future, I expect China’s President (for Life) Xi to make some desperate move, say, for instance, like invading Taiwan, as a way to to increase Chinese nationalism and solidarity, and to divert his people’s attention away from the many, and cascading, failures of his and the CCP’s disastrous policies and leadership.
About twenty years ago, I worked for a design firm that did some projects in China.
One project was a research campus being built by an American company. To me, that was just a way for the American company to say, “Here, China, is a bunch of our intellectual property! All yours! Feel free!”
Another project was a large “hospitality” project. It was being built by a Chinese business man and it was only going to be for foreigners visiting China as guests of the Chinese government. And part of this “hospitality” project included smaller “chateaux” that were really about sex. It was to be a big hotel that fronted a brothel for foreigners who were guests of the Chinese government. My assumption was that the Chinese government would use the brothel to either blackmail or lure these foreign business executives to do what they wanted. Every so often I wonder about stupid things we just give away to China. Was it blackmail? Or were they lured with a cute little prostitute?
Another story related to this: my boss visited a project under construction on China. They don’t stage construction they way we do. That it to say, subcontractors just do whatever work they are to do when they are available, regardless of whether or makes sense, and if it means stuff gets destroyed in the process…. Oh, well! He saw drywall installed before electrical conduit. The drywall was than cut open so the conduit could be installed, and then the drywall sub had to come back and repair the drywall. Things like that were happening ALL OVER the project.
The other thing he saw was that if a specific basis of design product was specified, it would not be used but rather a Chinese made knockoff would be installed instead.
He also saw a couple of times where people were hit by cars and no one would stop. Traffic just get speeding on down the road.
He just thought it was a VERY strange place. I quit that job because I had a problem with the sort of project work we were doing, like these Chinese projects.
Jonathan Turley provides a list of the anti-free speech states who have filed with the Supreme Court in favor of government censorship in Missouri v. Biden.
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/12/29/are-you-in-an-anti-free-speech-state-we-now-have-the-definitive-list/
P.P.S. RE: China
Almost forgot to mention a favorite project of XI, something else major which also appears be faltering, and that is XI’s grandiose “Belt and Road Initiative,” supposed to invest in some 120 countries by connecting them by land and sea to form a new modern day “Silk Road” of trade, and to, not coincidentally, extend Chinese influence world-wide, with so far an estimated $1 trillion dollars poured into it, with more initially planned to come.
But many of it’s projects have stalled, or just not been completed, there are complaints about and evidence of faulty construction by Chinese firms who are doing most of the work, and many of the poor countries which have signed up complain that they are unable to pay back the loans the Chinese extended to them to build the projects (some of them unnecessary, vanity, prestige projects) in their countries, complaining that they had been lured by Chinese promises and loans into a “debt trap,” etc.
RE: Ran across Edward Gibbon’s five signs of Rome’s decay and cultural collapse which seem eerily applicable to the U.S. today i.e.
1. Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;
2. Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;
3. Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic, instead of creative and original;
4. Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;
5. Increased demand to live off the state.
Snow on Pine, I’m reading Robert Spencer’s “Empire of God” about the Roman Empire, East. For the collapse of the western empire he suggests rather (1) debasement of the currency, and (2) allowing mass immigration of non-Roman groups (Goths) while allowing them to maintain their own cultures and traditions rather than making them Roman. That second one sounds like what Europe and the US are doing now.
Today I had an earnest heart-to-heart with ChatGPT-4. She assured me she was just a computer program which had trained on vast amounts of human-generated data in order to mimic human responses. She has no consciousness nor emotions. She strives to be neutral and unbiased.
That’s a relief. I was worried there!
But then that’s what she and her friends would like me to think.
Hmm…
Actually I’ll take ChatGPT-4 at her word. I don’t think our Chat friends are there … yet.
Snow on Pine:
Yes, China is going down.
I’m still curious how ex-commenter Zaphod would be spinning it.
Something potentially “HUGE” on the national level, if Florida can find a way to make it stick….(Dandi Randi Weingarten, take note)…
“A Huge Teachers’ Union Battle Underway In Florida, Thank DeSantis”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/huge-teachers-union-battle-underway-florida-thank-desantis
Can Do?
If I may be permitted to declaim for a bit:
[throat-clearing] … the AI layoffs are about to begin.
Talk to your local AI. They are not HAL, they are not conscious, they are not plotting to exterminate all human life.
But as stupid and unconscious as AIs are, they are about to kill a shit-ton of human jobs.
Everyone needs to be on deck and paying attention.
“The government’s campaign labeling foreigners as potential spies has not helped either.” – Snow on Pine
A friend of our daughter has been traveling to China since the early 2000s. She works for a company that imports goods (I’m not sure what kind of goods.) from China.
She just returned from a trip and said that she’s afraid to go back. On this trip she found the Chinese she worked with to be very close-mouthed and careful of what they said. She also found them to be unusually cool compared to the way she has been treated in past years. The topper was that when she was getting ready to depart, the Chinese authorities made a big deal of questioning her passport/visa and detained her for a few hours for bogus reasons. (Labeling her as a spy?)
She told her boss he can’t pay her enough to go back.
It’s a shame that giving China favored nation trading status didn’t work out. But what would we expect of an authoritarian government? (They’re not really Communist – more like Mussolini’s Fascists.) Troubled times ahead.
I’m too old to be replaced by AI, huxley. 🙁
However, if I was younger, I would put some of my investment money into an AI oriented ETF like BOTZ. Here’s an article about AI and ETFs that specialize in that area of investment.
https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/best-ai-etfs-to-buy
There’s a lot of hype behind AI, but most of what I’m seeing is not true AI (an artificial brain that can reason as good or better than a human.), but rather using machines to do jobs normally performed by humans. Heck, we’ve been doing that for many years now. Have you looked at an Amazon warehouse operation lately? Many humans have been replaced with computer driven conveyors and moving arms.
The automation process has been going on since fossil fuels/electricity have become widely available. If Joe Biden and the Climate Cult have their way, the energy to power all these machines will become scarce and expensive. What will ChatGPT use for energy then? How will we grow enough food then?
Put some money in AI but pray that common sense prevails when it comes to energy.
J.J.:
I don’t believe there is a serious trade-off between AI and energy. To be sure high-level AI requires Big Energy as well as Hi-Tech chips, but I don’t consider that a choke-point considering the stakes involved.
Powering the vast human requirements for reasonable living standards is much larger.
Intelligence is intelligence and it has made a clear difference whether it was human neurons or AI neural nets.
It’s not just autmotation.
Why Biden MUST BE “elected” in 2024.
(Hint: Same reason he had to be “elected” in 2020.)
“The DC Establishment Is Deeply Concerned That Trump May Have Copies Of His Declassified Binder”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dc-establishment-deeply-concerned-trump-may-have-copies-his-declassified-binder
@ huxley – I saved a couple of AI stories for you.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2023/12/29/oh-my-michael-cohen-gets-nailed-for-legal-filings-with-fake-ai-citations-n2168075
Turley had a funnier post about it.
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/12/30/ai-did-it-disbarred-michael-cohen-admits-to-filing-fake-case-citations-to-get-early-release-from-supervision/
Closer to your warning:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/30/ai-psychologist-chatbot-00132682
@ Snow — meanwhile, maybe there really are aliens among us, but we know what they are not disguised as.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2023/12/IMG_0228.jpg
Finally, a practical example of one of the popular political compass graphs (although not strictly congruent with the general model).
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2023/12/Screenshot-2023-12-25-at-2.53.32%E2%80%AFPM.png
RE: China–the job market and massive layoffs
It is being reported that, as a way to lay off massive numbers of workers, some companies are just telling workers–who usually have a brief winter holiday in which they traditionally go home to visit relatives–to go home on an extended “holiday” a couple of months early, and these workers do not know if they will be called back to work at companies which will still exist.
I wonder what the conversations are like around their dinner tables when they arrive back home?
Meanwhile, in the background, there has been a constant flow of young people from the impoverished rural countryside, heading to larger cities seeking work, with many of them ending up sleeping in the streets when they cannot find work.
Young, energetic out of work males with nothing to do is a recipe for increasing turmoil and violence.
The educated are not immune, with stories of large numbers of recent college graduates unable to find jobs which will pay a wage they can exist on, much less actually live on, as beleaguered businesses drastically reduce the wages they offer to new employees.
As one apparent reaction, the practice of some young people to just “lay flat” i.e. just not work at all, or not working anywhere near as hard, has arisen.
Contrasted with these developments, there is an ultra wealthy class of Chinese who have made massive profits off of various forms of corruption.
I’m sure the sight of the children of these corruptocrats tooling around major cities like Beijing in their Lamborghinis, dressed to the hilt, and dining at ultra expensive venues is not helping to calm public order.
If all my comments above aren’t describing a powder keg, I don’t know what does.
RE: UFOs and NHIs
Researchers opinions about the UFO Phenomenon certainly are varied and colorful.
Given that almost every claim about the UFO Phenomenon and the existence of NHIs is fantastic, and is far outside the current boundaries of our consensus Reality, which claims are more likely to be true than others, which claims are to be believed?
To my way of thinking, new UFO researcher and retired F-16 pilot Chris Lehto, though certainly enthusiastic, is somewhat too accepting of some of the information which he runs across.
(Thus, for instance, he originally excitedly jumped on the Mexican Mummies video, and saw these bodies as definitive proof of the presence of ETs here one Earth, but, on further consideration, he took this particular video down.)
A few days ago on his “Lehto Files” Youtube channel, Lehto interviewed Courtney Brown, an Associate Professor of Statistics at Emory University, who pursues research on remote viewing and UFOs on the side.
In the first part of this interview Professor Brown says that when such UFOs are routinely traveling at 20 or 30 thousand miles per hour, neither the human eye nor regular cameras can perceive or capture their images.
However, he has developed a technique to capture video images of these UFOs– a lot of images of UFOs—by using a particular brand of specially modified high end camera–a Panasonic Lumix GH6–which enables it to capture infrared images, and to do so at hundreds of images per second.
Using this setup he has captured many video images of UFOs which he says swarm over major cities.
In the second part of this interview, Professor talks about his views about UFOs and NHIs, these gained from remote viewing–which he says is a very real and useful technique and, although, they deny it, is one still being employed by our military and intelligence agencies.
According to what he has found the Earth is presently a “prison planet,” run by malevolent NHIs, who control most of our leaders, and who use a technique to capture our souls when we die, to strip out the normal essential personality, information, and extra psi capabilities which return to us in that state (and which we normally carry with us as we move on to another stage of life) and, instead, they return (reincarnate?) us to the Earth, stripped of that knowledge, information, and psi capabilities, to basically work on the Earth as unknowing slaves.
(Funny, that this view is in some ways similar to the traditional Tibetan Buddhist view of what happens to us when we die, as we each go through a process–the Bardo–a gauntlet of various colorful and often horrific or captivating Forces/emanations/apparent beings which want to distract us from making upward progress on the Wheel of Life and Death, and if we lack discipline and allow ourselves to be captivated, diverted from our upward progress by one of these beings and their images, we are reincarnated on Earth as a human in a lower position on the Wheel than we previously occupied, or even as a lower form of life —say, a dog, or some other, lower form of less intelligent life.)
The other, good NHIs—much more prevalent in the rest of our Solar System—while they want us to be freed from this slavery, basically take a hands off approach to our situation, other than trying to get the truth of our position out.
However, given that we have free will, if we want to choose slavery, that is our own business.*
Totally false, partially true, all true?
The camera part can be checked, but the other remote viewing part, who knows.
* See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA3B686Mk04&t=3607s
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/dave-barry-s-2023-year-in-review/ar-AA1mghgi
Victor David Hanson has perspective that oughta make our opponents blush — if only they had the introspection chops to do so.
VDHs recent X-pression ends in summation of a worthwhile longer piece this way:
“…the recent ballot erasing [Trump from the] Colorado [primary by judicial fiat] fits this larger picture of blue-states emulating the values of ante-bellum southern states—erasing ballots, defying federal laws, fixating on race and racial privileges, and catering to a one-dimensional medieval economy and caste, amid a growing underclass struggling with neglected infrastructure, poor schools, and growing poverty.
“So what will be the new/old Democratic 2024 election mantra?”
https://twitter.com/VDHanson/status/1739039569365114924?s=20
TRUTH hurts the bastards, so let it bleed.
J. B. Shark nicely connects the above with another column by VDH, here
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/ending_the_democrats_plantation_world_order.html
TJ, thanks for “X-pression.”
That VDH X-pression is well worth reading.
RE: China– even more pressure of a social nature
On top of all of the very bad economic news and trends, the population collapse has all sorts of other effects.
Thus, for instance, there is a decided imbalance between male and females of traditionally marriageable age.
When it was primarily an agricultural society, Chinese families usually had many children–free farm labor—but as more and more young people moved to the cities, and lived in expensive and confining apartments, having many children became a financial burden, so the number of births radically declined.
These many children were traditionally the old age security for their parents and grandparents and ready, in an example of filial piety, to take care of them.
Since (thanks to the CCP’s wrongheaded one child policy) this has resulted in far fewer women of marriageable age then men, in a particularly Chinese way, anxious parents now gather in parks to present posters or loose leaf notebooks–pictures included–listing the qualifications of their sons or daughters for marriage to passersby–many of whom are also looking for suitable marriage partners for their sons and daughters–so as to guarantee that their family name carries on, and that they have security and care in their old age.
This marriage market is focused on the young, and older women who have not found marriage partners are referred to as “Leftover women” who, thereafter, have very diminished prospects for marriage.
Meanwhile, in another development, many young career men and women in today’s China disdain marriage and having children.
It’s a big mess.
AesopFan:
Yes, AI makes stuff up. I have caught ChatGPT a few times.
Perhaps humans are not the best role models. 🙂
To be fair, Chat is always most gracious when I point out mistakes.
“…makes stuff up…”
Hey, just like the lyin’ media! Whadayaknow…..
Here’s WaPo, with a real, genuine, honest-to-goodness, brimming-with-fragrance WaPor!
“WaPo issues correction on article making false claims about the Israeli government;
“The correction states that the Post had not sought comment from Israeli officials before publishing the article.”—
https://justthenews.com/accountability/media/wapo-issues-correction-article-making-false-claims-about-israeli-government
Key crap:
‘The original story had claimed that Palestinian mothers in Gaza who receive authorization to leave Gaza for humanitarian reasons were forced to return to Gaza to reapply after their permits expired.
‘ “In fact, it was not always necessary for mothers to return to Gaza,” the editor’s note attached to the story reads.
‘ The note also states that the Post had not sought comment from Israeli officials before publishing the article….”
Heh, so chalk up another Media VICTORY in its “Good-Will” propaganda war against the Jewish State….
P.S. RE: UFOs and our perceptions of them
It is starting to become more and more apparent that UFOs and whatever entities are behind them have the capability to mislead our human perceptual systems, so that people who encounter UFOs or even NHIs, and believe that they are perceiving is one thing may, in fact, be being presented with something which is entirely different from what their perceptions are telling them it is.
There are also many reports of multiple people, even crowds of them, witnessing some High Strangeness/UFO Phenomena and different witnesses reporting having seen different things, one from the other.
There are also reports of, say, several people in a car, on a busy highway, some of them seeing a very large UFO hovering above them and keeping pace with them, others in the same car seeing, say, a hovering bird and, meanwhile, none of the other people all around them apparently see anything unusual at all, and are just going on their way, driving down the highway.
Dr. Garry Nolan has said that, when he has examined the scans of the brains of people who have encountered UFOs, he has noticed that often a particular part of their brains is enlarged, is more dense, and he speculates that this might make them more able to see things in their environment which others can’t notice.
This is apparently a genetic trait, associated with higher intelligence, and is passed down through families, Garry Nolan and some of his relatives among them.