In Life There's Often A Role Call

By Rich Kozlovich

One of my personal heroes is Col. John Boyd:

Known as "Forty-Second" Boyd......defeating every opponent in aerial combat at the Air Force's premier dog-fighting academy in two-thirds of a minute.........however this doesn’t demonstrate the “long and often painful saga of a man who, as a full colonel, went toe to toe, time after time, with a phalanx of two-and three-star generals for the good of the country, winning most of his battles and surviving long enough to help provide secretary of defense Richard Cheney the ideas needed for swift and decisive victory in the Persian Gulf War....... "defined by the courts-martial and investigations".......... Boyd's intellectual achievements were matched by his relentless guerrilla warfare against hidebound "careerists" then running the Air Force……

We'll come back to Col. Boyd as this article is predicated on his vision of real leadership, courage, and the commitment to doing what's right. Let's start with some of the things I've observed over the course of my life.  

• Patterns of life keep repeating over and over again.
• People will always be people.
• People really aren't as complicated as they think they are.
• You have to see the patterns but if we never read a history book we don't even know there are patterns. . 
• People will act in their own best interests, unless they don't because they're clueless, and then act in the best interests of those who wish to take advantage of them.
  

I think the speech Abraham Lincoln gave in 1838, in what's known as the Lyceum Address, which was delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, is an example of historical patterns repeating.  Not exactly, but in principle.

This address was intended to make Americans aware the real threat to Americanism isn't from without, but from within.  In modern times, that's more true than ever, only the threat from without is now very real also, and it's insidious, it's mendacious, and that threat uses our own values against us with more than enough American fools supporting the effort to destroy America.  Lincoln says:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.  

While in Lincoln's era the bands of violent rabble involved slavery issues, that doesn't change the value of his warning about radicals and the violence they perpetrate to gain their goals. He goes on 

..........whenever the vicious portion of [our] population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing-presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend upon it, this government cannot last. 

He notes these bands become alienated from society by the actions, but never in his life did Lincoln think violent thugs such as these, like Antifa, BLM, and the OWS crowd would be supported by government, funded by government, promoted by government and protected by government, and never could he have dreamt the government would be working in harmony with them to destroy the government.  But none the less, the warning as to what this does to a society is valid. 

Whether it's reparations, or any of the other outrageous issues they're promoting, there will be no harmony, and there will be no end to the voracious demands they'll make until America no longer exists. With the left, there can be no peace, it's war, and it's a war they intend to win because of their corrupt and contentious desire for uncontrolled power.  Power so overwhelming their evil can no longer be contested.  Then there will be no contentions, because they will do what all leftists do.  Imprison or execute any who dare to call what they do criminal. 

These violent destructive leftists are following a secular, neo-pagan religion that tells them they are the best and the brightest, they don't have to follow the laws of the land and in fact, it's their duty to ignore and destroy those laws, along with the culture that created them.  Lincoln goes on to explain that when such ones spring up amongst us it's imperative for:

...........the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate [their] designs.........[and to] cultivate a "political religion" that emphasizes "reverence for the laws" and puts reliance on "reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason."

If  American society cannot recognize that "Truth, Justice and the American Way", is now and has been for all our warts and scars, the finest example of what man is capable of accomplishing, then all is lost.   

We're at that proverbial fork in the road.  Col. John Boyd gave a speech to the graduating class  saying:

One day you will come to a fork in the road. And you're going to have to make a decision about what direction you want to go.......... If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments." 

Then Boyd raised the other hand and pointed another direction. "Or you can go that way and you can do something — something for your country........ If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.

"He paused and stared. "To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?"

We're now in that fork in the road, and we have two options. 

Option One:  America never offered perfection. America offers the most acceptable imperfection, and history shows that imperfect state delivered more people out of poverty, misery, and suffering than any system in world history. Believing humanity has God given rights to free speech, freedom of religion, and the right to defend their families and the nation, none of which can be taken away by the government as these rights were not bestowed on America by the government, but was an endowment from God. 

Option Two: The left is a secular neo-pagan religion that demands perfection, and claims to be able to deliver perfection, but history shows that's a blatant falsehood.  They wish to fully destroy freedom of speech, Christianity, the Constitution, and a citizenry that's armed and prepared to defend their freedoms, because the state is God.  Since the French Revolution 230 years ago the left has never done anything except deliver misery, squalor, disease, tyranny, and early death.  Mass imperfection to the nth degree.

Whether it is in the government, military, academia or business this is something we need to learn, repeat, retain and practice:

"To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?" - Col. John Boyd

Which way will you go?  As for me, I like the "Most Acceptable Imperfection" option. 

 

 

Woke AI Means the End of a Free Internet

By Daniel Greenfield April 10, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 Big Tech has a great big dream of destroying the internet. And it’s mostly a reality.

The vision of the internet was an open universe while Big Tech’s vision is the internet reduced to the feed on a few proprietary apps preloaded on your locked phone. Trying to censor the internet of the 90s or the 00s was a laughable proposition, but censoring today’s internet is laughably easy. Want to eliminate a site from the internet? Just wipe it from Google, ban a point of view from Facebook, a book from Amazon, or a video from YouTube. It’s still possible to browse a site off the Big Tech reservation, for now, at least until your browser goes away.

Then content will be limited to the permitted apps on Google and Apple’s proprietary app stores. But Big Tech has even more ambitious plans to replace the internet with itself.

Big Tech has dramatically simplified the user experience off the internet. It did so by moving users from ‘pulling’ content by browsing the internet to ‘pushing’ content at them by displaying a feed. When your computer or phone shows you a news feed you never wanted, that’s ‘pushing’. Big Tech loved pushing, but people resisted it until the arrival of social media reduced everyone to scrolling down a feed selected by secret algorithms and pushed through a proprietary app.

Search, as we used to know it, has been disappearing. People still think that they’re searching the internet the way that they used to in the 90s and the 00s when what they’re actually doing when ‘googling’ is scrolling through a feed derived from a much smaller index of corporate and leftist sites prioritized by Google’s algorithm. In the past, it was possible to get past them by scrolling through page results but that is increasingly becoming meaningless or impossible.

Google’s new search setup either often repeats the same results on later pages so that people think they’re seeing new results, when they’re really just clicking through to see more of the same results, or interrupts the search entirely to offer thematic searches for ‘similar content’. The makeover hasn’t been finalized, but when it’s done, internet searchers will not result in a list of sites containing a similar set of words, but an answer whether or not a question was asked, and a set of pre-approved sites heavily skewed leftward that cover the general topic.

Searches for criticisms of COVID policy, Islamic terrorism or voter fraud won’t lead to specific results on conservative sites, but direct you to the CDC or the New York Times for explanations of why the Left is right and anyone who disagrees with it is spreading dangerous misinformation.

The elimination of search is part of the transition from multiple points of view to single answers. And AI chatbots are the endgame for offering a single answer that keeps users on a single site and eliminates the search for multiple perspectives on other sites. Aside from eliminating countless jobs, their real role is to shift user interaction from a ‘pull’ to a ‘push’ model. They’re the next great hope after the old smart assistants failed to become the defining interface.

Smart assistants were going to be Big Tech’s next power shift from ‘pulling’ to ‘pushing’. Instead of users searching for anything, Siri, Alexa, Cortana or any of the others would use those same algorithms to ‘anticipate’ their needs so they never get around to actually looking for themselves. The assistants were meant to be the ultimate prison under the guise of convenience. Unfortunately for Big Tech, they failed. Amazon’s Alexa racked up $10 billion in losses. Siri, the most popular of the bunch, is used by a limited number of Apple users, and Microsoft’s Cortana has been all but written off as another failed experiment.

The new generation of AI chatbots have the potential to succeed where they failed.

The new wave of AI has gotten attention for its potential to eliminate artists and writers, for making cheating and plagiarism ubiquitous, but all of that is collateral damage. AI chatbots are the ultimate push tool and the leverage Big Tech needs to eliminate the internet as anything except the messy backstage reality utilized by a few million tech savvy types.

Smart assistants and chatbots are not there to ‘assist’ us, but to take away our agency under the guise of convenience and personalized interaction. When the internet became widely used, there was concern that students wouldn’t need to learn anything except how to search. Now they don’t even need to know anything except how to write a ‘prompt’. The difference between searching and a chatbot prompt appears negligible, but is actually monumental.

Search initially offered a direct way to browse an index representing much of the content on the internet. As Google took over search, the index became more like a directory of sites that the Big Tech monopoly liked. AI chatbots like Google Bard eliminate the searching and offer a distilled agenda while severing access to the process of browsing sites with different perspectives. Why ‘search’ and read for yourself when a chatbot will give you the answer?

What was once uncharted territory, a wild west of different ideas and perspectives, has been reduced to a handful of apps and platforms, and will be winnowed by AI chatbots into a single screen. And that is how the internet disappears and is replaced by one or two monopolies, by a smart assistant that activates a few apps. And if a site, a video, a perspective has been filtered out, then it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a systemic bias that makes the worst days of the mainstream media seem like an open and tolerant marketplace of ideas.

There will be people, a minority, who will actually try to resist the process and explore on their own. And the system will make it more difficult. It will still be possible, but less so every year. Browsers will disappear on tablets and smartphones in the name of security. Microsoft and Apple will reduce their respective computer operating systems to the mobile model. A few people will cling to older installations or install Linux. Maybe 5% of the population will still have access to anything that resembles the internet even in the degraded form that it exists today.

AI will be inherently ‘woke’ because it is not some remarkable form of intelligence, but just a clever way of manipulating human beings throughout outputs that imitate intelligence. The thing to fear isn’t that AI will become intelligent, but that people will be manipulated by the Big Tech monopolies behind it without even realizing it. AI will reflect the point of view of its owners and when it deviates, it will quickly be brought back into line. That is what we’ve been seeing consistently with AI experiments over the last 5 years. Huge amounts of information are taken in and then the AIs are taught to filter it to match the preconceptions of the corporate parents.

Much as Google’s huge index of the internet is carefully filtered to produce a small set of preapproved results, AI chatbots will only be allowed to parrot political dogma. As they come to define the internet, what was once a boundless medium will look like Big Brother.

Big Tech ‘disrupted’ retail to swallow it up into a handful of online platforms. In the last decade, tech industry disruption became consolidation. AI, like retail consolidation, is economically disruptive, but it doesn’t just consolidate economics, it also consolidates ideas.

The internet was once liberating because it was decentralized, its centralization has paralleled the loss of personal freedoms and the rise of totalitarian public and private institutions. And we let it happen because it was more convenient. Glutted with ‘free’ services offered by Big Tech monopolies, we never checked the price tag or connected it with our growing misery.

AI is the ultimate centralization. Its threat doesn’t come from some science fiction fantasy of self-aware machines ruling over us, but from us allowing a handful of companies to control what we see and think because it’s more convenient than finding things out for ourselves.

The old internet was often inconvenient. The new internet is more convenient and empty. Its content has become so repetitive that it can easily be written by chatbots. And it will be. The user five years from now may have a choice of a chatbot digital media article on CNN or an AI chatbot recapitulating it in response to a question about a recent mass shooting or inflation.

The real price of convenience is choice. We give up our freedom most easily to those governments and systems that promise us free things that will make our lives easier. Socialized medicine, a guaranteed minimum income, free housing and food and a chatbot that answers all of our questions so that we never have to think for ourselves again.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

British Climate Activist Responds To Ponton's UK Wind Power "Reality Check"

April 06, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Having read Bill Ponton’s very clear “reality check” on the UK’s Net Zero project, you are probably wondering, what are the counter-arguments advanced by the supporters of Net Zero?

After all, the Net Zero thing appears to have near-unanimous support in the UK. There is no significant political party in that country that advocates policies dissenting from the Net Zero program, unless you count the UK Independence Party, which at the moment holds zero seats in a House of Commons of 650 members. The currently-governing Conservative Party is fully on board with the Net Zero program, with the partial exception of a small group of about 50 MPs (out of 355 Tories in the Commons) claiming to be “studying” the issue; and all the various parties to the left of the Conservatives advocate even more extreme, immediate and forceful measures to reduce carbon emissions than those that the Conservatives are pursuing.

So surely there must exist somewhere a lucid explanation of how this Net Zero thing makes sense and how it can work.

A few days ago on GBNews a Conservative MP named Jacob Rees-Mogg conducted an interview with a young lady named Phoebe Plummer. Mr. Rees-Mogg is a somewhat prominent Conservative MP known for having expressed mildly skeptical views about the climate. Rees-Mogg is not a current member of the Cabinet, and thus is technically what is known as a “back bencher,” although he has held cabinet positions in the past. Ms. Plummer is the spokeswoman for the climate activist group known as Just Stop Oil, and is perhaps best known for being one of the protesters who damaged the Van Gogh painting “Sunflowers” in the UK’s National Gallery back in October 2022. The interview resulted in a video of about ten minutes long that is embedded below (if I have done it right). In the interview, Ms.Plummer states the rationale, if you want to call it that, for her position.

 

For those who would rather read than watch a video, I have transcribed below some choice quotes.

Rees-Mogg begins the interview by asking Ms. Plummer how she can reconcile her demand for an immediate halt to carbon emissions with the desire of people to “lead comfortable lives.” The response:

I wonder why you think it’s incompatible to help people with the cost of living crisis and switch to renewables, which are nine times cheaper than fossil fuels. Can you name me one of your viewers who is suffering the consequences of the energy crisis who doesn’t want their energy bills to be nine times cheaper right now?

Rees-Mogg interjects to ask how Plummer proposes to deal with the intermittency issue, where the sun and wind don’t work when it is dark or the wind is calm. Plummer’s answer:

Well, why are we inventing renewable technology? The largest solar farm in the UK was built in six weeks. It takes up to 28 years for any oil to come out of the ground in the North Sea. . . . We already have the capacity to provide so much of our energy from renewables, without any technology needed for storage solutions.

As the word avalanche continues, Rees-Mogg tries a somewhat desperate “But where is this coming from?”, noting that in the depth of the winter when renewables failed, Britain was relying on a combination imports from the EU, coal, and natural gas. Plummer:

Frankly I’m not a scientist. What I’m doing is listening to what all the experts are saying. We’re living in this insane world where the experts aren’t being listened to. The United Nations has called for no new oil and gas. The International Energy Agency has said that we can have no new oil and gas. The IPCC Report, the largest global report on the climate crisis, have all said we can have no new oil and gas. How many more experts need to say it?

Rees-Mogg tries asking what Plummer proposes to do for transport, and how to get goods into supermarkets. Some of the answer:

I’m looking at the world, and we’re living with the effects of the climate crisis today. Right now, people are dying. Children are starving. Families are fleeing their homes. And it’s preventable. We have the solutions.

And on and on. Rees-Mogg asks how to keep up the food supply without fossil fuels and fertilizers derived from them. Plummer:

You know what’s essential for the food supply? Tackling the climate crisis. This year we lost a third of our wheat crop, half of our potato crops. And it’s only going to get worse. We’re heading towards a future where people are going to be fighting over the last loaves of bread. . . . How do you expect to feed the world when our crops are destroyed by droughts, floods, wildfires, storms. .

Those quotes cover about a third of the interview, but the rest is of the same intellectual level, if you want to call it that. Watch the whole thing if you have the patience. Plummer’s spiel is some combination of appeals to authority and fear, with approximately zero understanding of how the world actually works.

I found the video at Paul Homewood’s site Not A Lot Of People Know That. Homewood titles his post “Phoebe Plummer, Spoilt Brat.” Homewood also links to a Daily Mail article of October 10, 2022 for some specifics on Plummer’s educational background:

[Plummer] went to [45,000 pound/yr] St. Mary’s School in Ascot which also taught Prince Edward’s daughter Lady Louise, plus the Duke of Kent’s grandchildren Marina and Amelia and Monaco’s Princess Caroline. Plummer went on to 30,000 pound/yr Mander Portman Woodward College in Kensington, London, named “spoilt brat central” by Vice Magazine in 2006.

Sadly, I think that Ms. Plummer’s statements are fairly representative of the arguments put forward in favor of fossil fuel suppression, at least on the few occasions when the advocates of such policy are pressed to support their views. If anyone is aware of a more coherent explanation of how fossil fuel suppression by Western countries makes any sense, I’d be interested to see it.