Month: September 2023

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 08SEP2023 – Gun Laws Will Do Nothing

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“Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids,” Shivanthi Sathanandan said in a Facebook post. “The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight.”

Well. Four juveniles. So I think we can say it was illegal for them to have guns. Does this liberal now understand that gun laws will do nothing?
No.
Further in her post she says they need to get the guns off the street.
It isn’t the gun, lady. It’s the person using it.
It is so sad when people refuse to learn.

Here’s a thought: What if even one of her neighbors had been armed?
The outcome would have been very different. The beating would not have gone on as long as it did and, maybe, some bad guys would be in jail.

08SEP2023 – The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost!

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There’s nothing like a brutal beat down and a broken leg during a carjacking to change a “defund the police” activist into a “law and order” advocate.  I’m not sure whether Saint George of Floyd will forgive this falling away from the faith.  It seems a little fickle.

Before beatdown:

In June of 2020, Sathanandan wrote in a post on Facebook: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department.”

After beatdown:

“Look at my face. These criminals will not win. We need to take back our city. And this will not be the last you hear from me about this. Thank you to the incredible Minneapolis 4th Precinct Officers,

Maybe after she’s had a chance to wash the blood off her face she’ll calm down and realize that those kooky, crazy carjacking kids were just full of high spirits and she should chalk it up to reparations.  After all, maybe it was some form of white privilege or white supremacy or something white that triggered their understandable reaction.  Stop blaming the victims Shivanthi and look in the mirror for the true culprit.

The Walls of Stupidity

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My perusal of the political opinion crap pile today included an article called Don’t Panic When You See New Trump-Biden Poll Numbers.   Apparently, the latest WSJ poll has Biden and Trump tied at 46%.  And the Left’s reaction is a cross between astonishment and panic:

“My informal canvas of liberal friends reveals that this feeling — something like incredulous despair verging on panic — is not unusual. We tamp it down and joke about it, but it never disappears. Tens of millions of Americans are fine with Trump’s brand of revanchist authoritarianism, and even yearn for it. Tens of millions more see him as just one choice among many; maybe they’ll vote for him again if the price of gas goes up.”

This post of mine isn’t meant to blow this poll result into some kind of hopeful sign that the Democrat voter fraud effort will somehow fail to fabricate the requisite millions of fake ballots needed to steal the 2024 election.  Far from it.  I see that as the reality that we now live with.  Protected by the Justice Department the blue city Democrats have carte blanche to steal any election that depends on these states with large cities like Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.  That’s a given.

But what this poll does tell us is that about half the country no longer believes the narrative.  In the old days telling the American voters that a candidate was a criminal and that he tried to steal his last election from the rightful winner would have completely destroyed his chances in any subsequent election.  Under that old idea of political reality Donald Trump or anyone who was branded a criminal the way he has would be polling 0.0%.  In fact, there wouldn’t even be a spot for him on the polling sheet.  He would just be a cautionary tale about not allowing crazy people to enter politics.

But that’s not today.  Trump panicked the Left.  He triggered the Deep State to pull out all the stops.  They activated all of their bag of tricks; phony prosecutors, phony judges, fake news, FBI goon squads, the COVID voting fraud, basically anything and everything.

So that is what my article is about.  This poll result is what I would call proof that everyone that can be awakened to the truth about our government and politics, has been.  These people are selecting Trump not despite the criminal charges but specifically because of them.  The prosecutions are proof that the system is rigged.  And Trump is our protest vote against this charade.  We are saying, “We see you behind the curtain pulling the strings.  We’re not fooled.  We’re not going to pretend.”

Now this in no way means that we will somehow overcome the regime that runs our country.  They are vicious, powerful and firmly entrenched.  Their actions to eliminate the middle class are proceeding at flank speed.  They have the whip hand and they know it.

But this awakening is a radical shift in the dynamic.  It means that the narrative is dead.  We’re not going to contribute to our own demise.

We’re not going to cheerfully adopt insanities like DEI, transgenderism, endless immigration or climate change as if they were for our own good.  We’re not going to pretend that the endless wars are making us safer.  Appeals to patriotism or legitimacy of rule or even fair play are meaningless.  We have the same relationship to the regime in Washington that the Russians had to the Soviet government.  It was their oppressive master that had to be avoided by any means possible and for which the hope was that eventually it would collapse on its own due to corruption, stupidity and the cumulative effects of the people’s resistance to its rule.

And so, I have the proof I need to unequivocally say something fundamental has changed in the United States.  We are now two different populations with completely separate narratives and diametrically opposed agendas.  The “point of no return” has been reached.  Donald Trump broke down the walls of our stupidity.  We should all thank him for that.

Real Artificial Intelligence

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Many people have heard at some point in their educational careers that in 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupted and completely buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum that were located at the foot of the volcano.  Vesuvius is located adjacent to the present Italian city Naples.

What most people are unaware of is that during excavations of Herculaneum in 1752 a building was discovered that contained ancient books, or more accurately, papyrus scrolls.  Unfortunately the heat from the lava flow had reduced these scrolls to carbonized lumps.  For the last two hundred years and more scholars have attempted to unroll these carbonized scrolls and read their text.  The painstaking work has only been minimally successful and mostly they’ve managed to find a small amount of text while basically destroying the scrolls.

But now modern medical imaging technology and advanced machine vision and machine learning techniques have combined to produce a possible way to read these ancient books.  Using x-ray tomography images that look through the burned books can help identify layers where ink appears on the papyrus.  Combining this with computer mapping of the ink locations the scroll can be “virtually unrolled” to reveal the text on the ancient remnant.  The proof of concept has now been performed on a small bit of the scan.  The challenge is to do this for the bulk of the document.  It is a daunting task because of the terribly distorted shape of the scrolls.

Now a million dollar prize has been offered for any silicon valley type who is savvy enough to take the scans and turn it into a readable text.

For most people this is meaningless.  Interest in even the books written a few years ago pales in comparison to watching a “TikTok” video of some vapid “influencer” describing her workout routine or grapefruit-papaya diet or other earth-shaking events. These old arcane texts have no bearing on their lives.  And the scrolls currently unearthed are the works of an unimportant Roman philosopher.  But it is believed that the rest of the unexcavated building is the repository of a very large private library that may contain many lost works by the best classical authors of Greece and Rome.  The lost tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes and lost histories that we currently only know the names of would be immensely interesting to scholars and also people like me who find remarkable relevance in these testaments from thousands of years ago.

So the fact that finally there seems to be some real progress on this project that has gone on for centuries, I find fascinating.  But my skeptical nature also forbids me from allowing unbounded enthusiasm to blind me to the likely outcome; failure.

So I share this with you, my readers, to let you know what I find to be the real progress that “AI” can provide to the world.  Not ChatGPT which just automates the nitwittery found on TikTok but instead the brute force restoration of books that were burned to a crisp by a volcanic eruption almost two thousand years ago.  A computer program guided by state of the art imaging technology plucking lost works from antiquity out of a pile of ashes.  That’s magic.