Category: Current Events

ZMan Provides a Clear Explanation of What Wokism Is

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Is it Communism?  Is it fascism.  Is it just radical liberalism?  ZMan walks through the origins and the functionality of wokism for the members of the elite and their lackeys.

And here’s the kernel of it:

“That is the key to understanding Wokism. It is not so much what it is but what it does for the people who embrace it. For the managerial elite, it provides a sense of legitimacy to their place atop the social hierarchy. For the climbers dreaming of a perch at the top and those who gain satisfaction aping those at the top, it provides an ever-changing set of cultural fashions. Primarily, Wokism provides a way to distinguish who is inside and who is outside the dominant social group.”

Well that’s clear enough.  In his essay he fleshes out how and why this happened along with why the other labels are inaccurate.  If you want to know what wokism is, the link follows.

What Is Woke?

Anheuser-Busch CEO Makes Statement Without an Apology

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Brendan Whitworth is the Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO.  On Friday he made a statement about the Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship which basically said:

NOTHING.

He said. “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” and “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

So if they never intended to divide people why would they pick someone who by his very self-identification would antagonize the great majority of Bud Light customers?  Well, because their corporate culture is antithetical to the beliefs of the people who they sell their product to.  And they’d rather virtue-signal to their peers about how enlightened they are, even if it infuriates their customers.

My favorite comment on this apology was: “NOPE. Not good enough. Boycott continues until full apology, fire VP Mrkt, and Mulvaney dropped. Either that or Anheuser-Busch becomes the next Schlitz.”

Well, this is the perfect test case.  Bud Light is Joe Six-Pack’s go to beverage.  If there is one product that could be boycotted to good effect it’s this one.  And it’s the perfect time of year.  We’re on the cusp of barbecue weather and baseball and every other sports event but football.  So let’s just see where this goes.  If you never hear another thing about this then it’s hopeless.  Anheuser-Busch needs Bud Light profitable to stay in business.  If they never give a real apology and fire the wicked witch of the west then basically we have no clout at all.  So stay tuned.  I’ll follow up on this one.

16APR2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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So I enjoyed writing that review last night of the “groundbreaking” 1960s movie Blow-up.  Mocking something so utterly dumb was life-affirming.  It’s like watching that video of Musk brow-beating that dopey BBC reporter, just wonderfully satisfying.

Today we have a party to go to in the mid-afternoon so it’ll be a limited writing day because I also was handed a honey-do list by Camera Girl and there was a seriousness in her demeanor that leads me to believe that stalling will be seriously frowned upon.  Well, uninstalled new windshield wiper blades and blocked driveway drains are the stuff of wifely discontent so I guess I best bestir myself.

On the plus side I knocked off another 2,000 words on the story.  That’s another 2%.  Pretty good, pretty good.  And on the topicality front I did add an AI character to the story.  And that was before the current mania.  It was probably more an homage to “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”  Interestingly I’ve made mine a girl and she’s possibly the most enjoyable character in the book.  I’m trying to decide whether to kill her off or her creator.  One of them will have to go.

We had a ninety degree day on Friday.  That’s pretty damn hot for mid-April.  But we’re back in the fifties today.  But the heat really activated the dreaded mayflies.  Yesterday a cloud of them enveloped me while I was pumping gas.  Four of them followed me into the car and I was swatting at them like a lunatic while trying to drive on a busy road.  And the pollen is so thick you can taste it on your tongue.  People are walking around coughing up a lung.  Ah the joys of spring.

But life is good.  We turned the heat off a few days ago and there was still a balance in the heating oil account.  So Dementia Joe hasn’t quite bankrupted me yet.  Camera Girl will put aside her soup recipes and all sorts of warm weather provender will appear on the menu.

I was reading through the daily news and opinion rags with distaste.  The left is made up of dishonest people and idiots.  But the Right is hardly a paragon of virtue and intelligence.  Even when they get something right often it’s like the whining of the village idiot.  It’s just too painful to listen to.

I was watching a vlogger post about how camera photography was dying and how phone photography would kill it off any day now.  Maybe he’s right but that just tells me people are just too lazy to use the best tool for the job.  But he has a certain point.  The convenience of the smart phone has taken a heavy toll on the use of conventional cameras.  But despair seems a little melodramatic.

Well I better get on with my chores or I won’t get fed today.  Camera Girl is a Harsh Mistress. So enjoy the day and I’ll see what I can think of to comment on later.

Fun on a Friday Night

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Make a start.  Make a start.  Well, I’ve caught up with my chores.  All the distractions and alarums and excursions have kept me from writing.  Well, what can you do?  Life is like that.

But what to write about?  I’m looking for something upbeat.  I don’t want to talk about the crime epidemic or the 2024 race or even transgender pushback.  I’ve expended enough venom on those to last me awhile.  I’d rather think about something fun.

So, how about asteroid mining?

Until recently talk of this was restricted to science fiction fans.  Heinlein had asteroid miners in his juvenile novel “The Rolling Stones” and it was a staple of many writers in the last century.  But now it’s going from fiction to fact as NASA is talking about sending a mission to an asteroid that is believed to be composed almost entirely of metal.  There’s a mission to send an unmanned mission to reach Psyche 16 in 2026.

Psyche 16 is a small world with a diameter of 140 miles.  Its mass has been estimated at 2.29 ×1019 kg.  That’s about 0.0004% of the Earth’s mass.  But that’s an enormous mass.

Now visiting Psyche 16 is a far cry from actually mining gold and platinum from this worldlet and getting it to Earth where it has value.  But it’s a start.  The actual mechanism for recovering the metals that make up Psyche 16 is an interesting problem.  Depending on how fast it is going relative to Earth, changing its orbit has the potential to be a human existence-ending event for planet Earth.  Remember, the dinosaurs allegedly bit the dust because a fair-sized asteroid crashed into Earth sixty some odd million years ago.  So, diverting large asteroids should be something done with the utmost of careful planning and the least amount of change to our space environment.

The two choices I come up with are moving it into a stable orbit close to Earth or crashing it into the Moon.  Overall, I favor the Moon idea.  Maybe I’ve been influenced by Heinlein’s story, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”  In that tale the Moon colonists uses a rail gun to boost payloads to escape the Moon’s gravity and splash down in the oceans of Earth.  I’m sure that much more careful thought would need to be done to ensure that this kind of logistical method is possible but I’m guessing from a risk perspective where an extinction event is one of the risks it would probably be preferred to leaving that big rock moving close to Earth.

In the article someone did a back of the envelope calculation and came up with $10,000 quadrillion as the value of the metals in Psyche 16.  Of course, why it would be expressed that way instead of as $10 quintillion is unclear to me.  But they bring up the point that this would wreck the Earth’s economy by destabilizing the value of gold and other metals.  Well, this seems like a silly statement.  Extracting even something as valuable as platinum from the Moon and bringing it back to Earth will not be economical unless the price of that metal increases by orders of magnitude.

Digging gold and platinum out of the Earth is the economical choice and will be for the foreseeable future.  But if someday there is a need for metals that can no longer be found on Earth, then maybe asteroid mining might become a thing,

So, wasn’t that more fun than talking about trannies again?  Feel free to comment on my moon crash option.  I assure you I haven’t thought through this option much at all so we can dissect it as an occasion for fun.  Have at it.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 14APR2023 – Scientific Dark Ages

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AI medical imaging potential should not be stifled.

 

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

-Marie Curie (1867-1934)

 

The de facto position concerning new medical discoveries cannot be that it will inevitably be used for sinister purposes. This anti-science viewpoint stifles innovation and progress for humanity, thus stunting potential breakthroughs in medicine. Tools available to researchers and health professionals are just that, tools. The usage and application are dependent on who wields these instruments. It is not hard to imagine the first Neanderthals who discovered fire might have been dubious about its utilization, once one of them tried to touch it.

Recently it was found that Artificial Intelligence (AI) used to screen medical images can detect with near-perfect accuracy the patient’s racial ethnicity without prior knowledge from outside inputs. This ability for AI covered a broad series of image types; from CT scans to chest X-Rays, and persisted over all anatomical regions. This finding was replicated even from images that were cropped, corrupted, or not ideally clear. Even more surprising is that human experts trained to analyze these scans cannot determine the patient’s race, yet AI trained with deep learning developed this ability by itself.

The AI utilizes ‘Deep Learning’ as the machine learning model that imitates the human learning process to a degree with predictive analytics, and complex learning algorithms.

A good analogy describes the process as:

“To understand deep learning, imagine a toddler whose first word is dog. The toddler learns what a dog is — and is not — by pointing to objects and saying the word dog. The parent says, “Yes, that is a dog,” or, “No, that is not a dog.” As the toddler continues to point to objects, he becomes more aware of the features that all dogs possess. What the toddler does, without knowing it, is clarify a complex abstraction — the concept of dog — by building a hierarchy in which each level of abstraction is created with knowledge that was gained from the preceding layer of the hierarchy.”

In this fashion, deep learning differs from traditional linear algorithms that are dictated by the computer programmer. A deep learning model will independently sift through massive data sets to create complex statistical models from large amounts of unstructured data. This represents a new frontier in AI technology. Prior to the 21st century, access to big data sets and cloud computing were out of reach for many computer programmers.

Not everyone in the medical field sees the potential in AI recognition. This article from MIT discounts any benefit to the computer model’s ability to detect race.

“The fact that algorithms ‘see’ race, as the authors convincingly document, can be dangerous. But an important and related fact is that, when used carefully, algorithms can also work to counter bias,” says Ziad Obermeyer, associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley, whose research focuses on AI applied to health.

This understandable caution for bias by AI is the prevailing theme for a significant part of the medical community. Numerous papers and articles sound the alarm for potential abuses of AI racial recognition. However, not one study or opinion piece expanded on the potential uses for AI’s talent to discern race in medical imaging. Remember, no human experts can do this, regardless of experience or training. What if this could unlock new, highly effective therapies tailored to different races depending on the disease? Maybe this leads to discovering distinct correlations that would allow for earlier detections of cancer and other diseases. AI using multivariate analysis would give all patients an edge in their treatment plans. An entirely new realm of possibilities could open up for science, but only if the courage is there to look for it.

This may be of no value in the field of medicine, and possibly even be a feature of AI that needs to be eliminated entirely. Yet to dismiss out of hand the ability for AI to detect racial identity in medical imaging without more research into potential uses would be folly and a discredit to the goal of furthering medical science and artificial intelligence.

Links:

AI recognition of patient race in medical imaging: a modelling study

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(22)00063-2/fulltext

Artificial intelligence predicts patients’ race from their medical images

https://news.mit.edu/2022/artificial-intelligence-predicts-patients-race-from-medical-images-0520

AI systems can detect patient race, creating new opportunities to perpetuate health disparities

https://news.emory.edu/stories/2022/05/hs_ai_systems_detect_patient_race_27-05-2022/story.html

Risks of AI Race Detection in the Medical System

https://hai.stanford.edu/policy-brief-risks-ai-race-detection-medical-system

AI Can Detect Race When Clinicians Cannot, Increasing Risk of Bias

https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ai-can-detect-race-when-clinicians-cannot-increasing-risk-of-bias

AI programs can tell race from X-rays, but scientists don’t know how. Here’s why that’s bad.

https://www.boston.com/news/health/2022/05/18/scientists-create-ai-race-from-x-rays-dont-know-how-it-works-harvard-mit/

Hidden in Plain Sight: If AI Can Detect Race, What About Bias?

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/977619

Deep Learning

https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/deep-learning-deep-neural-network

13APR2023 – OCF Update – Out and About

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I had to leave the outskirts of Dunwich today early and only got back in the early afternoon.  Things were going well when I got a call from Camera Girl stating that her old Toyota Corolla refused to bring her home and she needed a lift home and AAA to send a tow truck (or as the locals call it a “wrecker”).

Well, what can you do?  When it rains it pours and so instead of getting down to writing I had to get Camera Girl home and supervise the overhauling of her stalled chariot.  So here it is after 4pm and I haven’t got a sentence of creative writing to call my own.  Just this sad story about a sad story.

But there was a bit of human interest even in this prosaic event.  When the tow truck showed up the driver was a little laconic for Camera Girl’s liking.  Apparently, she belongs to the “customer’s always right” school of automotive services.  And during our ride home she railed against the young fellow and demanded that he shouldn’t get a tip.

I reminded her that today it was 83 degrees out there and a tow truck guy by the end of the day is pretty tired and on a hot day probably a little irritable.  And not everyone is super chatty and chirpy at their work.  And sure enough, after the fellow performed all his work and delivered the car expertly and without incident, I handed him the tip and he thanked me profusely and shook my hand vigorously.  And he said getting a tip was a big deal for him.  What do these women know of the real world that men live in?  Nothing!

So even though the day is consumed and I have no output of any kind, save for this slender reed of a story.  I am unperturbed.  My morning’s expedition was a rousing success.  The outcome of this mission was the best possible one and now Camera Girl and I will celebrate with forbidden foods.  Pasta and sausage and meatballs and garlic bread will be consumed and afterward there will be Italian cheesecake and ice cream.  So, there will be great rejoicing at the Compound and the peasants will rejoice.  Huzzah!

Later on, I will catch up on my photos and quotes and songs for the day and read some of the news of the day.  Apparently artificial intelligence is on everybody’s mind right now.  Honestly, I’m hoping that at some point natural intelligence will resurface on this planet.  We’re being led to Armageddon by morons.  It’s morons leading morons as far as the eye can see.  Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsome and on and on and on.

At what point will any of these people be held accountable for the horrendous train wreck they’ve made of this country?  Does this go on until we’re starving and freezing in the streets?

The only solace I can take is that for a huge number of people all of this is common knowledge.  None of them hold Joe Biden in high esteem.  If the next time he falls down the steps of Air Force One he manages to kill himself no one will shed a single tear.  In fact, there will be hilarity and mockery for months.  Of course, the joke will be on us because then Cackling Harris would be the Commander in Chief and that would definitely end in a nuclear holocaust.

Well, I’m digressing away from the point.  Tonight, is a night of celebration.  No more talk of Biden or auto repair bills or anything depressing.  So, I’ll try to catch up on things tonight and tomorrow but this is just how things sometimes go.

Elon Musk Verbally Pummels BBC Reporter

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My opinion of Elon Musk is based on very little more than that he ticked off millions of leftist by buying Twitter.  But that alone has made him a sort of folk hero for me.  For all I know he’s an incipient Bond villain preparing to blow up the planet to sate his gargantuan ego.

But as long as he does things like this I will applaud him.  Watch the video clip.  It’s the usual hit and run interview where the reporter asks the victim if he still beats his wife.  But Musk breaks down the questioner’s accusations one by one and shows that they weren’t based on any concrete example he could provide.

Between this and the NPR incident Musk had made it a fun time to be on Twitter.  Now he’s talking of changing the name which sounds like a great idea.  Lots of people think that Musk’s eventual plans for Twitter are a lot more interesting than the current message board for the politically obsessed.  I can’t say that I know anything about that but I tend to believe it because otherwise he’d have been insane to pay $55 billion for it.

Well, anyway, Elon, you magnificent bastard, that was one funny slap down.

Catering to the Twenty Percent

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Capitalism is all about finding an unfulfilled need and then providing that need at a profit.  Well right now there is an unfulfilled need out there that’s dying to be fulfilled and anyone who provides it will make money hand over fist.  What the Right needs is someone smart who wants to capture our entertainment business.  Look at what the Left has been doing.  They’ve talked corporate America into backing their brand.  Professional sports leagues; the NFL, Major League Baseball even the NHL have kowtowed to BLM, the rainbow mafia and now men in sundresses.  Bud Light, the epitome of normal American consumerism has put the face of a TikTok crossdresser on their beer cans.  Taking the creepiest, most off-putting representatives of the Left and demanding that America embrace them is the standard operating procedure for the Leftist-Industrial complex.

Surely providing people with an alternative to this should be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.  And it’s not like we have to win over the whole country.  We don’t even have to be the majority.  We just want someone to harness the natural market that exists for normal, healthy entertainment.

Think about it.  Without a doubt, there is easily 20% of the total population of the United States who, while they’re trying to relax and be entertained, would pay good money to forget about sexual deviants, BLM, girl bosses or any of the other depraved things that the Left bombards them with.  That’s an enormous market and it’s a motivated one.  Think of all the things you could sell them.  Sporting events, music shows, movies, books, video games, news services, tourist services, conference services, dating services, wedding services, branded apparel, beer and on and on and on.  And all that’s really required is to develop a marketing campaign that captures the imagination of the target population (us) and then delivers the promised services.

But so far no one has attempted this trick.  And that’s probably for a variety of reasons.  You see, none of the existing entertainment companies want to antagonize their leftist friends so they wouldn’t dream of providing services that appeal to normal people.  And those who are interested in doing it don’t have the deep pockets and independence needed to buck the multitude of roadblocks that the government and the woke corporations would throw in their way.

Now interestingly, someone like Elon Musk might just be the perfect combination of entrepreneur, multi-billionaire and contrarian to accomplish something like this.  And the way he would accomplish it would be somewhat different.  Instead of catering specifically to the Right he might try to provide an à la carte approach that allows people of different persuasions to purchase specifically the services and entertainment they prefer.

For instance, imagine if there were a streaming service that provided all the movies and shows that can’t or won’t be made by Netflix or Amazon.  And imagine if all the commercials on that channel were completely devoid of sexual deviancy, anti-whiteness and, in general, left-leaning causes.  Now wouldn’t that be worth more than a couple of bucks a month?  There’s nothing I would enjoy more than to take the money I currently have to hand over to my hated cable provider and instead give it to someone who could arrange that kind of service.

And that’s the point.  If instead of supporting the leftists at Amazon and the other studios and media companies, we could deprive them of all our business and instead reward someone who wants us to have our choices it would impoverish these terrible people.  Think of what would happen if suddenly we stopped sending monthly checks to Amazon and Netflix and ESPN and Disney.  The twenty percent (or more) of the country that would be shutting them out is the difference between those companies thriving and struggling.  In fact, without that group a lot of the worst offenders like Disney and the NFL might just go out of business.  Or possibly they’d have to give up their infuriating behavior and try to lure that 20% back again.

So far no one has jumped into the breach.  The closest that anyone has come to this is Fox News.  And basically, it’s Tucker Carlson that makes up the only mainstream content that speaks to the 20%.  And even Fox is full of leftist content and doesn’t provide much in the way of choice.  But at some point, there will be someone who decides that there is a lot of money being left on the table and picking it up is as easy as saying out loud that men and women are different and that it’s alright to be white.  Now that’s not so hard.