Category: Guest Contributors

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 26APR2023 – Ranking the World

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(Editorial Note:

This post is in reaction to this linked post: We’re Better Than That

that stated that determining whether America was still the “best” place to live based on available freedom was a worthwhile exercise.

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Problem is, the ones who say that other places are worse are pretty much right. Singapore is wealthy but they’ll cane you for chewing gum. Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK are all serfs to their mega-parliament. Disarmed, cowed

In Scotland it is an arrestable offense if you walk too closely behind another at night. In England, carrying a Gerber or Leatherman multitool is fairly serious arrestable offense. In the UK you can be arrested, held without council, interrogated, have your kids dragged off to social services, then released without charge (in other words, political terrorism) for owning or distributing pamphlets supporting a legal political party, UKIP. And they’ll do it a couple times a month until you are sufficiently subdued.

Look at what Trudeau has been up to the past couple of years. Japan and South Korea are xenophobic. Mexico is now a failed narcostate. Argentina is normally ok but they have coups and other issues on a regular basis. The entire continent of Africa is screwed. Western Europe is woke as hell.

Eastern Europe is attractive but too close to Russia who will not be satisfied with Ukraine. The Caribbean is as rife with crime as when the pirates ran the place. Ecuador isn’t bad if you can handle the climate and altitude. Costa Rica is okay but its crime is rising. Most of the rest of South and Central America is second world.

Brazil is becoming quite crazy. Great beaches and attractive women, though, but I doubt Camera Girl is going to go for that. Israel is the only sane place in the Middle East but of course they are embattled. If I had to move I believe I’d choose either Argentina or Romania/Czech Republic despite their issues

Then again, you and me both have cherished family in the States. I would not want to remove myself from their proximity. My last act of love may be to die defending them if things go bat-crap here. If so, I will sing my death song and die like a warrior going home.

Guest Contributor – Glenn W – 18APR2023 – Subjectivity on the Right

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ZMan, as a rule, is an excellent observer and commenter on the moral and social decline of the West. That being said, his over confident analysis of the psychology of woke is subjective and full of unsupported allegations. I’m not going to try and write a comprehensive critique but I do want to point a couple of things out that are worth considering.

I know James Lindsay and Paul Gottfried got into a dust-up but haven’t followed it closely. I don’t have, and won’t have, a Twitter account so I couldn’t follow the discussion. This statement by ZMan is, at best, a half truth:

“It needs to be said that Paul Gottfried’s dog probably knows more about this topic than Lindsay will ever know. Given Gottfried’s connection to Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse, he is as close as we get to an expert on the forerunners of this new ideology gripping the minds of the ruling class.”

First of all I’ve heard Gottfried say that his PhD is in European history. His studying under Marcuse as a PhD student gives him no special insight into what is happening now. He may have such insight but it isn’t because he studied under Marcuse 60 years ago.

Lindsay has spent a tremendous amount of time studying the “woke” primary source material and can legitimately be called a subject matter specialist. That does not mean he can’t make mistakes but ZMans blowing him off out of hand is just hand waving.

This ZMan statement made me chuckle:

“That said, there is a tendency of people on what we call the Right to engage in the same binary thinking we see with the people we call the Left. That means playing the old game of linguistic guilt by association.”

Let me get this straight: Paul Gottfried who studied under the hard core leftist Herbert Marcuse is a great guy but Harry Jaffa who studied under that “mediocrity” Leo Strauss is a bum. Gee, that seems pretty binary to me. Projection anyone?

The last thing I want to point out is ZMan claims special insight into the psychology of the “woke” ruling class. While he is a smart man he has no claim to special insight into the hive mind that is our “woke” overlords. His opinion isn’t worth any more than those dreaded civic nationalists.

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

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 30MAR2023 – Confiscations

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The day the feds start gun confiscation is the day the 2nd US civil war begins.

I believe Biden and the left are purposely trying to destroy the USA on behalf of their owners, the Chinese, Russians and Soros.

Biden’s plan to stop gas sppliances such as cook stoves, furnaces, clothes dryers, and water heaters will only serve to further erode the power grid. California is already at the point of rolling brownouts. Imagine taking away all gas appliances and adding in mandatory electric cars to boot? Grid meltdown. Add on anything else such as a good-sized earthquake or solar flare and California will have massive blackouts and, as a result, lots of deaths. California is broke. And remember, the hospitals, etc, will be forbidden gas or fuel powered backup generators.

I have a natural gas standby generator, a gas water heater (looking at an on-demand unit to replace the tank type), gas range and a gas clothes dryer. That reduces my electrical load during outages and puts less stress on the generator, so I can basically run my whole home as if I still had line power. I can cook, wash and dry clothes and the rest on a smaller generator. All circuits are available, not just an essential few. Big Daddy Joe wants to take that from me. Good luck.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 30MAR2023 – It Never Ends

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

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The problem for the Dims is they don’t know when to stop, anything.

Their first big win, in the 60’s, Civil Rights, was passed as “equal rights for everyone”. The nation was fine with that but it has evolved into permanent “affirmative action”, hard quotas, reverse racism and actual persecution of whites.

After several decades of gun “safety” laws, it has finally reached the point that we were promised would never be be reached: the current dominant political party proposing outright confiscation.

God knows where this “climate change” thing is going to end up.

I do believe that this current trans mania just beats anything that has ever happened before. The nation evolved to “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the 90’s (I think). Everyone was cool with that. Later, there was a bit of trepidation over gay marriage. Then it evolved further to the persecution of people refusing services to openly gay couples. But who could have anticipated the shrieking insanity it has become today, the 57 genders, gender change by the need statement of what you are today. Drag queens performing school sponsered sex shows for grammar school children. The government performing “sex change” butchery on per-pubescent children without the parents knowledge or consent. The domination of womens sports by men who self proclaimed themselves women, on this day anyway.

If this isn’t a present day recreation of Sodom and Gomorrah, I don’t know what else it could possibly be. A society this sick needs to heal itself or go down.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 25MAR2023 – Scientific American Goes Woke

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Did a quick google (Laura Helmuth) and found she’s chief editor of Scientific American. That would be hard to believe if SA hadn’t been totally co-opted 20 or so years ago. I hate it too, I subscribed to SA for decades and absolutely devoured every issue. I remember the issue with the article on the Supernova of 1987 in the Great Crab Nebula. Whoever wrote it did a great job, it was exciting, mesmerizing, illuminating. Back then, the basis of the magazine was purely science

I watched politics and what is now called wokeism creep in. There was an editor change, don’t remember the names now, but that opened the gates. SA hired a new columnist (again don’t remember the name), who on his 2nd column, stated flatly that the verdict of history was now in and the political organizing system of the future was clear and that was socialism.

Oh, yeah? That was it for SA for me. Now you don’t know if any particular article is true or an outright lie intended to mislead you to believe in some woke bulls***t.