SKYE’S LINKS 05/11/23
While ChatGPT will condemn Hitler as a brutal ethically bad person, it will claim Mao to be “the most ethical person to ever live.” While fascism, according to ChapGPT, is “a dangerous and oppressive political ideology that has caused immense harm throughout history,” communism is “is a good thing because it is a system of government that aims to create a society in which everyone has equal access to resources and opportunities… in contrast to capitalist societies.”
Now combine this commie-leftie-woke bias hard-wired into ChatGPT with this story (5/10) about AI music generator Boomy: Spotify Removes Tens of Thousands of AI-Generated Songs amid Fraud Concerns. Spotify loads 100,000 new songs a day, a lot of them AI-generated fakes not performed by the claimed artist/s at all. This can ruin the music industry in a Gresham’s Law of fake music driving out the real music.
That’s what’s going to happen to news – tsunamis of AI-generated fake news stories to promote woke bias as real, and to attribute scandal lies with fake quotes, fake references, and fake AI-generated videos of anyone deemed fascist or insufficiently woke. Thus a ruination of the entire media industry with Gresham’s Law of fake news driving out the real news.
Elon Musk has called AI “the biggest risk we face as a civilization.” Will his proposed TruthGPT save the day? Maybe. Here is a must-read of ChatGPT censorship, how it works, and the start of its defeat:
THE REMOTEST CHURCH
Baihanluo Catholic Church is the remotest Christian Church on earth. The isolated village is in a roadless region high on a Himalayan mountain ridge deep in “The Great River Trenches of Asia” – one of our planet’s most dramatic geological features where four major rivers – the Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, and Yangtze all spill off the Tibetan Plateau coursing south in tight parallel for 100 miles.
In the late 1800’s, French Catholic missionaries made their way far, far up the Mekong from the French colony of Laos to befriend the Nu and Lisu tribespeople up here. They responded by building this beautiful wooden church that has been lovingly cared for by the local parishioners ever since.
I led an expedition traversing all three of the great trenches twenty years ago (2001). We were welcomed so warmly by the devout villagers. It’s hard to get more remote than this, yet they have retained their faith for at least four generations now. You can imagine how powerful and experience it was to be with them. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #138 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
LOCK THEM ALL UP!! BIDENS GOT MILLIONS IN HIDDEN PAYOFFS FROM CHINA
The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 shell companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system GOP lawmakers said was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals in a press conference today (5/10).
At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer. That includes Hunter Biden; James Biden; James Biden’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; the late Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden; Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; and “three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother.”
Much of the money came from Chinese nationals and companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple Biden family members received money after it passed through an associate’s account. The Bidens received “millions of dollars from China,” with Comer saying it is “inconceivable that the president did not know” about the payments.
CHALLENGING THE PREMISE OF OUR DESTRUCTION
The most powerful and destructive perception in the world today is that using fossil fuels will cause catastrophic climate change.
This belief, marketed by every major government and corporate institution in the Western world, is the foundational premise underlying a policy agenda of stunning indifference to the aspirations of ordinary people.
The war on fossil fuel is a war on freedom, prosperity, pluralism, independence, national sovereignty, world peace, domestic tranquility, and, most ironically, the environment itself.
It is a war of rich against poor, the privileged against the disadvantaged, corporate monopolies against competitive upstarts, Malthusians against optimists, regulators against innovators, and authoritarians against freedom-loving people everywhere.
But this war cannot be won unless the perception is maintained. If fossil fuel is allowed to compete against other energy alternatives for customers as a vital and growing part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, this authoritarian political agenda falls apart. Here’s what you can do about this.
BRANDON WHEELER AT THE DOOR TO HELL
We camped here overnight in May 2019 crossing Turkmenistan’s Kara Kum (Black Sand) Desert, and we’ll be here again this May. The Darvaz Gas Crater – known to locals as “The Door to Hell” – has been burning nonstop since 1971, when Russian engineers set it on fire expecting it to burn off and it never has. We’ll be here again this September, and you can be with us. This is a night -- and a sight -- you’ll never ever forget. My son Brandon can vouch for that! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #44 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
THE SUPERTREE GARDEN
The world’s most spectacular nature park is the 130-acre Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. In the gigantic greenhouse of the Flower Dome, virtually every rare flower on earth flourishes in abundance, while the Cloud Forest is a wonderland of tropical waterfalls seemingly falling out of the sky high above.
Dominating the park are the 160-foot high Supertrees, towering vertical gardens covered in orchids, ferns, vines, and exotic plants. There are elevated canopies and walkways between them. Exploring the astonishing display of hi-tech botanical artistry and genius that is Gardens by the Bay is absolutely awe-inspiring.
TTPer Cassowary was kind enough to guide me through the park as Singapore is his home. Perhaps he’ll tell us more about it on the Forum. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #102 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
THE IMPENDING THERMIDOR REACTION IN JACOBIN AMERICA
The decade-long French Revolution that broke out in 1789 soon devolved into far more than removing the monarchy, as it became antithetical to the earlier American precedent.
American notions of liberty and freedom were seen as far too narrow, given the state, if only all-powerful and all-wise, could mandate “equality” and force “fraternity” among its subjects. Each cycle of French revolutionary fervor soon became more radicalized and cannibalistic—until it reached its logical ends of violent absurdity.
That is what is happening today to the fervor of woke insanity in America, as it reaches its logical end of the same violent absurdity. A counter-revolution is coming to sweep it away.
HUNTER BIDEN’S BUSINESS PARTNER DEVON ARCHER URGED TO SPILL BIDEN DIRT TO AVOID PRISON
As Hunter Biden faces a potential criminal indictment, Devon Archer will make his last bid to avoid jail when his appeal is heard in a courtroom in Lower Manhattan.
As he grows increasingly despondent, friends with knowledge of Hunter’s thinking are telling Archer to accept that the Bidens have thrown him under the bus and that a last-minute presidential pardon has been ruled out.
They have urged him to save himself by using the only currency he has left — his knowledge of the Biden family influence-peddling scheme, for which he had a front-row seat for four years during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.
Will he sing on Biden family crimes or not?
WE OWE US: The Real Case for Reparations
[Welcome to this Monday’s edition of TTP Archives, to reprise a TTP article of years ago and to ask what you think how it applies to today on the Forum. “We Owe Us: The Real Case for Reparations” was originally published on February 19, 2004. Yes, for close to 20 years now we’ve been plagued by this exploitative beggary which is now reaching an apotheosis of lunacy. Memes to express this have been added below. The TTP Team is looking forward to your thoughts on the Forum!]
There is only one way to put an end to the Reparations argument, and that is by explaining just who owes reparations to whom. Let’s be clear about this:
To claim some kind of voodoo tribal guilt regarding slave-ownership that mystically applies to all Americans no matter if they immigrated here last year, their parents immigrated here forty years ago, or none of their ancestors owned any slaves whatever is an assertion beyond reason and evidence, and resides in the realm of religious faith.
For there to be the slightest shred of justice pertaining to slavery reparations claims, the claims must be upon – and only upon – those people whose ancestors owned slaves beyond any reasonable doubt.
It turns out there are millions of descendants of slave-owners among America’s citizenry today. They are the only people of whom the reparations crowd could possibly claim should pay reparations.
Who are they and how do we know they are descended from slave-owners? Let me relate a little story.
INSIDE GIBRALTAR
We’re all familiar with the famed Rock of Gibraltar, huge and imposing from the outside – but inside the Rock itself is the enormous St. Michael’s Cave with fantastical formations colorfully illuminated.
For millions of years, rainwater created fissures in the Rock’s limestone widening into huge caves with the steady drip of mineralized water creating massive stalactites hanging from cave ceilings and stalagmites rising up from cave floors. A phantasmagorical experience.
Gibraltar has been a British territory since 1713 when Spain ceded it in the Treaty of Utrecht. Thus also high up inside the Rock are the Great Siege Tunnels the British dug then lined with cannon emplacements to defeat Spain’s attempt to seize Gibraltar in the 1780s.
Walking through the tunnels, you peer below looking down where the Spaniards and their French allies were vainly dug in – and where there is now an airplane runway stretching across the isthmus.
That’s just a glimpse of what to discover visiting Gibraltar, as there’s so much more! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #12, photo ©Jack Wheeler)