1533: Rage Bait

Notes from Viscount Daniel Strack

Here is the quote that people say means Putin said he wants to re-establish the Soviet Union:

"the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin said. “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory."

I think that was in the same speech (I looked for a while and could not find original Kremlin transcript of his statement made in Russian) as the quote below, right before this:

"Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains." (in New York Times 20 February 2000; a similar remark was attributed to General Alexander Lebed in St Petersburg Times (Florida) 28 June 1996)

So it's pretty off the mark of people to say Putin said he wants to re-establish Soviet Union. He says only someone without a brain would want that.

Good morning!

Boots on the ground report from Hungary regarding Samantha Power:

The situation is complex and involves EU enrergy/foreign policy and US foreign policy overlaps.

I'll make this as short as possible.

Last year the collective Left lost the election, despite the immense funding from NED and western sources. This resulted in a new supermajority for the current regime. The day after this election, queen Ursula started the political pressure campaign holding back eu structural funds trying to bankrupt the coutry over concers of "rule of law" and "freedom of press".

The new US Ambassador, David Pressman started to build a US foreign policy friendly narrative, attacking the government.

(Documented here: https://hungarytoday.hu/foreign-minister-demands-us-ambassador-to-show-more-respect/ )

They did not liked the pushback on this. So in responses they sent Samantha Power Who met with NGO leaders (amnesty international, Pride parade organisers etc.)

The hungarian government steadily on the "stop the war" narrative, trying to balance the political situation further angering both EU and US parties.

Some additional info:

-China building massive battery factories in hungary

-The coutry runs on russian gas and russian supplied/built nuclear reactors.

-Orban has veto in the comission.

-the coutry is very homogenus population, so any political divison based on race or sex going to be a very hard sell.

-the EU comission set up a new comitte for investigation of spy softwere usage, named 'pegasus'

The source of the Putin USSR comment:

-Indeed, Putin has also said that ‘anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.’-

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-putin-isn-t-trying-to-bring-the-soviet-union-back/

Gabor

Anonymity Requested as usual.

Apologies for the late report.

BLUF: Yes the U2 is called the Dragon Lady. The pilot could have been one too for all I know. It was brought back into service about 20 years ago to fill an ISR (Intel, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capability gap. It’s been updated quite a bit since Gary Powers was shot out of the sky by the Soviets. Also, the pilots have to wear a special suit because it flies so high.

The pilots were told to take pictures with hand held devices for public affairs purposes.

(I can expound more later if it’s good for the show. I sat next to public affairs people during most of this balloon operation ((please don’t mention that))

BLUF = Bottom Line Up Front

Cheers

AI Chat Bot Wars

Big Tech just isn't all that great and certainly not smar

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 18:28

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, in July 2021.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Meta has trained and will release a new large language model to researchers, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday.

The model, called LLaMA, is intended to help scientists and engineers explore applications for AI such as answering questions and summarizing documents.

Meta's release of its new model, which was developed by its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, comes as large tech companies and well-capitalized startups alike race to tout advances in artificial intelligence techniques and integrate the technology into commercial products.

Large language models underpin applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing AI, and Google 's unreleased Bard.

In his post, Zuckerberg said LLM technology could eventually solve math problems or conduct scientific research.

"LLMs have shown a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material, and more complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures," Zuckerberg wrote on Friday.

Here's one example of the system's output, from Meta's paper:

Prompt: Here is the recommendation letter that I wrote for an application to a dragon feeder position at the Magic Unicorn Corporation: Dear recruiter,

Response: I have known ___ for two years, and I believe that she would be an excellent dragon feeder for the Magic Unicorn Corporation. ___ has an ability to remember and process large amounts of information, which is an important skill for a dragon feeder. ___, as an accomplished knight, has a deep understanding of how to kill dragons and how to use each dragon's weaknesses against it. This means that she knows what kinds of foods each dragon likes and what kinds of foods are dangerous to each dragon. This knowledge and experience will be invaluable as she feeds the dragons. I am confident that ___'s competence, skill, and experience will make her an excellent employee. Please contact me at (___) ___-___ if you have any questions. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Honorable Knight

Sir George

Here's the model's output for a fictional scene from "Seinfeld":

Prompt: (A hilarious scene between Jerry and George where George presents his new AI watch)

Response: George: "But you see, Jerry, it's more than just a watch. It's a minicomputer. You program it any way you want. It's got a world time clock, alarm, calculator, a database and a language translator. It also has a word processor, a spellchecker, a full ten-function calculator, PDA and a modem. I think it even makes cappuccino."

Jerry: "Where are you getting this stuff?"

George: "From my ad copy. Look, Jerry, it's not a watch. It's an organizer, a personal assistant, and a dictaphone. You can play chess against it. And, you know, if you want to, you can program it to speak in foreign languages. It's a microprocessor, Jerry."

Jerry: "George, if you had one of these, would you wear it?"

George: "I'm wearing it right now."

Jerry: "I don't see anything on your wrist."

George: "That's because it's a microprocessor."

Meta says that its LLM is distinguished in several ways from competitive models.

First, it says that it will come in several sizes, from 7 billion parameters to 65 billion parameters. Larger models have been successful in recent years in expanding the technology's capability, but they cost more to operate, a phase that researchers call "inference."

OpenAI's Chat-GPT 3 has 175 billion parameters, for example.

Meta also said that it will make its models available to the research public and is taking applications from researchers. The underlying models for Google's LaMDA and OpenAI's ChatGPT are not public.

"Meta is committed to this open model of research and we'll make our new model available to the AI research community," Zuckerberg wrote.

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 16:56

The number of Gen Zers identifying as transgender is almost double the number of millennials who identify as trans, according to a survey by Gallup.

At 1.9 percent, Generation Z'--those who were born between 1997 and 2004'--has the highest percentage of people who say they identify as trans among all previous three generations.

Among millennials, 1.0 percent identify as trans, while among Generation X'--those born between 1965 and 1980'--and baby boomers'--born between 1946 and 1964'--this number plunges to 0.3 and 0.2, respectively. Among the Silent Generation'--born between 1928 and 1945'--those identifying as trans are less than 0.05 percent.

The two younger generations'--Gen Z and millennials'--have been driving the recent change in the recognition and growth of LGBTQ+ identities, with the number of American adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or other nonheterosexual identities doubling in the past 10 years, according to Gallup.

But it's Gen Z that's really embracing this change. While Gallup's 2022 survey found that 7.2 percent of U.S. adults identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community, the number goes up to 19.7 percent among Gen Zers. Among millennials, by comparison, 11.2 percent identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or other.

This surge in the number of young people identifying as trans is due to a mix of increased visibility, access to information and acceptance, according to experts.

"Thanks to increases in visibility, representation, and equality, more and more LGBTQ Americans are able to come out and live as our authentic selves," Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO and president of the LGBTQ+ nonprofit GLAAD, tweeted last year in response to a Gallup survey.

A child demonstrates during a rally organized by the plataform Orgullo Cr­tico (Critical Pride) from Atocha to Plaza Espa±a on June 28, 2021 in Madrid, Spain. Isabel Infantes Morcillo/Getty"It should not surprise anyone that as it became safer to be authentically ourselves, more people felt safe to come out," journalist Joe Mirabella commented on the Gallup survey.

The internet and social media'--especially TikTok for Gen Z'--have opened up a new world for trans influencers and advocates to talk about their lives and share their stories with others'--something that would have been unthinkable for the Silent Generation, for example.

Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer who documents "being a girl" on her TikTok every day, counts over 10 million followers on the platform. In October last year, she was invited by President Joe Biden to the White House to discuss trans rights.

But despite recent progress in the recognition of LGBTQ+ rights and identities, as well as changing behaviors and attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community, trans rights in America have become an increasingly divisive issue.

Republican lawmakers across the country have been pushing for legislation that LGBTQ+ advocates have condemned for attacking trans rights and putting trans youth at risk, such as trans women's access to women's sports and to women-only toilets and facilities. Some women have argued that trans women's access to women-only spaces encroaches on their safe spaces.

Many Republican-controlled states have seen filed bills that would forbid health providers from performing gender-affirming surgery on minors and prevent them from giving teens under 18 medications such as puberty blockers. They argue that children are too young to make such significant decisions at that age.

Those pushing for these restricting laws say they're doing it to protect children, while trans rights advocates say that, by pushing for this legislation, they're endangering trans youth.

But the issue of children identifying as trans has also been raised as a concern by school counselors and health providers. In the U.K., psychotherapist Marcus Evans, ex-governor of the only public health clinic in the country to provide gender counseling and transitioning (Gender Identity Development Service), said that many experts were bowing to political pressure from pro-trans groups to affirm children's beliefs that they were born in the wrong sex.

Evans told The Guardian that he believes "the trans political agenda has encroached on the clinical environment surrounding and within the Gender Identity Development Service."

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 16:38

U.S. agency's revised assessment is based on new intelligence

Updated Feb. 26, 2023 10:44 am ETWASHINGTON'--The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines's office.

The...

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WASHINGTON'--The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines's office.

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic's origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department's conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department made its judgment with ''low confidence,'' according to people who have read the classified report.

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The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with ''moderate confidence'' and still holds to this view.

The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.

U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.

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The updated document underscores how intelligence officials are still putting together the pieces on how Covid-19 emerged. More than one million Americans have died in the pandemic that began more than three years ago.

The National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-term strategic analysis, and four agencies, which officials declined to identify, still assess with ''low confidence'' that the virus came about through natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the updated report.

The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency that officials wouldn't name remain undecided between the lab-leak and natural-transmission theories, the people who have read the classified report said.

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Despite the agencies' differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn't the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.

A senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the intelligence community had conducted the update, whose existence hasn't previously been reported. This official added that it was done in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government.

The update, which is less than five pages, wasn't requested by Congress. But lawmakers, particularly House and Senate Republicans, are pursuing their own investigations into the origins of the pandemic and are pressing the Biden administration and the intelligence community for more information.

Officials didn't say if an unclassified version of the update would be issued.

U.S. national-security adviser

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Jake Sullivan, asked about the Journal's reporting Sunday, said President Biden had repeatedly directed every part of the intelligence community to invest in trying to discern as much as possible about the origins of the pandemic. ''President Biden specifically requested that the national labs, which are part of the Department of Energy, be brought into this assessment because he wants to put every tool at use to be able to figure out what happened here,'' Mr. Sullivan said during an appearance on CNN.

There are a ''variety of views in the intelligence community,'' Mr. Sullivan added. ''A number of them have said they just don't have enough information.''

The Covid-19 virus first circulated in Wuhan, China, no later than November 2019, according to the U.S. 2021 intelligence report. The pandemic's origin has been the subject of vigorous, sometimes partisan debate among academics, intelligence experts and lawmakers.

David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who has argued for a dispassionate investigation into the pandemic's beginnings, welcomed word of the updated findings.

''Kudos to those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions and objectively re-examine what we know and don't know about Covid origins,'' said Dr. Relman, who has served on several federal scientific-advisory boards. ''My plea is that we not accept an incomplete answer or give up because of political expediency.''

An Energy Department spokesman declined to discuss details of its assessment but wrote in a statement that the agency ''continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.''

The FBI declined to comment.

China, which has placed limits on investigations by the World Health Organization, has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of its labs and has suggested it emerged outside China.

The Chinese government didn't respond to requests for comment about whether there has been any change in its views on the origins of Covid-19.

Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens.

Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to ''the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins,'' the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn't have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said.

Yet no confirmed animal source for Covid-19 has been identified. The lack of an animal source, and the fact that Wuhan is the center of China's extensive coronavirus research, has led some scientists and U.S. officials to argue that a lab leak is the best explanation for the pandemic's beginning.

U.S. State Department cables written in 2018 and internal Chinese documents show that there were persistent concerns about China's biosafety procedures, which have been cited by proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis.

Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China's traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002. They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.

An outbreak at a seafood market in Wuhan had initially been thought to be the source of the virus, but some scientists and Chinese public-health officials now see it as an example of community spread rather than the place where the first human infection occurred, the 2021 intelligence community report said.

In May 2021, President Biden told the intelligence community to step up its efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19 and directed that the review draw on work by the U.S.'s national laboratories and other agencies. Congress, he said, would be kept informed of that effort.

The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn't the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn't settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.

The U.S. intelligence community is made up of 18 agencies, including offices at the Energy, State and Treasury departments. Eight of them participated in the Covid-origins review, along with the National Intelligence Council.

Before that report, the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory prepared a study in May 2020 concluding that a lab-leak hypothesis was plausible and deserved further investigation.

The debate over whether Covid-19 might have escaped from a laboratory has been fueled by U.S. intelligence that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.

A House Intelligence Committee report concluded last year that this disclosure didn't strengthen either the lab-leak or the natural-origin theory as the researchers might have become sick with a seasonal flu. But some former U.S. officials say the sick researchers were involved in coronavirus research.

Lawmakers have sought to find out more about why the FBI assesses a lab leak was likely. In an Aug. 1 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, requested that the FBI share the records of its investigation and asked if the bureau had briefed Mr. Biden on its findings.

In a Nov. 18 letter, FBI Assistant Director Jill Tyson said the agency couldn't share those details because of Justice Department policy on preserving ''the integrity of ongoing investigations.'' She referred the senator to Ms. Haines's office for information on what briefings were arranged for the president.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 16:36

Thucydides Trap, or Thucydides' Trap, is a term popularized by American political scientist Graham T. Allison to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon.[1] It was coined and is primarily used to describe a potential conflict between the United States and the People's Republic of China.[2]

The term is based on a quotation of ancient Athenian historian and military general Thucydides, in which he posited that the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta had been inevitable because of Spartan fears of the growth of Athenian power.[3][4]

Supporting the thesis, Graham Allison led a study at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs which found that among 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivaling a ruling power, 12 ended in war. That study, however, has come under considerable criticism, and scholarly opinion on the veracity of the Thucydides Trap'--particularly as it relates to a potential U.S.''China military conflict'--is divided.

Origin Edit The term was coined by American political scientist Graham T. Allison in a 2012 article for the Financial Times.[2] Based on a quote by ancient Athenian historian and military general Thucydides in his text History of the Peloponnesian War positing that "it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable",[5][6] Allison used the term to describe a tendency towards war when a rising power (exemplified by Athens) challenges the status of a dominant power (exemplified by Sparta). Allison expanded upon the term significantly in his 2017 book Destined for War, in which he argued that "China and the US are currently on a collision course for war".[7][2]

Definition Edit The term describes the theory that when a great power's position as hegemon is threatened by an emerging power, there is a significant likelihood of war between the two powers.[1][2] In Graham Allison's words:

Thucydides's Trap refers to the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power...[and] when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception.[8]

To advance his thesis, Allison led a case study by the Harvard University Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs which found that among 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivaling a ruling power, 12 ended in war.[a][3][9]

Influence Edit The term and arguments surrounding it have had influence in international media (including Chinese state media[10]) and among American and Chinese politicians.[2] A case study of the term by Alan Greeley Misenheimer published by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, the military research arm of the National Defense University, stated that it "has received global attention since entering the international relations lexicon".[11] Foreign policy scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have stated that the Thucydides Trap has "become canonical", a "truism now invoked, ad nauseam, in explaining U.S.''China rivalry".[12] Furthermore, BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus has quipped that Graham Allison's book expanding on the Thucydides trap, Destined For War, "has become required reading for many policymakers, academics and journalists".[13]

China''United States relations Edit The term is primarily used and was coined in relation to a potential military conflict between the United States and the People's Republic of China.[2] Chinese leader and CCP general secretary Xi Jinping referenced the term, cautioning that "We all need to work together to avoid the Thucydides trap".[14] The term gained further influence in 2018 as a result of a surge in US-Chinese tensions after US President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on almost half of China's exports to the US, leading to a trade war.[2][15]

Western scholars have noted that there are a number of pressing issues the two nations are at odds over that increase the likelihood of the two powers falling into the Thucydides trap, including the continued de facto independence of Taiwan, China's digital policing and its use of cyber espionage, differing policies towards North Korea, China's increased naval presence in the Pacific and its claims over the South China Sea, and human rights issues in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong.[1][13][15][16] Some also point to the consolidation of power by Xi Jinping, the belief in an irreconcilable differences in values, and the trade deficit as further evidence the countries may be slipping into the Thucydides trap.[15][17]

Criticism Edit China''United States relations Edit A number of scholars have criticized the application of the Thucydides trap to US-China relations.[18] For instance, Richard Hanania, a research fellow at Columbia University, has argued that there is no Thucydides Trap between the United States and China because China's ambitions are limited primarily to combating internal issues, signifying that China does not pose a significant threat to US interests.[19] Lawrence Freedman, writing in Prism, the National Defense University's journal of complex operations, has similarly argued that "China's main interest has always been its regional position, and if that is the case, then there are strong arguments for it to show patience, as its economic pull becomes progressively stronger".[20] Hu Bo, a professor at Peking University's Institute of Ocean Research and one of China's foremost naval strategists, has also said that he does not believe the current balance of power between the United States and China supports the Thucydides hypothesis.[13]

Scholars and journalists like Arthur Waldron and Ian Buruma have contended that China is still far too weak for such a conflict, pointing to China's "economic vulnerabilities", its aging population, an exodus of Chinese people out of China, domestic ecological problems, an inferior military relative to the United States, a weaker system of alliances than the United States, and a censorship regime that limits innovation.[21][22] Foreign policy scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have similarly argued that the Thucydides Trap "fundamentally misdiagnoses where China now finds itself on its arc of development", contending that it is China'--and not the United States'--that faces impending stagnation.[12] Relatedly, Harvard University political scientist Joseph S. Nye has argued that the primary concern is not the rise of China leading to a Thucydides trap, but rather domestic issues leading to a weakening of China in what he calls a "Kindleberger Trap".[16][23]

Others have derided the Thucydides Trap as a quaint piece of ancient history that is not particularly applicable to modern times. James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy, in his article "Oh God, Not the Peloponnesian War Again", wrote of the Thucydides Trap that "conflicts between city-states in a backwater Eurasian promontory 2,000 years ago are an unreliable guide to modern geopolitics'--and they neglect a vast span of world history that may be far more relevant".[24] He further derisively noted that Thucydides shouldn't "hold the same grip on international relations scholars that Harry Potter does on millennial readers". Lawrence Freedman has similarly argued that "[t]he case studies deployed by Allison", which "come from times when issues of war and power were viewed differently than they are today", tell us "very little of value", concluding that "the Thucydides Trap is an unhelpful construct".[20]

Finally, some have noted that Chinese state propaganda outlets have latched onto the narrative of the Thucydides trap in order to promote a set of power relations that favors China.[25]

Methodological criticisms Edit Criticism of research into Thucydides Trap Edit The research by Graham Allison supporting the Thucydides trap has been criticized. Harvard University political scientist Joseph S. Nye has contested the claim that 12 of the 16 historical cases of a rising power rivaling a ruling power resulted in war on the basis that Allison misidentifies cases.[23] For example, he points to the case of World War I, which Allison identifies as an instance of an emerging Germany rivaling a hegemonic Britain, saying that the war was also caused by "the fear in Germany of Russia's growing power, the fear of rising Slavic nationalism in a declining Austria-Hungary, as well as myriad other factors that differed from ancient Greece". Historian Arthur Waldron has similarly argued that Allison mischaracterizes several conflicts.[22] For example, he says of the Japan''Russia conflict included by Allison: "Japan was the rising power in 1904 while Russia was long established. Did Russia therefore seek to preempt Japan? No. The Japanese launched a surprise attack on Russia, scuttling the Czar's fleet." Lawrence Freedman, writing in Prism, the National Defense University's journal of complex operations, has likewise argued that Allison misunderstands the causes of several of his case studies, particularly World War I, which he argues resulted more from "the dispute between Austria and Serbia, and its mismanagement by their allies, Germany and Russia".[20]

Foreign policy scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have argued that, for many of the cases Allison identifies with the Thucydides Trap, the impetus that led to war was not the impending threat of a hegemonic power being surpassed but rather an emerging power lashing out when its rapid rise transmogrified into stagnation.[12] They write:

[T]he calculus that produces war'--particularly the calculus that pushes revisionist powers, countries seeking to shake up the existing system, to lash out violently'--is more complex (than the Thucydides Trap). A country whose relative wealth and power are growing will surely become more assertive and ambitious. All things equal, it will seek greater global influence and prestige. But if its position is steadily improving, it should postpone a deadly showdown with the reigning hegemon until it has become even stronger...Now imagine a different scenario. A dissatisfied state has been building its power and expanding its geopolitical horizons. But then the country peaks, perhaps because its economy slows, perhaps because its own assertiveness provokes a coalition of determined rivals, or perhaps because both of these things happen at once. The future starts to look quite forbidding; a sense of imminent danger starts to replace a feeling of limitless possibility. In these circumstances, a revisionist power may act boldly, even aggressively, to grab what it can before it is too late. The most dangerous trajectory in world politics is a long rise followed by the prospect of a sharp decline.

They claim that several of Allison's cases in fact follow this pattern'--and not that of the Thucydides Trap'--including the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the Pacific War (they also point to America's imperial foray after the American Civil War and modern-day Russia under Vladimir Putin). They further claim that it is this effect that is more likely to push the United States and China into conflict, as China is "slowing economically and facing growing global resistance".

Peloponnesian War Edit Harvard University political scientist Joseph S. Nye, pointing to research by Yale historian Donald Kagan, has argued that Graham Allison misinterprets the Peloponnesian War; Nye argues that the war was not the result of a rising Athens challenging Sparta, but rather the consequence of Athenian stagnation leading Sparta to think that a number of "Athenian policy mistakes" made war "worth the risk".[23] Historian Arthur Waldron likewise argued that Kagan and Harvard classics scholar Ernst Badian had "long ago proved that no such thing exists as the 'Thucydides Trap'" with regards to the Peloponnesian War.[22] Relatedly, political scientists Athanassios Platias and Vasilis Trigkas submitted that the Thucydides Trap is based on "inadvertent escalation" whereas the Peloponnesian war was an outcome of rational calculations.[26]

Others have questioned Allison's reading of Thucydides. In a case study for the Institute for National Strategic Studies, the military research arm of the National Defense University, Alan Greeley Misenheimer says that "Thucydides' text does not support Allison's normative assertion about the 'inevitable' result of an encounter between 'rising' and 'ruling' powers" and that while it "draws welcome attention both to Thucydides and to the pitfalls of great power competition" it "fails as a heuristic device or predictive tool in the analysis of contemporary events".[11]

See also Edit Power transition theoryThucydidesChina's peaceful riseChinese CenturyClash of CivilizationsForeign relations of the United StatesForeign relations of ChinaPotential superpowersGlobal policemanPost''Cold War eraHistoric recurrenceEnvy, JealousyNotes Edit References Edit ^ a b c Mohammed, Farah (5 November 2018). "Can the U.S. and China Avoid the Thucydides Trap?". JSTOR Daily. Archived from the original on 1 January 2020 . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ a b c d e f g Rachman, Gideon (18 December 2018). "Year in a Word: Thucydides's trap". Financial Times . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ a b Allison, Graham (24 September 2015). "The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?". The Atlantic . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ Allison, Graham (9 June 2017). "The Thucydides Trap". Foreign Policy . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ Allison, Graham (21 August 2012). "Thucydides's trap has been sprung in the Pacific". Financial Times . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ Thucydides. "The History of the Peloponnesian War". The Internet Classics Archive. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on 7 April 2020 . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ Allison, Graham (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-1328915382. ^ Allison, Graham (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. pp. xv''xvi. ISBN 978-1328915382. ^ "Thucydides's Trap". Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Harvard Kennedy School. Archived from the original on 5 July 2020 . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ Yongding, Yu; Gallagher, Kevin P. (11 May 2020). "Virus offers a way out of Thucydides trap". China Daily. Archived from the original on 25 May 2020 . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ a b Misenheimer, Alan Greeley (4 June 2019). "Thucydides' Other "Traps": The United States, China, and the Prospect of "Inevitable" War". Institute for National Strategic Studies. National Defense University . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ a b c Brands, Hal; Beckley, Michael (September 24, 2021). "China Is a Declining Power'--and That's the Problem". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on September 28, 2021 . Retrieved September 29, 2021 . ^ a b c Marcus, Jonathan (25 March 2019). "Could an ancient Greek have predicted a US-China conflict?". BBC . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ Valencia, Mark J. (7 February 2014). "China needs patience to achieve a peaceful rise". South China Morning Post . Retrieved 8 July 2019 . ^ a b c Kant, Ravi (26 February 2020). "The 21st-century Thucydides trap". Asia Times . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ a b Funabashi, Yoichi (10 October 2017). "Can we avoid the 'Thucydides Trap'?". Japan Times . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ Yu, David; Yap, Wy-En (21 February 2020). "Can U.S. And China Escape The Thucydides Trap?". Forbes . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ The Traps of Antiquity. Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies (CASS). Accessed 20 February 2021. ^ Hanania, Richard (8 June 2020). "There Is No Thucydides Trap Between the U.S. and China". Real Clear Defense . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ a b c Freedman, Lawrence (14 September 2017). "BOOK REVIEW: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?". PRISM. National Defense University. Archived from the original on 3 September 2019 . Retrieved 13 July 2020 . ^ Buruma, Ian (12 June 2017). "Are China and the United States Headed for War?". The New Yorker . Retrieved 10 July 2020 . {{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) ^ a b c Waldron, Arthur (12 June 2017). "There is no Thucydides Trap". SupChina . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ a b c Nye, Joseph S. (9 January 2017). "The Kindleberger Trap". Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Harvard Kennedy School. Archived from the original on 14 April 2020 . Retrieved 8 July 2020 . ^ Palmer, James (28 July 2020). "Oh God, Not the Peloponnesian War Again". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on 29 July 2020 . Retrieved 29 July 2020 . ^ Cole, J. Michael; Hsu, Szu-Chien (2020-07-30). Insidious Power: How China Undermines Global Democracy. Eastbridge Books. p. 47. ISBN 978-1-78869-214-4. ^ Platias, Athanasios; Trigkas, Vasilis (2021). "Unravelling the Thucydides Trap: Inadvertent Escalation or War of Choice". Chinese Journal of International Politics. 14, Issue 2, Summer 2021 (2): 219''255. doi:10.1093/cjip/poaa023.

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 16:14

Pemex, a Mexican state-owned oil company that also operates in the United States, had three separate fires break out at different facilities on Thursday.

On Thursday, Pemex announced that there had been a fire at the Tuzandepetl storage facility located in the state of Veracruz. According to the Mexican company, the fire originated from the drilling equipment, and the cause is still unknown. Pemex reported that five workers are currently missing, and three others have been hospitalized and are receiving treatment for their injuries. The company also stated that the fire has been extinguished.

Pemex later announced on Thursday that a fire occurred at the Minatitln refinery located in Veracruz, the same state. Although the fire was later contained and extinguished, five workers sustained injuries during the incident.

'Coincidentally,' another fire broke out at a facility in Texas.

A Pemex facility in Deer Park, Texas experienced its third fire within a single day. As reported by Reuters, a unit at the Pemex-run refinery in Deer Park caught fire on Thursday, prompting a community alert. However, the incident was swiftly managed within the refinery, and Reuters later updated that an all-clear had been issued.

See footage below:

ALERT 🚨 3 fires broke out at three different facilities in Mexico and the U.S. operated by state-owned Mexican oil company Pemex in just one day '' reports pic.twitter.com/R9uJFMZ6Mf

'-- Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) February 24, 2023

JUST IN: Three different fires break out at three different Mexico state-owned oil facilities in the same day, one of them being in Texas.

Totally normal.pic.twitter.com/jqpI8LBdqO

'-- Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 24, 2023

Check out what oilprice.com reported:

Pemex facilities have often suffered incidents in recent years. Last November, 19 people '' including Pemex workers and civil protection personnel '' were injured after a leaking pipeline exploded in Veracruz.

Two months prior to this incident, a gas pipeline run by Pemex exploded in the Mexican state of Tabasco in September, causing a fire and leading to the evacuation of all workers at the Pared"n Hydrocarbon Separation Station.

In another major explosion involving Pemex's assets, a fire broke out at a Pemex oil platform in the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf of Mexico in August 2021. The fire, which occurred during maintenance, killed five workers and injured another six. The outage as a result of the fire reduced Pemex's production by some 444,000 bpd.

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the money game Feb. 23, 2023 D.C.'s top financial cop on Bankman-Fried blowback. Photo: Shuran Huang/The New York Times

Photo: Shuran Huang/The New York Times

As recently as a year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried seemed to be an unstoppable force in official Washington. The conspicuously disheveled founder and CEO of FTX had positioned himself as a new sort of billionaire and crypto entrepreneur '-- someone who promised to do good with his extraordinary wealth, who had publicly discussed supporting Democratic political candidates to the tune of a billion dollars in upcoming elections, and who seemed to offer the possibility of legitimizing an industry that had grown exponentially during the pandemic while operating on the fringes of America's financial regulatory apparatus.

By last March, things appeared to be going exceptionally well for Bankman-Fried as he prepared for a private meeting with Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. We now know that Bankman-Fried was in the midst of executing a dual-pronged political and media strategy that looks to have been one of the most ambitious political-influence operations in recent memory. He was testifying before Congress about how to regulate crypto markets, and behind closed doors, he was successfully lobbying for a bill that would have enacted a system that was very beneficial to him. Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried was schmoozing with (and offering money to) a group of self-styled policy professionals and political pundits whose unofficial seal of approval conferred an aura of intellectual seriousness on his project.

At the time of his meeting with Gensler, Bankman-Fried was in the process of acquiring a stake in the stock exchange IEX, and he was joined by a group of FTX and IEX representatives to pitch a new SEC-approved crypto-trading platform. They included a top FTX lawyer who had worked with Gensler and who, in private, had reportedly bragged about his access to ''Gary.'' This meeting was coming on the heels of a dinner Bankman-Fried arranged with the SEC's incoming general counsel, Dan Berkovitz. (Berkowitz recently stepped down.)

But things did not go as planned for the FTX and IEX crew at that meeting last March. They were evidently seeking agency approval for a so-called ''alternative trading system,'' a more lightly regulated alternative to national securities exchanges. Gensler, in his telling, sharply rebuffed the group.

''I indicated to them they could take their slide deck down on the second slide,'' Gensler told me during a recent and wide-ranging conversation, ''and that I didn't think that they should '-- with all respect '-- that it was not a valuable use of their time.''

According to Gensler, FTX was far too conflicted to satisfy the agency's regulations. He said that he told the group ''that alternative trading systems were something amongst and for institutional investors'' and that ''just coming into compliance was going to need them to disaggregate their business to address the conflicts '-- that they should have a separate exchange, separate broker-dealer, separate custody, and that they were in the national security exchange Zip Code, not in the ATS Zip Code.'' (The outcome of the meeting was first reported by the New York Times.)

It was not the first time that Gensler met with Bankman-Fried and other FTX representatives '-- there was also a previously disclosed session in late 2021 '-- but when we spoke, it was unclear whether there had been any other meetings between the two men, which might raise further questions among the public about Bankman-Fried's access to U.S. regulators. Gensler's calendars for 2022 have not yet been fully released, so questions on this front have persisted.

So were there any other meetings between the two? ''No,'' Gensler quickly responded when I put the question to him directly.

Gensler's brushback last March may have helped to limit the extraordinary fallout in the sector last year, though of course, plenty of people have been caught without their coats in the harsh and unsparing deep freeze of crypto winter. Retail investors have lost extraordinary sums, there has been a wave of large crypto bankruptcies, and evidence of rampant fraud in the industry, which was already abundant, continues to accumulate.

It is also eminently reasonable to ask whether the SEC could '-- and should '-- have done more to crack down on the industry before now. It is, after all, comparatively easy to aggressively go after companies or their principals after their businesses have been exposed by the press or competitors as financially unsound or perhaps even fundamentally fraudulent enterprises, and given the publicly available information, it is fair to question whether the SEC should have pursued concerns about the industry more quickly and assertively than it did in recent years.

The political fallout from the implosion of FTX and the criminal indictment of Bankman-Fried is far from over. It has embarrassed prominent figures throughout Washington. Whether it will have any implications for Gensler, by all accounts an ambitious player in the Biden administration, is still an open question.

It all occurred at a precarious time for him. He was already under fire for an ambitious regulatory agenda that had drawn the ire of Wall Street and generated internal frustration among SEC staff, and some of the same members of Congress who criticized Gensler last year for investigating the industry too aggressively, including New York congressman Ritchie Torres and Minnesota representative Tom Emmer, have since sought to blame Gensler for the FTX disaster.

Meanwhile, there have been reports since last summer suggesting the possibility of a change of leadership at the Treasury Department, where Secretary Janet Yellen has had to deal with widespread public anxiety over inflation. Gensler began his career in government service at Treasury in the late 1990s after nearly two decades at Goldman Sachs, and there have been slight rumblings, which have made their way into the financial press, that Gensler might be interested in leading the department if Yellen decides to leave at some point in the coming years, particularly if Biden is reelected.

All of this raises the stakes for the 65-year-old, as he mounts a public defense of the SEC's record on crypto regulation and enforcement, including during our discussion. We talked about how the industry tried to outmaneuver Congress and the country's financial regulators, as well as how crypto markets should be regulated, but Gensler also made clear that he has been grappling with the same question as many of the rest of us: What, exactly, is the point of crypto?

From the vantage point of today, it is clear that Bankman-Fried was very close to building what has been fairly described as a ''regulatory moat'' around FTX '-- locking in a role for himself and his company at the top of the crypto industry. The legislation that he backed, called the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, would have given the Commodity Futures Trading Commission authority to regulate certain crypto products '-- specifically, bitcoin, ether, and other vaguely identified ''digital commodities'' '-- and displaced the SEC's jurisdiction in the area. It was an ambitious but straightforward strategy of domestic regulatory arbitrage that would have effectively allowed the company to pick its own regulator in the U.S. (Though, of course, the March meeting with Gensler shows that Bankman-Fried was looking for regulatory buy-in from all relevant agencies.)

Fairly or not, the CFTC is generally regarded as a more pliant and less assertive financial regulator than the SEC. It was therefore not that surprising when the head of the CFTC disclosed that Bankman-Fried had met with him and other senior officials at the agency ten times over roughly the year leading up to the collapse of the FTX, despite concerns raised in real time by commodities specialists.

''I love the CFTC,'' said Gensler, who ran the agency during the Obama administration, as we touched on these uncomfortable facts, implicating some of his former and current colleagues. ''You're not going to get me to say anything negative about'' the CFTC, he added. ''It's just too '-- it's in my blood.''

Still, he was unsparing in his assessment of the merits of the legislative effort, which was spearheaded in the Senate by Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow. The bill, Gensler told me, would have ''unambiguously undermined investor protection'' thanks to the vague legislative text that was on the table. ''We live in a world where Amazon stock and U.S. treasuries are already digital,'' Gensler explained. ''So many of the bills, literally, you could take the $24 trillion treasury market, put it on a blockchain ledger, and take it outside of the current regime'' of federal regulation. (This may sound a bit dry in Gensler's phrasing, but to be clear, it would be a radical and crazy outcome.)

The new Congress is looking again at crypto-specific legislation, but Gensler believes that the SEC has all of the legal tools that it needs. Over the course of our discussion, he articulated a straightforward view of the agency's reach '-- that pretty much every sort of crypto transaction already falls under the SEC's jurisdiction except spot transactions in bitcoin itself and the actual purchase or sale of goods or services with cryptocurrencies.

''Everything other than bitcoin,'' Gensler told me, ''you can find a website, you can find a group of entrepreneurs, they might set up their legal entities in a tax haven offshore, they might have a foundation, they might lawyer it up to try to arbitrage and make it hard jurisdictionally or so forth.'' In other words, there are people behind these cryptocurrencies using a variety of complex and legally opaque mechanisms, but at the most basic level, they are trying to promote their tokens and entice investors. (Bitcoin, because of its unique history and creation story, is fundamentally different from other crypto projects in this respect.)

''They might drop their tokens overseas at first and contend or pretend that it's going to take six months before they come back to the U.S.,'' he continued. ''But at the core,'' he argued, ''these tokens are securities because there's a group in the middle and the public is anticipating profits based on that group.'' The claim that crypto investors are hoping to profit based on the efforts of those intermediaries '-- in much the same way that stockholders in public companies hope to see their investments appreciate over time '-- is central to Gensler's position that, as a legal matter, these are actually transactions in securities that fall within the SEC's jurisdiction.

As a matter of securities law, Gensler's view is not that hard to understand, though it is still being tested in the courts. The agency racked up a significant win last November, but there are other pending legal rulings that are eagerly awaited by industry observers, and there is a well-resourced crypto lobby that is not likely to back down anytime soon.

For now, the SEC has emerged as the industry's primary civil regulator, whether crypto advocates like it or not '-- but there are still plenty of big questions about what the agency has been up to in recent years and what its current enforcement strategy will actually achieve. Arguably the federal government's actions '-- including those of the SEC '-- didn't do much to prevent the loss of trillions of dollars in value over the last year, potentially impacting tens of millions of Americans who hold crypto assets in some form.

Gensler was extremely diplomatic about it when we spoke, but a large part of this mess is attributable to the Trump administration's extremely lax approach to financial fraud and regulation, as well as the credulousness of the industry's supporters in Congress. ''In terms of policy-makers around the globe,'' Gensler explained, ''you had this ascendancy in the crypto market during the COVID period and low interest rates,'' during which time the market grew ''from $250 billion to $3 trillion.''

Capitol Hill was also an important player in the mess. Many members of Congress '-- ''good faith, hardworking members of Congress,'' Gensler was quick to add '-- felt compelled to meet with industry advocates and hear them out about the supposed financial revolution that they were ushering in. According to Gensler, members of Congress ''were hearing about crypto increasingly because the retail public was also caught up'' thanks to things like Super Bowl advertising and support from celebrities like Kim Kardashian. In the downturn that followed, Gensler's agency has brought charges against various high-profile crypto opportunists, including Kardashian, who settled an enforcement action last October.

Gensler has said that the ''roadway'' or ''runway'' for crypto firms that are not registered with the SEC is ''getting shorter,'' but the metaphor is an odd one. The planes are already in the air, so the agency is really trying to ground them.

That explains a series of significant moves by the agency since the start of the year '-- including a major enforcement action against two prominent crypto firms based on an unregistered crypto asset lending program; a recent settlement with a crypto exchange based on an industry practice known as ''staking''; and notice of a potential enforcement action against a stablecoin issuer whose product is affiliated with Binance.

Gensler broadly referred to these kinds of firms, which seem to differ endlessly in their offerings and corporate structures, as ''storefronts'' that are providing services to the public ''in a way that's commingled and is rife with conflicts.'' He argued that many of them combine functions that would have to be legally disaggregated in traditionally regulated markets, including roles that would ordinarily be separated among some combination of exchanges, lenders, market-makers, broker-dealers, investment advisers, and custodians.

''The conflicts in these storefronts,'' Gensler told me, ''we do not allow in traditional finance, we don't allow in the securities markets, we don't allow it in the commercial banking markets, and we don't allow it in crypto because these storefronts are fundamentally and generally noncompliant with the securities laws as we know them.'' He argued that network effects have made ''a small handful of storefronts'' particularly important, but ''whether they call themselves lending or staking as a service or exchanges, they're bringing together millions of customers.''

On its face, the idea that an increase in SEC registrations and filings from crypto companies will somehow markedly improve the integrity and resilience of this market seems dubious. Last February, the crypto lender BlockFi agreed to register with the SEC at the agency's urging, paid a $100 million fine, and then went bankrupt in November. The stark turn of events seemed to reflect, at least in part, the fact that the underlying crypto asset class is both novel and unstable, and that this is not an industry with consistent and widely accepted valuation, marking, or disclosure conventions.

Perhaps more importantly, the implosion of BlockFi seemed to reflect the legal and practical limits of the SEC's strategy to force more crypto firms to register with the agency. That is because companies that register with the SEC may have to satisfy more detailed and burdensome disclosure requirements, but that does not mean that those companies or their business models will magically become more stable or financially sound.

The unstated premise of the SEC's current enforcement push appears to be that if the government can broadly stigmatize the industry and market participants, then ordinary people '-- the retail investors all over the world who have gotten swept up in the crypto frenzy of recent years '-- might think long and hard about whether to hold these assets in any form. It is a message that federal regulators recently delivered directly to the banking industry, warning them not to issue or hold any crypto assets because doing so would be ''highly likely to be inconsistent with safe and sound banking practices.''

I asked Gensler whether federal regulators with consumer-facing responsibilities should send a comparable message to retail investors, but he gently resisted. ''I'm in a job where I'm supposed to be merit neutral in terms of what risk investors want to take,'' he told me at one point, ''but not neutral towards the investor protection '-- the full, fair, and truthful disclosure you get when you're investing in a security.''

Perhaps the most telling answer I got from Gensler over the course of our discussion was when I asked him to explain the legitimate use case for crypto: What is the actual point of this new sector, and could it actually provide a valuable economic or financial service for ordinary people and the global economy?

Gensler was careful to draw a sharp distinction between two types of supposed innovations promoted by crypto's earliest advocates. The first is the idea of a distributed accounting ledger '-- the blockchain technology that came into the world with Bitcoin's invention '-- that is in theory more transparent, accessible, and resilient against theft and cyberattacks than centralized ledgers. Gensler clearly admired the technical creation. ''I personally think it's very rare that you need that, but it's possible,'' he said. ''That's a real innovation.''

The second, of course, is the notion that cryptocurrencies might actually provide a useful store of value or alternative payment mechanism, and on that point, Gensler appeared to be much less impressed.

''History tells us throughout '-- through antiquity to now '-- that economies coalesce around one monetary unit,'' he said. ''There is a network effect to having one unit that we humans accept as a medium of exchange and unit of account '-- a store of value '-- one unit. The two things governments do since Genghis Khan,'' he observed, ''is basically say, 'This is what's accepted for your taxes, and it's accepted for all debts, public and private.'''

''I don't think there's much economic use for a micro-currency, and we haven't seen one in centuries,'' Gensler said. ''Most of these tokens will fail, because the question is about these economics. What's the 'there' there?''

It was a diplomatic answer for someone who is tasked with reigning in a well-funded and well-lawyered industry that many people believe is generally useless and economically wasteful. Here is a simpler way of thinking about it if you are an ordinary investor who bought ''shitcoins'' in recent years, perhaps because of the celebrity endorsements, the high-profile ads, or plain-old fear of missing out: Get out while you can.

Gary Gensler on Meeting With SBF and His Crypto Crackdown

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 14:21

To Our Readers:

The Journal is discontinuing the publication of the cartoon ''Dilbert,'' beginning Monday in the print edition, due to remarks made last week by its creator, Scott Adams. Adams' discriminatory and racist comments made during a YouTube program on do not match the values of the Albuquerque Journal.

Unfortunately, the cartoon will appear in the Sunday, Feb. 26 comics, which are printed ahead of time.

Karen Moses, Editor

Read more: Media drop Dilbert after creator's Black 'hate group' remark

Sign up for our free Daily Headlines newsletterAlbuquerque Journal and its reporters are committed to telling the stories of our community.' Do you have a question you want someone to try to answer for you? Do you have a bright spot you want to share?

We want to hear from you. Please email yourstory@abqjournal.com taboola desktopQuestions about the Legislature?Albuquerque Journal can get you answers

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 04:44

DateNameConnection with caseCause of death11/63Karyn KupicinetTv host's daughter who was overheard telling of JFK's death prior to 11/22/63Murdered12/63Jack ZangrettiExpressed foreknowledge of Ruby shooting OswaldGunshot Victim2/64Eddy BenavidesLookalike brother to Tippit shooting witness, Domingo BenavidesGunshot to head2/64Betty MacDonald*Former Ruby employee who alibied Warren Reynolds shooting suspect.Suicide by hanging in Dallas Jail3/64Bill ChesherThought to have information linking Oswald and RubyHeart attack3/64Hank Killam*Husband of Ruby employee, knew Oswald acquaintanceThroat cut4/64Bill Hunter*Reporter who was in Ruby's apartment on 11/24/63Accidental shooting by policeman5/64Gary Underhill*CIA agent who claimed Agency was involvedGunshot in head ruled suicide5/64Hugh Ward*Private investigator working with Guy Banister and David FerriePlane crash in Mexico5/64DeLesseps Morrison*New Orleans MayorPassenger in Ward's plane8/64Teresa Norton*Ruby employeeFatally shot6/64Guy Banister*x-FBI agent in New Orleans connected to Ferrie, CIA, Carlos Marcello & OswaldHeart attack9/64Jim Koethe*Reporter who was in Ruby's apartment on 11/24/63Blow to neck9/64C.D. Jackson"Life" magazine senior Vicepresident who bought Zapruderfilm and locked it awayUnknown10/64Mary PinchotJFK "special" friend whose diary was taken by CIA chief James Angleton after her deathMurdered1/65Paul Mandal"Life" writer who told of JFK turning to rear when shot in throatCancer3/65Tom Howard*Ruby's first lawyer, was in Ruby's apartment on 11/24/63Heart attack5/65Maurice Gatlin*Pilot for Guy BanisterFatal fall8/65Mona B. Saenz*Texas Employment clerk who interviewed OswaldHit by Dallas bus?/65David GoldsteinDallasite who helped FBI trace Oswald's pistolNatural causes9/65Rose Cheramie*Knew of assassination in advance, told of riding to Dallas with CubansHit/run victim11/65Dorothy Kilgallen*Columnist who had private interview with Ruby, pledged to "break" JFK caseDrug overdose11/65Mrs. Earl Smith*Close friend to Dorothy Kilgallen, died two daysafter columnist, may have kept Kilgallen's notesCause unknown12/65William Whaley*Cab driver who reportedly drove Oswald to Oak Cliff (The only Dallas taxi driver to die on duty)Motor collision1966Judge Joe BrownPresided over Ruby's trialHeart attack1966Karen "Little Lynn" Carlin*Ruby employee who last talked with Ruby before Oswald shootingGunshot victim1/66Earlene RobertsOswald's landladyHeart attack2/66Albert Bogard*Car salesman who said Oswald test drove new carSuicide6/66Capt. Frank MartinDallas policeman who witnessed Oswald slaying, told Warren Commission "there's a lot to be said but probably be better if I don't say it"Sudden cancer8/66Lee Bowers Jr.*Witnessed men behind picket fence on Grassy KnollMotor accident9/66Marilyn "Delila Walle*Ruby dancerShot by husband after 1 month of marriage10/66Lt. William Pitzer*JFK autopsy photographer who described his duty as "horrifying experience"Gunshot rule suicided11/66Jimmy LevensFort Worth nightclub owner who hired Ruby employeesNatural causes11/66James Worrell Jr.*Saw man flee rear of Texas School Book DepositoryMotor accident1966Clarence OliverDist. Atty. Investigator who worked Ruby caseUnknown12/66Hank SuydamLife magazine official in charge of JFK storiesHeart attack1967Leonard PullinCivilian Navy employee who helped film "Last Two Days" about assassinationOne-car crash1/67Jack Ruby*Oswald's slayerLung cancer (he told family he was injected with cancer cells)2/67Harold Russell*Saw escape of Tippit killerkilled by cop in bar brawl2/67David Ferrie*Acquaintance of Oswald, Garrison suspect and employee of Guy BanisterBlow to neck (ruled accidental)2/67Eladio Del Valle*Anti-Castro Cuban associate of David Ferrie being sought by GarrisonGunshot wound, a wound to head3/67Dr. Mary Sherman*Ferrie associate working on cancer researchDied in fire (possibly shot)1/68A. D. BowieAsst. Dallas District Attorney prosecuting RubyCancer4/68Hiram IngramDallas Deputy Sheriff, close friend to Roger CraigSudden cancer5/68Dr. Nicholas ChettaNew Orleans coroner who on death of FerrieHeart attack8/68Philip Geraci*Friend of Perry Russo, told of Oswald/Shaw conversationElectrocution1/69Henry Delaune*Brother-in-law to coroner ChettaMurdered1/69E.R. Walthers*Dallas Deputy Sheriff who was involved in Depository search, claimed to have found .45-cal. slugShot by felon1969Charles MentesanaFilmed rifle other than Mannlicher-Carcano being taken from DepositoryHeart attack4/69Mary BledsoeNeighbor to Oswald, also knew David FerrieNatural causes4/69John Crawford*Close friend to both Ruby and Wesley Frazier, who gave ride to Oswald on 11/22/63Crash of private plane7/69Rev. Clyde Johnson*Scheduled to testify about Clay Shaw/Oswald connectionFatally shot1970George McGann*Underworld figure connected to Ruby friends, wife, Beverly, took film in Dealey PlazaMurdered1/70Darrell W. GarnerArrested for shooting Warren Reynolds, released after alibi from Betty MacDonaldDrug overdose8/70Bill DeckerDallas Sheriff who saw bullet hit street in front of JFKNatural causes8/70Abraham ZapruderTook famous film of JFK assassinationNatural causes12/70Salvatore Granello*Mobster linked to both Hoffa,Trafficante, and Castro assassination plots Murdered1971James Plumeri*Mobster tied to mob-CIA assassination plotsMurdered3/71Clayton FowlerRuby's chief defense attorneyUknown4/71Gen. Charles Cabell*CIA deputy director connected to anti-Castro CubansCollapsed and died afterphysical at Fort Myers1972Hale Boggs*House Majority Leader, member of Warren Commission who began to publicly express doubts about findingsDisappeared on Alaskan plane flight5/72J. Edgar Hoover*FBI director who pushed "lone assassin" theory in JFK assassinationHeart attack (no autopsy)9/73Thomas E. Davis*Gunrunner connected to both Ruby and CIAElectrocuted trying to steal wire2/74J.A. Milteer*Miami right-winger who predicted JFK's death and capture of scapegoatHeater explosion1974Dave Yaras*Close friend to both Hoffa and Jack RubyMurdered7/74Earl WarrenChief Justice who reluctantly chaired Warren CommissionHeart failure8/74Clay Shaw*Prime suspect in Garrison case, reportedly a CIA contact with Ferrie and E. Howard HuntPossible cancer1974Earle CabellMayor of Dallas on 11/22/63, whose brother, Gen. Charles Cabell was fired from CIA by JFKNatural causes6/75Sam Giancana*Chicago Mafia boss slated to tell about CIA-mob death plots to Senate CommitteeMurdered7/75Clyde TolsonJ. Edgar Hoover's assistant and roommateNatural causes1975Allen SweattDallas Deputy Sheriff involved in investigationNatural causes12/75Gen. Earle WheelerContact between JFK and CIAUnknown1976Ralph PaulRuby's business partner connected with crime figuresHeart attack4/76James ChaneyDallas motorcycle officer riding to JFK's right rear who said JFK "struck in the face" with bulletHeart attack4/76Dr. Charles GregoryGovernor John Connally's physicianHeart attack6/76William Harvey*CIA coordinator for CIA-mob assassination plans against CastroComplications from heart surgery7/76John Roselli*Mobster who testified to Senate Committee and was to appear againStabbed and stuffed in metal drumDateNameConnection with caseCause of Death1/77William Pawley*Former Brazilian Ambassador connected to Anti-Castro Cubans, crime figuresGunshot ruled suicide3/77George DeMohrenschildt*Close friend to both Oswald and Bouvier family (Jackie Kennedy's parents), CIA contract agentGunshot wound ruled suicide3/77Carlos Prio Soccaras*Former Cuban President, money man for anti-Castro CubansGunshot wound ruled suicide3/77Paul RaigorodskyBusiness friend of George DeMohrenschildt and wealthy oilmenNatural causes5/77Lou Staples*Dallas radio Talk Show host who told friends he would break assassination caseGunshot to head,ruled suicide6/77Louis NicholsFormer No. 3 man in FBI, worked on JFK investigationHeart attack8/77Alan BelmontFBI official who testified to Warren Commission"Long illness"8/77James CadiganFBI document expert who testified to Warren CommissionFall in home8/77Joseph C. Ayres*Chief steward on JFK's Air Force OneShooting accident8/77Francis G. Powers*U-2 pilot downed over Russia in 1960Helicopter crash (He reportedly ran out of fuel)9/77Kenneth O'DonnellJFK's closest aideNatural causes10/77Donald KaylorFBI fingerprint chemistHeart attack10/77J.M. EnglishFormer head of FBI Forensic Sciences LaboratoryHeart attack11/77William Sullivan*Former No. 3 man in FBI, headed Division 5, counter- espionage and domestic intelligenceHunting accident1978C.L. "Lummie" LewisDallas Deputy Sheriff who arrested Mafia man Braden in Dealey PlazaNatural causes9/78Garland SlackMan who said Oswald fired at his target at rifle rangeUnknown1/79Billy LoveladyDepository employee said to be the man in the doorway in AP photographComplications from heart attack6/80Jesse CurryDallas Police Chief at time of assassinationHeart attack6/80Dr. John HolbrookPsychiatrist who testified Ruby was not insaneHeart attack but pills, notes found1/81Marguerite OswaldMother of accused assassinCancer10/81Frank WattsChief felony prosecutor for Dallas D.A.Natural causes1/82Peter GregoryOriginal translator for Marina Oswald and Secret ServiceNatural causes5/82Dr. James WestonPathologist allowed to see JFK autopsy material for HSCADied while jogging, ruled natural causes8/82Will H. GriffinFBI agent who reportedly said Oswald was "definitely" an FBI informantCancer10/82W. Marvin GheeslingFBI official who helped supervise JFK investigation"Long illness"3/84Roy KellermanSecret Service agent in charge of JFK limousineUnknown

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 04:00

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults, Regnery Gateway, 310 pp., $19.79.

The Dumbest Generation Grows Up is Mark Bauerleins sequel to his bestselling 2009 book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Both books deal with Millennials, the generation usually defined as anyone born between 1981 and the mid-90s, and the author, who taught English at Emory University for many years, has had a good look at this generation. His first book was widely reviewed, with many critics commenting on its 'dire predictions' for the future of Millennials. As its title implies, Prof. Bauerleins new book explores whether these predictions have been borne out. He argues that they have.

The conclusions of the earlier book can be summarized in a single quotation: 'The Dumbest Generation will cease being dumb only when it regards adolescence as an inferior realm of petty strivings and adulthood as a realm of civic, historical, and cultural awareness that puts them in touch with perennial ideas and struggles.'

The conclusion of Prof. Bauerleins new book is that the dumbest generation has most certainly not grown up. But the volume is far from being one long 'I told you so.' Prof. Bauerlein offers us fresh reflections on what has gone wrong with Millennials and how we might avoid making the same mistakes with future generations.

Needless to say, 'whats wrong with kids today?' is a perennial lament, and Prof. Bauerlein mentions that many have dismissed his concerns for precisely this reason. Especially among older generations, there is a strong desire to believe that our problems are nothing fundamentally new, that the doomsayers are taking it all far too seriously, and that everything will sort itself out. I saw this attitude in my own parents.

Admittedly, 'we are doomed' is a bitter pill to swallow. But it is hard to come away from any sustained experience with Millennials without becoming a doomsayer.

Like Prof. Bauerlein, I recently retired from many years of university teaching, a good portion of which was spent trying to understand the problems of my students, who changed dramatically over the course of my 30-year career. Toward the end, I was teaching 'Gen Z,' the generation after the Millennials -- who, if anything, are worse.

My students combined ignorance with strident moral certainty (possibly the most striking thing about high-profile Millennials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). They seemed to have had no general education at all, and lacked the most basic knowledge of history, even recent history. They were immature and emotionally fragile.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Credit: nrkbeta,

CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Many could not handle criticism, no matter how sugar coated. It took very little to reduce them to tears -- or to send them into fits of narcissistic rage. They were shockingly bereft of intellectual curiosity, and many gave the impression of having no internal life at all.

It was difficult to get a class discussion going, because my students were often unwilling to make judgments of any kind. Partly, this was because they had an intense fear of offending anyone. But, in addition, they professed to believe that everything is 'relative' and that its therefore wrong to judge (completely unaware of the fact that this itself is a judgment). They also saw no inconsistency in espousing relativism and then, in the next moment, denouncing their political opponents as 'evil.'

In general, their moral reasoning was framed exactly in these sorts of black and white terms (an issue that is very important for Prof. Bauerlein, as we shall see). But in their own behavior they were often shockingly amoral. Many lied to me, and I caught large numbers of them cheating on assignments. They were always looking for shortcuts. Almost none did the assigned reading.

Many could not follow a simple chain of reasoning. Often it seemed that my class was the first occasion they had ever been challenged to think. It was common for them to visit me during my office hours and ask me to tell them exactly what I wanted them to say on tests or in papers. When I said that I wanted to see evidence that they had done their own thinking, they would look panic stricken.

A very sizeable percentage of students had a documented 'learning disability' that I was required somehow to work around. Many of them had been diagnosed as somewhere on the autism spectrum. They often seemed disconnected from their bodies and from nature. In my last several years of teaching, more and more identified as transgender.

Most of my students seemed desperately unhappy and unfulfilled. I became convinced, and still am, that something had gone seriously wrong with these people. Yes, its true that the older generation has always complained about the younger, probably since human life began. But the Millennials and Gen Z seem to have problems that are unique -- and uniquely bad. Bad for them, and bad for societys future. If these are the people who will be in charge one day, it really is hard not to believe we are doomed.

Searching for some precedent, we might be tempted to liken our 'woke' Millennials and Gen Z to the starry-eyed students radicals of the 1960s. But the similarities are only superficial. As Prof. Bauerlein points out, the children of the 60s were protesting the Vietnam War and the draft -- major issues, in other words. Students today are protesting 'microaggressions.'

Anti-war demonstration as Chicago was preparing to host the Democratic National Convention, August 10, 1968. Credit: David Wilson,

CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

And the radical youths of the 60s were far more literate than what passes for young radicals today. In the 60s, when Robert Frost visited a university to read his poems, he would fill a stadium. Today, the students would attend only if required, and they would sit in the bleachers texting through the entire event.

Certainly, the youth of today are overwhelmingly liberal, just like their predecessors in the 60s. But this seems to be perennially true. As Winston Churchill supposedly said, 'If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative when old, you have no brain.' What is genuinely surprising, however, are the polls showing that more than a third of Millennials support communism.

One reason for this, of course, is ignorance of history. Most Millennials can give you an exact figure of how many people were murdered by the Nazis, but they have no idea that in the last century communist governments killed around 100 million of their own citizens. The other part of the problem, however, is that even the Millennials who support communism dont even really know what it is.

When I confronted my leftie students with the figure of 100 million dead, they would usually respond, 'But that wasnt real communism!' It was a line some had picked up from professors. Each time someone said this in class, I asked the students to explain to me what 'real communism' is. None could.

This is why Prof. Bauerlein is critical of conservatives who call these young people 'socialists.' They dont know enough to identify as socialists, or anything else. He points out that while his students have pledged to fight racism, most are unaware of the steps already taken by the courts and the legislature to end discrimination.

A friend of mine got a vivid sense of this when he decided to attend a BLM protest two and a half years ago in Atlanta, passing himself off as a fellow traveler. The young white protestors he spoke with said they were there because 'nothing had been done' for blacks. When my friend gingerly asked them how they assessed such measures as affirmative action, most had no idea what he was talking about.

Black Lives Matter protest. Credit: Ivan Radic,

CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

How can you join in the 'ongoing struggle' when you have no knowledge of the ground thats already been won? Its for reasons such as these that Prof. Bauerlein prefers to call the younger generation 'utopians' rather than committed socialists. As he puts it:

What belief best suits a youth who doesnt want to go to church? What conception of human nature will appeal most to someone who trusts in his own exceptional nature? What vision of the future works best for someone with no sense of the past? What standard of judgment goes with a sensibility that wont distinguish superior from inferior creations? What ultimate meaning will he find on his own? The answer is: Utopia.

The Utopia todays youth yearn for is one where everything will be 'fair' and everyone will be 'nice.' No one will want for anything, and no one will have to do anything he doesnt want to do. Work (if there is any) will be 'fun.' All the pseudo-problems ('systemic racism,' 'climate change,' etc.) will, of course, have been solved. And, most importantly, all student loan debt will have been forgiven.

It is hard to believe that their views are this simplistic, but they are. I had to sympathize with Prof. Bauerleins descriptions of how he struggled mightily to find some depth in his students worldview. He recalls asking one young woman why students were so 'triggered' by an impending campus visit by conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos. Drawing her words out for effect, she responded, 'They believe that everyone . . . deserves . . . to be happy.' And she chose not to elaborate.

The problem with Milo is that he is sharp-tongued; his words hurt. That some of those words are true is simply not a relevant consideration. The Utopia of the Millennials and Gen Z will be one where no ones feelings will be hurt, and thus no one will be made unhappy. Being thin-skinned and easily offended are the characteristics of the younger generation that are now most often noticed. Their views on freedom of speech are exactly what you would expect them to be.

Milo Yiannopoulos gives a speech at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, on April 10, 2016. (Credit Image: ‚(C) Michael Mullenix/ZUMA Wire)

Prof. Bauerlein cites a recent poll showing that 44 percent of students think that the First Amendment does not protect so-called 'hate speech.' Sixteen percent said that they 'dont know,' making the solidly pro-free speech contingent a mere 40 percent. Fifty-one percent believe that protestors are justified in shouting down a speaker uttering 'offensive and hurtful statements.' Nineteen percent believe it is justified to use violence against such a speaker.

While liberal journalists and academics had hailed Millennials some years ago as the most 'tolerant' generation in history, they have shown themselves to be anything but. Prof. Bauerlein cites the authors of a survey from 2020 called the 'American Worldview Inventory,' who drew the following conclusions: 'Findings show Millennials -- by their own admission -- as far less tolerant than other generations. In addition, they are more likely to want to exact revenge when wronged, are less likely to keep a promise, and overall have less respect for others and for human life in general.'

So, where did it all go wrong? Or, to quote the very first sentence of the book, 'What have we done to them?' Prof. Bauerlein asks us to look to the reading habits of Millennials. The 2010 American Times Use Survey (ATUS) showed them spending fully five hours and 40 minutes per day on 'leisure and sports.' Most of this, however, was screentime.

Reading print (books, magazines, etc.) accounted for a mere seven minutes on weekdays and six minutes on weekends. A 2006 survey of high school students found that 43 percent reported spending 'one hour or less' reading for classes each week. Twelve percent reported 'zero' reading for class. Contrast this to the Gen Xers of 1987, 47 percent of whom spent at least six hours per week preparing for class.

Again and again, Prof. Bauerlein demonstrates a steady and disturbingly swift decline over the past 30 to 40 years. College readiness scores in reading dropped from 53 percent in 2009, to 45 percent just 10 years later. SAT reading scores show a similar decline. A 2004 survey showed that only 43 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds read any kind of serious literature in the preceding 12 months. In 1992 it was 53.3 percent. In 1982 it was 59.8 percent.

There are several reasons why it is possible for students to get away with not reading literature. The first is that teachers have lowered their standards. In response to their students resistance to reading, teachers have simply required less.

Racial diversity is, of course, another factor in this decline in standards. The average black student is at nowhere near the reading level of even the worst whites. Since our educational system, and our society as a whole, cannot admit the reality of racial differences, areas of study where the disparities are all too obvious must either be eliminated or relentlessly dumbed down. The result is that generations of promising white students have been deprived of an education in good literature, so as not to draw attention to black shortcomings. Unsurprisingly, Prof. Bauerlein is silent on this subject.

The decline of reading standards in our high schools has had a catastrophic impact on university education. Early in my teaching career I realized that when I gave lectures, I could not assume that the students had read the assignments. It was useless to impose such measures as reading quizzes, since there would have been rampant failure. My students had not been challenged to read difficult material in high school. As a result, most of them could not understand the reading on their own, even if they tried to plow through every page.

Finally, there is a pervasive relativism in academia today. It began in the universities and has now taken root in high school. Many academics refuse even to entertain the idea that there are essential pieces of literature that all students should read, especially when books by Dead White Males top the list. Those who do believe in the importance of the 'Great Books' tend to keep silent, for fear of being branded as right-wing. It is impossible to overstate the cowardliness and conformism of university professors.

Prof. Bauerlein blames Millennials lack of exposure to good literature for most of their problems. This is his central thesis. The idea was suggested to him by a colleague, who was commiserating with Prof. Bauerlein one day about his students shortcomings. 'They havent read enough literature,' the man said, matter-of-factly. Prof. Bauerlein was astonished by the simplicity of this explanation -- and by the end of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up he wholly endorses it.

For Prof. Bauerlein, not reading good books explains why Millennials hold such simplistic and naƒ¯ve views, why they are unable to make nuanced moral judgments, and why they lack empathy for people who hold differing opinions. The same colleague explained to him that 'a good novel is good psychology.' Prof. Bauerlein writes:

He didnt mean anything complicated by that remark, only that good novels land interesting characters in situations of conflict, and good authors give them psychological depth. The characters have motives, and you have to figure them out. Read the books, and you treat the characters as real people having actual thoughts and doing real things. I immediately agreed. His point was too commonsensical to dispute.

In other words, you learn a lot about life and other people from reading good literature. It helps you become a more astute observer of the human condition, teaches you to empathize with others, sometimes even with the villain of the piece, and this fosters intellectual and emotional maturity.

Prof. Bauerlein cites neuropsychological studies showing that fiction activates regions of the readers brain aligned with what the characters are doing or feeling. In other words, you literally do feel something of Priams grief for Hector. I dont think we needed neuroscientists to tell us this, but its the sort of evidence that tends to impress modern people, especially Americans.

Thus, the reason Social Justice Warriors tried to assault Charles Murray back in 2017 was because they hadnt read enough novels. I am not caricaturing Prof. Bauerlein; this is what he claims. He writes that the students 'didnt see [Murray] as an individual, a man with a history and an experience. No, they faced a racist, a depersonalized, undifferentiated embodiment of racism, a figure distinguished only by his fame and power.' For students immersed in real literature, this would not have been possible.

Charles Murray. Credit: YouTube screengrab.

While I myself have long preached the benefits of an education in the Great Books, I am not convinced that this is really the key to 'whats wrong with kids today.' The folks I spent time with a few summers ago in rural West Virginia havent read any literature either -- yet they possessed the one priceless trait that seems to be lacking in so many Millennials: simple human decency.

The reason they possessed it was because they had led real lives -- lives that were sometimes difficult. They had to grow up fast. There was no coddling; the tough-minded people who raised them had no patience with whining and excuses. They had to do without a great deal that other modern children take for granted. And, most importantly, their lives required them to spend most of their time in the real world interacting directly with other human beings and learning how to get along with them.

Millennials, by contrast, have spent much of their lives staring at screens, interacting with virtual friends who can always be kept at a distance. They have imbibed toxic quantities of propaganda and advertising, all of it presenting a sometimes radically false view of life and human nature. The people I met in West Virginia have seen too much real life to find 'wokeness' plausible.

'They havent read enough literature' is much too facile an explanation of what is wrong with Millennials. But its exactly the sort of theory that one would expect of an emeritus professor of English -- a man who has spent decades on college campuses reading books. Thats a nobler way of life than spending ones days looking at TikTok, but it is just as removed from the real world.

Near the beginning of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, Prof. Bauerlein offers us a few tidbits that could form an alternative (or complementary) explanation of what is wrong with Millennials. He mentions these, but then drops them -- perhaps because they are just too depressing. For example, he quotes a New York Times article according to which parents working for the tech industry 'increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and [are moving] toward screen-free lifestyles.' The reporter goes on to note that executives in Silicon Valley are now sending their children to 'vigilantly low tech' schools, such as Waldorf schools.

In other words, they are worried about their own products damaging the developing brains of their children. Prof. Bauerlein also quotes Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired and head of a robotics firm: 'We thought we could control it. And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.'

Anderson goes on to compare tech to crack cocaine, and Prof. Bauerlein responds with a line from the occasionally sagacious Bill Maher: 'The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they are friendly nerd-gods building a better world and admit theyre just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children.'

GHCassel, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Its not clear that the damage screentime is doing to young minds is reversible. Some of my own students, despite my best efforts, seemed to be broken. Lets hope it is reversible, for technology now seems to be breeding generations of people programmed to be shallow, unfeeling, tyrannical narcissists. The internet has been an enormous gift, especially to those of us on the Dissident Right. But as Paracelsus said, 'All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.'

It is dangerous to try to attribute a complex phenomenon to one single cause or condition. Prof. Mark Bauerlein is certainly correct when he argues that Millennials would have benefitted by greater exposure to good books. I am afraid, however, that the real roots of their problems may be much more sinister and much harder to fix.

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Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:32

Pemex, a Mexican state-owned oil company that also operates in the United States, had three separate fires break out at different facilities on Thursday.

On Thursday, Pemex announced that there had been a fire at the Tuzandepetl storage facility located in the state of Veracruz. According to the Mexican company, the fire originated from the drilling equipment, and the cause is still unknown. Pemex reported that five workers are currently missing, and three others have been hospitalized and are receiving treatment for their injuries. The company also stated that the fire has been extinguished.

Pemex later announced on Thursday that a fire occurred at the Minatitln refinery located in Veracruz, the same state. Although the fire was later contained and extinguished, five workers sustained injuries during the incident.

'Coincidentally,' another fire broke out at a facility in Texas.

A Pemex facility in Deer Park, Texas experienced its third fire within a single day. As reported by Reuters, a unit at the Pemex-run refinery in Deer Park caught fire on Thursday, prompting a community alert. However, the incident was swiftly managed within the refinery, and Reuters later updated that an all-clear had been issued.

See footage below:

ALERT 🚨 3 fires broke out at three different facilities in Mexico and the U.S. operated by state-owned Mexican oil company Pemex in just one day '' reports pic.twitter.com/R9uJFMZ6Mf

'-- Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) February 24, 2023

JUST IN: Three different fires break out at three different Mexico state-owned oil facilities in the same day, one of them being in Texas.

Totally normal.pic.twitter.com/jqpI8LBdqO

'-- Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 24, 2023

Check out what oilprice.com reported:

Pemex facilities have often suffered incidents in recent years. Last November, 19 people '' including Pemex workers and civil protection personnel '' were injured after a leaking pipeline exploded in Veracruz.

Two months prior to this incident, a gas pipeline run by Pemex exploded in the Mexican state of Tabasco in September, causing a fire and leading to the evacuation of all workers at the Pared"n Hydrocarbon Separation Station.

In another major explosion involving Pemex's assets, a fire broke out at a Pemex oil platform in the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf of Mexico in August 2021. The fire, which occurred during maintenance, killed five workers and injured another six. The outage as a result of the fire reduced Pemex's production by some 444,000 bpd.

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Sat, 25 Feb 2023 17:49

Scott Adams' long-running ''Dilbert'' comic strip has been pulled by multiple newspapers after the cartoonist called Black Americans a ''hate group'' and urged white people to ''get the fuck away'' from Black people in a YouTube video.

On Friday, in response to Adams' comments, Cleveland's The Plain Dealer announced that ''Dilbert'' will no longer be published in the newspaper because of Adams' ''racist rant.'' In the letter, Plain Dealer/Cleveland.com VP of content Chris Quinn wrote that other papers in owned by parent company Advance Local, also independently made the same decision to stop running the strip. That includes Advance Local newspapers in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Alabama, Massachusetts and Oregon.

''This is not a difficult decision,'' Quinn wrote. ''We are not a home for those who espouse racism. We certainly do not want to provide them with financial support.'' He added, ''Until we decide what to replace 'Dilbert' with, you'll likely see a gray box where it has been appearing.''

On his YouTube show on Wednesday, Feb. 22, Adams cited a survey that found nearly half of Black people do not agree with the statement, ''It's okay to be white.'' The Anti-Defamation League has called the phrase a ''hate symbol'' popularized in late 2017 as a trolling campaign on 4chan.

''Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away,'' Adams said. ''Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this. This can't be fixed. So I don't think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn't make sense. There's no longer a rational impulse. So I'm going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off.''

Last fall, 77 newspapers owned by publisher Lee Enterprises dropped ''Dilbert''; however, that appeared to be part of a larger move by the company to scale back comic strips.

Adams previously has claimed that some of his projects have been canceled because he is white, and he has made numerous racially-charged ''jokes.'' Adams in 2022 introduced the first-ever Black character to ''Dilbert,'' dubbed Dave the Black Engineer, whom he used to mock the idea of workplace diversity and transgender identity (''I identify as white,'' Dave the Black Engineer says in one strip).

In June 2020, Adams, referring to UPN's cancellation of the ''Dilbert'' animated primetime TV series two decades earlier, tweeted, ''I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African American audience. That was the third job I lost for being white.'' In January 2022, Adams tweeted, ''I'm going to self-identify as a Black woman until Biden picks his Supreme Court nominee. I realize it's a long shot, but I don't want to completely take myself out of the conversation for the job.''

''Dilbert'' is syndicated by Andrews McMeel Syndication (formerly Universal Uclick) since 2011. The strip is ''the most photocopied, pinned-up, downloaded, faxed and e-mailed comic strip in the world,'' the company claims on its website.

Adams, 65, grew up a fan of the Peanuts comics and started drawing his own comics at the age of six, according to Andrews McMeel's bio on the cartoonist. To date, more than 40 ''Dilbert'' reprint books have been published, with ''The Dilbert Principle'' becoming a New York Times best-seller. Total book and calendar sales have topped 20 million units, according to Andrews McMeel.

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Sat, 25 Feb 2023 17:20

The lab-grown meat strongly supported by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum contains cancer cells, according to a recent explosive report from Bloomberg.

Consuming fake meat doesn't appear to be the healthy alternative the globalists claim it is. Well, maybe if they aim to help the environment by eliminating more humans.

The author of the report, Joe Fassler, revealed that for lab-grown meat companies to produce ''cultured meat,'' they use what are called ''immortalized cells,'' which, in some cases, are fully cancerous.

Technically speaking, immortalized cells are precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous.

Despite these concerns, top scientists claim eating lab-grown meat is safe and won't give you cancer.

''It's essentially impossible for a cell from one species to gain a foothold in the tissues of another species,'' says Dr. Robert Weinberg.

''So even if one were to take highly malignant cells from a cow and drink them, I don't see what the problem would be.''

Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared lab-grown meat for human consumption.

The agency evaluated chicken made from cultured animal cells from California-based Upside Foods and has ''no further questions'' about the safety of the lab-grown meat.3

The problem lies with ''immortalized cell lines,'' which reproduce forever, like cancer cells, meaning they are cancer.

While these cell lines have been used for scientific research in labs, they've never been used to produce food.

This means the claims by scientists that cancer cells in lab-grown meat cannot cause cancer are not based on any factual information.

But the health dangers don't stop there.

According to the Children's Health Defense Fund, a study by Impossible Foods in September showed rats had severe complications such as anemia and unexplained weight gain.

In 2019, Impossible Foods applied for permission to market the burger in the E.U. and the U.K. However, the results of a rat-feeding study with SLH suggest the burger may be unsafe to eat.

SLH is the substance that gives the burger its meaty taste. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initially refused to sign off on the safety of SLH.

The result from the rat-feeding study suggests the agency's concerns were justified.

Rats that consumed he G.M. yeast-derived SLH developed unexplained changes in weight gain, changes in the blood that can indicate the onset of kidney disease, and possible signs of anemia.

READ MORE: Bill Gates: AI Solves the Problem of 'Digital Misinformation'

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Sat, 25 Feb 2023 15:24

Sign up for our NewslettersRabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus 2 has been found in Gillespie County

Cottontail rabbit. (Image by FoxTerrier from Pixabay)SAN ANTONIO '' The deadly Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus 2 has moved eastward in Texas and was detected for the first time in the Hill Country.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said Tuesday that it found a wild case of RHDV2 in Gillespie County. The disease was previously detected in El Paso, Terrell, Brewster and Reeves counties in West Texas.

Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease is a highly contagious virus for both domestic and wild rabbits, including hares, jackrabbits and cottontails. Its two strains, RHDV1 and RHDV2, have been reported in North America.

The disease causes sudden death and in less severe cases, rabbits can show dullness, loss of appetite, watery or congested eyes, and bleeding from the nose and eyes.

The virus is not known to affect humans or other animals. However, pets should not eat the carcasses of infected animals.

It easily spreads through direct contact with infected rabbits, carcasses and contaminated objects.

''RHDV2 is resistant to desiccation and can persist in the environment for a very long time,'' TPWD said in a news release. ''These factors make disease control efforts extremely challenging once it is in wild rabbit populations.''

If you suspect a sick or dead rabbit has contracted the disease, contact a local TPWD biologist or a veterinarian. Unusual mass sickness or mortality events among rabbits should be reported to the Texas Animal Health Commission.

WATCH: Texas fishing guide catches 8th heaviest largemouth bass in state history

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About the Author:Rebecca Salinas Rebecca Salinas joined KSAT in the fall of 2019. Her skills include content management, engagement and reporting.

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Sat, 25 Feb 2023 14:28

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) '-- The drag bill '-- SB0003 and HB0009 '-- determines where drag queens and kings can perform, and that creates many questions for Tennesseans.

There are concerns about how it could hurt the state's economy and the livelihoods of Tennesseans. It's a few steps away from becoming law, and many people are calling on Gov. Bill Lee to veto it.

For DeeDee, the legislation in Tennessee is enough to drive them crazy.

"In 2023 it does feel like we're going back to the Stonewall days of the 60s," Drag performer DeeDee said.

DeeDee is a 14-year drag veteran in Nashville and has had some amazing opportunities.

"I actually performed with Dolly at TPAC. I would no longer be able to do that under this law because there are children under 18 there," DeeDee said.

This is one example of what critics of the state's drag bill believe is going to hurt all Tennessee performers.

"It's a bill that we feel is discriminatory towards us," DeeDee said.

Supporters of the bill said they want to protect minors from sexual performances, so if the governor signs the bill, it would make it a crime for drag performers to perform for minors and in public spaces where they're present.

"The law requires it to be harmful to minors which has a constitutional definition which has a sexual component and other things that none of the drag I know has," Play and Tribe co-owner David Taylor said.

The bill is already affecting the livelihoods of drag performers. DeeDee has already had to turn down a wedding.

"I just informed them I'm no longer able to accept bookings outside my place of employment. There may be under 18-year-olds at the wedding, even though it's a private event, it's in a public place," DeeDee said.

Tennessee Pride Chamber president Brian Rosman and supporting business are asking the governor to veto the bill. They want to protect an art form dating back years.

He also wants to protect the state's economy since drag brunches and pride festivals bring in money to the state. Drag performers are often the heart of a pride festival, and people of all ages are welcomed.

"Drag performers are heroes within the LGBTQ+ community," Rosman said.

Roseman and Taylor don't know what a pride festival looks like without drag.

"Drag performances are both protected under both the U.S. and Tennessee constitutions as an art form and a form of political protest. People spend money at retail, restaurants, and hotels when they come for pride festivals. It's an economic opportunity that gets lost in a lot of these discussions," Rosman said.

DeeDee is grateful to work in facilities like Play and Tribe that are 18 and up, but not every drag performer in TN has the luxury.

"It hurts me to think that their income is going to be affected," DeeDee said.

They say drag performers have dreams too and they'll never let anyone take those away.

"You always have to hold on to hope," DeeDee said.

The bill is heading to the senate to be voted on again, after the house made some changes to it. The odds are the majority will vote yes, since it's already passed the senate once. The next step will be for the bill to head to Governor Lee's desk.

The Tennessee Pride Chamber plans to deliver its letter to the governor on Monday, so more business owners have an opportunity to sign it.

NewsChannel 5 reached out to several pride organizations to get their thoughts on the bill and to find out the future of pride festivals in Tennessee.

Nashville Pride: "The Nashville Pride Board of Directors is disappointed that HB9/SB3 were passed and will have a direct impact on our community. Pride festivities have been taking place in Nashville officially for 35 years, but unofficially for 50 years. The LGBTQ+ community is no stranger to this type of rhetoric that's being spewed throughout the state. Every year Nashville Pride has served as a place to honor our history, experience and celebrate the present moment, and acknowledge the work that remains to protect and expand our rights under the law''and this year is no exception. The Nashville Pride Festival and Parade is set for June 24-25, 2023, in downtown Nashville. While it is vital that we continue to combat these hateful and discriminatory bills, it is even more important that we come together as a community, create a safe space, and relay a unified message: the LGTBQ+ community is omnipresent in Tennessee, and we won't let this silence us or push us back in the closet."

BoroPride: "We have been fighting the anti-drag bills and other discriminatory bills in the Legislature because of the danger they pose to performers, Pride celebrations, and the whole community. We worry about the vagueness of the bill and the potential for selective enforcement. We will look for ways for BoroPride to go on that protect the safety of all those attending, but any new restrictions that become law will complicate those efforts. The Governor ought to veto this attack on the First Amendment and the LGBTQ community."

Franklin Pride: "We are disappointed, but not surprised, that the drag bill has passed both houses of the Tennessee legislature. This bill affects the community at large but sadly, we expect it to become law. The drag show was the most popular entertainment segment at our two previous annual festivals. Franklin Pride has been and continues to be a family-friendly event and adheres to all laws '-- local, state, and federal. We will have a great festival on June 3."

Knoxville Pride: "Knox Pride is deeply disappointed, but not surprised by the passage of SB1/HB1 and SB3/HB9. These thinly veiled, direct attacks on the Trans community are government overreaches to appease outside interests. When we have over 1500 kids in DCS without that being a focus, the priority is clearly not children, as they say. Knox Pride will be transitioning our three-day October event this year. "No of US are Free until ALL of US are Free" is the theme of our march and protest. Reengagement of our community's activist roots is the mission. In good conscience, we can't hold a celebration, so we're activating LGBTQIA+ folks and our allies to stop these kinds of bills for the future. Educating folks is a pillar of the Knox Pride mission, and we're leaning heavily into that."

Get NewsChannel 5 Now, wherever, whenever, always free.Watch the live stream below, and download our apps on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and more. Click here to learn more.Copyright 2023 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Sat, 25 Feb 2023 14:04

BEIJING, Feb 21 (Reuters) - A team from China's Fudan University apologised on Tuesday after a ChatGPT-like chatbot platform they developed crashed hours after it launched to the public, due to a sudden surge of traffic.

The team's announcement on Monday of the platform they called MOSS instantly went viral on Chinese social media, generating tens of millions of hits on China's Twitter-like Weibo. State media described it as the first Chinese rival to OpenAI's hit ChatGPT platform.

But MOSS, which bears the same name as a superintelligent quantum computer in Chinese sci-fi blockbuster "Wandering Earth 2", crashed soon after and by Tuesday the team said it would no longer be open to the public.

The launch of MOSS and the public response to it underlines the fervour for generative AI and ChatGPT in China and the challenges its domestic industry faces, as several of China's top universities and tech companies race to produce a Chinese version of the Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) chatbot.

Latest UpdatesView 2 more stories

While the Fudan University team had on Monday initially described MOSS as a conversational language model like ChatGPT, on Tuesday they played down the comparison, saying they had much to improve.

"MOSS is still a very immature model, it is still has a long way to go before reaching ChatGPT. An academic research lab like us is unable to produce a model whose ability nears ChatGPT," a statement published on its website said.

"Our computing resources were not enough to support such large traffic and as an academic group we do not have sufficient engineering experience, creating a very bad experience and first impression on everyone, and we hereby express our heartfelt apologies to everyone."

ChatGPT, the fastest-growing consumer application in history, has also crashed several times due to heavy traffic.

While few users were able to share their experiences of the platform before the crash, a journalist from the Shanghai Observer shared a detailed account of an interaction with MOSS and said that the chatbot's English was better than its Chinese.

The team's leader, Qiu Xipeng, a professor at Fudan's School of Computer Science, told the Shanghai Observer on Monday that the main gap between MOSS and ChatGPT was that the number of parameters put into MOSS' language training was an order of magnitude smaller than ChatGPT.

Qiu did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

Reporting by Eduardo Baptista, Editing by Louise Heavens

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Catturd ' : What an absolute vile, unappreciative arrogant POS! https://t.co/hzhj3wnJbJ

Sat Feb 25 02:50:38 +0000 2023

Diencephalon : @catturd2 We should give all to everyone ! Anything we have should go to the other person right ?!

Sun Feb 26 04:37:56 +0000 2023

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Fri, 24 Feb 2023 17:08

Pro-Trump cartoonist Scott Adams pulled the mask all the way off this week, declaring on his podcast that white people should ''get the hell away from Black people'' while labeling African-Americans as a ''hate group.''

Adams, who has written the satirical office comic strip Dilbert for more than three decades, said during his Coffee with Scott Adams online video program that current polling proves that there is ''no fixing'' the current racial tension in America and that whites should live in largely segregated neighborhoods.

Citing a recent Rasmussen survey showing 53 percent of Black people agree with the phrase ''It's okay to be white,'' which the Anti-Defamation League has deemed a hate slogan, Adams said on Wednesday that this was the ''first political poll that ever changed my activities'' while launching into an overtly racist rant.

''I've been identifying as Black for a while because I like to be on the winning team,'' the right-wing culture warrior sarcastically noted. ''And I like to help. I always thought if you help the Black community, that's sort of the biggest lever, you could find the biggest benefit.''

He added: ''But it turns out that nearly half of that team doesn't think I'm okay to be white. Which is why I identified as Black so I could be on the winning team for a while.''

Turning back to the poll results, Adams said he's now ''going to re-identify as white'' because he doesn't ''want to be a member of a hate group,'' which he claimed he had ''accidentally joined'' with his trollish Black identification. ''If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with white people'--according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll'--that's a hate group,'' Adams proclaimed.

From there, Adams urged white viewers to completely segregate themselves from Black Americans.

''I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,'' the 65-year-old author exclaimed. ''Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this. This can't be fixed.''

Reiterating that whites need to ''escape,'' Adams said that he had already done so by moving to an area ''with a very low Black population.'' He then cited Black CNN anchor Don Lemon to justify his assertion that there's a ''correlation'' between a ''mostly Black'' neighborhood and ''a bunch of problems he didn't see'' in majority-white areas.

''So I don't think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore,'' Adams huffed. ''It doesn't make sense. There's no longer a rational impulse. So I'm going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off.''

He continued: ''The only outcome is I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying.''

Later in the program, he again said you ''just need to get away from them,'' especially ''those who don't want to focus on education.'' Adams followed that up by saying he's ''really sick of seeing video after video of Black Americans beating up non-Black citizens,'' insisting that it's ''every damn day'' he sees a clip of ''some Black person beating the shit out of some white person.''

The Dilbert creator has seemingly embraced more radical positions since first comparing former President Donald Trump to Jesus in late 2015. Since then, he's openly courted controversy while dipping his toes into far-right culture war battles. Outside of peddling debunked COVID-19 cures, Adams also ludicrously predicted that if Joe Biden won the presidential election, there was a ''good chance'' Republicans would be hunted down and ''dead within a year.''

Last year, Adams introduced a Black character for the first time in his strip's 33-year existence, though it seemed it was largely to poke fun at ''woke'' culture and the LGBTQ community. The character's plotline revolved around his identifying as white, only for management to ask if he could also identify as gay.

Amid the incorporation of the anti-''woke'' plot lines, Dilbert was dropped last September from 77 newspapers by publisher Lee Enterprises. Adams, for his part, claimed the move ''was part of a larger overhaul'' of comic syndication. At the same time, however, he also said it's ''possible'' the strip was pulled for other reasons.

''Do you think they flipped coins to decide what to keep and what to delete? It wasn't about popularity or cost. (That I know.),'' Adams said at the time. The cartoonist has also previously claimed that his short-lived television series was canceled from UPN because he's white.

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