December 31st, 2023 • 3h 7m
Shownotes
Every new episode of No Agenda is accompanied by a comprehensive list of shownotes curated by Adam while preparing for the show. Clips played by the hosts during the show can also be found here.
Cloward Pivens - Migration Replacement
Cloward Pivens 1966 Paper - The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty | The Nation
The strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive. This gulf is not recognized in a society that is wholly and self-righteously oriented toward getting people off the welfare rolls. It is widely known, for example, that nearly 8 million persons (half of them white) now subsist on welfare, but it is not generally known that for every person on the rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility but is not obtaining assistance.
The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system, which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.
Summary of the Cloward-Piven Strategy
The Cloward-Piven strategy, proposed by sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in the 1960s, is a political and social strategy aimed at overloading and collapsing the welfare system to create a crisis. The desired outcome, according to its proponents, is to force political change and the establishment of a guaranteed income or a socialist state.
The strategy suggests that by encouraging a large number of people to enroll in welfare programs and exhausting available resources, it would create a situation where the government is compelled to respond with more comprehensive social welfare policies. The ultimate goal, as envisioned by Cloward and Piven, is to bring about social and economic transformation through the destabilization of the existing system. It's important to note that the Cloward-Piven strategy has been a subject of controversy, with critics viewing it as a potentially harmful and unethical approach to achieving political change.
Pivens - Remember the Former NY Banker - We win over China with a growing population
“They” get to create more money
CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY: The Central Pillar of the Khazarian Cabal’s Agenda of Cultural Marxism | SOTN: Alternative News, Analysis & Commentary
Cloward-Piven’s goal was to create impetus for government to guarantee a universal living. The modern Democratic Party is significantly less interested in guaranteed benefits than for an economic leveling. The motivating factor of the left is not caring for the poor but tearing down the wealthy…
And so the Democrats will move to bankrupt the system. No welfare state can survive with open borders. That is a truism. And yet that’s exactly what Democrats are now promoting: open borders with a full welfare state. Why? Not because Democrats believe that the homegrown poor in America will be better off with more people joining them on the dole; they won’t. Rather, Democrats love the size and scope of the state and despise the rival the state faces in individual success. A growing welfare base requires higher taxation, more degradation of individual success. That is the goal…
The Cloward–Piven strategy remains an active instrument of change in America. Ultimately, it is the tool by which multicultural elites aim to “fundamentally transform America.”
Cloward–Piven strategy - Wikipedia
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.
It is the strategy of forcing political change leading to societal collapse through orchestrated crises. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unpayable national debt, and other methods such as unfettered immigration thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse by overwhelming the system.
Reverse migration and the Wall with Mexico
What I see is a form to print more cash, keep the debt going because that is the only thing that keeps the economy going.
You know, dump USDs all over the world.
To be quiet frankly, I have sympathy for them because they are naive they think someone will give some for free in exchange of nothing.
I had the chance to talk to some migrants the other day. I asked them, when it was the last time someone gave you some for free without string attached? They said never, and I say, these NGOs giving all these free trips and promises are no different; what is the catch?
I saw a lightbulb coming on, kind of dim, but was on.
For what I see, it will be a reverse migration going south because there is nothing here for them. Majorcas, I think, is talking to Obrador about the reversed wave. I bet Mexico is going to "Pay and Build" the wall; just like Trump predicted.
Big Tech AI - TESCREAL
Tech we called - Amazon Alexa - Mastodon - Podcasting
Until we said it would end
Tech we Mocked - Virtual Reality - Augmented reality - Blockchain
I tried it myself
Called out FTX and SBF
@eshear on redistribution
TESCREALism: The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares
Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism
Essentially, a bunch of 20th-century atheists concluded that their lives lacked the meaning, purpose and hope provided by traditional religion. In response to this realization, they invented a new, secular religion, in which “heaven” is something we create ourselves, in this world.
Prosecutors say they will not pursue second Sam Bankman-Fried trial
The second trial, which had been slated to start in March, addressed an additional set of criminal counts, including conspiracy to bribe foreign officials, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and substantive securities fraud and commodities fraud.
Big Pharma
Japan Elderly Care Are Increasingly Killing Off Aged Population To Cut Costs In What’s Being Called ‘Caregiver Fatigue’ – winepressnews.com
Ministry of Truthiness
Missouri v. Biden - Amicus Tsunami (Installment #2)
Adam—Wow! Six more amicus briefs have been filed by 43 more people and organizations (including a bunch of states and secretaries of state). Five are filed in support of the government, one in support of neither party.
So now we have 15 total amicus briefs filed by a combined 62 amici. I expect these numbers to grow substantially in February. I told you this would get interesting! Here are my humble abridged thoughts on the briefs:
IN SUPPORT OF THE GOVERNMENT: These five briefs raise three basic themes: (1) SCOTUS must be careful about converting actions by private parties into “state actions”; (2) citizens just aren’t that smart and need the government to protect them from false speech; and (3) governments have First Amendment rights too.
Stanford University: Stanford runs programs designed to monitor the internet for misinformation and other things. The disputed injunction doesn’t embrace Stanford, but there’s another lawsuit that seeks to hold Stanford liable for helping the government’s suppression efforts. Stanford believes that the Fifth Circuit got it right by carving out private parties, and wants SCOTUS to do the same. (Note: When you consider Stanford’s federal funding, a finding that it’s a “state actor” seems more plausible, although there are limits. Let’s keep an eye on that.)
The Coalition for Independent Technology Research: Similar argument to Stanford’s. This brief says that the injunction has chilled private technology companies from interacting with the government and exposed private researchers to burdensome litigation. It asks SCOTUS to limit the kinds of behavior that can be deemed “state action” versus the action of private parties. Some of this organization’s members receive government funding.
The States of NY, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, NV, NJ, NM, OR, PA, RI, VT, WA, and WI, and the District of Columbia: These jurisdictions (all blue except purplish AZ) take the nanny-state approach: People are dullards who must be protected from what the states consider false speech. The brief ignores Justice Brandeis’s 1927 adage that the solution to disagreeable speech is not censorship, but more speech. They make technical arguments based on their purported “experience” to say that the Fifth Circuit failed to distinguish between permissible persuasion and improper coercion. In so doing, they downplay what the feds did.
United States Senator Mark Warner (D-VA): Senator Warner, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, fears “foreign malign influence” from Russia, Iran, China, Cuba, and Venezuela—especially in elections. This brief is so full of buzzwords and shopworn tropes that you might want to read it just so you can wear out your desk bell.
The Secretaries of State of AZ, CO, CT, ME, MN, NM, OR, and VT: The short and snarky version: These SOSs claim that the Fifth Circuit’s decision has made their cozy relationships with social media dry up—so it must therefore be reversed.
IN SUPPORT OF NEITHER PARTY:
Election Officials (nine of them, mostly from blue states): Although presented as a neutral brief, this one reads like a pro-government piece. The election officials understandably want to get accurate election information out to the voters, and they want to rely on social media to get those messages out. They fear that the Fifth Circuit has blurred the line between legitimate government communication and improper coercion.
Iran Houthis Red ea
Iran working with US?
Iran: The majority of Muslims in Iran are Shia Muslims, particularly adherents to the Twelver Shia branch. The country has a unique form of Islamic governance known as Wilayat al-Faqih, where the Supreme Leader is the highest authority in the state.
Egypt: The majority of Muslims in Egypt are Sunni Muslims, mainly following the Shafi'i school of thought, with a significant minority adhering to the Maliki school. Egypt does not have the same emphasis on Shia Islam as Iran.
VAERS
Died Suddenly list
Great Barrington Declaration - Wikipedia
The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.[1][2] It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection.[3][4][5] The envisaged result was herd immunity within three months, as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population.[1][2][4]
Doctors fear new Covid strain could trigger 'heart failure pandemic' across the globe - The Mirror US
Covid-19 could trigger a 'heart failure pandemic', experts have warned, calling it a 'global healthcare risk'. The rise in Covid cases, especially due to the new strain known as JN.1, could lead to potential heart issues.
Scientists from Japan's top research institute, Riken, have issued a new report. They say the ACE2 receptors, which the coronavirus clings to within human cells, are 'very common' in the heart. This means many people who catch the virus may suffer from 'reduced cardiac function'.
The reason for this is still not clear. However, the report suggests the Covid pandemic might have changed things significantly. It warns those at risk of future heart failure due to 'persistent infection of SARS-CoV-2 (Covis-19) is expected to exponentially increase'.
Jews vs Muslims
chatGPT Jewish vs Muslim jokes
Here's one:
Why did the rabbi bring a ladder to the party?
Because he heard the drinks were on the house!
Hope that brings a smile!
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I can't fulfill this request. I strive to be culturally sensitive and respectful of all religions and beliefs. Muslims, like any other group, should not be stereotyped or mocked. Jokes that target a particular religion or group can be hurtful and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Instead, I focus on humor that brings people together and celebrates shared human experiences. If you need assistance or have a different topic you'd like to explore, feel free to ask!
MIC
Climate Change
STORIES
Air Force feared generals' foreign consulting jobs would cause scandal - Washington Post
Sun, 31 Dec 2023 17:47
During the height of the war in Afghanistan, U.S. military leaders flocked to the Caspian Sea nation of Azerbaijan to embrace its president, Ilham Aliyev, despite a report from the U.S. Embassy comparing the mustachioed strongman to mafia bosses in ''The Godfather.''
Setting aside concerns about Azerbaijan's culture of corruption, Pentagon officials persuaded Aliyev to open his country's borders and airspace to critical U.S. and NATO supply routes to Afghanistan. In exchange, U.S. officials promised a closer diplomatic partnership with Aliyev and steered $369 million in defense contracts to Silk Way Airlines, an Azerbaijan cargo carrier that U.S. investigators say was controlled by the government.
Two U.S. Air Force generals '-- Duncan McNabb and William Fraser III '-- who oversaw the supply routes from 2008 to 2014 later tried to cash in on their Azerbaijan connections. Upon retiring from active duty, the four-star generals negotiated valuable consulting deals with Silk Way Airlines, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. One of them stood to earn $5,000 a day.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, left, sits across from Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at a June 2010 meeting in Baku, the country's capital. In front of Aliyev is a letter from President Barack Obama. (Carolyn Kaster/Pool/AP)The Pentagon and State Department normally rubber-stamp requests from retired U.S. military personnel to work for foreign powers or companies controlled by foreign governments, having approved more than 95 percent of applications since 2015. But when the Air Force learned about McNabb's and Fraser's business ventures in Azerbaijan, officials flagged them as a potential embarrassment and a risk to national security, the documents show.
The case triggered a prolonged internal battle between the retired generals and R. Philip Deavel, a civilian Air Force lawyer who feared that the consulting deals might trigger a scandal.
Other Air Force officials repeatedly sought to prevent the dispute from becoming public. Between 2016 and 2021, The Post submitted four separate FOIA requests that should have produced records about the case, but the Air Force either did not reply or said it could not find any documents.
This year, the Air Force finally released more than 400 pages of records '-- but only after The Post sued in federal court and presented written proof from another agency that the generals' conduct in Azerbaijan had generated an investigation.
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The files provide an unusually detailed look at how two high-ranking U.S. military commanders tried to profit from foreign relationships forged during wartime, and at the Pentagon's struggles to police such behavior.
The documents reveal that Air Force intelligence officials objected to the Azerbaijan business deals for reasons that remain classified. Meanwhile, Deavel, who as the director of the Air Force Review Boards Agency was responsible for reviewing such arrangements, raised ethical concerns because the U.S. military had given extensive business to Silk Way Airlines while McNabb and Fraser managed the supply routes through Azerbaijan.
In a 2015 confidential memo, Deavel warned his superiors that ''we should do nothing that would cause Congress or the media to question whether the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to Silkway are solely for valid national security needs.'' The lawyer added that it might look like McNabb and Fraser knew ''that a perk of office is a lucrative advisory contract from Silkway upon retirement.''
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The retired generals pressed Air Force officials to approve their consulting deals anyway.
At one point, according to the 2015 memo, Fraser warned that if the U.S. government prevented him from working for Silk Way, it would face ''blow-back'' from Azerbaijan, and that Aliyev's government might even block U.S. and NATO supply routes to Afghanistan in retaliation.
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'Azerbaijan was the key'Two decades of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East have created a thriving job market for American veterans trying to profit from their overseas deployments.
Fraser and McNabb are among more than 500 retired U.S. military personnel who have sought federal permission over the past eight years to accept jobs as consultants or contractors for foreign governments, according to a Post investigation. Most of the jobs originate in countries known for human rights abuses and political repression.
McNabb and Fraser, now both 70, accumulated a multitude of foreign contacts while leading the U.S. Transportation Command (Transcom), the military's giant logistics arm responsible for moving troops and supplies around the globe.
McNabb, an Air Force Academy alumnus, headed the command from 2008 to 2011. Fraser, a Texas A&M graduate, succeeded him and held the job until retiring in 2014.
As commanders, their primary challenge was transporting materiel to landlocked Afghanistan, a logistical nightmare. Iran blocked access from the west. Pakistan offered access from the south and east for truckers willing to drive arduous routes over mountains and through deserts, but sometimes closed its border checkpoints when tensions rose with Washington.
When McNabb took charge of Transcom, he told The Post in a recent interview, one of his first tasks was to try to open an alternative supply route to Afghanistan from the north that bypassed Russia. The only feasible option was to cross the territories of several former Soviet republics, including Azerbaijan, a country the size of Portugal that is sandwiched between Russia and Iran.
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In November 2008, McNabb made his first international trip as Transcom commander to Baku, Azerbaijan's capital on the Caspian Sea, to see if he could win support from Aliyev and his government for new sea and ground supply routes as well as expanded overflight rights.
''Azerbaijan was the key,'' McNabb recalled in the interview. ''Folks don't realize how critical that was.''
Aliyev had ruled Azerbaijan since the 2003 death of his father, Heydar, a former KGB boss who became president shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Corruption flourished under the Aliyevs, with the CIA describing it as ''pervasive'' and the State Department calling it ''systemic.''
Ilham Aliyev wore tailored suits, spoke fluent English and favored friendly relations with the United States and NATO. But he was intolerant of political dissent and challenges to his family's power.
In a classified 2009 diplomatic cable made public by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, the U.S. Embassy in Baku described Aliyev as ''a mix'' of Michael and Sonny Corleone, the fraternal mobsters of ''The Godfather'' novel and movie.
''His goal appears to be a political environment in which the Aliyev dynasty is unchallenged,'' the embassy wrote. Aliyev later appointed his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, as vice president. Both remain in their positions.
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McNabb said Aliyev's government was open to the proposed military supply routes but wanted something in return. At first, Azerbaijani officials insisted the United States would have to pay tariffs to use their country's airspace, though they later relented. ''I had to tell them we don't pay anyone,'' McNabb said.
The supply routes paid off for Azerbaijan in other ways, however. Silk Way Airlines, seeking to break into the U.S. market, received $269 million in U.S. defense contracts during McNabb's three-year tenure at Transcom to transfer supplies from Europe to Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Air Force records.
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McNabb did not play a direct role in the contracting process. But he met with Silk Way officials and said he once hosted a Silk Way executive for dinner at his home at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. ''They did do a lot of missions and they did do a lot of good work,'' he said.
He estimated that he visited Azerbaijan five or six times as Transcom commander to keep the supply routes to Afghanistan humming. By the peak of the war in 2010, about one-quarter of U.S. and NATO nonlethal supplies '-- fuel, food and construction material '-- transited through Azerbaijan.
U.S. soldiers prepare for a convoy in May 2009 at a forward operating base in Afghanistan's Wardak province. (Jonathan Saruk/Getty Images)Retirement and a job offerMcNabb retired from the Air Force in December 2011 and settled in Arlington, Va. Eighteen months later, he said, officials with Silk Way Airlines contacted him about a possible business venture.
DuncanMcNabb
Consultant / Silk Way Airlines, Azerbaijan
' Commander, U.S. Transportation Command, 2008-2011' Vice chief of staff, U.S. Air Force, 2007-2008
Silk Way wanted to modernize its operational control center at Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku. The firm invited McNabb to return to Azerbaijan in June 2013 for a visit and offered to hire him as an adviser, he said.
McNabb agreed. That month, he said, he set up a consulting firm, Ares Mobility Solutions, partnering with a retired Air Force colonel and a captain in the Navy Reserve who had worked in the airline industry. Ares signed a contract with Silk Way that paid a monthly retainer of $10,000 plus expenses, documents show. Under the deal, McNabb was expected to travel to Baku every three to five months to work for a few days at a time.
According to federal law, retired U.S. military personnel '-- defined as those who served at least 20 years in uniform '-- and reservists are required to obtain permission from their branch of the armed forces and the State Department before they accept anything of value from foreign powers or companies controlled by foreign governments.
Silk Way Airlines was one of 23 subsidiaries of a private holding company, Silk Way Group LLC, that had come to dominate the aviation sector in Azerbaijan after the partial privatization of the country's state-owned airline.
McNabb said he thought Silk Way Airlines was wholly private so he didn't seek federal authorization at first. ''This was not with the government,'' he told The Post. U.S. investigators would disagree.
Gen. Duncan McNabb, left, commander of Transcom, tours the control tower at Camp Bastion, in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in January 2010. (Cpl. Joshua E. Bradley/U.S. Marine Corps)Like McNabb, Fraser made Azerbaijan a priority during his tenure as Transcom chief.
A few weeks after taking command, he flew to Baku in December 2011 to discuss the Afghanistan supply routes with Aliyev and other Azerbaijani officials. Over the next three years, Fraser met with Aliyev twice in Azerbaijan and once in New York, according to Azerbaijan's government.
Transcom also continued to do considerable business with Silk Way Airlines, with the firm receiving an additional $100 million in U.S. defense contracts, according to Air Force records.
In April 2014, Azerbaijan's ambassador to the United States visited Scott Air Force Base in Illinois to tour Transcom headquarters.
The ambassador, Elin Suleymanov, met with Fraser, who was nearing the end of his time in command.
During the visit, the diplomat noted that ''there are many opportunities for future military and commercial cooperation'' between the United States and Azerbaijan, according to a U.S. military press release.
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A 'going rate' of $5,000 a dayFraser retired from the Air Force two months later, on July 1, 2014. Within days, according to Air Force records, he received a job offer from Silk Way Group '-- the corporate parent of Silk Way Airlines, Silk Way West Airlines, Silk Way Bank and other businesses with the Silk Way name.
WilliamFraser III
Prospective consultant / Silk Way Group, Azerbaijan
' Commander, U.S. Transportation Command, 2011-2014' Commander, Air Combat Command, 2009-2011
Unlike McNabb, Fraser sought advance permission from the Air Force to work for Silk Way. In Fraser's application, dated Aug. 25, 2014, he wrote that ''I am not aware of any connection to the Azerbaijan government'' and that he didn't think he needed federal approval.
Fraser said he sought authorization anyway because a Transcom ethics counselor had advised him to do so. In a memo, the counselor noted that ''the degree to which the Azerbaijan government owns and/or controls [Silk Way Group] has been the subject of media speculation in the past.''
The reference was to a 2010 investigation by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty '-- an overseas broadcaster funded by the U.S. government '-- that reported that Aliyev's 21-year-old daughter was one of the owners of Silk Way Bank.
In his foreign-employment application to the Air Force, Fraser gave few specifics in describing his proposed duties with Silk Way Group, writing that he ''would be a consultant/advisor providing subject matter expertise'' and would ''help develop future business opportunities.'' He said his ''going rate'' as a consultant was $5,000 a day.
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The application immediately drew scrutiny at the Pentagon. Deavel's staff concluded that, contrary to Fraser's assertion, there were strong indications that the government of Azerbaijan controlled Silk Way Group.
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Meanwhile, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations conducted a separate review and submitted a classified report to Deavel. While details of the review remain a secret, the investigative agency said it had ''national security concerns'' about Silk Way, according to an unclassified memo summarizing the report.
That was enough for Deavel. He denied Fraser's application on Sept. 30, 2014. ''Ultimately, I cannot find the proposed relationship in the best interests of the United States,'' he wrote.
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Fraser didn't give up. Two days later, he called Deavel and asked what he needed to do to persuade the Air Force to change its decision.
In a memo recounting the conversation, Deavel wrote that the discussion was ''a little awkward,'' partly because it was unusual for him to get a call from a four-star general, and partly because he had based his decision on the classified report.
On the phone, he told Fraser about the existence of the classified report, but said he couldn't discuss details. He explained that the classified material ''did cause me concern about the activities of his proposed employer and whether approving this compensated relationship posed risks to the reputation of the Air Force,'' according to Deavel's memo.
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Still, Fraser pushed for approval. He told Deavel ''that he knew the application was hazy and lacked specifics,'' and asked if he could resubmit it with additional information that might make approval more likely.
Fraser also made some comments that Deavel took as a warning, documents show. The general said he believed there would be ''blowback for the United States'' if the Air Force didn't let him work for Silk Way, according to Deavel's memo.
In particular, Fraser noted that Azerbaijan had just renewed Transcom's overflight rights and entered a strategic security relationship with the United States. He said Azerbaijani officials ''would see a denial as inconsistent with those partnership agreements.''
Fraser also urged Deavel to contact the State Department's desk officer for the Caucasus region, who he said would vouch that the general's employment with Silk Way ''was useful for American interests'' in Azerbaijan.
Deavel was taken aback but noncommittal. He told Fraser he ''did not want to shoot from the hip'' about whether he might change his mind. But he said he'd discuss the case with other Air Force lawyers.
Reached for comment, Fraser declined to discuss the matter with The Post. ''I don't see the value in talking about something that happened nearly eight years ago,'' he said in an email.
In a 2015 filing with the U.S. Department of Transportation, Silk Way Group said it was ''100% owned'' by another private firm, Silk Way Development LLC. That entity, in turn, was listed as being 95 percent owned by Zaur Akhundov, the founder of Silk Way Airlines.
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In a written response to questions from The Post, Silk Way Airlines said that it ''has always been commercial, private and has never been related to the state or politics'' and that it sought to hire McNabb and Fraser for their expertise in transportation and logistics. The company added that ''it in no way intended, implied or needed to offer 'payback' for a longstanding'' contractual relationship with Transcom.
Silk Way described Akhundov as ''the ultimate beneficial owner'' of the firm and said ''he has never acted'' as a proxy or trustee for other shareholders.
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Like father, like son Fraser resubmitted his application to the Air Force in November 2014. This time, he specified that he would consult for Silk Way West Airlines instead of the Silk Way holding company. He said his duties would be to ''improve their knowledge and understanding of U.S. commercial markets and existing U.S. commercial supply chains.''
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One thing Fraser did not mention on his application was that his son, William Fraser IV, also worked in the aviation business in Azerbaijan.
William Fraser IV, a former U.S. Marine sergeant who goes by the nickname ''Mac,'' had taken a job two years earlier as an assistant to the president of Azerbaijan Airlines, the state-owned carrier, as a public relations and strategic communications specialist.
Gen. William Fraser III, center, commander of Transcom, is shown bridge controls of the high-speed vessel HSV-2 Swift in May 2012 during a visit to Rota, Spain. (Senior Airman Jonathan Garcia/U.S. Air Force)Mac Fraser said he also worked part time for Silk Way West Airlines '-- the company that now wanted to hire his father for $5,000 a day. Mac Fraser left Azerbaijan Airlines to accept a full-time job with Silk Way West Airlines as a Houston-based marketing manager in March 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In an email exchange with The Post, Mac Fraser said he was unaware his father had received an offer to work for Silk Way West Airlines around the same time he did.
''As I understand it, upon retiring from active duty my father cast a wide net and entertained a number of offers from a number of different companies,'' he wrote. ''While I consider ours to be a close-knit family, I could not even begin to speculate who any of those companies were.''
Informed that the Air Force had blocked his father from working for Silk Way, Mac Fraser replied: ''That's all news to me and WAY above my pay grade.''
''Me and my father have never crossed paths professionally and his business is completely separate and apart from mine,'' he added.
Mac Fraser declined to say how he came to work for companies based in Azerbaijan. His LinkedIn profile notes no previous professional experience in the country.
Unlike his father, Mac Fraser was not required to seek federal approval for his jobs in Azerbaijan because he served in the U.S. military for only four years. The law restricting foreign-government employment applies only to U.S. veterans who served for at least 20 years, because they receive a military pension and can be recalled to active duty.
National security concernsAfter Gen. Fraser submitted his second application, Deavel checked out his claim that the State Department thought his job with Silk Way would be ''useful for American interests,'' according to the case files.
State Department officials contradicted the general's assertion and said they weren't pushing for his job to be approved. They also said they ''strongly disagree[d] with Gen. Fraser's assessment'' that there would be ''diplomatic 'blow-back' from the Government of Azerbaijan'' if U.S. officials rejected his consulting gig, documents show.
The State Department surprised Deavel with a second revelation. Officials told him another retired four-star Air Force general '-- McNabb '-- had informed the State Department's desk officer for Azerbaijan that he was working for Silk Way Airlines. It was the first time anyone had notified the Air Force about McNabb's consulting job in Azerbaijan.
Deavel informed other Air Force officials that they had another potential problem on their hands. Not only had McNabb not applied for federal permission but the Office of Special Investigations' national security concerns about Silk Way would probably apply in his case, too.
In the military, it takes courage to say no to a four-star general, even one who is retired. Deavel wanted to make sure he had the backing of his superiors. He wrote a ''High Interest Notification'' memo that was labeled ''**SENSITIVE AND PRE-DECISIONAL**'' and sent it up the chain of command.
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Deavel provided a recap of his previous denial of Fraser's request to work for Silk Way and ticked off the reasons why it was problematic.
He noted that the State Department agreed that the government of Azerbaijan effectively controlled Silk Way and its subsidiaries. State Department officials, he emphasized, had expressed ''disappointment that Gen Fraser, as a retired four star, would not voluntarily withdraw the request and seek post-retirement opportunities elsewhere,'' according to the memo.
A Silk Way West Airlines Boeing 747-400F comes in for a landing at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in January. (Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/AP)Deavel also reported that the Office of Special Investigations had shared its classified report with other federal intelligence agencies and that they all concurred with the national security concerns about retired U.S. military personnel working for Silk Way.
Further, Deavel described how he had recently learned that McNabb was working as a Silk Way consultant without federal approval, which ''causes me even greater concern'' given Silk Way's U.S. defense contracts. Deavel reported that Transcom had awarded 2,230 cargo airlift missions to Silk Way during McNabb's tenure, plus 1,117 missions while Fraser was in command, for a total cost of $369 million.
Deavel said he wasn't questioning the need for the airlift missions but warned that Congress and the media might see the generals' subsequent consulting deals as ''payback.'' As a result, he said, he was planning to reject Fraser's reapplication unless his bosses instructed him otherwise.
None did. On Jan. 9, 2015, Deavel wrote a terse letter denying Fraser's employment with Silk Way as ''not in the best interests of the Air Force.''
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When contacted by The Post, Deavel declined to comment directly on the case, except to say that he stood by all his decisions.
''I'm not going to run from my responsibilities to do what's right for the United States,'' said Deavel, who retired as director of the Air Force Review Boards Agency in 2016. ''You have to look beyond whether a decision will be popular with the retired general officer club.''
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A failure to seek permissionWhile that marked the end of Fraser's push to consult in Azerbaijan, the Air Force still needed to decide what to do about McNabb.
The case bounced around the highest levels of the Air Force until June 2015, when the Air Force inspector general opened an investigation to determine whether McNabb had committed misconduct by working for Silk Way Airlines without federal approval.
Three investigative officers interviewed McNabb at the Pentagon on Oct. 23, 2015. The retired general said that he hadn't done anything wrong and that he had never come across any evidence that Silk Way Airlines was under the control of the government of Azerbaijan.
''When you go online and when you talk about what Silk Way does, it just said it's a private enterprise,'' he said, according to a transcript of the interview. ''I had a very extensive intel network that would look at especially foreign carriers that would be going in and out of places, and I never had anything that said that this was controlled by the government.''
14
Gen. McNabb accepts the Joint Meritorious Unit Award for members of Transcom at an April 2010 ceremony at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. Flanking him are Secretary Gates and Gen. David H. Petraeus. (Derik Holtmann/Belleville News-Democrat/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)During his interview with investigators, McNabb was argumentative at times and questioned why no one in the Air Force had ever told him he should apply for federal permission to work for Silk Way.
''If somebody thinks I need to, please just tell me,'' he said. ''I'm chagrined that anybody would think that I would not try to live up to all of the ethics rules.''
15
Investigators noted that he had been briefed about the rules on foreign-government employment shortly before his retirement and that it was his responsibility to comply with the law.
In his interview with The Post, McNabb said that he was aware Fraser was also trying to work for Silk Way, but that they didn't coordinate their efforts. He said he mistakenly assumed that only Fraser needed to apply for federal permission because Fraser was working for Silk Way primarily in the United States.
He denied that his consulting job with Silk Way was a reward for the U.S. defense contracts awarded to the company when he headed Transcom. ''Absolutely not,'' he said.
The Air Force inspector general's office completed its investigation into McNabb in November 2015 and concluded that he had violated the law by failing to seek permission for foreign-government employment.
16
There is no criminal penalty for breaking the law, but the military can withhold retirement pay from those who do so.
McNabb confirmed that the Defense Department docked his pension but declined to say how much.
''It was enough,'' he said. ''I paid.''
correctionAn earlier version of this article incorrectly said the U.S. government owned Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The broadcaster is a nonprofit corporation supervised by an independent government agency and funded by Congress. The article has been corrected.
Francis Collins Has Regrets, but Too Few - WSJ
Sun, 31 Dec 2023 14:35
The former NIH chief and promoter of Covid lockdowns now says his view was too 'narrow.'Hard to believe it's been four years since the first reports of a mysterious virus spreading in Wuhan, China. Now comes a Covid lockdown mea culpa'--if you can call it that'--from former National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins.
''If you're a public-health person and you're trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life,'' Dr. Collins explained in a Covid discussion this summer for Braver Angels, an outfit that aims to bridge political divides. A video of the discussion surfaced this week on X.com.
Copyright (C)2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Great Barrington Declaration - Wikipedia
Sun, 31 Dec 2023 14:29
COVID-19-related open letter
The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.[1][2] It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection.[3][4][5] The envisaged result was herd immunity within three months, as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population.[1][2][4]
Signed by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, it was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.[6][7][8] The declaration was drafted in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5 October.[2][9] At the time, COVID-19 vaccines were considered to be months away from general availability.[4] The document presumed that the disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it made no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact tracing,[10] or long COVID, which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.[11][12]
The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the strategy is dangerous and lacks a sound scientific basis.[13][14] They say that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions.[15][16] As of October 2020, they warn that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood.[14][17] Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-infection immunity.[14][17] They say that the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.[16] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the "Great Barrington Declaration is not grounded in science and is dangerous".[13] The Great Barrington Declaration received support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
Background and content The idea to issue a declaration came from a conference run by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).[18] Gupta, one of the authors, said that given journals' reluctance to publish on herd immunity and that the authors had been "repeatedly dismissed as fringe or pseudoscience" an open letter was chosen as the publication route out of necessity.[1]
The declaration says that lockdowns have adverse effects on physical and mental health, for example, because people postpone preventive healthcare.[19] They propose reducing these harms by ending mandatory restrictions on most activities for most people. Without these restrictions, more people will develop COVID-19. They believe that these infections will produce herd immunity (the idea that when enough people become immune, then the virus will stop circulating widely), which will eventually make it less likely that high-risk people will be exposed to the virus.[19]
The authors say that, instead of protecting everyone, the focus should instead be on "shielding" those most at risk, with few mandatory restrictions placed on the remainder of the population.[19] Stanford epidemiologist Yvonne Maldonado said that 40% of Americans have an elevated risk of dying from COVID-19, so this would require keeping the 40% of people with known risk factors away from the 60% of people without known risk factors.[20] In practice, such shielding is impossible to achieve.[3]
The declaration names specific economic changes that the signatories favour: resuming "life as normal", with schools and universities open for in-person teaching and extracurricular activities, re-opening offices, restaurants, and other places of work, and resuming mass gatherings for cultural and athletic activities. By October 2020, many of these things had already happened in some parts of the world,[9] but likewise were being restricted elsewhere; for instance the UK saw quarantines of students, travel advisories, restrictions on meeting other people, and partial closures of schools, pubs and restaurants.[21]
The declaration does not provide practical details about who should be protected or how they can be protected.[9] For instance, it does not mention testing any people outside of nursing homes, contact tracing, wearing masks, or social distancing.[9] It mentions multi-generational households but does not provide any information about how, for example, low-risk people can get infected without putting high-risk members of their household at risk of dying.[9]
The declaration does not provide any references to published data that support the declaration's strategy.[10]
Authors The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration at the American Institute for Economic Research. (L''R) Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Jay BhattacharyaSunetra Gupta is a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the Oxford University Department of Zoology.[22] Gupta has been a critic of early COVID-19 lockdown strategy, arguing that the cost is too high for the poorest in society, and expressing concern about the risk of widespread starvation in many countries because of lockdown-related disruptions in food supply chains.[2] In 2020, Gupta led a group which in March released a widely criticized modelling study suggesting, in one of its scenarios, that half the population of the United Kingdom might already have been infected with COVID-19,[23] and in September a preprint study which argued herd immunity thresholds might be lower than expected due to pre-existing immunity in the population.[24] Rupert Beale of the Francis Crick Institute described the March preprint as "ridiculous" and "not even passed by peer review".[25] Gupta was one author of a 21 September letter to the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, recommending shielding of vulnerable groups of people rather than the lockdown method of the British government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[26] Of the declaration's signatories, Gupta said: "We're saying, let's just do this for the three months that it takes for the pathogen to sweep through the population", arguing that the situation would only be temporary.[10] Gupta has dismissed claims of having a right-wing perspective, claiming to be "more Left than Labour".[25]
Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University whose research focuses on the economics of health care. Before he co-authored the declaration, Bhattacharya co-wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled "Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?", in which he claimed that there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States,[27] and was a lead author of a serology study released in April which suggested that as many as 80,000 residents of Santa Clara County, California might have already been infected with COVID-19.[28] The study and conduct of the research drew wide criticism for statistical and methodological errors and apparent lack of disclosure of conflicts.[29][30] The study was later revealed to have received undisclosed funding from JetBlue's founder David Neeleman, according to an anonymous whistle blower.[31][32] Bhattacharya said that he received racist attacks and death threats during the pandemic, and he also claimed that "Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google" suppressed "our ideas, falsely deeming them 'misinformation'". He also said that "I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to 'let the virus rip', when I had proposed nothing of the sort."[33] Bhattacharya argued that the declaration did not take "a contrarian position, but represents the standard way of dealing with respiratory virus pandemics that the world has followed for a century until 2020."[34]
Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine and a biostatistician at Harvard University. He has defended Sweden's response to the pandemic[35] and, along with Bhattacharya, wrote a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing against testing the young and healthy for SARS-CoV-2.[36] Kulldorff had previously claimed that people under 50 years old "should live their normal lives unless they have some known risk factor" while "anybody above 60, whether teacher or bus driver or janitor I think should not be working '' if those in their 60s can't work from home they should be able to take a sabbatical (supported by social security) for three, four or whatever months it takes before there is immunity in the community that will protect everybody."[10] He did not provide a detailed explanation about what people between these ages should do.[10] While Gupta has said in a promotional video that less vulnerable people should be allowed "to get out there and get infected and build up herd immunity", Kulldorff cautioned against deliberately seeking out infection; he said that "everybody should wash their hands and stay home when sick".[10] Kulldorff disagreed with criticism that the plan would lead to more deaths, calling it "nonsense".[10] He said "fewer older people '' not zero, but fewer old people '' would be infected. But you'll have more young people infected, and that's going to reduce the mortality."[10] Kulldorff has discussed the Declaration on The Richie Allen Show, a radio programme that has previously featured antisemites and Holocaust deniers, although Kulldorff said he had no knowledge of the show prior to being invited on.[37]
An epidemiologist from Johns Hopkins, Stefan Baral, also participated in the formation of the GBD, but declined to sign the final text stating he had "differing perspectives on what to do."[38]:'105'
Since 2021, Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and Gupta have worked with the Brownstone Institute, a think tank that has opposed COVID-19 masking and vaccine mandates. The institute was started in 2021 by Jeffrey Tucker, the AIER editorial director who helped organize the Great Barrington Declaration. It has described itself as the declaration's "spiritual child". Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were named senior scholars there. Gupta has been an author.[39]
The declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free market think tank based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts,[40][41] which has a history of promoting climate change denial,[42][43][44] and the benefits of sweatshops.[45][46] Byline Times journalist Nafeez Ahmed has described the AIER as an "institution embedded in a Koch-funded network that denies climate science while investing in polluting fossil fuel industries".[6]
Signatories While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration,[47][48] this list'--which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"'--contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings".[49][50][51] More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei'--a Mongolian style of overtone singing'--described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".[50] An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt.[51] Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names.[51]
Reception WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has characterized the herd immunity concept proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration as "scientifically and ethically problematic"[14][17]Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, warned against the idea of letting the virus spread in order to achieve herd immunity at a 12 October 2020 press briefing, calling the notion "unethical". He said: "Herd immunity is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached '... Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it."[14][17] Tedros said that trying to achieve herd immunity by letting the virus spread unchecked would be "scientifically and ethically problematic", especially given that the long-term effects of the disease are still not fully understood.[14][17] He said that though "there has been some discussion recently about the concept of reaching so-called 'herd immunity' by letting the virus spread", "never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic."[14][17][52]
The British Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance told the House of Commons's Science and Technology Select Committee on 3 November that the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, having examined the declaration's proposal, had found "fatal flaws in the argument".[53] Concerns about the declaration had been issued on behalf of the British Academy of Medical Sciences by its president, Robert Lechler, who similarly described the declaration's proposals as "unethical and simply not possible".[45][54] Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, compared the declaration to "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".[50] On 7 October the British Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson said that while at 10 Downing Street "we have considered the full range of scientific opinion throughout the course of this pandemic and we will continue to do so", it was "not possible to rely on an unproven assumption that it is possible for people who are at lower risk, should they contract the virus, to avoid subsequently transmitting it to those who are at a higher risk and would face a higher risk of ending up in hospital, or worse in an intensive care unit."[55] The spokesman reiterated that the Chief Medical Adviser to the British Government and Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Whitty, had stressed that the effects on the rest of the healthcare system were already considered in the formulation of public health advice.[55] British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock said in the House of Commons on 13 October that the Great Barrington Declaration's two central claims '' that widespread infection would lead to herd immunity and that it would be possible to segregate the old and vulnerable '' were both "emphatically false".[56][57][58] On 15 October, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Leader of the House of Commons, told parliament: "The Government are sceptical about the Barrington declaration."[59][60] On 3 November, Chris Whitty told the Science and Technology Select Committee that the declaration was "dangerously flawed", "scientifically weak", and "ethically really difficult".[53][61][62] He explained that "Focused Protection" was operationally impractical and would "inevitably" cause the deaths of "a very large number of people".[53][61][62]
United States infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci called the proposals in the Great Barrington Declaration "nonsense and very dangerous".[15]Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, called the declaration "ridiculous", "total nonsense" and "very dangerous", saying that it would lead to a large number of avoidable deaths.[15][63][64] Fauci said that 30 percent of the population had underlying health conditions that made them vulnerable to the virus and that "older adults, even those who are otherwise healthy, are far more likely than young adults to become seriously ill if they get COVID-19."[63] He added, "This idea that we have the power to protect the vulnerable is total nonsense because history has shown that that's not the case. And if you talk to anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases, they will tell you that that is risky, and you'll wind up with many more infections of vulnerable people, which will lead to hospitalizations and deaths. So I think that we just got to look that square in the eye and say it's nonsense."[63] The Infectious Diseases Society of America, representing over 12,000 doctors and scientists, released a statement calling the Great Barrington Declaration's proposals "inappropriate, irresponsible and ill-informed".[65] 14 other American public-health groups, among them the Trust for America's Health and the American Public Health Association, published an open letter in which they warned that following the recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration would "haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives", adding that "the declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace. Instead of selling false hope that will predictably backfire, we must focus on how to manage this pandemic in a safe, responsible, and equitable way."[13] Europe's largest association of virologists, the Gesellschaft f¼r Virologie [de] , released a statement co-authored by Christian Drosten saying the declaration's proposals were liable to result in "a humanitarian and economic catastrophe".[66]
The then-U.S. National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins, told The Washington Post that the proposed strategy was "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment."[16][5] In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "(it). . . seems to be getting a lot of attention '' and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises".[33][67] The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration" and of "Shut[ting] down covid debate".[67]
William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor and founder of Harvard's cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments, told CNN, "Herd immunity is another word for mass murder. If you allow this virus to spread '... we are looking at 2 to 6 million Americans dead. Not just this year, but every year."[16]
David Naylor, co-chair of the Government of Canada's COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, told the National Post: "Obviously, the Great Barrington fix will excite the minimizers who pretend COVID-19 is not much worse than the flu and enliven the libertarians who object to public health measures on principle '... So be it: they've been offside all along."[10] Naylor also pointed out that a study published in August in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine examined Sweden's "no-lockdown" policy's effect on herd immunity among the Swedish population, finding it did not improve herd immunity despite higher rates of hospitalization and death than in neighbouring countries.[10][68] According to Naylor, the policy advocated by signatories of the declaration would never be the "controlled demographic burn that some zealots imagine", and because of exponential growth of infections would lead to a situation where "with masses of people sick in their 40s and 50s; hospitals will be over-run and deaths will skyrocket as they did in Italy and New York".[10] With the prospect of a vaccine available within months, Naylor questioned the logic of the Great Barrington strategy, asking: "Why on earth should we rush to embrace a reckless prescription for a demographically-selective national 'chickenpox party' involving a dangerous pathogen?".[10]
Deena Hinshaw, Chief Medical Officer of Health of Alberta, said that the declaration would lead to increased deaths, hospitalizations and cases of Long COVID. Hinshaw also said that it was unclear if infection with COVID-19 would create long-term immunity and that being able to successfully implement the declaration's focused protection strategy "is not supported by evidence."[69]
Harvard University professor of epidemiology William Hanage criticized the logic of the declaration's signatories: "After pointing out, correctly, the indirect damage caused by the pandemic, they respond that the answer is to increase the direct damage caused by it", and attacked the feasibility of the idea of "Focused Protection" for those vulnerable to severe infection, saying that "stating that you can keep the virus out of places by testing at a time when the White House has an apparently ongoing outbreak should illustrate how likely that is."[19] He asked, "How would you keep the virus out if 10 percent of the younger population is infected at peak prevalence and with tests that cannot keep the virus out of the White House?"[70] He called the declaration "quite dangerous, for multiple reasons", explaining that "if you do this, you'll get more infections, more hospitalizations and more deaths" and that "the greatest risk of introduction to the most vulnerable communities will be when the rate of infection is really high in younger age groups."[70] Hanage cautioned that uncontrolled infections among the young run the risk of long-term medical effects of the disease.[19] He added that "we tend to make contacts with people around our own age, and given that none of the older generations would have immunity, they'd be in contact networks at risk of devastating outbreaks" and further explained that blanket lockdowns were not argued for by most experts in any case.[70]
David Nabarro, a special envoy of the World Health Organization, said lockdowns can be avoided "if governments impose some reasonable restrictions like social distancing and universal masks and install test and trace strategies."[71]David Nabarro, a special envoy of the World Health Organization, said governments should refrain from using "lockdowns as the primary method to control the virus", a comment cited with approval by the American president, Donald Trump.[71] However, Nabarro rejected Trump's interpretation of his comments, saying that the lockdowns in the spring had been necessary as emergency measures, to buy time, and emphasized the need to find a "middle way", with "masks, social distancing, fewer crowds, testing and tracing" the right way forward.[71] Commenting on the fact that 20 per cent of people killed by COVID-19 have been people aged under 65, and that about a third of recovered COVID-19 patients, including young patients, continue to have symptoms weeks after their infection, Nabarro said it was "amazingly irresponsible" not to take these risks into consideration.[71]
Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University, described the strategy proposed by the declaration as "culling the herd of the sick and disabled", calling it "grotesque".[72] Arguing nearly half the American population is considered to have underlying risk factors for the infection, he advocated for the prevailing quarantine strategy, since peaks in infection rates among the young were likely to correlate with deaths of more vulnerable older people.[70] He wrote: "If you're going to turbo-charge community spread, as everyone else at 'low-risk' goes about their business, I want the plan for my 86-year-old mother to be more than theoretical."[70]
The Francis Crick Institute's group leader of the cell biology of infection laboratory, Rupert Beale, said herd immunity is "very unlikely" to be built up before a COVID-19 vaccine is generally implemented.[73][55] Of the Great Barrington Declaration he said the "declaration prioritises just one aspect of a sensible strategy '' protecting the vulnerable '' and suggests we can safely build up 'herd immunity' in the rest of the population. This is wishful thinking. It is not possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, and it is not possible to fully isolate them. Furthermore, we know that immunity to coronaviruses wanes over time, and re-infection is possible '' so lasting protection of vulnerable individuals by establishing 'herd immunity' is very unlikely to be achieved in the absence of a vaccine."[73][55] Beale described the declaration as "not a helpful contribution to the debate".[55] Of the declarations' signatories he said: "There's a lot of other people who have also signed it and guess what, it's the usual suspects '... It's Karol Sikora who knows nothing about this whatsoever but who is endlessly self-promoting, and you've got Michael Levitt who's got a bad case of Nobel Prize disease."[25] Beale criticized Gupta's actions, saying, "You've got someone who has a track record of saying stuff that is total rubbish, and then moving on to the next thing which is total rubbish, and she's not being held to account. That makes people pretty annoyed."[25] Of the declaration's other critics, Beale said: "That's everyone being polite '... What everyone really thinks is, 'this is all fucking stupid'."[25]
Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, said that the declaration "sounds good in theory" but would not work in practice.[74]Devi Sridhar, the University of Edinburgh's professor of global public health, said that the declaration "sounds good in theory" but that "if you actually work in practical public health on the front line, it doesn't make much sense", saying the declaration's premise was neither "accurate" nor "scientific".[74] Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at University of Southampton, said the declaration was "a very bad idea" and doubted if vulnerable people could avoid the virus if it were allowed to spread.[49] He also said that "ultimately, the Barrington Declaration is based on principles that are dangerous to national and global public health".[49] He said: "There are countries who are managing the pandemic relatively well, including South Korea and New Zealand, and their strategies do not include simply letting the virus run wild whilst hoping that the asthmatic community and the elderly can find somewhere to hide for 12 months."[10][6] Associate professor at the University of Leeds's School of Medicine Stephen Griffin criticized the declaration's flaws in ethics, logistics, and science, pointing out the risk of long-term effects of infection in even those less vulnerable to severe infection.[75] He said: "Ethically, history has taught us that the notion of segregating society, even perhaps with good initial intentions, usually ends in suffering."[76] Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, questioned whether herd immunity was possible for SARS-CoV-2: "Natural, lasting, protective immunity to the disease would be needed, and we don't know how effective or long-lasting people's post-infection immunity will be."[75] Michael Osterholm, an American epidemiologist, regents professor, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said that the Great Barrington Declaration was "a dangerous mix of pixie dust and pseudoscience."[77]
John M. Barry, a professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and author of a book on the 1918 flu pandemic, wrote in The New York Times that the Great Barrington Declaration sounds attractive until one examines "three enormously important omissions".[78] Firstly, it says nothing about harm suffered by people in low-risk groups, even though a significant number of patients who recover from COVID-19, including people who experience no symptoms, have been shown to have heart and lung damage.[78] Secondly, it says nothing about how to shield the vulnerable, and thirdly, it says nothing about the number of dead the strategy would cause, which Barry estimates might "far exceed one million".[78] Barry said that while it was too late for the United States to achieve "near containment of the virus", as South Korea, Australia and Japan had done, the US could still aim for results comparable to those of Canada or Germany, where daily deaths were a couple of dozen at the time of writing (October 2020).[78]
Writing for Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski said that the Great Barrington Declaration was a form of astroturfing similar to that which had previously been used for AIDS denial, climate change denial and creationism advocacy, but this time being deployed for COVID-19 denial, and amounted in practice to an argument for eugenics. Gorski speculated whether the scientists fronting the declaration were simply being useful idiots for AIER or whether they were actively being "motivated more by ideology than science", but said that the practical effect was that the declaration provided a narrative of scientific division useful for political purposes.[79] The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), at whose meeting the declaration was launched, has been described as a libertarian think tank that has received funding from the Koch Foundation and engages in climate change denial.[6][80][81]
Chris Whitty, England's Chief Medical Officer, said the scientists behind the Declaration were "just wrong".[82]Tyler Cowen, a libertarian economist at George Mason University, wrote that while he sympathized with a libertarian approach to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, he considered the declaration to be dangerous and misguided.[83]
In November 2023 during the UK COVID-19 Inquiry, England's chief medical officer Chris Whitty gave evidence that government ministers had been 'bamboozled' by talk of herd immunity in the early stages of the pandemic, and that he thought the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration "were just wrong, straightforwardly", adding that the Declaration was "flawed at multiple levels".[82]
Signatories' statements Citing the principle first do no harm, Matt Strauss, a physician and assistant professor at Queen's School of Medicine, subsequently wrote that mandatory government lockdowns "amount to a medical recommendation of no proven benefit, of extraordinary potential harm, that do not take personal values and individual consent into account" and that "if lockdowns were a prescription drug for Covid treatment, the FDA would never have approved it".[84][85] University of Montreal's paediatrics and clinical ethics professor, Annie Janvier, a co-signatory and part of a group of Quebec scientists critical of the Government of Quebec's response to COVID-19, said that "it's not science that seems to be leading what's going on with COVID, it's public opinion and politics". She criticized the current lockdown measures in Canada, saying that "We need to protect the vulnerable, but right now in Quebec they're not protected".[85]
David Livermore, professor of medical microbiology at the University of East Anglia explained his decision to sign the declaration, saying that "never in history have we handled a pandemic like this" and that "future generations will look back aghast".[86] Co-signatory Ellen Townsend, professor of psychology and leader of the self harm research group at the University of Nottingham, emphasised mental health concerns, stating that "one policy decision that could have the most significant impact for young people to protect their mental health both now and in the future, would be to release them from the lockdown as soon as possible".[87] Mike Hulme, professor of human geology at the University of Cambridge said he had signed because he had "been frustrated that there hasn't been a sufficiently open public debate in the UK". Anthony Brooks, professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, criticized the British Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, alleging that "Being a senior vice president at a drug company doesn't give you the same background that others have. They're seeing things in a non-sophisticated way."[25] Brooks also said that the high average age of the member of the British government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies has influenced their recommendations to the government, as many of the members are themselves "at risk" of serious infection.[25]
Trump administration's support The Trump administration was reported to support the Great Barrington Declaration, based on statements made to Newsweek and other publications by senior advisers that were not authorized to speak on the record.[88]
On 5 October'--the day after the date of the declaration'--Gupta, Bhattacharya, and Kulldorff met the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, an appointee in the Cabinet of Donald Trump, and the neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, an adviser to the Trump administration's White House Coronavirus Task Force in Washington, D.C.[70] Azar said the meeting was held "as part of our commitment to ensure we hear broad and diverse scientific perspectives" and that "we heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration's strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace", while Kulldorff stated that "we had a very good discussion. He asked many questions, and we put forth our case to protect the people who are vulnerable, and the idea of trying to do lockdowns to eliminate this disease is not realistic".[70] Afterwards, Atlas also endorsed the declaration, telling The Hill that the "targeted protection of the vulnerable and opening schools and society policy matches the policy of the President and what I have advised".[70] On the evening of 5 October, Donald Trump returned to the White House after several nights in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, having undergone treatments for coronavirus disease; he told his followers on social media on his return "don't be afraid of it [COVID-19]".[10][89]
Bhattacharya denied that a herd immunity strategy was recommended by the declaration, saying that "a herd immunity strategy better describes the current lockdown policy", explaining "herd immunity is a biological fact so of course we mention it, but it is not our strategy".[70] Gupta said that "the alternative [to herd immunity], which is to keep suppressing the virus, comes at an enormous cost to the poor and to the young and not just in this country [the United States] but worldwide", arguing that the herd immunity threshold for SARS-CoV-2 will be reached in December 2020.[70] Bhattacharya advised that until that time vulnerable people might be housed away from multigenerational households, with government support, saying that "we could do policies that would make those resources available to older people in multigenerational settings for the limited period of time that's necessary until the disease is under control, and after time, they could go back home".[70]
Other supporters In the UK, Conservative Party member of parliament for Wycombe, Steve Baker, having signed the declaration, spoke in favour of the declaration's policies on two occasions in the House of Commons, first on 6 October and again on 13 October.[90][91][92] Conservative MP for New Forest West, Desmond Swayne asked the Leader of the House of Commons if a debate could be held on what he called "censorship" and "the sinister disappearance of the link from Google to the Great Barrington declaration".[93][94][60] Conservative journalist Toby Young wrote an opinion piece in The Spectator supporting the declaration and querying the credentials of its critics, claiming they were "censors" and "smear merchants" while claiming the declaration's authors were not "outliers or cranks" but there had been a "well-orchestrated attempt to suppress and discredit it".[95] On 1 November, eurosceptic former members of the European Parliament, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, announced in The Telegraph that an application has been made to the Electoral Commission for their Brexit Party to be renamed Reform UK; after identifying the British government response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a more pressing issue than Brexit, the party is to advocate Focused Protection in accordance with the Great Barrington Declaration.[96][97][98]
On 6 October, the declaration was endorsed by The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, who called it "the best advice for how we should cope with Covid."[99]
Counter memorandum The John Snow Memorandum, the text of which was published simultaneously in The Lancet and dedicated site www.johnsnowmemo.com,[100][101][102] and built on a previous The Lancet correspondence piece,[103] is a response by 80 researchers denouncing the Great Barrington Declaration and its herd immunity approach.[20][104] Taking its name from John Snow, the epidemiologist who worked on the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak,[20][102] it states that the herd immunity idea is "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by the scientific evidence".[16] It acknowledges that COVID-19 restrictions have led to demoralization, making such an idea attractive, but states that "there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2", adding that "such a strategy would not lead to the end of COVID-19, but instead result in recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination."[16]
The letter's authors were co-ordinated by Deepti Gurdasani, clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London,[105][106] and included researchers and clinicians such as Marc Lipsitch, William Hanage,[107][16] Nahid Bhadelia,[16] Isabella Eckerle,[108] Emma Hodcroft,[108] Florian Krammer,[109] Martin McKee,[110] Dominic Pimenta,[111] Viola Priesemann,[106] Devi Sridhar,[112] Gavin Yamey,[113] and Rochelle Walensky.[16][114]
Other signatories have included Reinhard Busse,[106] Christian Althaus,[108] Jacques Fellay,[108] Ilona Kickbusch,[108] and David Stuckler.[110]
In 2022, John Ioannidis, a scientist who has opposed prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns, authored a paper in BMJ Open arguing that signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration were shunned as a fringe minority by those in favor of the John Snow Memorandum. According to him, the latter used their large numbers of followers on Twitter and other social media and op-eds to shape a scientific "groupthink" against the former, who had less influence as measured by the Kardashian Index.[115][116] The BMJ published responses to his paper, including a comment by Gavin Yamey, David Gorski, and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz which argued that Ioannidis's paper featured "factual errors, statistical shortcomings, failure to protect the named research subjects from harm, and potentially undeclared conflicts of interest that entirely undermine the analysis presented."[117]
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This is plan B, authored by Dr Martin Kulldorff, Dr Sunetra Gupta and Dr Jay Bhattacharya and signed by 1,120 medical and public health scientists, 1,241 medical practitioners and more than 19,000 members of the public, including me. I commend it to the Government. ^ Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con) (13 October 2020), volume 682; column 217, "Public Health", Hansard, archived from the original on 26 October 2020 , retrieved 17 October 2020 , I turn in the last few seconds to the Great Barrington declaration. No one can deny that it is well motivated. Indeed, it says: "Keeping these measures" '' lockdown policies around the world '' "in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed." I have been looking closely at the critiques of the declaration. Professor James Naismith of the University of Oxford wrote: "Humility and willingness to consider alternatives are hallmarks of good science." 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10 AI Predictions For 2024
Sun, 31 Dec 2023 13:09
Prediction #8: The Microsoft/OpenAI relationship will begin to fray.
Getty1. Nvidia will dramatically ramp up its efforts to become a cloud provider.Most organizations do not pay Nvidia directly for GPUs. Rather, they access GPUs via cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, which in turn buy chips in bulk from Nvidia.
But Amazon, Microsoft and Google'--Nvidia's largest customers'--are fast becoming its competitors. Recognizing how much value in AI today accrues to the silicon layer (for evidence of this, look no further than Nvidia's stock price), the major cloud providers are all investing heavily to develop their own homegrown AI chips, which will compete directly with Nvidia's GPUs.
With the cloud providers looking to move down the technology stack to the silicon layer in order to capture more value, don't be surprised to see Nvidia move in the opposite direction: offering its own cloud services and operating its own data centers in order to reduce its traditional reliance on the cloud companies for distribution.
Nvidia has already begun exploring this path, rolling out a new cloud service called DGX Cloud earlier this year. We predict that Nvidia will meaningfully ramp up this strategy next year.
This could entail Nvidia standing up its own data centers (DGX Cloud is currently housed within other cloud providers' physical infrastructures); it could even entail Nvidia acquiring an upstart cloud provider like CoreWeave, with whom it already partners closely, as a way to vertically integrate. One way or another, expect the relationship between Nvidia and the big cloud providers to get more complicated as we move into 2024.
2. Stability AI will shut down.It is one of the AI world's worst-kept secrets: once-high-flying startup Stability AI has been a slow-motion train wreck for much of 2023.
Stability is hemorrhaging talent. Departures in recent months include the company's chief operating officer, chief people officer, VP engineering, VP product, VP applied machine learning, VP comms, head of research, head of audio and general counsel.
The two firms that led Stability's high-profile $100 million financing round last year, Coatue and Lightspeed, have reportedly both stepped off the company's board in recent months amid disputes with Stability CEO Emad Mostaque. The company tried and failed earlier this year to raise additional funds at a $4 billion valuation.
Next year, we predict the beleaguered company will buckle under the mounting pressure and shut down altogether.
Following pressure from investors, Stability has reportedly begun looking for an acquirer but so far has found little interest.
One thing Stability has going in its favor: the company recently raised $50 million from Intel, a cash infusion that will extend its runway. For Intel's part, the investment seems to reflect a pressing desire to get a high-profile customer to commit to its new AI chips as it seeks to gain ground against competitor Nvidia.
But Stability has a notoriously high burn rate: at the time of the Intel investment in October, Stability was reportedly spending $8 million a month while bringing in a small fraction of that in revenue. At that rate, the $50 million investment won't last through the end of 2024.
3. The terms ''large language model'' and ''LLM'' will become less common.In AI today, the phrase ''large language model'' (and its abbreviation LLM) are frequently used as shorthand for ''any advanced AI model.'' This is understandable, given that many of the original generative AI models to rise to prominence (e.g., GPT-3) were text-only models.
But as AI model types proliferate and as AI becomes increasingly multimodal, this term will become increasingly imprecise and unhelpful. The emergence of multimodal AI has been one of the defining themes in AI in 2023. Many of today's leading generative AI models incorporate text, images, 3-D, audio, video, music, physical action and more. They are far more than just language models.
Consider an AI model that has been trained on the amino acid sequences and molecular structures of known proteins in order to generate de novo protein therapeutics. Though its underlying architecture is an extension of models like GPT-3, does it really make sense to call this a large language model?
Or consider foundation models in robotics: large generative models that combine visual and language input with general internet-scale knowledge in order to take actions in the real world, e.g. via a robotic arm. A richer term than ''language model'' should and will exist for such models. (''Vision-language-action,'' or VLA, model is one alternative phrase that researchers have used.)
A similar point can be made about the FunSearch model recently published by DeepMind, which the authors themselves refer to as an LLM but which deals in mathematics rather than in natural language.
In 2024, as our models become increasingly multidimensional, so, too, will the terms that we use to describe them.
4. The most advanced closed models will continue to outperform the most advanced open models by a meaningful margin.One important topic in AI discourse today is the debate around open-source and closed-source AI models. While most cutting-edge AI model developers'--OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Cohere, among others'--keep their most advanced models proprietary, a handful of companies including Meta and buzzy new startup Mistral have chosen to make their state-of-the-art model weights publicly available.
Today, the highest-performing foundation models (e.g., OpenAI's GPT-4) are closed-source. But many open-source advocates argue that the performance gap between closed and open models is shrinking and that open models are on track to overtake closed models in performance, perhaps by next year. (This chart made the rounds recently.)
We disagree. We predict that the best closed models will continue to meaningfully outperform the best open models in 2024 (and beyond).
The state of the art in foundation model performance is a fast-moving frontier. Mistral recently boasted that it will open-source a GPT-4-level model sometime in 2024, a claim that has generated excitement in the open source community. But OpenAI released GPT-4 in early 2023. By the time Mistral comes out with this new model, it will likely be more than a year behind the curve. OpenAI may well have released GPT-4.5 or even GPT-5 by then, establishing an entirely new performance frontier. (Rumors have been circulating that GPT-4.5 may even drop before the end of 2023.)
As in many other domains, catching up to the frontier as a fast follower, after another group has defined it, is easier to achieve than establishing a new frontier before anyone else has shown it is possible. For instance, it was considerably riskier, more challenging and more expensive for OpenAI to build GPT-4 using a mixture-of-experts architecture, when this approach had not previously been shown to work at this scale, than it was for Mistral to follow in OpenAI's footsteps several months later with its own mixture-of-experts model.
There is a basic structural reason to doubt that open models will leapfrog closed models in performance in 2024. The investment required to develop a new model that advances the state of the art is enormous, and will only continue to balloon for every step-change increase in model capabilities. Some industry observers estimate that OpenAI will spend around $2 billion to develop GPT-5.
Meta is a publicly traded company ultimately answerable to its shareholders. The company seems not to expect any direct revenue from its open-source model releases. Llama 2 reportedly cost Meta around $20 million to build; that level of investment may be justifiable, even without any associated revenue boost, given the strategic benefits. But is Meta really going to sink anywhere near $2 billion into the quest to build an AI model that outperforms anything else in existence, just to open-source it without any expectation for a concrete return on investment?
Upstarts like Mistral face a similar conundrum. There is no clear revenue model for open-source foundation models (as Stability AI has learned the hard way). Charging for hosting open-source models, for instance, becomes a race to the bottom on price, as we have seen in recent days with Mistral's new Mixtral model. So'--even if Mistral had access to the billions of dollars needed to build a new model that leapfrogged OpenAI'--would it really choose to turn around and give that model away for free?
Our sneaking suspicion is that, as companies like Mistral invest ever greater sums to build ever more powerful AI models, they may end up relaxing their stance on open source and keeping their most advanced models proprietary so that they can charge for them.
(To be clear: this is not an argument against the merits of open-source AI. It is not an argument that open-source AI will not be important in the world of artificial intelligence going forward. On the contrary, we expect open-source models to play a critical role in the proliferation of AI in the years ahead. However: we predict that the most advanced AI systems, those that push forward the frontiers of what is possible in AI, will continue to be proprietary.)
5. A number of Fortune 500 companies will create a new C-suite position: Chief AI Officer.Artificial intelligence has shot to the top of the priority list for Fortune 500 companies this year, with boards and management teams across industries scrambling to figure out what this powerful new technology means for their businesses.
One tactic that we expect to become more common among large enterprises next year: appointing a ''Chief AI Officer'' to spearhead the organization's AI initiatives.
We saw a similar trend play out during the rise of cloud computing a decade ago, with many organizations hiring ''Chief Cloud Officers'' to help them navigate the strategic implications of the cloud.
This trend will gain further momentum in the corporate world given a parallel trend already underway in government. President Biden's recent executive order on AI requires every federal government agency to appoint a Chief AI Officer, meaning that over 400 new Chief AI Officers will be hired across the U.S. government in the coming months.
Naming a Chief AI Officer will become a popular way for companies to signal externally that they are serious about AI. Whether these roles will prove valuable over the long term is a different question. (How many Chief Cloud Officers are still around today?)
6. An alternative to the transformer architecture will see meaningful adoption.Introduced in a seminal 2017 paper out of Google, the transformer architecture is the dominant paradigm in AI technology today. Every major generative AI model and product in existence'--ChatGPT, Midjourney, GitHub Copilot and so on'--is built using transformers.
But no technology remains dominant forever.
On the edges of the AI research community, a few groups have been hard at work developing novel, next-generation AI architectures that are superior to transformers in different ways.
One key hub of these efforts is Chris R(C)'s lab at Stanford. The central theme of R(C) and his students' work has been to build a new model architecture that scales sub-quadratically with sequence length (rather than quadratically, as transformers do). Sub-quadratic scaling would enable AI models that are (1) less computationally intensive and (2) better able to process long sequences compared to transformers. Notable sub-quadratic model architectures out of R(C)'s lab in recent years have included S4, Monarch Mixer and Hyena.
The most recent sub-quadratic architecture'--and perhaps the most promising yet'--is Mamba. Published just last month by two R(C) prot(C)g(C)s, Mamba has inspired tremendous buzz in the AI research community, with some commentators hailing it as ''the end of transformers.''
Other efforts to build alternatives to the transformer architecture include liquid neural networks, developed at MIT, and Sakana AI, a new startup led by one of the co-inventors of the transformer.
Next year, we predict that one or more of these challenger architectures will break through and win real adoption, transitioning from a mere research novelty to a credible alternative AI approach used in production.
To be clear, we do not expect transformers to go away in 2024. They are a deeply entrenched technology on which the world's most important AI systems are based. But we do predict that 2024 will be the year in which cutting-edge alternatives to the transformer become viable options for real-world AI use cases.
7. Strategic investments from cloud providers into AI startups'--and the associated accounting implications'--will be challenged by regulators.A tidal wave of investment capital has flowed from large technology companies into AI startups this year.
Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI in January and then led a $1.3 billion funding round in Inflection in June. This fall, Amazon announced that it would invest up to $4 billion into Anthropic. Not to be outdone, Alphabet announced weeks later that it would invest up to $2 billion into Anthropic. Nvidia, meanwhile, has been perhaps the most prolific AI investor in the world this year, plowing money into dozens of AI startups that use its GPUs including Cohere, Inflection, Hugging Face, Mistral, CoreWeave, Inceptive, AI21 Labs and Imbue.
It is not hard to see that the motivation for making these investments is, at least in part, to secure these high-growth AI startups as long-term compute customers.
Such investments can implicate an important gray area in accounting rules. This may sound like an esoteric topic'--but it will have massive implications for the competitive landscape in AI going forward.
Say a cloud vendor invests $100 million into an AI startup based on a guarantee that the startup will turn around and spend that $100 million on the cloud vendor's services. Conceptually, this is not true arms-length revenue for the cloud vendor; the vendor is, in effect, using the investment to artificially transform its own balance sheet cash into revenue.
These types of deals'--often referred to as ''round-tripping'' (since the money goes out and comes right back in)'--have raised eyebrows this year among Silicon Valley leaders like VC Bill Gurley.
The devil is in the details. Not all of the deals mentioned above necessarily represent true instances of round-tripping. It matters, for instance, whether an investment comes with an explicit obligation for the startup to spend the capital on the investor's products, or simply encourages broad strategic collaboration between the two organizations. The contracts between Microsoft and OpenAI, or between Amazon and Anthropic, are not publicly available, so we cannot say for sure how they are structured.
But at least in some cases, cloud providers may well be recognizing revenue via these investments that they should not be.
These deals have proceeded with little to no regulatory scrutiny to this point. This will change in 2024. Expect the SEC to take a much harder look at round-tripping in AI investments next year'--and expect the number and size of such deals to drop dramatically as a result.
Given that cloud providers have been one of the largest sources of capital fueling the generative AI boom to date, this could have a material impact on the overall AI fundraising environment in 2024.
8. The Microsoft/OpenAI relationship will begin to fray.Microsoft and OpenAI are closely allied. Microsoft has poured over $10 billion into OpenAI to date. OpenAI's models power key Microsoft products like Bing, GitHub Copilot and Office 365 Copilot. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was unexpectedly fired by the board last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella played an instrumental role in getting him reinstated.
Yet Microsoft and OpenAI are distinct organizations, with distinct ambitions and distinct long-term visions for the future of AI. The alliance has so far worked well for both groups, but it is a marriage of convenience. The two organizations are far from perfectly aligned.
Next year, we predict that cracks will begin to appear in the partnership between these two giants. Indeed, hints of future friction have already begun to surface.
As OpenAI looks to aggressively ramp up its enterprise business, it will find itself more and more often competing directly with Microsoft for customers. For its part, Microsoft has plenty of reasons to diversify beyond OpenAI as a supplier of cutting-edge AI models. Microsoft recently announced a deal to partner with OpenAI rival Cohere, for instance. Faced with the exorbitant costs of running OpenAI's models at scale, Microsoft has also invested in internal AI research efforts on smaller language models like Phi-2.
Bigger picture, as AI becomes ever more powerful, important questions about AI safety, risk, regulation and public accountability will take center stage. The stakes will be high. Given their differing cultures, values and histories, it seems inevitable that the two organizations will diverge in their philosophies and approaches to these issues.
With a $2.7 trillion market capitalization, Microsoft is the second-largest company in the world. Yet the ambitions of OpenAI and its charismatic leader Sam Altman may be even more far-reaching. These two organizations serve each other well today. But don't expect that to last forever.
9. Some of the hype and herd mentality behavior that shifted from crypto to AI in 2023 will shift back to crypto in 2024.It is hard to imagine venture capitalists and technology leaders getting excited about anything other than AI right now. But a year is a long time, and VCs' ''convictions'' can shift remarkably quickly.
Crypto is a cyclical industry. It is out of fashion right now, but make no mistake, another big bull run will come'--as it did in 2021, and before that in 2017, and before that in 2013. In case you haven't noticed, after starting the year under $17,000, the price of bitcoin has risen sharply in the past few months, from $25,000 in September to over $40,000 today. A major bitcoin upswing may be in the works, and if it is, plenty of crypto activity and hype will ensue.
A number of well-known venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and technologists who today position themselves as ''all in'' on AI were deeply committed to crypto during the 2021-2022 bull market. If crypto asset prices do come roaring back next year, expect some of them to follow the heat in that direction, just as they followed the heat to AI this year.
(Candidly, it would be a welcome development to see some of the excessive AI hype redirect elsewhere next year.)
10. At least one U.S. court will rule that generative AI models trained on the internet represent a violation of copyright. The issue will begin working its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.A significant and underappreciated legal risk looms over the entire field of generative artificial intelligence today: the world's leading generative AI models have been trained on troves of copyrighted content, a fact that could trigger massive liability and transform the economics of the industry.
Whether it is poetry from GPT-4 or Claude 2, images from DALL-E 3 or Midjourney, or videos from Pika or Runway, generative AI models are able to produce breathtakingly sophisticated output because they have been trained on much of the world's digital data. For the most part, AI companies have pulled this data off the internet free of charge and used it at will to develop their models.
But do the millions of individuals who actually created all that intellectual property in the first place'--the humans who wrote the books, penned the poetry, took the photographs, drew the paintings, filmed the videos'--have a say over whether and how it is used by AI practitioners? Do they have a right to some of the value created by the AI models that result?
The answers to these questions will hinge on courts' interpretation of a key legal concept known as ''fair use''. Fair use is a well-developed legal doctrine that has been around for centuries. But its application to the nascent field of generative AI creates complex new theoretical questions without clear answers.
''People in machine learning aren't necessarily aware of the nuances of fair use and, at the same time, the courts have ruled that certain high-profile real-world examples are not protected fair use, yet those very same examples look like things AI is putting out,'' said Stanford researcher Peter Henderson. ''There's uncertainty about how lawsuits will come out in this area.''
How will these questions get resolved? Through individual cases and court rulings.
Applying fair use doctrine to generative AI will be a complex undertaking requiring creative thinking and subjective judgment. Credible arguments and defensible conclusions will exist on both sides of the issue.
Thus, don't be surprised to see at least one U.S. court next year rule that generative AI models like GPT-4 and Midjourney do represent copyright violations, and that the companies that built them are liable to the owners of the intellectual property on which the models were trained.
This will not resolve the issue. Other U.S. courts, in other jurisdictions, faced with different fact patterns, will in all likelihood reach the opposite conclusion: that generative AI models are protected by the fair use doctrine.
The issue will begin to work its way all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will eventually provide a conclusive legal resolution. (The path to the nation's highest court is long and winding; don't expect a Supreme Court ruling on this issue next year.)
In the meantime, plenty of litigation will ensue, plenty of settlements will be negotiated, and lawyers around the world will be kept busy navigating a patchwork of caselaw. Many billions of dollars will hang in the balance.
See here for our 2023 AI predictions, and see here for our end-of-year retrospective on them.
See here for our 2022 AI predictions, and see here for our end-of-year retrospective on them.
See here for our 2021 AI predictions, and see here for our end-of-year retrospective on them.
TESCREAL hallucinations: Psychedelic and AI hype as inequality engines in: Journal of Psychedelic Studies Volume 7 Issue S1 (2023)
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 21:36
AbstractBackground and AimsWhile many scholars have called attention to similarities between the earlier SSRI hype and the ongoing hype for psychedelic medications, the rhetoric of psychedelic hype is tinged with utopian and esoteric aspirations that have no parallel in the discourse surrounding SSRIs or other antidepressants. This utopian discourse provides insight into the ways that global tech elites are instrumentalizing both psychedelics and artificial intelligence (AI) as tools in a broader world-building project that justifies increasing material inequality. If realized, this project would undermine the use of both tools for prosocial and pro-environmental outcomes.
MethodsMy argument develops through rhetorical analysis of the ways that industry leaders envision the future of medicalized psychedelics in their public communications. I draw on examples from media interviews, blog posts, podcasts, and press releases to underscore the persuasive strategies and ideological commitments that are driving the movement to transform psychedelics into pharmaceutical medications.
ResultsCounterfactual efforts to improve mental health by increasing inequality are widespread in the psychedelics industry. These efforts have been propelled by an elitist worldview that is widely-held in Silicon Valley. The backbone of this worldview is the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies, which describes an interrelated cluster of belief systems: transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism.
ConclusionsThis article demonstrates that TESCREALism is a driving force in major segments of the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, where it is influencing the design of extractive systems that directly contradict the field's world-healing aspirations. These findings contribute to a developing subfield of critical psychedelic studies, which interrogates the political and economic implications of psychedelic medicalization.
IntroductionResearchers have called attention to the ways that the hype promoting psychedelics as miracle cures replicates preceding claims about the efficacy of SSRIs and other antidepressants in prior decades. As the drug historian David Herzberg articulated in conversation with UC Berkeley's
The Microdose:
There's been an enormous amount of money invested in psychedelics as people hope that they can be the real Prozac in the same way that Prozac hoped it would be the real Valium and Valium would be the real barbiturates, which would be the real morphine. There's a long history of hoping that maybe this time, it's not so complicated; maybe there is a simple switch to change people without having to change any [other] aspect of their [lives]. (Hu, 2023a)
Although corporate actors assert that psychedelics will succeed where other mental health treatments failed due to their unique mechanisms of action (see Devenot, Conner, & Doyle, 2022, pp. 486''488), the project of psychedelic medicalization is following the same playbook as the earlier rollout of antidepressant pharmaceuticals. While the underlying etiology of mental illness might have shifted from a model of chemical imbalance to restricted features in the brain's energy landscape (Carhart-Harris et al., 2023), commentators are positioning psychedelics as yet another individualized, brain-based solution to complex social problems with roots in material inequality. By treating individual symptoms rather than calling for societal reorganization, the medicalization of psychedelics is repeating the same neoliberal, for-profit approach to healthcare that contributed to the poor outcomes of Prozac and other SSRIs (Davies, 2022; Ioannidis, 2008; Kemp, Lickel, & Deacon, 2014). As a result, there is every indication that the transplantation of this approach into the novel context of psychedelic medicine will lead to similarly disappointing outcomes.
Although neoliberalism arose as a theory of political-economic practices that sought to ''liberat[e] individual entrepreneurial freedoms'' through ''strong property rights, free markets, and free trade'' (Harvey, 2005, p. 2), the global ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism since the 1970s came to influence the ''common sense'' way that people view the world and themselves. Since its values are often internalized as natural and inevitable, neoliberalism drives people to seek out continual self-improvement in the name of personal responsibility, under immense pressure to persevere and succeed as individuals in isolation from broader community support (Gearin & Devenot, 2021, pp. 926''927). Despite evidence against the quality of care provided by the neoliberal approach to individualized, for-profit healthcare, this model has persisted'--in part'--because it aligns with the interests of the powerful, creating market opportunities within which wealth can be extracted from the masses and funneled to the top.
While others have noted similarities between the earlier SSRI hype and the ongoing hype for psychedelic medications,1 the rhetoric of psychedelic hype is tinged with utopian and magico-religious aspirations that have no parallel in the discourse surrounding SSRIs or other antidepressants. I argue that this utopian discourse provides insight into the ways that global financial and tech elites are instrumentalizing psychedelics as one tool in a broader world-building project that justifies increasing material inequality. This elite project reveals how medicalized psychedelics can potentially undermine the very prosocial and pro-environmental outcomes that the field's funders insist psychedelics will promote. To understand the envisioned role of psychedelics within this elite project, this paper analyzes a different parallel hype, revealing correspondences between the psychedelic industry hype and the concurrent hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), including the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT.2 The presence of these parallels is understandable when one considers their underlying affinities, like two blooms from one plant: the same Silicon Valley and venture capital forces are investing enormous amounts of capital to develop both as cultivars in their own image, selecting for desired traits that further the existing socioeconomic order.
My argument develops through rhetorical analysis of the ways that industry leaders envision the future of medicalized psychedelics in their public communications. I draw on examples from media interviews, blog posts, podcasts, and press releases to underscore the persuasive strategies and ideological commitments that are driving the movement to transform psychedelics into pharmaceutical medications. These communications reveal the pervasiveness of beliefs that circumvent the actual barriers to human and more-than-human flourishing on this planet. I begin by examining how the pharmaceutical field of psychedelic medicine has been informed by teleological and spiritual perspectives that contradict the interdisciplinary evidence base regarding the causes of trauma. With the influx of capital investments into this field, these spiritual beliefs have synergized with elitist theories of change and innovation, which position the well-being of elites as inherently more important than the material needs of the masses. Together, these strains set the groundwork for the co-optation of psychedelic discourse by longtermist transhumanists, who envision roles for psychedelic pharmaceuticals within a heroic, evolutionary project that depends on widening inequality to succeed.
This methodology and its findings contribute to a developing subfield of critical psychedelic studies that interrogates the political and economic implications of psychedelic medicalization. Through similar approaches to rhetorical analysis, each of the preceding papers in this tradition have problematized widely-held, normative, and hegemonic assumptions in the field to highlight how alternative approaches are obscured by the dominant discourses (e.g., Devenot, Conner, & Doyle, 2022; Gearin & Devenot, 2021, 2021; Noorani, 2019; Pace & Devenot, 2021; Plesa & Petranker, 2022; Tvorun-Dunn, 2022; K. Williams, Romero, Braunstein, & Brant, 2022). As this critical literature has emphasized, the neoliberal and corporatized medicalization of psychedelics promises to exacerbate the very issues that it purports to solve. Although industry insiders have positioned psychedelics as solutions for civilizational threats including political polarization, the rise of fascism, environmental degradation, and increasing rates of mental illness, scholars in other fields have associated all of these problems with rising inequality in society.3 If the psychedelic industry provides the impetus for yet more billionaires and unicorn companies, these promised outcomes'--which are cited to justify the industry's rapid expansion'--will amount to nothing more than a bait and switch: by increasing the overall inequality in society, the psychedelics industry could end up fueling the root causes of the very problems to which it is selling supposedly novel solutions.
Rather than addressing the systemic drivers of these interrelated problems, major funders are explicitly building the psychedelics industry to extract wealth for ever-widening inequality. In this paper, I will argue that this counterfactual approach to mental healthcare is propelled by an elitist worldview that is widely-held among Silicon Valley's billionaires. The backbone of this worldview is the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies'--an acronym coined by the critical AI scholars mile Torres and Timnit Gebru to describe an interrelated cluster of belief systems: transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism. Taken together, TESCREALism amounts to the ''court philosophy'' of the global oligarch class, serving to lionize the acceleration of inequality towards the goal of colonizing far-distant galaxies. Just as earlier court philosophers articulated the divine right of kings to naturalize monarchy, present-day billionaires are funding TESCREAList philosophers and ''thought leaders'' to articulate ethical justifications for extreme inequality under oligarchic rule.4
In its most dangerous formulation, TESCREALism sounds like science fiction. To its adherents, the rise of AI signals that humanity is hurtling towards an evolutionary phase change or technological singularity that can only be realized through elite control of the world's collective resources. A prominent example is Elon Musk, who has justified his extreme wealth in terms of ''accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of consciousness to the stars'' (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, p. 5). Beyond AI, TESCREALism is also a driving force in major segments of the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, where it is influencing the design of extractive systems that directly contradict the field's world-healing aspirations. As this article will explore, some of these figures envision psychedelics as a new extractive industry for funneling wealth towards transhumanist evolution, whereas others anticipate accommodating the masses to impending evolutionary changes. In parallel to the capitalist AI field, which is plowing past critical calls for transparency and democratic engagement (Luccioni, 2023), ''corporadelic'' actors in the psychedelics industry are claiming an urgent mandate to address global suffering that cannot wait (W. Williams, 2020). In their capitalist manifestations, both industries claim authority to pursue solutions to the precise harms that their nascent systems are designed to actively perpetuate. As I will argue, critical voices must remain vigilant to these rhetorical strategies in order to reveal'--and counteract'--the fabricated, hallucinatory character of Silicon Valley's self-serving narratives. Far from the promise of healing trauma, the alternative would amount to both fields' complicity in the use of AI and psychedelics as technologies of elite persuasion.
Elite hallucinations in AI and psychedelicsDrawing on a distinction between genuine psychedelic insights and illusory ''tripping,'' the public intellectual Naomi Klein wrote in The Guardian about how corporate actors in the field of generative AI have co-opted the word ''hallucination'' as a means of subtly naturalizing their preferred approach to AI development as both good and inevitable. Klein argues that by describing unreal but plausible-sounding facts and citations as ''hallucinations,'' this rhetoric gives credence to the transhumanist fantasy that these companies are on the cusp of birthing an advanced form of consciousness that will trigger an ''evolutionary leap for our species'' (Klein, 2023).5 For Klein, this belief and its attendant mythologies'--that AI will end poverty, cure all disease, solve climate change, and make jobs more meaningful'--are the actual hallucinations, since these claims dissociate from the evidence of material conditions to justify AI's rapid cultivation by corporate interests. Although Klein references psychedelics as a metaphorical frame in order to highlight this point within the specific context of AI hype, she does not mention that these same elite hallucinations are also fueling the rise of psychedelic medicalization.
In the corporate rollout of both psychedelics and AI, capitalist logics actively undercut any potential for these tools to address the problems of poverty, climate change, and disease. As Klein points out:
There is a world in which generative AI'...could indeed be marshaled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the [planet]'.... In [today's] reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI'...is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further [inequality]. (Klein, 2023)
As it stands, both AI and psychedelics are bankrolled by financial elites who are seeking new ways to profit off of (and maintain) the status quo of power relations in society. Klein argues that the solutions to climate change are not elusive, as AI enthusiasts claim; rather, the known solutions are at odds with the status quo of capitalism, which profits off of the production of oil and ''consumption-based models'' for economic growth. A similar argument applies to the discourse on psychedelics: to actually fix the mental health ''crisis,'' we need to address the root cause of inequality by ensuring access to safe food, water, shelter, education, and healthcare. Since this would require systems change, economic elites are holding out for ''magic bullet'' solutions that can be deployed at scale to prop up'--and develop new income streams for'--the existing, dysfunctional socioeconomic system. The elite vision for psychedelics as individualized treatments for social problems is thus a symptom of the problem itself, as Klein describes of AI in relation to the climate: ''The climate crisis is not, in fact, a mystery or a riddle we haven't yet solved'.... We know what it would take, but it's not a quick fix'--it's a paradigm shift. Waiting for'...a more palatable and/or profitable answer is not a cure for this crisis, it's one more symptom of it.''
In line with the promotion of other psychopharmaceuticals during preceding decades, business leaders in the psychedelics industry pitch their products as revolutionary solutions for contemporary society's ills, including the mental illness epidemic. Often, these proclamations are informed by political and economic ideologies that contradict their purported therapeutic aspirations. The following sections will present case studies of prominent figures in the psychedelic medicine industry in order to make legible what these figures mean when they claim that psychedelics will revolutionize mental healthcare. As close readings of their public statements reveal, many leaders of the psychedelic medical industry express motivations that run counter to evidence-based solutions for supporting human (and non-human) flourishing. Although some of these figures' visions for the future are unlikely to succeed, their words reveal the extent to which the public discourse about psychedelic medicines has been shaped by vested interests in maintaining the status quo of society's widespread inequalities. As Tvorun-Dunn has argued, such rhetorical analysis of this discourse provides insight into the actual ''meanings and motivations'' that have guided the development of psychedelics as pharmaceutical medications and biotech investment opportunities'--often in contradiction to their prosocial and pro-evironmental claims (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, p. 2).
''Net-zero trauma'' and ''mass mental health'' through mass spiritualization (Rick Doblin, MAPS)As in the case of AI hype, industry leaders are arguing that psychedelics offer a profitable solution to the ravages of inequality without changing society's underlying material conditions. Rick Doblin'--founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)'--has repeatedly stated that psychedelics ''will be a catalyst for mass mental health'' through their capacity to change individual perspectives (Doblin, 2021). While international media outlets have tended to run this line without further elaboration, Doblin clarified his meaning in a 2020 podcast, when he identified ''mass mental health'' with a ''mass spiritualization'' of humanity. According to Doblin, the psychedelic experience is ''the antidote to genocide, to the holocaust, to nuclear destruction, to racism'.... I see the medicalization [of psychedelics]'...as a tool to bring about mass mental health or mass spiritualization you could say'.... I see that what we need to do with psychedelics is expand our humanity'' (CIIS Public Programs Podcast, 2020). Doblin further defines this spiritualization as a shift from literal or ''fundamentalist'' religious beliefs to a spiritual mysticism rooted in unitive psychedelic experiences (PSYCH, 2021, 39:53). This confidence in the notion that psychedelics will radically minimize interpersonal harms reappears in another frequent slogan: ''I believe that fully globalized access to MDMA-assisted therapy can lead to a world of net-zero trauma by 2070'' (Doblin, 2023). These claims are based on theological beliefs rather than medical evidence, and Doblin's suggestion that psychedelic experiences necessarily encourage prosocial behavior is contradicted by both cross-disciplinary research (Pace & Devenot, 2021) and by the harms caused within MAPS's own clinical trials (McNamee, Devenot, & Buisson, 2023; Nickles & Ross, 2022).
The spiritual orientation of MAPS's mission extends beyond Doblin's public relations strategy to the scientific methodology of its clinical trials. Although MAPS describes the therapy component of its MDMA for PTSD trials as ''non-directive,'' their approach'--which is explicitly informed by Stanislav Grof's psychedelic philosophy'--includes a range of spiritual beliefs that have never been empirically supported (Devenot, Tumilty, et al., 2022; Love, 2022). Chief among these is the notion that MDMA unleashes the patient-participant's ''inner healing intelligence,'' which MAPS's treatment manual characterizes as ''a person's innate capacity to heal'' (Mithoefer et al., 2017, p. 8). Although this language sounds analogous to the body's ability to heal damaged tissue, the inner healing intelligence is a Grofian concept that attributes healing to ''ordinarily hidden spiritual dimensions of existence,'' which are accessed through non-ordinary states of consciousness (Grof, 2006, p. 350). MAPS's manual directs adherence raters to monitor therapists' belief in the inner healing intelligence: therapists should ''trust'' that difficult emotions are productive and emerge at the ''best time,'' according to the wisdom of the inner healer (Mithoefer et al., 2017, pp. 11''12). Although MAPS is approaching FDA approval of MDMA as a medical treatment for PTSD, this amounts to a form of faith-based healing through the unfolding of teleological processes. As the following sections will explore, these currents of teleological spirituality within the field of psychedelic medicine have primed its co-optation by Silicon Valley's elitist, evolutionary ideologies.
''Trickle-down ecstasis'': elite theories of social change in Silicon Valley (Ronan Levy, Field Trip Health)While some psychedelic leaders are driven by spiritual motivations that bypass material barriers to flourishing, others are angling for market share by medicalizing the distress associated with inequality. Approaching extreme inequality as an inevitable feature of society, many psychedelic investors and CEOs frame psychedelics as tools for adapting individuals to the consequences of inequality in a manner that obscures the potential for societal transformation. Often, this normalization of inequality specifically venerates Silicon Valley's culture of tech disruptions as a societal good. In a paradigmatic example, Field Trip Health'--a mental health and wellness company that described itself as ''a global leader6 in the development and delivery of psychedelic therapies'' (Eldor, 2021)'--announced a special program to provide free ketamine services to individuals who were recently laid off from the tech industry (Mikhail, 2022). In that announcement and an accompanying tweet, then-CEO Ronan Levy reiterated that this opportunity was intended for white-collar workers from Silicon Valley companies including Twitter, Google, Meta, Stripe, and Amazon. Within a global context of worsening labor relations, these mass layoffs presented opportunities to challenge the inordinate power imbalances wielded by multinational corporations, but Field Trip's individualized solution obscured these systemic issues.
As a consequence of Silicon Valley's search for ever-more-profitable solutions to the consequences of widening inequality, the focus among tech elites is never on addressing the social determinants of widespread distress, since inequality is both their income stream and the object of their efforts. As Nils Redeker has described, multinational corporations (including those cited by Field Trip) have increasingly adopted strategies that focus on investing profits into financial markets rather than in workers and their pay. These corporate savings and the corresponding divestment from workers have contributed internationally to rising inequality and labor disenfranchisement, which have devastating impacts on mental health (Redeker, 2022). In a systematic review published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Tibber and colleagues identified a consistent correlation between income inequality and poor adult mental health at the subnational level, which reinforces the longstanding sociologically-informed understanding of the effects of poverty and inequality on wellbeing (Tibber, Walji, Kirkbride, & Huddy, 2022). In their conclusion, the authors note that there is an ''ethical imperative'' to address the environmental causes of psychological distress, given that inequality is only predicted to rise based on current market trajectories. As they note: ''In a recent report entitled 'Britain in the 2020s' the Institute for Public Policy Research predicted that inequality will 'surge' over the course of the decade'...with the income of the rich forecasted to rise 11 times faster than the incomes of the poor, and an extra 3.6 million predicted to fall into poverty within this time-frame'' (Tibber et al., 2022, p. 20). Instead of addressing the structural and social drivers of inequality, Field Trip's narrative centers around medicalizing the distress associated with involuntary unemployment. In doing so, it promotes individualized, pharmaceutical solutions to the pain caused by material instability, which obscures the structural roots of a precarious labor market.
For Ronan Levy and other corporate actors in the psychedelics industry, the comprehensible stresses and anxieties of life under neoliberal capitalism present lucrative market opportunities (Davies, 2022), and this profit motive is reinforced by elitist beliefs about capitalism as a social good. Speaking on a conference panel in 2020, Levy claimed that ''capitalism'...often gets defined in a very'...negative way, but to me, capitalism is just respecting everybody's agency'' (OPEN Foundation, 2021, 18:48). In a hierarchical system that funnels wealth from the bottom to those at the top, this emphasis on agency implies that elites have earned'--and hence deserve'--their positions of power. This perspective aligns with Silicon Valley's hierarchical ideologies, which often frame the billionaire class as more intrinsically important and valuable than the masses, since their global reach and ability to mobilize capital offer the greatest potential for wide-scale impact (Chang, 2019, pp. 188''189).7
The translation of Silicon Valley's ideologies into the psychedelics industry is evident in hallucinatory assurances that psychedelics will improve society by influencing elite perspectives. As an example, Levy has justified prioritizing the mental health of Silicon Valley's ''rich white men'' in terms of a ''trickle-down ecstasis''
8 model for social change. The latter phrase alludes to the debunked theory of trickle-down economics, whose proponents claimed that society's interests were best supported by further enriching the ultrawealthy. In this context, ''trickle-down ecstasis'' captures the individualistic credo that psychedelics lead to social change by percolating through the innovations and insights of tech elites. As Levy described on an industry panel:
Even if you only serve rich white men with access to psychedelic therapies, it's going to change them in a way that I think is constructive and positive, and will create an army of people who are more open-minded and more willing to think about how we address the challenges of equity'.... I know it seems counterintuitive that creating more inequity is going to create equity, but I do genuinely believe that that's a possible outcome here. (PsychedelX, 2021, 50:14)
Although Levy's perspective holds out the prospect of improving the world through elite innovation, there is no evidence that psychedelics make billionaires more interested in equity. Despite claims to the contrary, psychedelic experiences of interconnection are often interpreted as irrefutable validations of existing status and power hierarchies (Pace & Devenot, 2021, pp. 9''11, 13). Far from persuading billionaires to relinquish their power over society, there is growing evidence that psychedelics are actually fueling elitist ideologies that naturalize inequality, as the next sections will explore.
''A significantly greater good'': TESCREALism and the tech oligarchy's new court philosophersBeyond medicalizing the stresses of living under existing inequalities and social injustice, others in the psychedelics industry are anticipating how psychedelic medicine might lubricate a future world with even greater inequality. As Maxim Tvorun-Dunn has argued, Silicon Valley's elites are operationalizing psychedelics within an anti-human, ''secular-esoteric'' quasi-religion that frames capital accumulation as the necessary means for heroic, evolutionary ends (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, pp. 2, 5). Drawing on philosophers like Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, many tech elites now embrace a worldview wherein ''enterprising wealthy individuals'' will be necessary to achieve ''utopian gains for humanity which must not be stopped by democratic masses'' (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, p. 5). Over the last decade, these trends have coalesced in the Effective Altruism (EA) movement and its associate philosophy of longtermism, which are highly influential amongst Silicon Valley's tech elites and major funders of the psychedelics industry.
On its surface, the Effective Altruism (EA) movement champions the use of science and reason to determine the most high-impact applications of philanthropy, with the goal of improving the world while reducing suffering. In practice, however, EA rationalizes the increase of inequality as the most effective means of changing the world, since it advances the notion that individuals can best support EA's goals by making the most money as quickly as possible'--a practice described as ''earning to give'' (Current Affairs, 2023). The Oxford philosopher William MacAskill'--a co-founder of EA who has drawn positive attention for attracting tech and crypto billionaires to the movement (Crary, Gruen, & Adams, 2022; Kulish, 2022)'--has argued that lucrative career paths (like finance) are more ethical than working to improve local conditions, since financial elites can scale their impact beyond the merely proximal by amassing extraordinary material resources (MacAskill, 2016). In exploring this line of reasoning, MacAskill goes so far as to argue that working for a petrochemical company can be an optimal means of mitigating climate change if it generates income to fund meaningful philanthropic efforts (MacAskill, 2014, pp. 275''276). Along the same lines, he advocates for professions that profit by ''disrupting the livelihood of the global poor'' (MacAskill, 2014, p. 274)'--such as in the case of financial speculation on the price of wheat'--so long as the wealth generated contributes to ''a significantly greater good'' that eclipses those incidental harms (MacAskill, 2014, p. 277). According to this line of reasoning, harmful actions can be ethically justified ''if the ratio of benefit to harm is great enough'' (MacAskill, 2014, p. 277).
In 2017, MacAskill coined the term ''longtermism'' to enshrine the flourishing of distant-future generations as among the greatest goods, and hence ''a key moral priority of our time'' (MacAskill, 2019). Due to this consequentialist philosophy, Silicon Valley's tech-utopian fantasies of future splendor can provide cover for the exploitation and brutalization of actual humans (and non-humans) living in the present. Scholars including Timnit Gebru and mile Torres have already begun tracing the consequences of this philosophy for the rollout of AI, where glittering visions of a future tech utopia are distracting from the real harms that AI is causing today, including systemic discrimination from biased data sets (Benjamin, 2019; Birhane, Prabhu, & Kahembwe, 2021) and the disenfranchisement of workers through mass theft (Zanzotto, 2019). These harms are a consequence of the specific ways that Silicon Valley's elites are developing AI systems, which are at the expense of other (prosocial, democratic, non-extractive) approaches to AI development (Birhane, 2021; DAIR Institute, 2021).
Torres and Gebru argue that Effective Altruism and longtermism are the latest iterations within a cluster of ideologies that they have named the TESCREAL bundle'--an acronym that organizes these worldviews according to their chronological emergence (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism).9 As embraced by the TESCREALists of Silicon Valley, transhumanism'--the futurist vision of technologically reengineering the human species'--is a racist and eugenicist project that labels some forms of consciousness and modes of experience as inherently more valuable than others.10 As Torres argues, the combination of these ideologies amounts to a secular religion that ''justifies pursuing the social preferences of elites'' while it claims to hold the solutions to ''humanity's deepest problems'' (Torres, 2021a). Their scholarship reveals how, among AI's major funders and CEOs, TESCREAList beliefs have normalized the perspective that extreme inequality is a societal good, which is justifying the development of AI in a manner that exacerbates inequality. This analysis explains why elites are warning of AI's existential risks in a manner that obscures the actual, unnecessary harms that are caused by human decisions.
The TESCREAL bundle is so dangerous because it superficially appears to align with genuinely prosocial and pro-environmental orientations towards the future. For instance, longtermism seems to echo the widespread Indigenous principles of conservation and mutualism known collectively as the Honorable Harvest, which the Potawatomi poet-botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as ''principles and practices that'...rein in our tendency to consume'--[so] that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is for our own'' (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 180). Although these principles might sound compatible with longtermism's focus on the flourishing of distant-future generations, these two worldviews'--upon closer inspection'--are actually based on incompatible values and aspire to opposite goals. As Keith Williams and Suzanne Brant (both of Haudenosaunee ancestry) articulate in ''Tending a vibrant world: Gift logic and sacred plant medicines,'' Indigenous views on the wellbeing of future generations are commonly rooted in a non-hierarchical ontology based on reciprocity and relationality with the specific, local diversity of the more-than-human world (K. Williams & Brant, 2023).11 The authors describe how this Indigenous ontology is incompatible with neoliberal capitalism's basis in extraction and exploitation, which is premised on a colonial ''hierarchization of all life.'' By imposing a hierarchy wherein some forms of life are ascribed greater value and meaning than others, neoliberalism justifies the instrumentalization of those at the bottom of that hierarchy by those at the top.
Longtermism is an extension of the extractive logics that Williams and Brant characterize as ''anti-life.'' Drawing on Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics or ''the subjugation of life to the power of death,'' they reveal how the colonial project is premised on a (white supremacist) human exceptionalism that assumes the right to label some life as disposable, and hence to identify acceptable sacrifices in the context of a more worthy cause. The irreconcilability of colonial necropolitics with Indigenous gift logic is made apparent in the context of the global climate crisis, which is often mistaken as a justification for longtermism. At a time when the impacts of climate change are increasingly evident and disruptive, onlookers have misread longtermism as advocating for sensible behavioral changes in the present'--like degrowth and fossil fuel divestment'--in order to safeguard the planet for future generations (Kaspersen & Wallach, 2022).
The distinction between longtermism and Indigenous relationality is apparent in mile Torres' analysis of the discourse surrounding AI's risks for human extinction. Torres observes that this discourse relies on an idiosyncratic sense of the word ''extinction'' (Torres, 2023a). Key figures among Silicon Valley's elite are interested in maintaining the planet's life support systems, but only insofar as they are waiting to reap a very specific harvest: a new form of (transhuman) consciousness that they believe will usher in a future utopia. Within their TESCREAList belief system, all of cosmic evolution has gotten humanity to a place where'--for the first time'--we have the necessary technological capacity (paired with an awareness of this capacity) to birth the true potential of consciousness, unshackled from the limitations of biological drives and irrational emotions. Climate disruptions only matter insofar as they might jeopardize AI's development into artificial general intelligence (AGI), which will be capable of re-engineering humanity and launching an intergalactic, posthuman civilization. Concern for the Earth's climate ceases beyond that point: In order to purge consciousness of the inefficiencies of biological existence, we must be willing to transcend humanity and to sacrifice our home planet as a source of fuel towards this evolutionary transformation.
From the perspective of some TESCREALists, the stakes for creating posthuman AGI are high (Torres, 2021a). If the tech elites are unsuccessful in this project, their failure will amount to a cosmic stillbirth. Consciousness will have failed to develop past the fetal stage of its theoretical potential, and this universe will have been a dud. In the context of this mission to colonize the stars, accelerating inequality is justified as an optimal strategy that increases the chances of a successful launch sequence. With concentrated wealth, the tech elites can funnel material resources to the right intermediary steps (like advancing AI towards AGI) while suppressing dissent by humankind's masses, who might otherwise resist this longtermist mission based on shortsighted emotional preferences for notions like justice and democracy. From this perspective, aversion to planetary sacrifice amounts to nostalgic attachment to the familiar'--a limiting belief that must be overcome in order to achieve our cosmic purpose. Torres summarizes the inherent dangers of this perspective: ''When one believes'...that failing to realize 'our potential' would not merely be wrong but a moral catastrophe of literally cosmic proportions'...you may be quite willing to use extraordinary means to stop anyone who stands in your way'' (Torres, 2021a).
While this TESCREAList perspective might sound outlandish to the average reader, it resonates with major currents in the history of psychedelic philosophy, which might contribute to acceptance of TESCREAList ideas within the psychedelic conference community. Despite widespread associations of psychedelics with prosocial outcomes, the appropriation of psychedelics by TESCREAList billionaires had already been primed by major currents of countercultural psychedelic thought in the twentieth century, which blended evolutionary spirituality with elite theories of social change. In a paper describing its hold on the psychedelic imagination, Jules Evans defines evolutionary spirituality as the notion that human evolution ''can be guided towards the creation of higher beings through such techniques as meditation, psychedelics and eugenics or genetic modification'' (Evans, 2023a, p. 1). The extensive list of ''leading psychedelic thinkers'' who have theorized a role for psychedelics in catalyzing evolution includes MAPS's Rick Doblin and his mentor Stanislav Grof, who are at the forefront of the project of psychedelic medicalization (Evans, 2023a, p. 2).12
For many of these figures, spiritual evolutionary ideas explicitly emerged from the phenomenology of psychedelic experiences. For instance, Terence McKenna'--the bardic author of
True Hallucinations (1994), on which my title plays'--described psychedelic visions that are virtually indistinguishable from TESCREALism:
If history goes off endlessly into the future [without an evolutionary advancement], [then the future] will be about scarcity'.... We are [currently] at the breakpoint. It's like when a woman comes to term. At a certain point, if the child is not severed from the mother and launched into its own separate existence, toxemia will set in'.... The mushrooms said clearly, ''When a species prepares to depart for the stars, the planet will be shaken to its core.'' All evolution has pushed for this moment, and there is no going back. What lies ahead is a dimension of such freedom and transcendence, that once in place, the idea of returning to the womb will be preposterous. We will live in the imagination. We will quickly become unrecognizable to our former selves because we're now defined by our limitations: the laws of gravity; the need to eat, excrete, and make money. We have the will to expand infinitely into pleasure, caring, attention, and connectedness. (Miller, 1993)
In this passage, McKenna frames the ongoing planetary crises (including climate change) as positive signals that we are on the right evolutionary track. Rather than alerting us to pause and reassess our collective behavior, environmental degradation demands an acceleration towards transhumanism'--an evolutionary leap that will free us from umbilical dependence on our planetary home. In transcending the inefficiencies of biological existence into a life of bliss in the imagination, McKenna's vision closely resembles the TESCREAList ideas of Ben Goertzel,
13 who coined the term AGI:
This is a new phase of the evolution of our species, just picking up speed about now'.... Mind uploading technology will permit [us] to leave biology behind'.... We will spread to the stars and roam the universe'...achieving, by scientific means, most of the promises of religions'.... Radical technological advances will reduce material scarcity.'... New ethical systems will emerge, based on principles including the spreading of joy, growth and freedom through the universe'.... All of these changes will'...[lead] to states of individual and shared awareness'...far beyond that accessible to ''legacy humans.'' (Goertzel, 2010, pp. 9''11; Torres, 2023b)
Although this storyline reads like science fiction, this project is being bankrolled by some of the wealthiest people on the planet, including many of the billionaires who are investing in psychedelic medicine.
''A few breakthroughs away from abundance at scale'' (Sam Altman, OpenAI and Journey Colab)As mile Torres emphasizes, TESCREALism'--and its evolutionary race to digitize consciousness'--is the ideology that drives Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, when he claims that through the development of AGI, ''we can colonize space. We can get fusion to work and solar [energy] to mass scale. We can cure all human diseases. We can build new realities. We are only a few breakthroughs away from abundance at scale that is difficult to imagine'' (Torres, 2023a). When Altman says in the same Twitter thread that ''It's obviously better to save a million lives in the future than one life today,'' he is not actually talking about human lives, since humans are weak and unsuited to the harsh conditions of interplanetary travel (Altman, 2022). To the contrary, his TESCREAList vision is premised on the overcoming of Homo sapiens by our digital, posthuman successors. As a consequence, the extinction of H. sapiens and all other forms of biological life is an acceptable'--if not preferred'--outcome of an evolutionary, eugenicist process (Torres, 2023a).
As this example illustrates, longtermism is yet another necropolitical manifestation of colonial inequality premised on the hierarchization of all life'--an exceptionalism that justifies certain kinds of disposability (first of non-human life and of lives in the Global South, and eventually of human life itself) in the service of an elite, teleological vision. Despite proximity to discourses of Indigenous reciprocity, Altman's investments in psychedelic medicine must be understood as continuous with this TESCREAList mission, which is irreconcilable with Indigenous ontologies. According to a Washington Post article titled ''Executive behind ChatGPT pushes for a new revolution: Psychedelics,'' Altman first identified psychedelic medicine as ''undervalued technology'' with high profit potential during his tenure as president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator (Gilbert, 2023). In addition to overseeing the development of ChatGPT, Altman now serves as the chairman of Journey Colab, a pharmaceutical startup that is pursuing FDA approval for psychedelic medicines including mescaline, the use of which originated with Indigenous ceremonies involving the San Pedro cactus and peyote.14
Within the psychedelics industry, Journey Colab has been praised for its emphasis on Indigenous reciprocity, beginning with its decision to place 10 percent of its founding equity into an irrevocable ''Reciprocity Trust'' for the benefit of Indigenous communities and ''other stakeholders in the psychedelic sector'' (Journey Colab, 2022). In 2022, the startup also issued a ''Patent Pledge'' in which it committed to not enforcing its mescaline-related patents against any ''Indigenous communities and practitioners who use mescaline for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes'' (Psychedelic Alpha, 2022). Following the analysis by Williams and Brant, such displays of reciprocity obscure a deeper, colonial imposition of power directed towards capital accumulation, enclosure, and extraction, which is inherently at odds with genuine reciprocity. Altman's praise of Journey Colab's reciprocity initiatives emphasizes capital accumulation as the driving goal: ''Those [Indigenous] communities will share with Journey what they know of the history of these medicines, and Journey will share what Silicon Valley is good at, with how to use startups and capitalism to deliver something to people who can really benefit from it'' (Al Idrus, 2020). For Altman, ''reciprocity'' is code for strategic research and development towards the further enrichment of Silicon Valley's tech elites. In this context, Indigenous knowledge is framed as a source of extractable wealth to serve as grist for the TESCREAL mill.
A new soma for the masses: psychedelic shields for the budding tech-utopia (Christian Angermayer, atai Life Sciences)While Sam Altman envisions the creation (and monopolization) of a global psychedelics industry as a means of funneling capital towards TESCREAList projects, other funders have anticipated specific roles for psychedelics in building a TESCREAList future. Influenced by the arc from transhumanism to longtermism, Christian Angermayer'--the billionaire founder of atai Life Sciences and a lead investor in COMPASS Pathways'--envisions psychedelics as tools for accommodating the masses to societal instability and disruption in a context of accelerating inequality. Angermayer's motivations are notable given his influential position in the psychedelics industry: in Psychedelic Alpha's 2022'Year in Review series, atai and COMPASS accounted for nearly 40% of the aggregate psychedelic sector public market cap by the end of 2022 (Psychedelic Alpha, 2023).
Angermayer takes a tech elite vision of the future for granted: humankind will be shepherded into a future of Mars travel, artificial intelligence, and widespread automation, which promises to cause extraordinary stress for the common masses of society. The influence of Silicon Valley's worldview is evident in Angermayer's rhetoric, which regularly emphasizes a transhumanist march towards themes of ''self-transformation, genetic modification, nootropic drugs, AI, crypto-libertarianism and space exploration'' (Evans, 2022). In this context, Angermayer presents a vision of psychedelics as tools for adapting and mollifying the masses in order to ease their acceptance of his assumed vision for this tech-utopian future world: ''We need to have the discussion that we, let's say the elite'.... We need to offer'...these people'...[in] the lower-level jobs'...new jobs for them. But at the same time, we need to make sure they want [their new jobs]'' (The Rubin Report, 2021).
In essence, Christian Angermayer argues that psychedelic medicines could be used to medicate popular resistance to our impending, posthuman future. Angermayer's public statements regularly align with longtermism's belief that we should ''use advanced technologies to reengineer our bodies and brains to create a 'superior' race of radically enhanced posthumans'' in order to realize humanity's ultimate'--or ''longterm'''--potential (Torres, 2021b). Since popular resistance to these changes would pose an existential threat to the wellbeing of future (transhuman) generations, Angermayer highlights the urgency of attending to the mental health of the common masses during the early, discomforting stages of technological transformation. He notes that'--if left unaddressed'--this resistance will likely explode in retaliatory revolution, which would threaten the entire enterprise of building a brighter, transhuman future (Angermayer, 2021).
Rather than questioning the desirability or long-term necessity of this elite project, Angermayer focuses on addressing its near-term impacts on mental health in order to ensure that this project continues unimpeded: ''Unfortunately, I deeply believe that the world we're building, with all the technology'--and I'm part of the builders, this is why I'm so conscious of that'--is not good for our mental health'' (The Dales Report, 2023). To avert this possibility for disruptive revolution, Angermayer goes on to propose a new diagnosis for ''fear of the future'' (The Rubin Report, 2021), which could be treated with psychedelic medications: ''Psychedelics'...generally help people to move forward into the future in a positive way. Psychedelics can enhance creativity and improve neuroplasticity'--two essential abilities we need to be successful with this transition, such as making ourselves open to new models of living and new job opportunities'' (Angermayer, 2021). Across these descriptions, Angermayer is essentially advocating for a use of psychedelic medicines that approximates the role of ''soma'' in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, Brave New World: a drug that increases the complacency of the lower classes to discourage rebellion against an exploitative social hierarchy that does not serve their interests (Hamamra, 2017, p. 15; Huxley, 2006).
The evolutionary plan must be ''cultivated correctly'': from psychedelic neuroscience to cosmoplasticity (Robin Carhart-Harris, Neuroscape Psychedelics Division, UCSF)Christian Angermayer's call for ''a new opium of the people'' represents a hyperbolic vision for how psychedelics could facilitate the growth of capitalism's inequalities. However extreme this view may appear, his central contention'--that psychedelic medicine can successfully medicate the distresses of living under capitalism'--gains credibility from leading psychedelic scientists. Speaking to The Times, the psychologist and neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris'--described as a ''pioneer'' of the psychedelic renaissance'--explains the therapeutic effects of psychedelics in brain-based, depoliticized, and individualized terms. From Carhart-Harris' perspective, psychedelic medicines are destined to render SSRI medications obsolete, since conventional antidepressants do not offer ''a good enough curative action'' (Spencer, 2022). Through this choice of language to describe the relative failure of SSRIs, Carhart-Harris implies that psychedelic medicines, by contrast, offer a cure'--a possibility that is reflected in the article's headline: ''Are psychedelic drugs the answer to the mental health crisis?'' By emphasizing this curative alternative to SSRIs, Carhart-Harris positions psychedelics as a lucrative new market, framing this new class of pharmaceuticals as the successor to conventional antidepressants. In place of the previous paradigm of ''chemical imbalance,'' Carhart-Harris and many of his colleagues locate the cause of psychological distress in entrenched ''canals'' within the brain's energy landscape (Carhart-Harris et al., 2023). Richard E. Daws, the first author on a paper co-authored with Carhart-Harris, characterized their research as demonstrating that ''Psilocybin therapy liberates the entrenched depressed brain by increasing the global integration of functional networks'' (Daws, 2022). While this proposed mechanism of action differs from chemical imbalance, the underlying etiology still attributes distress to an individual's diseased brain. As a result, this neuroscientific model functions like a docking port or protein spike, facilitating the conscription of psychedelic pharmaceuticals by neoliberal heuristics. If this explanatory model aids the assimilation of psychedelics within capitalist healthcare, it will undermine the healing potential of psychedelics, since any mainstream rollout of psychedelic medicine that fuels the current capitalist system can never meaningfully improve the global toll of mental illness.
Beyond the risk of facilitating neoliberal approaches to healthcare, there is a deeper resonance here between the language of psychedelic neuroscience and TESCREALism, which provides insight into how the rhetoric of science can carry political force despite pretensions to neutrality. Across a series of Twitter posts, Carhart-Harris has articulated sympathies with philosophers aligned with the TESCREAList bundle, including the singularitarians Ray Kurzweil and Teilhard de Chardin. By July 2023, he self-identified as a ''mechanistic mystic,'' citing a term from Bobby Azarian's
The Romance of Reality (
2022) that bears striking resemblance to TESCREAList beliefs. In particular, Carhart-Harris expresses enthusiasm for a short poem by Azarian, which opens the book's section on ''Transcendence'' and hinges on the same teleological, evolutionary language that animates elite invocations of AGI:
Chains of connected cells create cognition and consciousness
Conscious creatures coalesce into creative communities called cultures
And cultures create a collective consciousness that,
If cultivated correctly, will cross the cosmos.
'...sentience shall surely spread
Suffusing space-time with self-awareness and subjective states'...
Through our efforts to evade death and transcend our mortality
We get grander glimpses of the romance of reality (Azarian, 2022, p. 183)
Read alongside accompanying screenshots of Azarian's philosophical prose, this ''grander glimpse'' into the nature of reality reflects the guiding conviction of transhumanist longtermism'--namely, that humanity is an adolescent, larval stage of consciousness that must be transcended to actualize its cosmic potential of colonizing far-distant galaxies. Azarian emphasizes that this cosmic ''awakening process'' is by no means assured; it requires coordination and active steering through ''meta-aware'' participation, which must be consciously cultivated by switched-on individuals acting in concert with the cosmic mission (Azarian, 2022, p. 277''278). With language harkening to the EA movement, he asserts that ''our goal should be to try to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people'' within the context of ''long-term,'' evolutionary aims (Azarian, 2022, pp. 278, original emphasis). In his conclusion, Azarian explicitly suggests that psychedelic experiences could serve to coordinate action towards this evolutionary goal by initiating humanity into a shared ''cosmic religion'' (Azarian, 2022, p. 278).
Responding to Carhart-Harris' initial post, Azarian shared that his book had been ''heavily influenced'' by Carhart-Harris' entropic brain hypothesis (Azarian, 2023), which Carhart-Harris had developed through his research in psychedelic neuroscience (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014).15 In his book, Azarian implies that Carhart-Harris' research has helped to ''reveal'...that the universe seems to be evolving according to a developmental plan'...the way an organism's developmental trajectory is encoded in DNA'' (Azarian, 2022, p. 187). From this perspective, actualizing AGI through the constraints of humanity's chrysalis will require ''harnessing the energy in the environment'' by accelerating consumption of finite resources (Azarian, 2022, p. 187). As this example illustrates, there is a danger that the rhetoric of psychedelic science could extend beyond the shortcomings of neoliberal healthcare: In parallel to the ways that psychedelic experiences might be exacerbating TESCREAList convictions among Silicon Valley's elites (as I will explore further in the next section), the discourse of psychedelic science might be inspiring their court philosophers to articulate cosmic teleologies that can only be actualized through elite interventions. If psychedelics provide justifications for exacerbating societal inequalities along these lines, their structural impact will directly counteract any world-healing potentials.
Discussion: psychedelics and AI as non-specific amplifiersWithout the mobilization of social support, reductions in inequality, attention to climate change, and other systemic changes to society's material conditions, there is no brain-based solution to distress that will be capable of achieving ''mass mental health.'' As the philosopher Mark Fisher has elaborated, any ''privatisation of stress'' within the individual's neurobiology serves the interests of capitalism by deflecting from its social determinants. Promising new pharmaceutical cures to systemic problems, corporadelia feeds into political and economic systems that are objectively harmful to mental health and to the flourishing of life on this planet. Although Fisher wrote about this idea in
Capitalist Realism before the present-day era of psychedelic pharmaceuticals,
16 his critique about the individualization of distress with SSRIs is equally applicable to this new psychedelic research landscape:
The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). (Fisher, 2009)
As Fisher elaborates in ''The Privatisation of Stress,'' the ongoing environment of widespread inequality, precarity, pollution, and exploitation is making people sick, and brain-based solutions are distracting us from the only real solution, which is societal transformation through organized solidarity: ''Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorized'' (Fisher, 2011). Based on these dynamics, there is a real risk that psychedelic capitalism will end up fueling the social determinants of distress by creating yet new billionaires and unicorn corporations, all while promising to cure the very ills that capitalism is actively perpetuating. Although the framing has changed from the days of ''chemical imbalance,'' the underlying logic (and its relationship to perpetuating capitalism's inequalities) remains the same, which exposes the inadequacy of corporadelia's utopian justifications for rapid scaling of the psychedelics industry.
In the absence of broader structural changes that address root causes, there will be an inherent limit on the extent to which psychedelic-induced insights can provide relief to individuals. As a metaphor, consider the theoretical risk of a ''self-awareness paradox'' as described by neuroscientists Gregory Scott and Carhart-Harris in a controversial paper17 that anticipates psychedelic research with individuals in comas and minimally conscious states. The authors suggest that if a psychedelic succeeds in increasing an individual's level of conscious awareness, the individual might experience emotional distress as they become aware of their ''clinical predicament'' and the impact of their brain injury (Scott & Carhart-Harris, 2019, p. 5). Explaining this idea for DoubleBlind, Scott ''recounts a frightening possibility where 'you wake someone up to the reality that two years have passed [and] their wife has left them'''--cognizant of, but unable to change, their circumstances (Moens, 2023). Under our existing social system of widening inequality, attempts to treat the ills of poverty with psychedelic medicines might only lead to this kind of ''paradoxical'' reaction. Without the requisite material conditions to support positive change, psychedelics might only heighten an individual's awareness of being trapped by material circumstances that prevent human flourishing: they can't afford healthcare or feed their kids, they're working three jobs around the clock, and their water is full of lead.18
Instead of addressing these structural issues, Silicon Valley's multinational corporations are exacerbating the inequality and precarity that are driving widespread distress. These corporations rely on a global, anonymous workforce of precarious and underpaid workers to process (or ''annotate'') the large-scale data sets that enable their various AI systems, ranging from chatbots to e-commerce behavioral analytics to self-driving cars. The pay provided for this challenging yet tedious work is variable and unpredictable, since companies continually shift their outsourcing to regions with the cheapest labor force. The result is ''a vast tasker underclass'' (
Dzieza, 2023) that exploits refugees and other ''victims of economic collapse'' in order to build systems that maximize profits through widespread immiseration:
Each task represents a stretching of the gulf between the vast and growing ghettos of disposable life and a capitalist vanguard of intelligent bots and billionaire tycoons'.... Forced to adapt their sleeping patterns to meet the needs of firms on the other side of the planet and in different time zones, the largely Syrian population of Lebanon's Shatila camp forgo their dreams to serve those of distant capitalists. Their nights are spent labeling footage of urban areas'--''house,'' ''shop,'' ''car'''--labels that, in a grim twist of fate, map the streets where the labelers once lived, perhaps for automated drone systems that will later drop their payloads on those very same streets. (Jones, 2021)
In addition to those who are conscripted into such crowdwork or clickwork with no other options, some annotators are explicitly motivated by the AI hype to act against their own interests, persuaded by TESCREAList hallucinations to build the very systems that are accelerating inequality and increasing the ubiquity of alienating forms of work. In his reporting for The Verge, Josh Dzieza introduces Victor, ''a self-proclaimed 'fanatic' about AI'' who ''started annotating because he wants to help bring about a fully automated post-work future'' (Dzieza, 2023). Although corporations mask their identities to clickworkers, Dzieza points to evidence that Victor had been training ChatGPT for around $3 per hour. Rather than following the hype to serve as foot soldiers for elite interests, there are opportunities in these examples to mobilize in solidarity against this extractive machinery, as Adrienne Williams, Milagros Miceli, and Timnit Gebru have emphasized in NoÄ'ma (Williams, Miceli, & Gebru, 2022). Instead of medicating the distress from job loss with ketamine at wellness clinics, highly-paid tech workers could join unionizing efforts to push back against the disposability of labor and join in solidarity with the lower-paid, precarious gig workers on which these industries depend.
Silicon Valley's construction of this ''vast tasker underclass'' was not anticipated by early tech-utopians, who viewed the internet as an inherently democratizing force that was destined to connect the global population through new forms of equitable participation and peer-to-peer communication. In practice, multinational corporations built the infrastructure of the internet in a manner that now enables unprecedented surveillance, restrictions on information flows, and platforms for scaled behavioral control. Douglas Rushkoff'--formerly among the most prominent techno-utopians'--conveys the extent of this capitalist capture in the subtitle to Team Human: ''Our technologies, markets, and cultural institutions'--once forces for human connection and expression'--now isolate and repress us'' (Rushkoff, 2019). Rather than inherent features of the technology, these outcomes resulted from elite decisions that were optimizing for profit. A different internet was possible, as Rushkoff states: ''This is not just coincidence, or some circumstantial byproduct of how these platforms function. This is the science of designing for behavior change'' (Rushkoff, 2022, p. 105).
As happened with the early internet, the AI and psychedelics industries are still in nascent phases, and the same utopian hype is desensitizing people from noticing how elite decisions are optimizing both for profit. If we want AI and psychedelics to be used as forces for healing, connection, and expression, now is the time to name'--and resist'--the corporate takeover of both industries, because we might not get a second chance. As Celeste Kidd and Abeba Birhane describe, AI-generated text and images are now saturating the internet with millions of daily outputs due to the widespread adoption of generative models. Since the training data for generative AI models are largely drawn from the internet, the biases present in today's models are introducing ''systemic distortions'' by getting baked into the training data for all future models (Kidd & Birhane, 2023, p. 1223). In parallel to AI, corporations are now building the infrastructure for a global psychedelic industry. We must be vigilant about the possibility that harmful, untested norms and assumptions may be baked in at this early stage'--especially if those norms are tuned towards the generation of profit and widening inequality. For instance, Tvorun-Dunn argues that the push to integrate psychedelics with AI and data-harvesting digital apps must be understood as ''opportunities for Silicon Valley to exploit'' towards TESCREAList ends, which would open new avenues to surveillance and behavioral control despite therapeutic justifications (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, pp. 3, 5).
Writing in Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022), Douglas Rushkoff suggests that Silicon Valley's embrace of psychedelics might be turbocharging its TESCREAList plans for AI. Returning from experiences at Burning Man or Amazonian retreats, many of Silicon Valley's elites report psychedelic-induced, evolutionary insights that reveal lucrative solutions to humankind's biggest problems. With their elitist views newly garbed in TESCREAList beliefs, ''they return to the same exploitation, domination, and chauvinism they were doing before, only camouflaged'...with more cosmic justifications'' (Rushkoff, 2022, p. 115). In June 2023, an article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal described many of Silicon Valley's billionaires, including Elon Musk and Google's Sergey Brin, as ''part of a drug movement'' that is embracing psychedelics as ''gateways to business breakthroughs'' (Grind & Bindley, 2023). The authors state that among Silicon Valley's tech elite, taking psychedelics is now ''a practice that has become for many a routine part of doing business.'' Within this community, psychedelics are framed as offering ''the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing for yourself what's going on,'' as one tech industry microdosing coach described in an interview. Since psychedelics commonly induce noetic feelings of cosmic insight, often tinged with grandiosity or messianic convictions (Anderson, Danforth, & Grob, 2020), these tech elites are primed to interpret their experiences as subjective confirmations of their hierarchical, TESCREAList beliefs. Despite claims that psychedelics will make billionaires more empathic, the use of psychedelics by billionaires might be fueling the hype behind both AI and psychedelics, which increases the risks of both tools to broader society.
Conclusion: longtermism is incompatible with Indigenous reciprocityRhetoricians including Richard Doyle and Amanda Pratt have argued that conceptions of psychedelic harm reduction must develop extra-pharmacologically, extending from considerations of substance and dosage to the social impact of the field's rhetorical ecologies (Doyle, 2011, p. 7; Pratt, 2023, p. 153). Within these ecologies, the competing discourses of hype and anti-hype are ''social facts'' (Langlitz, 2023, p. 12) that influence the possible cultural applications'--and risk profiles'--of otherwise mutable technologies (Hartogsohn, 2017, p.10). Whereas Nicolas Langlitz has championed a descriptive, ethnographic approach to the resulting diversity of psychedelic practices, this article has taken up a more activist orientation that experiments with the field-building potentials in staking explicit moral claims. Future work in the psychedelic humanities can explore the potential for activist scholarship to shift the research landscape through counter-hegemonic speech-acts'--as when ''the emperor has no clothes.'' In this context, inter-field collaborations'--including exchanges between critical scholars in AI and psychedelics'--present intersectional opportunities to expose pretense and contradictions within the dominant narratives, since these patterns can become more apparent as they reappear and play out across disparate contexts. This collaborative work can extend beyond AI to include other overhyped technologies that have been conscripted by ''the gospel of tech solutionism'' (Byrum & Benjamin, 2022), such as cryptocurrency and other applications of blockchain.
One clear example of the tensions and contradictions within the rhetoric of psychedelic healing emerged at the end of MAPS's Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, as reports of an Indigenous protest trickled onto the internet. In video clips shared from cell phones, the protestors (a group that included Dr. Angela Beers and Kathoomi Castro) condemned the psychedelic industry's continuations of colonialism under the banner of healing. As Castro stated to the assembled audience, ''I want you to be aware that you have been deceived by this movement'.... Please stop. Think! Think critically'.... We need to stand in liberation together. This is not a collective liberation movement. This is a capitalization'' (Rodgers, 2023, 4:47). In its coverage of the event, Lucid News praised Rick Doblin's graceful response to the protest'--including his invitation for the protestors to join him onstage'--as an embodiment of the field's ideals of ''ego death and collective healing.'' Lucid's coverage implied that there could be simple resolutions to the protestors' concerns, such as extra complimentary tickets and additional travel support for Indigenous speakers at the next conference. In its description of the protest's conclusion, Lucid reinforced this premise of mutual benefit without any fundamental change to the field's status quo: ''A silence familiar to medicine people filled the space as [Lira Ornelas] Godoy and Doblin, alone on the stage, faced each other. Godoy then embraced Doblin to thunderous applause'' (Lucid News, 2023).
As a microcosm of the field's tensions, this example reveals how the rhetorics of healing and intergenerational benefit are obscuring the extent to which different perspectives cannot actually coexist.19 As this paper has demonstrated, corporate psychedelia is imbued with colonialist and longtermist ideas and orientations that are incompatible with Indigenous relational ontologies. So long as the infrastructure of the psychedelics industry is built as an engine of inequality that channels wealth to its funders, it will remain nonsensical to claim that the industry is oriented towards decolonization and collective healing. As Tvorun-Dunn has argued, ''To promote psychedelics'...as commercial'...services offered by private institutions with little oversight and a vague and undemocratic goal of improving human capacity is to relegate further commercial power to a consolidated elite who see themselves, and not others, as those who must guide our lives'' (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, p. 5).
In the fields of AI and psychedelics, where the contexts of use constrain possibilities for outcomes and applications, extractive industries cannot be expected to produce just futures. While the outputs of both AI and psychedelics often seem veridical and agentic, both can behave as ''non-specific amplifiers'' of available models (Pace & Devenot, 2021, p. 2)'--remixing and sampling from the ''building blocks'...of existing beliefs, learned patterns of perception, and available cultural scripts or authorized explanations'' (E. Davis, 2019, p. 28; Devenot, Seale-Feldman et al., 2022; Noorani, Bedi, & Muthukumaraswamy, 2023). LLMs are stochastic parrots (Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, & Shmitchell, 2021) that regurgitate pre-seeded biases in their generative outputs, while psychedelics can project images and interpretations influenced by expectancy and priming. If tech elites control the infrastructure for global access to these tools, the encoding of normative ideologies in AI's datasets and in psychedelic medicine's therapeutic protocols could have far-reaching implications by influencing beliefs and expectations in a manner that aligns with elite interests. In both cases, echoes and reflections of the status quo of power relations can seem like evidence about the fundamental nature of reality, which undermines their utility as tools for healing and liberation.
While prominent figures are now discussing the ''existential risks'' of AI and the ''catastrophic risks'' of psychedelics (Evans, 2023b) in the context of inflated hype, the mundane risks of capitalism and its ideological drivers are underemphasized topics in these fields. In parallel to these omissions, critical scholars and activists in both fields'--often the very people who initiated public discussions of risk, at personal expense'--have described continuing patterns of marginalization and exclusion for highlighting the real harms already caused by these industries.20 In identifying these patterns across apparently disparate fields, we can gain insight into the influence of Silicon Valley's power on the circulation of ideas and identify the real risks facing our planet. To prevent psychedelics from becoming yet another extractive industry, we need to organize beyond the hubristic fantasies of the elite's TESCREAL hallucinations. Any genuinely prosocial applications of either AI or psychedelics will depend on collective resistance to their conscription by neoliberalism and colonialism. The alternative is complicity in their use as technologies of elite persuasion.
AcknowledgementsThe author thanks the anonymous reviewers in addition to Brian Pace, Brian Normand, and Russell Hausfeld for providing feedback on earlier versions of this article. In particular, this article benefitted from conversations with Brian Pace regarding the parallelism between ''ripple out'' and ''trickle down'' ecstasis. Thanks also to Sasha Sisko for identifying several of the video sources that informed the analysis.
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Doctors fear new Covid strain could trigger 'heart failure pandemic' across the globe - The Mirror US
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 20:49
Several countries, including the US, have seen a surge in Covid infections over recent weeks due to influx of new strain JN.1
Covid cases have skyrocketed once again ( Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Covid-19 could trigger a 'heart failure pandemic', experts have warned, calling it a 'global healthcare risk'. The rise in Covid cases, especially due to the new strain known as JN.1, could lead to potential heart issues.
Scientists from Japan's top research institute, Riken, have issued a new report. They say the ACE2 receptors, which the coronavirus clings to within human cells, are 'very common' in the heart. This means many people who catch the virus may suffer from 'reduced cardiac function'.
The reason for this is still not clear. However, the report suggests the Covid pandemic might have changed things significantly. It warns those at risk of future heart failure due to 'persistent infection of SARS-CoV-2 (Covis-19) is expected to exponentially increase'.
The report states: "Even though conclusive clinical evidence that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with declined cardiac function has not been reported so far, the proof-of-concept study of the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 persistent infection of the heart and the potential risk of opportunistic progression of heart failure should be validated by a three-dimensional human cardiac tissue model which would serve as the alarm bell for a global healthcare risk."
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READ MORE: New Covid variant JN.1 sweeping US as cases rise - symptoms to look out for
Riken research leader Hidetoshi Masumoto said: "Some people infected with Coronavirus may have persistent viral infections in their hearts. A testing system and treatment methods must be established in preparation for a 'heart failure pandemic,' in which we will see a rapid increase in the number of heart failure patients. The explosive increase in the number of virus-infected patients due to the COVID-19 pandemic may have led to an enormous increase in the number of patients at potential risk for future heart failure. These patients would be predicted to maintain cardiac function superficially despite being at marginal risk."
The latest warning comes with Covid cases significantly spiking in the US as millions of people prepared to travel for the holiday season, with the fast-spreading JN.1 variant making up 44 percent of all cases nationwide. The latest analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows this has more than doubled from its share earlier this month.
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* An AI tool was used to add an extra layer to the editing process for this story.
The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty | The Nation
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 20:15
EconomyMarch 8, 2010A mass strategy to recruit the poor onto welfare rolls would create a political crisis that could result in legislation that brings an end to poverty.March 8, 2010 (AP Photo/Mike Groll)
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Sign up for our Wine Club today.Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? July, 2015: In honor of The Nation's 150th anniversary, Frances Fox Piven has contributed a new introduction to the groundbreaking 1966 piece she wrote with Richard Cloward, ''The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.''
By the mid-1960s it was clear that the Black Freedom Movement had spread to the big American cities, carried along by the great migration of blacks out of the rural South. With that change, the movement also changed: it began to focus less on the overt denial of civil rights that characterized the Jim Crow South, and more on the persisting economic deprivations that kept so many of the new migrants desperately poor.
''A Strategy to End Poverty,'' which I wrote with Richard Cloward, was influenced by the changing focus of the Movement. We tried to think through the institutional context in which the minority poor found themselves, from the distortions of the New Deal welfare programs that denied them assistance, to urban fiscal constraints and intergroup conflicts that paralyzed local governments, to the possibilities that locally-based movements could provoke reform by creating problems that reverberated upward in the federal grant-in-aid system. Our objective was not, as later critics of the Glenn Beck variety later charged, to propose a strategy to bring down American capitalism. We were not so ambitious. But we did think that the minority poor and their allies might create sufficient disturbance to force reforms in the American income support programs. And we were not entirely wrong.
In 1972 the Nixon administration moved to relieve the fiscal and political pressures on local and state governments that were the result of rising welfare rolls. (Indeed, for a wild moment Nixon even embraced the idea of a basic guaranteed income.) But the administration avoided the tainted Aid to Families with Dependent Children program that was the locus of the politics of the poor and instead federalized the programs that provided assistance to the aged, blind and disabled. Still, we continued to value ''A Strategy to End Poverty'' not because it had been proven right, but because we had at least tried to tackle the difficult strategy problems that an urban-based movement of poor people confronted in a centralized economic and political system.
This is of course the strategy problem of the movements for higher wages and restrained policing that are spreading in the United States today. Protest movements are necessarily local, whether in Ferguson or Athens, because that is where people are concentrated, where they form relationships and experience their grievances. But to score victories, these local protests have to create disturbances that threaten sometimes far away centers of economic and political power. That is how we sometimes win deep reforms.Popular "swipe left below to view more authors" Swipe ''
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This article is part of The Nation's 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.
How can the poor be organized to press for relief from poverty? How can a broad-based movement be developed and the current disarray of activist forces be halted? These questions confront, and confound, activists today. It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.This article appeared in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation.
The strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive. This gulf is not recognized in a society that is wholly and self-righteously oriented toward getting people off the welfare rolls. It is widely known, for example, that nearly 8 million persons (half of them white) now subsist on welfare, but it is not generally known that for every person on the rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility but is not obtaining assistance.
The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system, which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.
The distribution of public assistance has been a local and state responsibility, and that accounts in large part for the abysmal character of welfare practices. Despite the growing involvement of federal agencies in supervisory and reimbursement arrangements, state and local community forces are still decisive. The poor are most visible and proximate in the local community; antagonism toward them (and toward the agencies which are implicated with them) has always, therefore, been more intense locally than at the federal level. In recent years, local communities have increasingly felt class and ethnic friction generated by competition for neighborhoods, schools, jobs and political power. Public welfare systems are under the constant stress of conflict and opposition, made only sharper by the rising costs to localities of public aid. And, to accommodate this pressure, welfare practice everywhere has become more restrictive than welfare statute; much of the time it verges on lawlessness. Thus, public welfare systems try to keep their budgets down and their rolls low by failing to inform people of the rights available to them; by intimidating and shaming them to the degree that they are reluctant either to apply or to press claims, and by arbitrarily denying benefits to those who are eligible. A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level.
The ultimate objective of this strategy''to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income''will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income. Instead, programs are demanded to enable people to become economically competitive. But such programs are of no use to millions of today's poor. For example, one-third of the 35 million poor Americans are in families headed by females; these heads of family cannot be aided appreciably by job retraining, higher minimum wages, accelerated rates of economic growth, or employment in public works projects. Nor can the 5 million aged who are poor, nor those whose poverty results from the ill health of the wage earner. Programs to enhance individual mobility will chiefly benefit the very young, if not the as yet unborn. Individual mobility is no answer to the question of how to abolish the massive problem of poverty now.
It has never been the full answer. If many people in the past have found their way up from poverty by the path of individual mobility, many others have taken a different route. Organized labor stands out as a major example. Although many American workers never yielded their dreams of individual achievement, they accepted and practiced the principle that each can benefit only as the status of workers as a whole is elevated. They bargained for collective mobility, not for individual mobility; to promote their fortunes in the aggregate, not to promote the prospects of one worker over another. And if each finally found himself in the same relative economic nevertheless clear relationship to his fellows, as when he began, it was nevertheless clear that all were infinitely better off. That fact has sustained the labor movement in the face of a counter pull from the ideal of individual achievement.
But many of the contemporary poor will not rise from poverty by organizing to bargain collectively. They either are not in the labor force or are in such marginal and dispersed occupations (e.g., domestic servants) that it is extremely difficult to organize them. Compared with other groups, then, many of today's poor cannot secure a redistribution of income by organizing within the institution of private enterprise. A federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en masse from poverty.
Several ways have been proposed for redistributing income through the federal government. It is not our purpose hereto assess the relative merits of these plans, which are still undergoing debate and clarification. Whatever mechanism is eventually adopted, however, it must include certain features if it is not merely to perpetuate in a new guise the present evils of the public welfare system.
First, adequate levels of income must be assured. (Public welfare levels are astonishingly low; indeed, states typically define a ''minimum'' standard of living and then grant only a percentage of it, so that families are held well below what the government itself officially defines as the poverty level.) Furthermore, income should be distributed without requiring that recipients first divest themselves of their assets, as public welfare now does, thereby pauperizing families as a condition of sustenance.
Second, the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated. Because benefits are conditional under the present public welfare system, submission to arbitrary governmental power is regularly made the price of sustenance. People have been coerced into attending literacy classes or participating in medical or vocational rehabilitation regimes, on pain of having their benefits terminated. Men are forced into labor on virtually any terms lest they forfeit their welfare aid. One can prize literacy, health and work, while still vigorously opposing the right of government to compel compliance with these values.
Conditional benefits thus result in violations of civil liberties throughout the nation, and in a pervasive oppression of the poor. And these violations are not less real because the impulse leading to them is altruistic and the agency is professional. If new systems of income distribution continue to permit the professional bureaucracies to choose when to give and when to withhold financial relief, the poor will once again be surrendered to an arrangement in which their rights are diminished in the name of overcoming their vices. Those who lead an attack on the welfare system must therefore be alert to the pitfalls of inadequate but placating reforms, which give the appearance of victory to what is in truth defeat.
How much economic force can be mobilized by this strategy? This question is not easy to answer because few studies have been conducted of people who are not receiving public assistance even though they may be eligible. For the purposes of this presentation, a few facts about New York City may be suggestive. Since practices elsewhere are generally acknowledged to be even more restrictive, the estimates of unused benefits, which follow probably yield a conservative estimate of the potential force of the strategy set forth in this article.
Basic assistance for food and rent: The most striking characteristic of public welfare practice is that a great many people who appear to be eligible for assistance are not on the welfare rolls. The average monthly total of New York City residents receiving assistance in 1959 was 325,771, but according to the 1960 census., 716,000 persons (unrelated or in families) appeared to be subsisting on incomes at or below the prevailing welfare eligibility levels (e.g. $2,070 for a family of four). In that same year, 539,000 people subsisted on incomes less than 80 per cent of the welfare minimums, and 200,000 lived alone or in families on incomes reported to be less than half of eligibility levels. Thus it appears that for every person on welfare in 1959, at least one more was eligible. The results of two surveys of selected areas in Manhattan support the contention that many people subsist on incomes below welfare eligibility levels. One of these, conducted by Greenleigh Associates in 1964 in an urban-renewal area on New York's upper West Side, found 9 per cent of those not on the rolls were in such acute need that they appeared to qualify for emergency assistance. The study showed, further, that a substantial number of families that were not in a ''critical'' condition would probably have qualified for supplemental assistance.
The other survey, conducted in 1961 by Mobilization for Youth, had similar findings. The area from which its sample was drawn, 67 square blocks on the lower East Side, is a poor one, but by no means the poorest in New York City. Yet 13 per cent of the total sample who were not on the welfare rolls reported incomes falling below the prevailing welfare schedules for food and rent.
There is no reason to suppose that the discrepancy between those eligible for and those receiving assistance has narrowed much in the past few years. The welfare rolls have gone up, to be sure, but so have eligibility levels. Since the economic circumstances of impoverished groups in New York have not improved appreciably in the past few years, each such rise increases the number of people who are potentially eligible for some degree of assistance.
Even if one allows for the possibility that family-income figures are grossly underestimated by the census, the financial implications of the proposed strategy are still very great. In 1965, the monthly average of persons receiving cash assistance in New York was 490,000, at a total cost of $440 million; the rolls have now risen above 500,000, so that costs will exceed $500 million in 1966. An increase in the rolls of a mere 20 per cent would cost an already overburdened municipality some $100 million.
Special grants: Public assistance recipients in New York are also entitled to receive ''non-recurring'' grants for clothing, household equipment and furniture''including washing machines, refrigerators, beds and bedding, tables and chairs. It hardly needs to be noted that most impoverished families have grossly inadequate clothing and household furnishings. The Greenleigh study, for example, found that 52 per cent of the families on public assistance lacked anything approaching adequate furniture. This condition results because almost nothing is spent on special grants in New York. In October, 1965, a typical month, the Department of Welfare spent only $2.50 per recipient for heavy clothing and $1.30 for household furnishings. Taken together, grants of this kind amounted in 1965 to a mere $40 per person, or a total of $20 million for the entire year. Considering the real needs of families, the successful demand for full entitlements could multiply these expenditures tenfold or more''and that would involve the disbursement of many millions of dollars indeed.
One must be cautious in making generalizations about the prospects for this strategy in any jurisdiction unless the structure of welfare practices has been examined in some detail. We can, however, cite other studies conducted in other places to show that New York practices are not atypical. In Detroit, for example, Greenleigh Associates studied a large sample of households in a low-income district in 1965. Twenty per cent were already receiving assistance, but 35 percent more were judged to need it. Although the authors made no strict determination of the eligibility of these families under the laws of Michigan, they believed that ''larger numbers of persons were eligible than receiving.'' A good many of these families did not know that public assistance was available; others thought they would be deemed ineligible; not a few were ashamed or afraid to ask.
Similar deprivations have been shown in nation-wide studies. In 1963, the federal government carried out a survey based on a national sample of 5,500 families whose benefits under Aid to Dependent Children had been terminated. Thirty-four percent of these cases were officially in need of income at the point of closing: this was true of 30 percent of the white and 44 percent of the Negro cases. The chief basis for termination given in local department records was ''other reasons'' (i.e., other than improvement in financial condition, which would make dependence on welfare unnecessary). Upon closer examination, these ''other reasons'' turned out to be ''unsuitable home'' (i.e., the presence of illegitimate children), ''failure to comply with departmental regulations'' or ''refusal to take legal action against a putative father.'' (Negroes were especially singled out for punitive action on the ground that children were not being maintained in ''suitable homes.'') The amounts of money that people are deprived of by these injustices are very great.
In order to generate a crisis, the poor must obtain benefits, which they have forfeited. Until now, they have been inhibited from asserting claims by self-protective devices within the welfare system: its capacity to limit information, to intimidate applicants, to demoralize recipients, and arbitrarily to deny lawful claims.
Ignorance of welfare rights can be attacked through a massive educational campaign Brochures describing benefits in simple, clear language, and urging people to seek their full entitlements, should be distributed door to door in tenements and public housing projects, and deposited in stores, schools, churches and civic centers. Advertisements should be placed in newspapers; sport announcements should be made on radio. Leaders of social, religious, fraternal and political groups in the slums should also be enlisted to recruit the eligible to the rolls. The fact that the campaign is intended to inform people of their legal rights under a government program, that it is a civic education drive, will lend it legitimacy.
But information alone will not suffice. Organizers will have to become advocates in order to deal effectively with improper rejections and terminations. The advocate's task is to appraise the circumstances of each case, to argue its merits before welfare, to threaten legal action if satisfaction is not given. In some cases, it will be necessary to contest decisions by requesting a ''fair before the appropriate hearing'' before the appropriate state supervisory agency; it may occasionally be necessary to use for redress in the courts. Hearings and court actions will require lawyers, many of whom, in cities like New York, can be recruited on a voluntary basis, especially under the banner of a movement to end poverty by a strategy of asserting legal rights. However, most cases will not require an expert knowledge of law, but only of welfare regulations; the rules can be learned by laymen, including welfare recipients themselves (who can help to man ''information and advocacy'' centers). To aid workers in these centers, handbooks should be prepared describing welfare rights and the tactics to employ in claiming them.
Advocacy must be supplemented by organized demonstrations to create a climate of militancy that will overcome the invidious and immobilizing attitudes which many potential recipients hold toward being ''on welfare.'' In such a (climate, many more poor people are likely to become their own advocates and will not need to rely on aid from organizers.
As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and injustices of welfare. For example, the system will not be able to process many new applicants because of cumbersome and often unconstitutional investigatory procedures (which cost 20c for every dollar disbursed). As delays mount, so should the public demand that a simplified affidavit supplant these procedures, so that the poor may certify to their condition. If the system reacts by making the proof of eligibility more difficult, the demand should be made that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare dispatch ''eligibility registrars'' to enforce federal statutes governing local programs. And throughout the crisis, the mass media should be used to advance arguments for a new federal income distribution program. *
*In public statements, it would be important to distinguish between the income distribution function of public welfare, which should be replaced by new federal measures, and many other welfare functions, such as foster care and adoption services for children, which are not at issue in this strategy.
Although new resources in organizers and funds would have to be developed to mount this campaign, a variety of conventional agencies in the large cities could also be drawn upon for help. The idea of ''welfare rights'' has begun to attract attention in many liberal circles. A number of organizations, partly under the aegis of the ''war against poverty,'' are developing information and advocacy services for low-income people [see ''Poverty, Injustice and the Welfare State'' by Richard A. Cloward and Richard M. Elman, The Nation, issues of February 28 and March 7]. It is not likely that these organizations will directly participate in the present strategy, for obvious political reasons. But whether they participate or not, they constitute a growing network of resources to which people can be referred for help in establishing and maintaining entitlements. In the final analysis, it does not matter who helps people to get on the rolls or to get additional entitlements, so long as the job is done.
Since this plan deals with problems of great immediacy in the lives of the poor, it should motivate some of them to involve themselves in regular organizational activities. Welfare recipients, chiefly ADC mothers, are already forming federations, committees and councils in cities across the nation; in Boston, New York, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, to mention a few. Such groups typically focus on obtaining full entitlements for existing recipients rather than on recruiting new recipients, and they do not yet comprise a national movement. But their very existence attests to a growing readiness among ghetto residents to act against public welfare.
To generate an expressly political movement, cadres of aggressive organizers would have to come from the civil rights movement and the churches, from militant low-income organizations like those formed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (that is, by Saul Slinky), and from other groups on the Left. These activists should be quick to see the difference between programs to redress individual grievances and a large-scale social-action campaign for national policy reform.
Movements that depend on involving masses of poor people have generally failed in America. Why would the proposed strategy to engage the poor succeed?
First, this plan promises immediate economic benefits. This is a point of some importance because, whereas America's poor have not been moved in any number by radical political ideologist, they have sometimes been moved by their economic interests. Since radical movements in America have rarely been able to provide visible economic incentives, they have usually failed to secure mass participation of any kind. The conservative ''business unionism'' of organized labor is explained by this fact, for membership enlarged only as unionism paid off in material benefits. Union leaders have understood that their strength derives almost entirely from their capacity to provide economic rewards to members. Although leaders have increasingly acted in political spheres, their influence has been directed chiefly to matters of governmental policy affecting the well being of organized workers. The same point is made by the experience of rent strikes in Northern cities. Their organizers were often motivated by radical ideologies, but tenants have been attracted by the promise that housing improvements would quickly be made if they withheld their rent.
Second, for this strategy to succeed, one need not ask more of most of the poor than that they claim lawful benefits. Thus the plan has the extraordinary capability of yielding mass influence without mass participation, at least as the term ''participation'' is ordinarily understood. Mass influence in this case stems from the consumption of benefits and does not require that large groups of people be involved in regular organizational roles.
Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely. Other movements have failed precisely because they could not produce continuous and cumulative influence in the Northern rent strikes, for example, participation depended largely on immediate grievances; as soon as landlords made the most minimal repairs, participation fell away and with it the impact of the movement. Efforts to revive tenant participation organizing demonstrations around broader housing issues (e.g., the expansion of public housing) did not succeed because the incentives were not immediate.
Third, the prospects for mass influence are enhanced because this plan provides a practical basis for coalition between poor whites and poor Negroes. Advocates of low-income movements have not been able to suggest how poor whites and poor Negroes can be united in an expressly lower-class movement. Despite pleas of some Negro leaders for joint action on programs requiring integration, poor whites have steadfastly resisted making common cause with poor Negroes. By contrast, the benefits of the present plan are as great for whites as for Negroes. In the big cities, at least, it does not seem likely that poor whites, whatever their prejudice against either Negroes or public welfare, will refuse to participate when Negroes aggressively claim benefits that are unlawfully denied to them as well. One salutary consequence of public information campaigns to acquaint Negroes with their rights is that many whites will be made aware of theirs. Even if whites prefer to work through their own organizations and leaders, the consequences will be equivalent to joining with Negroes. For if the object is to focus attention on the need for new economic measures by producing a crisis over the dole, anyone who insists upon extracting maximum benefits from public welfare is in effect part of a coalition and is contributing to the cause.
The ultimate aim of this strategy is a new program for direct income distribution. What reason is there to expect that the federal government will enact such legislation in response to a crisis in the welfare system?
We ordinarily think of major legislation as taking form only through established electoral processes. We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions.
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest, which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognizable eruption to public attention. Public trouble is a political liability, it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus, which politicians would ordinarily act to avert.
Although crisis impels political action, it does not itself determine the selection of specific solutions. Political leaders will try to respond with proposals, which work to their advantage in the electoral process. Unless group cleavages form around issues and demands, the politician has great latitude and tends to proffer only the minimum action required to quell disturbances without risking existing electoral support. Spontaneous disruptions, such as riots, rarely produce leaders who articulate demands; thus so terms are imposed, and political leaders are permitted to respond in ways that merely restore a semblance of stability without offending other groups in a coalition.
When, however, a crisis is defined by its participants''or by other activated groups''as a matter of clear issues and preferred solutions, terms are imposed on the politicians' bid for their support. Whether political leaders then design solutions to reflect these terms depends on a two- fold calculation: first, the impact of the crisis and the issues it raises on existing alignments and, second, the gains or losses in support to be expected as a result of a proposed resolution.
As to the impact on existing alignments, issues exposed by a crisis may activate new groups, thus altering the balance of support and opposition on the issues; or it may polarize group sentiments altering the terms, which must be offered to insure the support of given constituent groups. In framing resolutions, politicians are more responsive to group shifts and are more likely to accommodate to the terms imposed when electoral coalitions threatened by crisis are already uncertain or weakening. In other words, the politician responds to group demands, not only by calculating the magnitude of electoral gains and losses, but by assessing the impact of the resolution on the stability of existing or potential coalitions. Political leaders are especially responsive to group shifts when the terms of settlement can be framed so as to shore up an existing coalition, or as a basis for the development of new and more stable alignments, without jeopardizing existing support. Then, indeed, the calculation of net gain is most secure.
The legislative reforms of the depression years, for example, were impelled not so much by organized interests exercised through regular electoral processes as by widespread economic crisis. That crisis precipitated the disruption of the regionally based coalitions underlying the old national parties. During the realignments of 1932, a new Democratic coalition was formed, based heavily on urban working-class groups. Once in power, the national Democratic leadership proposed and implemented the economic reforms of the New Deal. Although these measures were a response to the imperative of economic crisis, the types of measures enacted were designed to secure and new Democratic coalition.
The civil rights movement, to take a recent case, reveals the relationship of crisis and electoral conditions in producing legislative reform. The crisis in the South took place in the context of a weakening North-South Democratic coalition. The strains in that coalition were first evident in the Dixiecrat desertion of 1948, and continued through the Eisenhower years as the Republicans gained ground in the Southern states. Democratic party leaders at FMT tried to hold the dissident South by warding off the demands of enlarging Negro constituencies in Northern cities. Thus for two decades the national Democratic Party campaigned on strongly worded civil rights planks but enacted only token measures. The civil rights movement forced the Democrats' hand, a crumbling Southern partnership was forfeited, and major civil rights legislation was put forward, designed to insure the support of Northern Negroes and liberal elements in the Democratic coalition. That coalition emerged strong from the 1964 election, easily able to overcome the loss of Southern states to Goldwater. At the same time, the enacted legislation, particularly the Voting Rights Act, laid the ground for a new Southern Democratic coalition of moderate whites and the hitherto untapped reservoir of Southern Negro voters.
The electoral context which made crisis effective in the South is also to be found in the big cities of the nation today. Deep tensions have developed among groups comprising the political coalitions of the large cities''the historic stronghold of the Democratic Party. As a consequence, urban politicians no longer turn in the vote to national Democratic candidates it hun faillng regularity. The marked defections revealed in the elections of the 1950s and which continued until the Johnson landslide of 1964 area matter of great concern to the national party. Precisely because of this concern, a strategy to exacerbate still further the strains in the urban coalition can be expected to evoke a response from national leaders.
The weakening of the urban coalition is a result of many basic changes in the relationship of local party leadership to its constituents. First, the political machine, the distinctive and traditional mechanism for forging alliances among competing groups in the city, is now virtually defunct in most cities. Successive waves of municipal reform have deprived political leaders of control over the public resources''jobs, contracts, services and favors''which machine politicians formerly dispensed to voters in return for electoral support. Conflicts among elements in the urban Democratic coalition once held together politically because each secured a share of these benefits, cannot now be so readily contained. And as the means of placating competing groups have diminished, tensions along ethnic and class lines have multiplied. These tensions are being intensified by the encroachments of an enlarging ghetto population on jobs, schools and residential areas. Big-city mayors are thus caught between antagonistic working-class ethnic groups, the remaining middle class, and the rapidly enlarging minority poor.
Second, there are discontinuities in the relationship between the urban party apparatus and its ghetto constituents which have so far remained unexposed but which a welfare crisis would force into view. The ghetto vote has been growing rapidly and has so far returned overwhelming Democratic majorities. Nevertheless, this voting bloc is not fully integrated in the party apparatus, either through the representation of its leaders or the accommodation of its interests.
While the urban political apparatus includes members of new minority groups, these groups are by no means represented according to their increasing proportions in the population. More important, elected representation alone is not an adequate mechanism for the expression of group interests. Influence in urban politics is won not only at the polls but through the sustained activity of organized interests''such as labor unions, homeowner associations and business groups. These groups keep watch over the complex operations of municipal agencies, recognizing issues and regularly asserting their point of view through meetings with public officials, appearances at public hearings and the like, and by exploiting a whole array of channels of influence on government. Minority constituencies''at least the large proportion of them that are poor''are not regular participants in the various institutional spheres where organized interest groups typically develop. Thus the interests of the mass of minority poor are not protected by associations, which make their own or other political leaders responsive by continuously calling them to account. Urban party organizations have become, in consequence, more an avenue for the personal advancement of minority political leaders than a channel for the expression of minority-group interests. And the big city mayors, struggling to preserve an uneasy urban consensus, have thus been granted the slack to evade the conflict-generating interests of the ghetto. A crisis in public welfare would expose the tensions latent in this attenuated relationship between the ghetto vote and the urban party leadership, for it would thrust forward ghetto demands and back them with the threat of defections by voters who have so far remained both loyal and quiescent.
In the face of such a crisis, urban political leaders may well be paralyzed by a party apparatus which ties them to older constituent groups, even while the ranks of these groups are diminishing. The national Democratic leadership, however, is alert to the importance of the urban Negro vote, especially in national contests where the loyalty of other urban groups is weakening. Indeed, many of the legislative reforms of the Great Society can be understood as efforts, however feeble, to reinforce the allegiance of growing ghetto constituencies to the national Democratic Administration. In the thirties, Democrats began to put forward measures to circumvent the states in order to reach the big-city elements in the New Deal coalition; now it is becoming expedient to put forward measures to circumvent the weakened big-city mayors in order to reach the new minority poor.
Recent federal reforms have been impelled in part by widespread unrest in the ghetto, and instances of more aggressive Negro demands. But despite these signs that the ghetto vote may become less reliable in the future, there has been as yet no serious threat of massive defection. The national party has therefore not put much pressure on its urban branches to accommodate the minority poor. The resulting reforms have consequently been quite modest (e.g., the war against poverty, with its emphasis on the ''involvement of the poor,'' is an effort to make the urban party apparatus somewhat more accommodating).
A welfare crisis would, of course, produce dramatic local political crisis, disrupting and exposing rifts among urban groups. Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition. Whites''both working-class ethnic groups and many in the middle class''would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few and, in any event, receiving the beneficent assistance of public welfare would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe. In New York City, where the Mayor is now facing desperate revenue shortages, welfare expenditures are already second only to those for public education.
It should also be noted that welfare costs are generally shared by local, state and federal governments, so that the crisis in the cities would intensify the struggle over revenues that is chronic in relations between cities and states. If the past is any predictor of the future, cities will fail to procure relief from this crisis by persuading states to increase their proportionate share of urban welfare costs, for state legislatures have been notoriously unsympathetic to the revenue needs of the city (especially where public welfare and minority groups are concerned).
If this strategy for crisis would intensify group cleavages, a federal income solution would not further exacerbate them. The demands put forward during recent civil rights drives in the Northern cities aroused the opposition of huge majorities. Indeed, such fierce resistance was evoked (e.g. school boycotts, followed by counter-boycotts), that accessions by political leaders would have provoked greater political turmoil than the protests themselves, for profound class and ethnic interests are at stake in the employment, educational and residential institutions of our society. By contrast, legislative measures to provide direct income to the poor would permit national Democratic leaders to cultivate ghetto constituencies without unduly antagonizing other urban groups, as is the case when the battle lines are drawn over schools, housing or jobs. Furthermore, a federal income program would not only redeem local governments from the immediate crisis but would permanently relieve them of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare*''a function which generates support from none and hostility from many, not least of all welfare recipients.
We suggest, in short, that if pervasive institutional rescuer particular reforms are not yet possible, requiring as they do expanded Negro political power and the development of new political alliances, crisis tactics can nevertheless be employed to secure particular reforms in the short run by exploiting weaknesses in current political alignments. Because the urban coalition stands weakened by group conflict today, disruption and threats of disaffection will count powerfully, provided that national leaders can respond with solutions, which retain the support of ghetto constituencies while avoiding new group antagonisms and bolstering the urban party apparatus. These are the conditions, then, for an effective crisis strategy in the cities to secure an end to poverty.
No strategy, however confident its advocates may be, is foolproof. But if unforeseen contingencies thwart this plan to bring about new federal legislation in the field of poverty, it should also be noted that there would be gains even in defeat. For one thing, the plight of many poor people would be somewhat eased in the course of an assault upon public welfare. Existing recipients would come to know their rights and how to defend them, thus acquiring dignity where none now exists; and millions of dollars in withheld welfare benefits would become available to potential recipients now''not several generations from now. Such an attack should also be welcome to those currently concerned with programs designed to equip the young to rise out of poverty (e.g., Head Start), for surely children learn more readily when the oppressive burden of financial insecurity is lifted from the shoulders of their parents. And those seeking new ways to engage the Negro politically should remember that public resources have always been the fuel for low-income urban political organization. If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors. At least, they have always done so in the past.
CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY: The Central Pillar of the Khazarian Cabal's Agenda of Cultural Marxism | SOTN: Alternative News, Analysis & Commentary
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 19:18
by Fred ElbelThe CAIRCO Report
The Cloward''Piven strategy was developed in 1966 by Americans Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven '' both sociologists and political activists. The Cloward''Piven strategy focused on overloading the United States public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis, which would ultimately lead to replacing the welfare system with a national system of ''a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty''.
An ancillary consequence of the strategy includes shoring up of the Democratic Party, which at the time was splintered by pluralistic interests. Another side effect would be relieving local and state governments of public welfare burdens, since the burden would be shifted to the federal government '' in other words, in a manifestation of socialism. Taxpayers, of course, would cover the cost in either case.
Cloward and Piven focused primarily on redistribution of income, stating that full enrollment in welfare programs:
''would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments'' that would: '''...deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.'''...
The ultimate objective of this strategy'--to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income'--will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.
Near-term effects of the Cloward''Piven strategyIn a new 2010 introduction to the original article, Frances Fox Piven wrote in The Nation:
Our objective was not, as later critics of the Glenn Beck variety later charged, to propose a strategy to bring down American capitalism. We were not so ambitious. But we did think that the minority poor and their allies might create sufficient disturbance to force reforms in the American income support programs. And we were not entirely wrong.
Political commentator James McWhorter wrote in his 2006 book Winning the Race that the rise in the welfare state after the 1960s could be attributed to the Cloward Piven strategy. He reported that the strategy unfortunately ''created generations of black people for whom working for a living is an abstraction.''
Whether or not the above point is wholly true, the strategy has affected change, as noted by Piven.
Long-term effects of the Cloward''Piven strategyThe strategy, while originally intended to bring about a socialistic guaranteed national income, remains a viable way to transform an entire nation. Indeed, many of the changes we see in America today are consistent within the framework of the Cloward''Piven strategy. A few examples are provided below:
1965 Immigration ActThe 1965 Immigration Act marked the turning point when American immigration was no longer managed for the American interest. In his article The Collapse of America '' A Plan Decades in the Making, David Risselada states:
In my article ''Amnesty and the Immigration Act of 1965'', I discussed the origins of the immigration crisis we are now facing and how it was nothing but a plot to secure more voters for the Democrat Party. This was based on the ideas of Marxism and the teachings of Antonio Gramsci, who taught that America's culture would have to be changed incrementally from within. The immigration act of 1965 was signed into law by Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson. This is the same president who promised Americas black communities free welfare for their votes'...
At the time America's immigration laws were based on a quota system, meaning that immigrants from any part of the world were allowed in based on the number of existing immigrants already in country from that part of the world. This was done in an effort to maintain national identity and ensure that people with useful skills and a desire to assimilate into our culture would be the ones to immigrate here. This meant that most of the people who were immigrating here were of European ancestry and just as is the case today, people referred to this as a racist system'...
It should be noted that this act resulted in ever-increasing numbers of foreigners '' both legal and illegal '' entering America who would become dependent on America's generous taxpayer-paid welfare system.
2008 financial crisisThere is plenty blame to go around for the financial crash. Yet, there is a distinct odor of the shadowy Cloward-Piven strategy as the taproot of abusive practices that triggered the crisis. The strategy's goal is to bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading and undermining government bureaucracy.
Its supporting tactics include flooding government with impossible demands until it slowly cranks to a stop; overloading electoral systems with successive tidal waves of new voters, many of them bogus; shaking down banks, politicians in Congress, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for affirmative-action borrowing; and, now, pulling down the national financial system by demanding exotic, subprime mortgages for low-income Americans with little hope of repaying their loans. These toxic mortgages are an important source of the foul smell engulfing the entire financial bailout'...
Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center explained that ''community organizers help to undermine America's economy by pushing the banking system into a sink-hole of bad loans.'''...
2014 Border crisis '' Unaccompanied Alien ChildrenIn Summer 2014, a massive influx of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) inundated our southern border. Barak Obama's immigration actions (or lack thereof) seemed to be an efficacious implementation of the Cloward''Piven strategy. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D. warned that ''Carried by this tsunami of illegals are the invisible ''travelers'' our politicians don't like to mention: diseases the U.S. had controlled or virtually eradicated: tuberculosis (TB), Chagas disease, dengue fever, hepatitis, malaria, measles, plus more.''
Obama invited these minors into the US. He has virtually gutted America's immigration enforcement system, and has taken even more outrageous executive actions. Of course, both political parties are culpable, as there is an active bipartisan amnesty exponent in Congress.
The 2014 border crisis was a manufactured crisis of the first order, which in the short term backfired. Virginia voters immediately fired House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), predominantly because he signed on to the Republican amnesty plan and expressed intent to work with Obama on a ''Kids Act'' for Dreamers. But the long-term damage remains.
2015 Syrian refugees '' importing terrorismAfter the November 2015 Paris Islamic terrorist attacks, Obama recommitted to bring Syrian ''refugees'' into the United States. This was notwithstanding the facts that a sizeable proportion are not from Syria, a majority are young men of military age, and that the U.S. government has no way to vet those coming in as ''refugees''.
Such refugees would become an additional burden on American taxpayers and could indeed comprise a very real terrorist threat.
Read more '' see Syrian refugees and national security the Refugee Resettlement racket.
The end result '' fundamentally transforming AmericaIn the 2014 article, Why the White House Wants Amnesty, Ben Shapiro writes:
Cloward-Piven's goal was to create impetus for government to guarantee a universal living. The modern Democratic Party is significantly less interested in guaranteed benefits than for an economic leveling. The motivating factor of the left is not caring for the poor but tearing down the wealthy'...
And so the Democrats will move to bankrupt the system. No welfare state can survive with open borders. That is a truism. And yet that's exactly what Democrats are now promoting: open borders with a full welfare state. Why? Not because Democrats believe that the homegrown poor in America will be better off with more people joining them on the dole; they won't. Rather, Democrats love the size and scope of the state and despise the rival the state faces in individual success. A growing welfare base requires higher taxation, more degradation of individual success. That is the goal'...
The Cloward''Piven strategy remains an active instrument of change in America. Ultimately, it is the tool by which multicultural elites aim to ''fundamentally transform America.''
ReferencesThe Collapse of America '' A Plan Decades in the Making, David Risselada, Freedom Outpost, July 16, 2014. (This article contains a many additional references.)
The Cloward''Piven strategy, Richard Chandler, The Washington Times, October 15, 2008.
The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty, Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, The Nation, March 8, 2010 (original 1966 article with updated introduction).
The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty, Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, Common Dreams, March 24, 2010 (original 1966 article from The Nation).
Bad News for Liberals May Be Good News for a Liberal Magazine, Jeremy W. Peters, The New York Times, November 7, 2010.
John McWhorter: How Welfare Went Wrong NPR, John McWhorter, August 9, 2006.
Chandler: The Cloward-Piven strategy, Robert Chandler, The Washington Times, October 15, 2008.
Cloward-Piven at the border, John Hayward, Human Events, June 10, 2014.
Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) '' Illegal alien kiddie colonists invited by Obama administration, CAIRCO, August 21, 2014.
Deadly diseases crossing border with illegals, Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., World Net Daily, June 20, 2014.
Colorado won't block Syrian refugees, November 17, 2015.
Syrian refugees and national security.
The Refugee Resettlement racket.
___https://www.cairco.org/reference/cloward-piven-strategy-fundamentally-transforming-america
Cloward''Piven strategy - Wikipedia
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 19:06
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Political strategy
The Cloward''Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.
It is the strategy of forcing political change leading to societal collapse through orchestrated crises. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unpayable national debt, and other methods such as unfettered immigration thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse by overwhelming the system.
History [ edit ] Cloward and Piven were both professors at the Columbia University School of Social Work. The strategy was outlined in a May 1966 article in the liberal magazine The Nation titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty".[1]
Strategy [ edit ] Cloward and Piven's article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They stated that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare "would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments" that would: "...deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas."[2]
They further wrote:
The ultimate objective of this strategy '' to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income '' will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.[2]
Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven "proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system '' by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice '' that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy."[3]
Focus on Democrats [ edit ] The authors pinned their hopes on creating disruption within the Democratic Party:
"Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition...Whites '' both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class '' would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few... would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe.''[4]
Reception and criticism [ edit ] Michael Tomasky, writing about the strategy in the 1990s and again in 2011, called it "wrongheaded and self-defeating", writing: "It apparently didn't occur to [Cloward and Piven] that the system would just regard rabble-rousing black people as a phenomenon to be ignored or quashed."[5]
Impact of the strategy [ edit ] In papers published in 1971 and 1977,[6] Cloward and Piven argued that mass unrest in the United States, especially between 1964 and 1969, did lead to a massive expansion of welfare rolls, though not to the guaranteed-income program that they had hoped for.[7] Political scientist Robert Albritton disagreed, writing in 1979 that the data did not support this thesis; he offered an alternative explanation for the rise in welfare caseloads.
In his 2006 book Winning the Race, political commentator John McWhorter attributed the rise in the welfare state after the 1960s to the Cloward''Piven strategy, but wrote about it negatively, stating that the strategy "created generations of black people for whom working for a living is an abstraction".[8]
According to historian Robert E. Weir in 2007: "Although the strategy helped to boost recipient numbers between 1966 and 1975, the revolution its proponents envisioned never transpired."[9]
See also [ edit ] Guaranteed minimum incomeReferences [ edit ] ^ Cloward, Richard; Piven, Frances (May 2, 1966). "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty". (Originally published in The Nation). Archived from the original on November 24, 2011 . Retrieved April 11, 2010 . [non-primary source needed ] ^ a b Cloward and Piven, p. 510[non-primary source needed ] ^ Reisch, Michael; Janice Andrews (2001). The Road Not Taken. Brunner Routledge. pp. 144''146. ISBN 1-58391-025-5. ^ Cloward and Piven, p. 516 ^ Glenn Beck and Fran Piven, Michael Tomasky, Michael Tomasky's Blog, The Guardian, January 24, 2011 ^ Cloward, Richard; Piven, Frances, "Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail", Vintage Books, 1978. ^ Albritton, Robert (December 1979). "Social Amelioration through Mass Insurgency? A Reexamination of the Piven and Cloward Thesis". American Political Science Review. 73 (4): 1003''1011. doi:10.2307/1953984. JSTOR 1953984. ^ McWhorter, John, "John McWhorter: How Welfare Went Wrong", NPR, August 9, 2006. ^ Weir, Robert (2007). Class in America. Greenwood Press. p. 616. ISBN 978-0-313-33719-2.
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Prosecutors say they will not pursue second Sam Bankman-Fried trial
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 18:11
Indicted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrives at the United States Courthouse in New York City, July 26, 2023.
Amr Alfiky | Reuters
Prosecutors have decided not to pursue a second trial against disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
In a note to Judge Lewis Kaplan on Friday, the U.S. government explained that the decision to forego a second set of proceedings had to do with the fact that much of the evidence that would have been presented in a second trial had already been submitted to the Court during Bankman-Fried's first criminal trial.
In November, following a month's worth of testimony from nearly 20 witnesses, a jury found the former FTX chief executive guilty of all seven criminal counts against him following a few hours of deliberation. Prosecutors added that the Court could consider the hundreds of exhibits already entered into evidence during these proceedings when he is sentenced next year.
Read more on FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried"Given that practical reality, and the strong public interest in a prompt resolution of this matter, the Government intends to proceed to sentencing on the counts for which the defendant was convicted at trial," continued the letter to Judge Kaplan.
Bankman-Fried, the 31-year old son of two Stanford legal scholars and graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud against FTX customers and against Alameda Research lenders, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit commodities fraud against FTX investors, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
He had pleaded not guilty to the charges, which were all tied to the collapse of FTX and its sister hedge fund Alameda late last year.
The second trial, which had been slated to start in March, addressed an additional set of criminal counts, including conspiracy to bribe foreign officials, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and substantive securities fraud and commodities fraud.
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote in the letter to the Court that "a second trial would not affect the United States Sentencing Guidelines range for the defendant, because the Court can already consider all of this conduct as relevant conduct when sentencing him for the counts that he was found guilty of at the initial trial."
So now, the question of prison time goes to Judge Kaplan.
The sentencing date is March 28 at 9:30 a.m. ET. The FTX founder faces more than 100 years in prison.
Government exhibit in the case against former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
Source: SDNY
Decades behind barsThat the jury was able to reach a unanimous verdict in a just few hours suggests that they were truly convinced and that there were no holdouts that needed to be coaxed, Yesha Yadav, law professor and Associate Dean at Vanderbilt University, told CNBC in November.
"This overwhelming consensus should give the judge confidence to follow the jury's decisiveness by imposing a more severe sentence than a lighter one," continued Yadav.
In this case, the statutory maximum sentence is around 115 years, but there is a sliding scale for sentencing according to recommended guidelines given the scale of the crimes and the criminal history of the defendant.
"I wouldn't be surprised if SBF spends the next 20 or 25 years of his life in prison," Renato Mariotti, a former prosecutor in the U.S. Justice Department's Securities and Commodities Fraud Section, told CNBC.
"The sheer scale of his fraud was immense, he was defiant and lied on the witness stand, and Judge Kaplan had very little patience for his antics while out on bond. He will have more sympathy for the victims than he has for Bankman-Fried," added Mariotti.
Caroline Ellison, former chief executive officer of Alameda Research LLC, leaves Manhattan Federal Court after testifying during the trial of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, on October 10, 2023 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
In August, Judge Kaplan revoked Bankman-Fried's bail and sent him back to jail for witness tampering.
"The federal sentencing guidelines will likely be sky high, but they are just that '-- guidelines '-- and the judge is required to consider all of the circumstances surrounding SBF and his offense," said Mariotti.
Yadav added that the issue of sentencing is governed by guidelines that look to factors such as how many have been harmed and the overall dollar quantum, as well as the seriousness of the damage a defendant has inflicted.
"Here, there are some factors that could push the judge toward a very lengthy prison term, possibly close to the 110 years that the sentencing guidelines suggest," said Yadav.
The sentence will come down to what the judge believes is sufficient to punish Bankman-Fried, deter others, and promote respect for the law, Yadav added.
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin J. O'Brien, who specializes in white-collar criminal defense in NYC, thinks Bankman-Fried has the chance at a shorter sentence, telling CNBC, "Since judges have discretion even under the Guidelines, I believe his sentence will be in the 15 to 20 year range."
O'Brien added that given Bankman Fried's age, he thinks the judge will be inclined to give him a chance to live a full life after his prison term.
Bankman-Fried's case has been compared with that of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of medical device company Theranos, which ceased operations in 2018.
Holmes, 39, was convicted in early 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors in Theranos after testifying in her own defense. She was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison, and began serving her punishment in May at a minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas.
But former federal prosecutor Paul Tuchmann tells CNBC that he expects harsher terms for the former FTX CEO, because "the amount of losses that were suffered is simply staggering."
Tuchmann compared Bankman-Fried's case to that of Bernie Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
"Like Madoff, a lot of the losses in this case were small investors. They weren't all large institutions, which really tends to create a greater pressure for a significant sentence," said Tuchmann.
"Certainly, there may be some mitigation here. Sam Bankman-Fried is very young. The judge may take that into consideration. Bernie Madoff went to jail for 150 years when he was obviously much older '' with limited productive years left," Yadav said of the Madoff comparison.
"Sam Bankman-Fried still has an opportunity to make some kind of positive contribution during his lifetime. His crimes are also not violent in nature," continued Yadav.
Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Releases National Strategy to Put Nature on the Nation's Balance Sheet | OSTP | The White House
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 17:56
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration released the final National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions, a historic roadmap that will kick off a multi-year effort to put nature on the nation's balance sheet for the first time, with an emphasis on better data to understand nature's critical contributions to the U.S. economy and to guide policy and business decisions moving forward. Current national economic statistics measure the U.S. economy in a manner that does not account for the role and value of underlying natural assets, such as land, water, minerals, animals, and plants. Without natural capital reflected in national statistics, the United States cannot fully track the role of natural capital in driving economic growth, making it harder for public and private sectors to plan for the future. Expanding the national economic accounting system to include natural capital will better capture the links between nature and the economy and lead to a more inclusive and comprehensive accounting of the U.S. economy. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the U.S. Department of Commerce led the development of the final National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions, working with more than 27 federal departments and agencies at the table, and incorporating input received from across sectors during a public open comment period. ''Natural assets, like land and water, underpin businesses, enhance quality of life, and act as a stabilizing force for economic prosperity and opportunity. They also help counteract the destabilizing risks to our environment and markets caused by climate change and nature loss. Yet the connections between nature and the economy are not currently reflected in our national economic statistics,'' wrote OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and OMB Director Shalanda Young, in a letter introducing the report. ''The National Strategy gives us a path to change that. Clearly measuring the quantity and value of natural capital will enable more accurate economic growth forecasts and facilitate a more complete picture of economic progress to inform how we prioritize investments.'' Using existing authorities and building on and integrating numerous existing natural capital measurement efforts across the government, implementation of the Final National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions will organize the information needed to make informed decisions that enhance economic prosperity in the present, while securing future nature-dependent economic opportunities. The final National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions is available here.
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Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real | Scientific American
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 17:01
Opinion
December 20, 2023
5 min read
Today's Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they're trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook
By Charles Stross
Science fiction (SF) influences everything in this day and age, from the design of everyday artifacts to how we'--including the current crop of 50-something Silicon Valley billionaires'--work. And that's a bad thing: it leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian novels mistaken for instruction manuals.
Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats.  Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and ''seasteading.'' Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a ''techno-optimist manifesto'' promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.
These men collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens. But this is tremendously bad news because the past century's science fiction and fantasy works widely come loaded with dangerous assumptions.
SF is a profoundly ideological genre'--it's about much more than new gadgets or inventions. Canadian science-fiction novelist and futurist Karl Schroeder has told me that ''every technology comes with an implied political agenda.'' And the tech plutocracy seems intent on imposing its agenda on our planet's eight billion inhabitants.
We were warned about the ideology driving these wealthy entrepreneurs by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the ethical artificial intelligence team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and mile Torres, a philosopher specializing in existential threats to humanity. They named this ideology TESCREAL, which stands for ''transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism.'' These are separate but overlapping beliefs in the circles associated with big tech in California. Transhumanists seek to extend human cognition and enhance longevity; extropians add space colonization, mind uploading, AI and rationalism (narrowly defined) to these ideals. Effective altruism and longtermism both discount relieving present-day suffering to fund a better tomorrow centuries hence. Underpinning visions of space colonies, immortality and technological apotheosis, TESCREAL is essentially a theological program, one meant to festoon its high priests with riches.
How did this ideology come about, and why do I think it's dangerous?
The science-fiction genre that today's billionaires grew up with'--the one that existed in the 1970s'--goes back to inventor and publisher Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback published general articles about science and technology and then fiction in that vein. He started publishing Amazing Stories magazine in 1926 as a vehicle for fantastic tales about a technological future. His magazine's strain of SF promoted the combination of the American dream of capitalist success, combined with uncritical technological solutionism and a side order of frontier colonialism.
Gernsbackian SF mirrored Italian futurism's rejection of the past and celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry, and both were wide open to far-right thought. Gernsback's rival, John W. Campbell, Jr. (editor of Astounding Science Fiction from 1937 until 1971), promoted many now famous authors, including Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. But Campbell was also racist, sexist and a red-baiter. Nor was Campbell alone on the right wing of SF: for example, bestselling author Ayn Rand held that the only social system compatible with her philosophy of objectivism was laissez-faire capitalism. The appeal this holds for today's billionaires is obvious.
Perhaps SF's weirdest contribution to TESCREAL is Russian cosmism, the post-1917 stepchild of the mystical theological speculation of philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov. It's pervasive in science fiction'--seen in topics from space colonization to immortalism, superhumans, the singularity, mind uploading, and more.
Cosmism's contribution to the TESCREAL ideology is a secular quasi-religion with an implied destiny'--colonize Mars and then the galaxy, achieve immortality, prioritize the long-term interests of humanity'--that provides billionaires with an appealing justification for self-enrichment. We can see this with Thiel, who co-founded analytics company Palantir Technologies with a Lord of the Rings''themed name and recently told the Atlantic that he wanted to be immortal like J.R.R. Tolkien's elves. And we can see it when Musk lands his rockets on barges with names taken from a science-fiction series by Iain M. Banks (ironically enough, one about a galactic socialist utopia). TESCREAL is also heavily contaminated with Christian theological reasoning, Campbellian white supremacism, Randian ruthlessness, the eugenics that was pervasive in the genre until the 1980s and the imperialist subtext of colonizing the universe.
But there is a problem: SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental. We recycle the existing material'--and the result is influenced heavily by the biases of earlier writers and readers. The genre operates a lot like a large language model that is trained using a body of text heavily contaminated by previous LLMs; it tends to emit material like that of its predecessors. Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.
Science fiction, therefore, does not develop in accordance with the scientific method. It develops by popular entertainers trying to attract a bigger audience by pandering to them. The audience today includes billionaires who read science fiction in their childhood and who appear unaware of the ideological underpinnings of their youthful entertainment: elitism, ''scientific'' racism, eugenics, fascism and a blithe belief today in technology as the solution to societal problems.
In 2021 a meme arose based on writer and game designer Alex Blechman's tweet about this issue (which was later posted to Mastodon):
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary taleTech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
It's a worryingly accurate summary of the situation in Silicon Valley right now: the billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we're trapped in the passenger seat. Let's hope there isn't a cliff in front of us.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
TESCREALism: The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 16:51
TESCREAL'--pronounced ''tess-cree-all.'' It's a strange word that you may have seen pop up over the past few months. The renowned computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru frequently mentions the ''TESCREAL'' ideologies on social media, and for a while the Twitter profile of billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen read: ''cyberpunk activist; embracer of variance; TESCREAList.'' The Financial Times, Business Insider and VentureBeat have all used or investigated the word. And The Washington Spectator published an article by Dave Troy titled, ''Understanding TESCREAL'--The Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley's Rightward Turn.''
My guess is that the acronym will gain more attention as the topic of artificial intelligence becomes more widely discussed, along with questions about the strange beliefs of its most powerful Silicon Valley proponents and critics. But what the heck does ''TESCREAL'' mean and why does it matter?
I have thought a lot about these questions, as I coined the term in an as-yet unpublished academic paper, co-written with Gebru, tracing the influence of a small constellation of interrelated and overlapping ideologies within the contemporary field of AI. Those ideologies, we believe, are a central reason why companies like OpenAI, funded primarily by Microsoft, and its competitor, Google DeepMind, are trying to create ''artificial general intelligence'' in the first place.
The problem that Gebru and I encountered when writing our paper is that discussing the constellation of ideologies behind the current race to create AGI, and the dire warnings of ''human extinction'' that have emerged alongside it, can get messy real fast. The story of why AGI is the ultimate goal'-- with some seeing ChatGPT and GPT-4 as big steps in this direction '-- requires talking about a lot of long, polysyllabic words: transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and longtermism. I have written about the last two of these in previous articles for Truthdig, which probed how they have become massively influential within Silicon Valley. But you don't have to look very hard to see their impact, which is pretty much everywhere. ''TESCREAL'' is one solution to the problem of talking about this cluster of ideologies without a cluttering repetition of almost-impossible-to-pronounce words. John Lennon captured the problem when he sang, ''This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m.''
The Oxford professor Nick Bostrom plans to cryogenize his body for revivification by AI doctors in the distant future. Image: nickbostrom.comTo minimize the ''is-m, is-m, is-m,'' I proposed the acronym ''TESCREAL,'' which combines the first letter of the ideologies listed above, in roughly the same order they appeared over the past three and a half decades. Gebru and I thus began to reference the ''TESCREAL bundle of ideologies'' to streamline our discussion, which gave rise to the terms ''TESCREALism'' (a reference to the bundle as a whole) and ''TESCREAList'' (someone who endorses most or all of this bundle). So, we traded a messy list of words for a single clunky term; not a perfect fix, but given the options, a solution we were happy with.
Little that's going on right now with AI makes sense outside the TESCREAL framework. The overlapping and interconnected ideologies that the ''TESCREAL'' acronym captures are integral to understanding why billions of dollars are being poured into the creation of increasingly powerful AI systems, and why organizations like the Future of Life Institute are frantically calling for ''all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.'' They also explain the recent emergence of ''AI doomerism,'' led by the TESCREAList Eliezer Yudkowsky, who in a recent TIME op-ed endorsed the use of military strikes against data centers to delay the creation of AGI, including at the risk of triggering an all-out thermonuclear war.
At the heart of TESCREALism is a ''techno-utopian'' vision of the future. It anticipates a time when advanced technologies enable humanity to accomplish things like: producing radical abundance, reengineering ourselves, becoming immortal, colonizing the universe and creating a sprawling ''post-human'' civilization among the stars full of trillions and trillions of people. The most straightforward way to realize this utopia is by building superintelligent AGI.
Those ideologies, we believe, are a central reason why companies like OpenAI, funded primarily by Microsoft, and its competitor, Google DeepMind, are trying to create ''artificial general intelligence'' in the first place.
But then, as the AGI finish line got closer, some began to worry that the whole plan might backfire: AGI could actually turn on its creators, destroying humanity and along with it, this utopian future. Rather than ushering in a paradise among the stars, an AGI built ''under anything remotely like the current circumstances'' would kill ''literally everyone on Earth,'' to quote Yudkowsky. Others in the TESCREAL neighborhood, like Andreessen, disagree, arguing that the probability of doom is very low. In their view, the most likely outcome of advanced AI is that it will drastically increase economic productivity, give us ''the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence'' and ''take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.'' Developing AI is thus ''a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children and to our future,'' writes Andreessen.
Consequently, a range of positions have emerged within the TESCREAL community, from ''AI doomers'' to ''AI accelerationists,'' a term that Andreessen included next to ''TESCREAList'' in his Twitter profile. In between are various ''moderate'' positions that see the dangers as real but not insuperable, a position exemplified by the Future of Life Institute, which merely calls for a six-month ''pause'' on AGI research.
While it might appear that ''doomers'' and ''accelerationists'' have little in common, the backdrop to the entire debate is the TESCREAL worldview. It is the key to understanding these different schools of thought and the race to AGI that's catapulted them into the public consciousness. To be clear, Microsoft and Google are of course driven by the profit motive. They expect the AI systems being developed by OpenAI and DeepMind to significantly boost shareholder value. But the profit motive is only part of the picture. The other part, which is no less integral, is the TESCREAL bundle. This is why it's so important to understand what this bundle is, who embraces it and how it's driving the push to create AGI.
To see how the TESCREAL ideologies fit together, it's useful to examine each ideology separately.
The ''T'' stands for transhumanism. This is the backbone of the TESCREAL bundle. Indeed, the next three letters of the acronym '-- Extropianism, singularitarianism, and cosmism '-- are just variations of transhumanism. But we'll get to them in a moment. The core vision of transhumanism is to technologically reengineer the human species to create a superior new race of ''posthumans.'' These posthumans would be ''superior'' by virtue of possessing one or more super-human abilities: immortality, extremely high ''IQs,'' total control over their emotions, exceptional ''rationality'' and perhaps new sensory modalities like echolocation, used by bats to navigate the world. Some transhumanists have imagined ''enhancing'' our moral capacities by slipping ''morality-boosting'' chemicals into the public water supply, like we do with fluoride.
Essentially, a bunch of 20th-century atheists concluded that their lives lacked the meaning, purpose and hope provided by traditional religion. In response to this realization, they invented a new, secular religion, in which ''heaven'' is something we create ourselves, in this world. This new religion offered the promise of eternal life, just like Christianity, and has its own version of resurrection: those who don't become immortal can have their bodies cryogenized by a company named Alcor, based in California, so they can be revived when the technological know-how becomes available. Leading TESCREAList Nick Bostrom is an Alcor customer. Along the same lines, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, was one of 25 people who signed up with Nectome, a company that preserves people's brains so they can someday be ''uploaded'' to a computer '-- a process that, incidentally, requires euthanizing the customer.
William MacAskill has led Effective Altruists away from concern over current suffering towards concern for a very distant Digital Valhalla. Image: Armchair ExpertAs for God, if he doesn't exist, then why not just create him? This is what AGI is supposed to be: an all-knowing, all-powerful entity capable of solving all our problems and creating utopia. Indeed, the phrase ''God-like AI'' has become a popular way of referring to AGI over the past few months. Conversely, if the AGI we build turns on us, it will be a ''demon'' of our own creation. This is why Elon Musk '-- who co-founded OpenAI with Altman and others '-- warned that ''with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.''
Understanding transhumanism is important not just because of its role in TESCREALism, but because of its ubiquity in Silicon Valley. Tech titans are pouring huge sums of money into realizing the transhumanist project and see AGI as playing an integral part in catalyzing this process. Take Elon Musk's company Neuralink. Its mission is to merge ''your brain with AI,'' and in doing so to ''jump-start the next stage of human evolution.'' This is transhumanism. Or consider that Altman, in addition to signing up with Nectome, secretly donated $180 million to a ''longevity'' start-up called Retro Biosciences, which aims ''to prolong human life by discovering how to rejuvenate our bodies.'' This, too, is transhumanism.
Moving on to the next three letters in the ''TESCREAL'' acronym: Extropianism, Singularitarianism and Cosmism. The first was the original name of the organized transhumanist movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was on the Extropian mailing list that Bostrom sent his now-infamous racist email claiming that ''Blacks are more stupid than whites.'' (After I discovered this email, he apologized for using the N-word but didn't walk back his claim about race and ''intelligence.'') Singularitarianism is just the idea that the ''Singularity'' '-- the moment when the pace of technological development exceeds our comprehension, perhaps driven by an ''intelligence explosion'' of self-improving AI '-- will play an integral role in bringing about the techno-utopian future mentioned above, plus a state of radical, post-scarcity abundance. In one popular version, the Singularity enables our posthuman digital descendants to colonize and ''wake up'' the universe. ''The 'dumb' matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,'' writes TESCREAList Ray Kurzweil, a research scientist at Google who was personally hired by Larry Page, the company's co-founder and an adherent of a version of TESCREALism called ''digital utopianism.''
While it might appear that ''doomers'' and ''accelerationists'' have little in common, the backdrop to the entire debate is the TESCREAL worldview.
If transhumanism is eugenics on steroids, cosmism is transhumanism on steroids. In his ''The Cosmist Manifesto,'' the former Extropian who christened the now-common term ''artificial general intelligence,'' Ben Goertzel, writes that ''humans will merge with technology,'' resulting in ''a new phase of the evolution of our species.'' Eventually, ''we will develop sentient AI and mind uploading technology'' that ''will permit an indefinite lifespan to those who choose to leave biology behind.'' Many of these ''uploaded minds'' will ''choose to live in virtual worlds.'' The ultimate aim is to ''develop spacetime engineering and scientific 'future magic' much beyond our current understanding and imagination,'' where such things ''will permit achieving, by scientific means, most of the promises of religions '-- and many amazing things that no human religion ever dreamed.''
This brings us to Rationalism and Effective Altruism. The first grew out of a website called LessWrong, which was founded in 2009 by Yudkowsky, Bostrom's colleague in the early Extropian movement. Because realizing the utopian visions above will require a lot of really ''smart'' people doing really ''smart'' things, we must optimize our ''smartness.'' This is what Rationalism is all about: finding ways to enhance our ''rationality,'' which '-- somewhat humorously '-- has led some Rationalists to endorse patently ridiculous ideas. For example, Yudkowsky once claimed, based on supposedly ''rational'' arguments, that it would be better to let ''one person be horribly tortured for 50 years without hope or rest'' than to allow some very large number of people to experience the nearly imperceptible discomfort of having an eyelash in their eye. Just crunch the numbers and you'll see that this is true '-- sometimes you just need to ''shut up and multiply,'' as Yudkowsky argues.
Related The Bright Side of Extinction While Rationalism was spawned by transhumanists, you could see EA as what happens when members of the Rationalist community pivot to questions of ethics. Whereas Rationalism aims to optimize our rationality, EA focuses on optimizing our morality, often using the same tools and methods, such as ''expected value theory.'' For example, should you go work for an environmental nonprofit or get a job on Wall Street working for a proprietary trading firm like Jane Street Capital? EAs argue that if you crunch the numbers, you can do more overall ''good'' if you work for an ''evil organization'' like Jane Street and donate the extra income. In fact, this is exactly what a young EA named Sam Bankman-Fried did after a conversation with one of the cofounders of EA, William MacAskill. A few years later, Bankman-Fried came to believe he might be better positioned to ''get filthy rich, for charity's sake'' '-- as one journalist put it '-- if he started his own cryptocurrency company, which he did, resulting in Alameda Research and FTX. Bankman-Fried now faces up to 155 years in prison for allegedly committing ''one of the biggest financial frauds in history.''
Like Rationalists, EAs are obsessed with ''intelligence,'' ''IQ,'' and a particular interpretation of ''rationality.'' One former EA reported in Vox that EA leaders tested a ranking system of community members in which those with IQs less than 120 would get points subtracted from their score card. EAs would also get points added if they focused on ''longtermist'' issues like AGI safety, whereas they'd lose points if they ''worked to reduce global poverty or mitigate climate change.'' This brings us to the final letter in the acronym:
Longtermism, which emerged out of the EA movement and is probably EAs most significant contribution to the TESCREAL bundle. If transhumanism is the backbone of TESCREALism, longtermism is the ''galaxy brain'' sitting atop it. What happened is that, in the early 2010s, a bunch of EAs realized that humanity can theoretically exist on Earth for another 1 billion years, and if we spread into space, we could persist for at least 10^40 years (that's a 1 followed by 40 zeros). More mind-blowing was the possibility of these future people living in vast computer simulations running on planet-sized computers spread throughout the accessible cosmos, an idea that Bostrom developed in 2003. The more people who exist in this ''Matrix''-like future, the more happiness there could be; and the more happiness, the better the universe will become.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has emerged as the consummate AI Doomer. Image: The Logan Bartlett ShowHence, if your aim is to positively influence the greatest number of people possible, and if most people who could exist will live in the far future, then it's only ''rational'' to focus on them rather than current day people. According to Bostrom, the future could contain at least 10^58 digital people in virtual-reality worlds (a 1 followed by a mind-boggling 58 zeros). Compare that to the 1.3 billion people in multidimensional poverty today, which absolutely pales in comparison. This is why longtermists concluded that improving these future people's lives '-- indeed, making sure that they exist in the first place '-- should be our top global priority. Furthermore, since creating a ''safe'' AGI would greatly increase the probability of these people existing, longtermists pioneered the field of ''AI safety,'' which aims to ensure that whatever AGI we build ends up being a ''God'' rather than ''demon.''
If transhumanism is the backbone of TESCREALism, longtermism is the ''galaxy brain'' sitting atop it.
Like transhumanism, Rationalism, and EA, longtermism boasts of a large following in Silicon Valley and among the tech elite. Last year, Elon Musk retweeted a paper by Bostrom, one of the founding documents of longtermism, with the line: ''Likely the most important paper ever written.'' After MacAskill published a book on longtermism last summer, Musk described it as ''a close match for my philosophy.'' Longtermism is the backdrop to Musk's claims that ''we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future,'' and that ''what matters '... is ''maximizing cumulative civilizational net happiness over time.'' And although Altman has questioned the ''branding'' of longtermism, it's what he gestures at in saying that building a safe AGI is important because''galaxies are indeed at risk.'' As alluded to earlier, the founding of companies like OpenAI and DeepMind were partly the result of longtermists. An early investment in DeepMind, for example, was made by Jaan Tallinn, a prominent TESCREAList who also co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge and the Future of Life Institute, itself largely funded by the crypto millionaire Vitalik Buterin, himself a TESCREAList. Five years after DeepMind was formed, Musk and Altman then joined forces with other Silicon Valley elite, such as Peter Thiel, to start OpenAI.
Longtermism is also a major reason for the ''doomer'' freak-out over AGI being built in the near future, before we can figure out how to make it ''safe.'' According to the longtermist framework, the biggest tragedy of an AGI apocalypse wouldn't be the 8 billion deaths of people now living. This would be bad, for sure, but much worse would be the nonbirth of trillions and trillions of future people who would have otherwise existed. We should thus do everything we can to ensure that these future people exist, including at the cost of neglecting or harming current-day people '-- or so this line of reasoning straightforwardly implies. This is why Yudkowsky recently contended that risking an all-out thermonuclear war on Earth is worth it to avert an AGI apocalypse. The argument is that, while an AGI apocalypse would kill everyone on Earth, thermonuclear war almost certainly wouldn't. At least with thermonuclear war, then, there'd still be a chance of eventually colonizing space and creating utopia, after civilization rebuilds. When asked ''How many people are allowed to die to prevent AGI?,'' Yudkowsky thus replied:
There should be enough survivors on Earth in close contact to form a viable reproductive population, with room to spare, and they should have a sustainable food supply. So long as that's true, there's still a chance of reaching the stars someday.
This is the dark side of TESCREALism '-- it's one reason I've argued that this bundle, especially the ''galaxy brain'' at the top '-- longtermism '-- could be profoundly dangerous. If the ends can sometimes justify the means, and if the end is a utopian paradise full of literally astronomical amounts of ''value,'' then what exactly is off the table for protecting this future? The other dark side of TESCREALism is its accelerationist camp, which wants humanity to rush headlong into creating increasingly powerful technologies with little or no regulation. Doing so is bound to leave a trail of destruction in its wake.
What links these two extremes '-- along with the ''moderate'' positions in the middle '-- is a fundamentalist belief that advanced technologies are our ticket to a world in which, as Altman writes in an OpenAI blog post, ''humanity flourishes to a degree that is probably impossible for any of us to fully visualize yet.'' TESCREALism is the worldview based on this grand vision, which grew from the overlapping movements and ideologies discussed above.
It may be somewhat obvious at this point why the TESCREAL ideologies comprise a ''bundle.'' You can think of them as forming a single entity extended across time, from the late 1980s up to the present, with each new ideology arising from and being shaped by previous ones. Put differently, the emergence of these ideologies looks a lot like suburban sprawl, resulting in a cluster of municipalities without any clear borders between them '-- a conurbation of movements that share much the same ideological real estate. In many cases, the individuals who influenced the development of one also shaped many others, and the communities that coalesced around each letter in the acronym have always overlapped considerably. Let's define a ''TESCREAList'' as anyone who's linked to more than one of these ideologies. Examples include Bostrom, Yudkowsky, MacAskill, Musk, Altman and Bankman-Fried.
(The only ideology that's mostly defunct is Extropianism, having merged into subsequent ideologies while passing along its commitment to values like ''perpetual progress,'' ''self-transformation,'' ''rational thinking'' and ''intelligent technology.'' The role of Extropianism in the formation of TESCREALism and its continuing legacy are why I include it in the acronym.)
There are many other features of TESCREALism that justify thinking of it as a single bundle. For example, it has direct links to eugenics, and eugenic tendencies have rippled through just about every ideology that comprises it. This should be unsurprising given that transhumanism '-- the backbone of TESCREALism '-- is itself a form of eugenics called ''liberal eugenics.'' Early transhumanists included some of the leading eugenicists of the 20th century, most notably Julian Huxley, president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962. I wrote about this at length in a previous Truthdig article, so won't go into details here, but suffice it to say that the stench of eugenics is all over the TESCREAL community. Several leading TESCREALists, for instance, have explicitly worried about ''less intelligent'' people outbreeding their ''more intelligent'' peers. If ''unintelligent'' people have too many children, then the average ''intelligence'' level of humanity will decrease, thus jeopardizing the whole TESCREAL project. Bostrom lists this as a type of ''existential risk,'' which essentially denotes any event that would prevent us from creating a posthuman utopia among the heavens full of astronomical numbers of ''happy'' digital people. In Bostrom's words,
it is possible that advanced civilized society is dependent on there being a sufficiently large fraction of intellectually talented individuals. Currently it seems that there is a negative correlation in some places between intellectual achievement and fertility. If such selection were to operate over a long period of time, we might evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species, homo philoprogenitus (''lover of many offspring'').
This leads to another characteristic of the TESCREAL community: many members see themselves as quite literally saving the world. Sometimes this is made explicit, as when MacAskill '-- co-founder of EA, leading longtermist, and advocate of transhumanism '-- writes that ''to save the world, don't get a job at a charity; go work on Wall Street.'' Luke Muehlhauser, a TESCREAList who used to work with Yudkowsky on AI safety issues, similarly declares:
The world cannot be saved by caped crusaders with great strength and the power of flight. No, the world must be saved by mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers.
By which he means, of course, TESCREALists.
One of the central aims of the TESCREAL community is to mitigate existential risk. By definition, this means increasing the probability of a utopian world of astronomical ''value'' someday existing in the future. Hence, to say ''I'm working to mitigate existential risks'' is another way of saying, ''I'm trying to save the world '-- the world to come, utopia.'' As one scholar puts it, ''the stakes are so high that those involved in this effort will have earned their keep even if they reduce the probability of a catastrophe by a tiny fraction.'' Bostrom argues that if there's a mere 1% chance of 10^52 digital lifetimes existing in the future, then ''the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.'' In other words, if you mitigate existential risk by this minuscule amount, then you've done the moral equivalent of saving billions and billions of existing human lives.
This grandiose sense of self-importance is evident in the names of leading TESCREAL organizations, such as the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, founded by Bostrom in 2005, and the Future of Life Institute, which aims ''to help ensure that the future of life exist[s] and [is] as awesome as possible'' and originally included Bostrom on its Scientific Advisory Board.
The belief that TESCREALists trying to mitigate existential risks are doing something uniquely important '-- saving the world '-- is also apparent in an attitude that many express toward ''nonexistential'' threats to humanity. Social justice provides a good example. After Bostrom's racist email came to light earlier this year, he released a sloppily written ''apology'' and griped on his personal website about ''a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitoes'' distracting him ''from what's important'' '-- a clear reference to the social justice activists who were upset with his behavior. When one believes they are literally saving the world, everything else looks trivial by comparison.
This is yet another reason I believe the TESCREAL bundle poses a serious threat to people in the present, especially those who aren't as privileged and well-off as many leading TESCREALists. As Bostrom once quipped, catastrophes that don't threaten our posthuman future among the heavens are nothing more than ''mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life.'' Why? Because they won't ''significantly affect the total amount of human suffering or happiness or determine the long-term fate of our species.'' ''Giant massacres for man,'' are but ''small missteps for mankind.''
When one believes they are literally saving the world, everything else looks trivial by comparison.
Perhaps the most important feature of the TESCREAL bundle as a whole is its enormous influence. Together, these ideologies have given rise to a normative worldview '-- essentially, a ''religion'' for atheists '-- built around a deeply impoverished utopianism crafted almost entirely by affluent white men at elite universities and in Silicon Valley, who now want to impose this vision on the rest of humanity '-- and they're succeeding. This is why TESCREALism needs to be named, called out and criticized. Although not every TESCREAList holds the most radical views found in the community, the most radical views are often championed by the most influential figures. Bostrom, Musk, Yudkowsky and MacAskill have all made claims that would give most people shivers. MacAskill, for example, argues in his 2022 book ''What We Owe the Future'' that, in order to keep the engines of economic growth roaring, we should consider replacing human workers with digital workers. ''We might develop artificial general intelligence (AGI),'' he writes, ''that could replace human workers '-- including researchers. This would allow us to increase the number of 'people' working on R&D as easily as we currently scale up production of the latest iPhone.''
Does this sound like utopia or a dystopia? Later he declares that our obliteration of the natural world might be ''a good thing,'' since there's a lot of wild-animal suffering in nature, and hence the fewer wild animals there are, the less wild-animal suffering. On this view, nature itself might not have a place in the TESCREAList future.
If TESCREALism was not an ascendant ideology within some of the most powerful sectors of society, we might chuckle at all of this, or just roll our eyes. But the frightening fact is that the TESCREAL bundle is already shaping our world, and the world of our children, in profound ways. Right now, the media, the public, policymakers and our political leaders know little about these ideologies. As someone who participated in the TESCREAL movement over the past decade, but who now views it as a destructive and dangerous force in the world, I feel a moral obligation to educate people about what's going on. Although the term ''TESCREAL'' is strange and clunky, it holds the keys to making sense of the ''accelerationist'' push to develop AGI as well as the ''doomer'' backlash against recent advancements, driven by fears that AGI '-- if created soon '-- might annihilate humanity rather than ushering in a utopian paradise.
If we are to have any hope of counteracting this behemoth, it is critical that we understand what ''TESCREAL'' means and how these ideologies have infiltrated the highest echelons of power. To date, the TESCREAL movement has been subject to precious little critical inquiry, let alone resistance. It's time for that to change.
Climate change made 2023 the hottest year on record | Science News
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 16:31
This year didn't just shatter records. It changed the scales.
Graph after graph tracking this year's soaring global temperatures reveal that not only were the numbers higher than ever recorded in many places around the world, but the deviation from the norm was also astonishingly large.
''The margins by which records are being broken this year have surprised not just me but [other climate scientists] that I trust, even my very unalarmist friends,'' says Doug McNeall of the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, England.
As of late November, months of sweltering global temperatures easily put 2023 on track to be Earth's hottest year since record keeping began about 150 years ago. The 12-month period from November 2022 through October 2023 is officially the hottest such period on record '-- a record that's likely to be broken in 2024, according to the nonprofit group Climate Central (SN: 11/9/23).
Extreme heat waves baked many regions, which in turn fueled catastrophic wildfires. Ocean heat was off the charts, with global average sea surface temperatures sustaining record highs for much of the year. And in the water surrounding Antarctica, sea ice reached new lows.
These records had the fingerprints of human-caused climate change all over them, according to the international scientific consortium World Weather Attribution. Climate change made July's extreme heat waves in North America, Southern Europe and North Africa hundreds of times as likely, and another in China about 50 times as likely (SN: 7/25/23). Climate change was also the primary cause behind a brutal winter and early spring heat wave in South America, making that event at least 100 times as likely.
On social media, many climate scientists who posted jaw-dropping screenshots of 2023's temperature anomalies struggled to find words to explain them.
''Surprising. Astounding. Staggering. Unnerving. Bewildering. Flabbergasting. Disquieting. Gobsmacking. Shocking. Mind boggling,'' Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in England, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, about September's air temperatures.
Global temperatures smashed recordsFrom January through September, Earth's average global surface air temperature was about 1.1 degrees Celsius (nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the 20th century average of 14.1° C (57.5° F).
June, July, August, September and October were each the hottest ever recorded for those months '-- and September was hotter than an average July from 2001 to 2010. The year isn't out yet, but temperatures so far suggest 2023 has a greater than 99 percent chance of being the hottest year on record, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information.
In the redThe global average of daily air temperatures in 2023 (red) climbed to extraordinary heights during the Northern Hemisphere's summer months, soaring over global temperatures recorded each year since 1981 (gray).
The Southern Hemisphere had a particularly sweltering winter and early spring, with temperatures in August and September soaring above 40° C (104° F) across parts of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. In some areas, daytime temperatures were about 20 degrees C (36 degrees F) above normal. Madagascar also had its warmest October on record, with some spots 2.5 degrees C (4.5 degrees F) above average.
The second half of 2023 saw the onset of an El Ni±o climate pattern, which generally means higher global temperatures, says John Kennedy, a climate scientist with the U.N. World Meteorological Organization. But most El Ni±o''related warming generally comes the year after an El Ni±o event, he says, as the heat that's been accumulating in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean gets transported elsewhere. That's what happened in 2016, previously the hottest year on record (SN: 7/13/23).
Ocean temperatures began reaching new highs long before El Ni±o kicked in. From late March through October, the world's average sea surface temperature consistently broke daily records. By July, these temperatures were nearly 1 degree C (about 1.8 degrees F) above average, as marine heat waves racked nearly half of the global ocean, compared with a more typical 10 percent.
Sweltering seasBeginning in late March, 2023's average ocean surface temperatures (red) were higher for latitudes spanning 60° N to 60° S than in any year going back to at least 1981 (gray).
Such warm waters are unprecedented in the modern record '-- and possibly in the last 125,000 years, researchers note (SN: 8/9/23). Ocean life suffered, as the relentless accumulation of all that heat took its toll. Coral reefs, for instance, suffered widespread bleaching across the Gulf of Mexico, the northern Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
High temps can lead to health problemsMost of the unprecedented temperatures to hit the news were daytime maximums, but the record-breaking heat continued into the night, endangering human health.
On July 6, the city of Adrar, Algeria, faced the hottest night ever recorded in Africa '-- nighttime temperatures never dipped below 39.6° C (103.3° F). And just after midnight on July 17, a weather station in Death Valley, Calif., recorded a temperature of 48.9° C (about 120° F). If confirmed, that is the highest temperature ever recorded anywhere for that dark hour.
In most parts of the world, nights have been warming faster than days for decades. That's a concern because, when nights are hot, the body loses a chance to recover from the heat of the day (SN: 8/6/23).
Balmier bedtime temperatures also diminish the quantity and quality of sleep. Last year, data scientist Kelton Minor of Columbia University and colleagues published an analysis of billions of sleep-duration measurements from nearly 70 countries. The team estimated that, as of 2017, warmer nights contributed to eroding an average of about 44 hours of slumber from each person every year.
Extrapolating to this year's extreme heat, Minor says, ''you would expect that this summer, on a global scale, would have eroded probably the most [sleep] in the observational record.''
Extreme heat can also lead to heat stroke, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and death. And heat-related deaths have been on the rise for years.
In many parts of the world '-- such as Africa, where a prolonged spring heat wave in Madagascar would have been virtually impossible without climate change, according to World Weather Attribution '-- the number of lives lost to extreme heat is unknown. But an analysis of Eurostat data estimated that in Europe last year there were more than 60,000 heat-related deaths, up from around 40,000 in 2018. Provisional data from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that over 1,700 people in the United States died from heat in 2022. That's more than four times the number of U.S. lives lost to heat just eight years earlier.
It appears 2023 may have continued the trend. By October, hundreds of heat-related deaths had been reported from multiple counties in the American Southwest, where people sweltered through some of the summer's highest temperatures. A record-breaking 579 such deaths have so far been reported out of Arizona's Maricopa County '-- the fourth most populous county in the United States '-- up from 386 confirmed fatalities in 2022. Neighboring Pima County reported 175 heat-related deaths this year, up from 58 the previous year.
Part of the problem is that the danger of heat is often underestimated. There ''is really low awareness that heat is a killer,'' says Kristie Ebi, a climate and health researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Moving forward, it will be crucial to spread greater awareness about the dangers and to invest in more interventions like cooling centers and urban green spaces. ''Nobody needs to die and this is not like somebody being caught in a flash flood,'' Ebi says. ''There is enough known that it's possible to protect people.''
It was a bad year for wildfiresHotter nights may have also exacerbated wildfires. ''In the past, you would get a drop in temperatures overnight, and that would help abate the wildfire spread,'' says climate and atmospheric scientist Danielle Touma, of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics in Austin. ''But more recently, especially during a heat wave, these temperatures have not been dropping as much as they used to,'' she adds. ''That means that the fire continues to spread overnight.''
This year, heat contributed to an especially bad fire season in the Boreal region, a colossal area that wraps around the Earth just south of the Arctic Circle and contains close to one-third of the world's forests. The largest intact stretch of this forest lies in Canada, which had its worst fire year on record.
Hundreds of megafires burned across the country, and some 200,000 people were forced to evacuate in the face of approaching flames. Blazes in Quebec billowed smoke that engulfed the U.S. East Coast and Midwest, turning the skies orange and subjecting millions to hazardous air quality (SN: 6/9/23). As of October, the area burned in Canada surpassed 180,000 square kilometers, an area larger than Greece, more than doubling the previous national record from 1995.
In July, the world's hottest month on record, heat contributed to the spread of hundreds of wildfires in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, which billowed huge plumes of smoke that are visible in this satellite image. Lauren Dauphin, MODIS/LANCE/EOSDIS/NASA, Worldview/GIBS/NASA In July, the world's hottest month on record, heat contributed to the spread of hundreds of wildfires in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, which billowed huge plumes of smoke that are visible in this satellite image. Lauren Dauphin, MODIS/LANCE/EOSDIS/NASA, Worldview/GIBS/NASAWildfires contribute to carbon emissions, which intensify global warming. The estimated carbon emissions from the Canadian fires amounted to nearly 410 million metric tons, shattering another record for the country. It's also more than a quarter of the world's wildfire emissions this year.
As a whole, though, 2023's wildfire emissions didn't break global records. In fact, wildfire emissions have been decreasing for decades, largely because humans have cleared away many forested areas for agriculture, ultimately decreasing the total area where wildfires could burn (SN: 6/16/23).
Nonetheless, terrifying wildfires scorched many parts of the world.
In the Northern Hemisphere, summer heat contributed to a wildfire in Greece that became the largest ever recorded in the European Union. In Hawaii, a wildfire fueled in part by drought destroyed much of the town of Lahaina and left at least 99 dead, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire since 1918.
Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere's warm winter helped fires spread in many regions including Argentina and the Amazon rainforest. In Australia, an unusual spring heatwave helped the fire season kick off early; by August, around 70 blazes had already been reported out of New South Wales, the country's most populated state, two months before the official start of the bushfire season in that state.
Antarctic sea ice hit a record low extentDwindling sea ice in the Arctic has become a familiar story in recent decades, while the southernmost continent's sea ice has waxed and waned more erratically.
But in the last few years, satellite data have shown an uptick in the rate of Antarctic sea ice loss, says climate scientist Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
Then came 2023. Antarctica's sea ice ''just plummeted,'' Serreze says.
The sea ice expanse was at near record-low levels for much of the year (SN: 7/5/23). February, the peak of summer, saw a record low minimum extent. By late July, the height of winter, the sea ice was more than 2.6 million square kilometers below the 1981''2010 average. On September 10, the sea ice extent hit its annual maximum at about 17 million square kilometers. That's roughly 1 million square kilometers smaller than the previous lowest maximum in 1986.
These numbers were ''far outside anything observed in the 45-year modern satellite record,'' Serreze says.
Shrinking sea iceThe expanse of sea ice surrounding Antarctica has remained at record low levels for nearly all of 2023 (red), reaching its lowest point in February, the height of the Southern Hemisphere's summer. In September, when Antarctic sea ice typically reaches its largest extent, the sea ice was far below the 1981''2022 median (black).
El Ni±o and other regional climate patterns probably played a role. Shifting ocean circulation or wind directions could have either packed the ice in or shuttled it farther out to sea. But growing evidence suggests that warmer ocean waters may also be complicit, Serreze says.
Whatever the case, this year's trail of shattered records has made it clearer than ever that human-caused climate change is not a problem for tomorrow. ''We're standing in the aftermath of one of the biggest waves in the climate system in recent history,'' Minor says, ''and we need to also prepare for bigger waves that are approaching.''
Sarah Kate Ellis - Wikipedia
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 16:28
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
American media executive
Sarah Kate Ellis (born November 27, 1971) is an American media executive, journalist, and author.
After Ellis's graduation from Russell Sage College in 1993 with a degree in Sociology and minor in Women's Studies, she began her career in media through the re-launch of Cond(C) Nast's House & Garden.[1]
In January 2014, Ellis was appointed president and CEO of GLAAD, the largest U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) media advocacy organization.[2][3]
Early years [ edit ] Ellis was born and raised on Staten Island, where she attended Staten Island Academy. She and her older brother Spencer were raised by their parents, Barbara and Ken Ellis. During her youth, Ellis was an athlete; she participated in field hockey and was a Junior Olympic swimmer. While attending Russell Sage College, Ellis led a media campaign against the college administration's attempt to shut down the only women's center on campus and, in her senior year of college, Ellis came out of the closet as a lesbian. In 2011, Ellis was selected to attend the Tuck Executive Education program at Tuck School of Business Dartmouth College and completed it in 2012.
Media work [ edit ] In 1995, Ellis began her profession in media. She first worked at mass media company Cond(C) Nast, which laid the groundwork for her career advancement. Initially, Ellis worked at Cond(C) Nast's House and Garden. From there, she moved to New York magazine as a senior manager, then to In Style as a director. Following her tenure at In Style, Ellis launched and directed the turnaround of Real Simple, which led her to Vogue where she oversaw 10 lifestyle group brands. Ellis specialized in marketing and applied her abilities most effectively through leadership roles. Extending the reach of her efforts, Ellis involved herself as co-chair of OUT at Time Inc., the company's LGBT employee resource group, where she led programming to spotlight the diversity of the LGBT community (2008-2013).[citation needed ]
LGBT rights activism [ edit ] Ellis began her activism in 1992, when she marched on Washington to support the rights of women and then marched again in 1993 to support the rights of LGBT people.
On January 1, 2014, Ellis began as president and CEO of GLAAD,[4] the only U.S. organization working to move lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality forward through the power of the media.
One of the first campaigns Ellis pursued at GLAAD was the organization's 2014 protest against the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade, specifically the parade's ban of lesbian and gay participants. In an article in the New York Daily News,[5] Ellis wrote about her Irish-American heritage and sexual orientation, calling on parade organizers to end the ban.
Personal life [ edit ] In 2011, Ellis co-authored a memoir with her wife, Kristen Ellis-Henderson, titled Times Two, Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made, released by Simon & Schuster.[6] The autobiography chronicled their simultaneous pregnancies and road to motherhood'--it was nominated for a Stonewall Book Award.[7] In 2013, the couple was featured on the "Gay Marriage Already Won" cover of TIME Magazine.[8]
Ellis and her wife were also profiled in a special New York Times Style section about marriage equality following its legalization in New York State[9] and were the subjects of The Huffington Post's three-part documentary web series titled "Here Come the Brides."[10] They were named one of GO Magazine's Most Captivating Couples of 2012[11] and are the mothers of two children. Ellis's marriage was the first marriage ceremony performed for a same-sex couple in the Episcopal Church of New York State.[7]
Ellis is also a Vestry member of St. Luke's Episcopal Church.
See also [ edit ] LGBT culture in New York CityList of LGBT people from New York CityNew Yorkers in journalismReferences [ edit ] External links [ edit ] Sarah Kate Ellis at IMDbAppearances on C-SPAN
Sarah Kate Ellis, President and CEO | GLAAD
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 16:23
Sarah Kate Ellis was named President and CEO of GLAAD in early 2014 after a successful career as a media executive.
In short order, Ellis refocused GLAAD's crucial advocacy to accelerate acceptance of the LGBTQ community through a variety of compelling and effective initiatives, campaigns, and programs.
A powerful communicator, Ellis has used GLAAD's position as the world's leading media advocacy organization to demand fair and accurate coverage of the LGBTQ community. Ellis also commissioned GLAAD's annual Accelerating Acceptance report, providing a window into national sentiment towards the LGBTQ community. In 2018, Ellis launched the GLAAD Media Institute (GMI), which focuses on research into LGBTQ representation and acceptance, consulting on LGBTQ storylines in media and Hollywood, and training activists on LGBTQ media advocacy and storytelling that creates change. Over the past few years alone, the GLAAD Media Institute has trained over 10,000 people and consulted on hundreds of media projects. Ellis is also the Executive Producer of the GLAAD Media Awards, which is the most visible LGBTQ awards show in the world. The GLAAD Media Awards recognize and honor media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the LGBTQ community and ultimately raise the bar for LGBTQ inclusion across all forms of media.
Under her leadership, Ellis has evolved GLAAD from a media watchdog organization to one of the most powerful cultural change agents across industries. At a time when LGBTQ issues were being largely left out of the mainstream conversation, Ellis, GLAAD, One Iowa, and The Advocate co-hosted the first Presidential Candidate Forum on LGBTQ issues during the 2020 election cycle in September 2019. This was the first time an LGBTQ-focused Presidential forum had taken place since 2007. In December 2019, Ellis & GLAAD also worked through the media and behind-the-scenes with The Hallmark Channel to reinstate TV ads which were pulled from air for featuring a same-sex couple. In response to the unique and disproportionate challenges facing LGBTQ people during the pandemic, Ellis executive produced ''Together in Pride: You are Not Alone,'' a digital event which highlighted the LGBTQ response to COVID-19 and raised critical funds for local LGBTQ centers providing life-saving services.
Ellis has also taken her mission of LGBTQ acceptance to a global level. In June 2019, Ellis travelled to Cannes-Lions, where she spoke about increasing LGBTQ inclusion in marketing and advertising and the workplace on panels with the world's largest companies. For the past several years, Ellis has also brought LGBTQ issues to the forefront at the World Economic Forum. In 2020, Ellis organized a standing-room-only event during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos with P&G on the power of LGBTQ representation in advertising, and presented groundbreaking new research on how exposure to LGBTQ images in advertising and media leads to greater LGBTQ acceptance. As part of her mission to expand GLAAD's work in advertising, Ellis has worked with global brands including Dow, P&G, Skittles, Ketel One, Wells Fargo, Hilton, and more on LGBTQ-inclusive marketing, public relations, and ad campaigns.
A forceful spokesperson for LGBTQ acceptance, Ellis regularly appears in media including CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Associated Press, USA Today, PR Week, and hundreds of other outlets. In June 2019, The New York Times spotlighted Ellis' ability to turn GLAAD from an organization that was struggling to adapt to one of Hollywood's most powerful change agents. Oprah Magazine said that Ellis helps ''helps LGBTQ people feel seen.'' A thought leader in the space, Ellis has spoken about LGBTQ acceptance and the crucial impact of GLAAD at Princeton University, the Milken Institute Global Conference, SXSW, the Association of National Advertisers, the Women's March, University of California Berkeley, the Sundance Film Festival, the Academy Awards, the Public Relations Society of America, and more.
Ellis has been widely recognized for her leadership. Most recently, Ellis has been named to the 2023 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has also been recognized by Adweek & ADCOLOR's 2020 Champions of Diversity and Inclusion, Crain New York Business' 2020 Notable LGBTQ Leaders & Executives, Logo30, Stevie Awards for Women in Business, Webby Awards, Variety's Power of New York, OUT100, and Guardian's World Power Pride List.
Ellis co-authored a memoir with her wife, Kristen Ellis-Henderson, titled ''Times Two, Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made,'' released by Simon & Schuster. The autobiography chronicled their simultaneous pregnancies and road to motherhood. The two were featured on the groundbreaking ''Gay Marriage Already Won'' cover of TIME Magazine. They were the first same-sex couple to have their marriage ceremony performed in the Episcopal Church of New York State.
Prior to joining GLAAD, Sarah Kate Ellis led national media brands, notably growing Real Simple into one of Time Inc.'s most respected and successful magazines. Her vision also transformed and energized leading media outlets including Vogue, InStyle, New York, and House & Garden. She served as Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Martini Media, a digital firm specializing in online branding, public relations and marketing.
She earned seven MIN Awards for marketing innovation, two President's Awards, and MIN's Sales Executive Team of the Year award in 2012.
As co-chair of OUT at Time Inc., she led programming to spotlight the diversity of the LGBTQ community and educated the organization's straight allies on a wide range of LGBTQ issues.
Ellis earned her B.A. from Russell Sage College and also attended the Tuck Executive Education program at Dartmouth.
Ellis and her wife Kristen are the proud mothers of two adorable children.
For booking inquiries, please contact: press@glaad.org
Steering Committee '-- Partnership for Global LGBTIQ Equality
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 16:22
Steering Committee MembersThe PGLE Steering Committee sets the direction for PGLE, takes decisions, and provides ongoing support to the initiative. It is composed of the following companies and representatives:
Beck BaileyCo-Chair, Partnership for Global LGBTQI+ Equality
Beck Bailey is a Managing Director of Global Inclusion & Diversity at Accenture working to support its culture of equality for all where everyone feels as though they belong. Beck manages a team that sets the firm's I&D strategy and enables global stakeholders to drive inclusion and equality across its over 650,000 employees.
Prior to Accenture, Beck was director of the Workplace Equality Program at the Human Rights Campaign where he worked with Fortune-ranked firms to increase the adoption of policies, practices, and benefits critical to LGBTQ inclusion. Beck regularly coached C-Suite and other senior executives on understanding the business imperative for LGBTQ inclusion and in developing their own inclusion strategies to advance equality. A recognized expert in LGBTQ workplace inclusion, Beck has been interviewed by NPR, CNN, BBC, the New York Times and more.
Beck has a BS in Management from Virginia Tech and an MBA from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst. He lives in Atlanta with his partner Margaux, three cats, and an exuberant yellow lab named Ziggy.
Clare IeryCo-Chair, Partnership for Global LGBTQI+ Equality
Clare Iery leads P&G's Ethics & Corporate Responsibility foundation of Citizenship, which is responsible for ensuring strong governance and compliance practices and supporting P&G's priority areas of Community Impact, Equality & Inclusion and Environmental Sustainability. Clare also serves as P&G's human rights expert and develop edits Respecting Human Rights program. In these roles, Clare has matched her personal passion of advocating for social justice with P&G's dedication to being a force for good and a force for growth. Clare is a highly valued and effective leader who has strengthened P&G's capabilities in doing the right thing across its end-to-end value chain.
Michael schachtnerManaging Director & Partner, Boston Consulting Group
Michael is Managing Director and Partner at BCG with over 10 years of consulting experience. He brings thought leadership and insight to business leaders in the insurance and financial services industry. He focuses on accelerating their strategic agenda with digital technologies and new ways of working to unlock sources of economic value and achieve improvements in productivity and innovation.
Michael also leads the Pride@BCG network in North America and is a member of BCG's Diversity & Inclusion Council. In his role as a LGBT leader, he has a personal passion and commitment to advocate LGBTQ and workplace equality, building on his experience from both Europe and North America.
Prior to joining BCG, Michael worked for a multi-family office and was an executive editor of "Electronic Markets,'' a research journal. Michael earned his PhD from the University of St Gallen, Switzerland and studied at UC Berkeley. He lives in New York with his husband, their daughter and dog.
Tameka HarperGlobal Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer, The Coca-Cola Company
Tameka is Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at The Coca-Cola Company '' leading the company's global DEI strategy, as well as implementation of measurable programs and initiatives. In her role, Tameka leads a talented team focused on operationalizing the company's DEI strategy. She works closely with the Executive Leadership Team, Board of Directors, networked team of operating units and functional leaders as well as partners across The Coca-Cola Foundation, Global Supplier Diversity, Legal and Public Affairs.
Tameka has held a variety of leadership roles across several functions during her tenure at Coca-Cola. Before becoming the CDEIO, Tameka led Transformation & Value Delivery for the company's Platform Services division, where she connected with internal and external stakeholders, driving collaboration and transparent performance management with operating units and functions.
As a woman of color, DEI has always been at the forefront of Tameka's life and the decisions she makes. Tameka shares ''DEI is one of our strategic business priorities at Coca-Cola and we have a tremendous opportunity to develop lasting, measurable and impactful DEI programs that will benefit all our employees and the communities we serve.''
Tameka is a native of Atlanta and an alum of Georgia Tech where she earned a degree in electrical engineering. She received her MBA from Mercer University. She currently serves as a Director on the Board of the Greater Women's Business Council, where she chairs the Engagement Committee.
Trey BoyntonGlobal Lead, Inclusion & Collaboration Strategy, Inclusive Future & Strategy, Cisco Systems
Trey Boynton has spent her professional career working to create inclusive environments. For nearly 20 years, she worked in university settings driving equity and inclusion for students, faculty and staff at the University of Michigan.
She shifted to the tech industry in 2017 when she joined Duo Security as their first head of diversity and inclusion. As the lead for overall diversity strategy, Trey envisioned a bold road ahead for Duo and implemented company-wide programs and initiatives that positively grew Duo's magical culture and team. Duo achieved a milestone in August 2018 when it was acquired by Cisco as a cornerstone of their software-as-a-service (SAAS) cloud security business. In her new Cisco role as the Global Lead for Inclusion Strategy, she manages a team dedicated to building and delivering on inclusion promises and aspirations at scale.
For Trey, inclusion work is deeply personal. She describes it as head and heart work centered on creating space so that employees and teams are valued, celebrated, and able to define their own success. In short, her ultimate goal is to reduce barriers to brilliance.
Originally from her beloved northern California, she studied at Spelman College, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan. Her most important job is helping her two teen feminist daughters continue to be awesome and buying her fianc(C)e banana splits from Dairy Queen. In the two minutes of time she has left to spare, she fancies herself an overly hopeful San Francisco 49ers fan, a budding Lego engineer, and an expert on all things Jane Austen.
Nhu Fabros Managing Director, Global Talent, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Deloitte
Nhu Fabros is a passionate and experienced corporate executive with over 25 years of global experience in talent, business transformation, leadership and organizational strategy, and communications.
As the Managing Director of Deloitte's global diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) team'-- ALL IN'--she leads a team of talented professionals dedicated to developing DEI programs and strategies to foster an inclusive work environment across Deloitte. She chairs several committees for Deloitte globally '' the Inclusion Committee of Deloitte Global's Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Council and Deloitte Global's Asian + Allies group. Nhu furthermore is a strategic advisor on DEI and succession planning for Deloitte's Global Clients & Industries group, and regularly works with Deloitte firms to advise on DEI and talent matters.
Nhu's prior experience includes serving as the Talent and Communications leader for Deloitte Private globally, the Strategic Priorities Leader and Talent Executive Sponsor for Deloitte Canada's Tax Practice, and the leader of the Office of Deloitte US's Tax CEO.
Kathryn Burdett Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Americas, Deutsche Bank
Kathryn Burdett is head of Diversity & Inclusion, Americas at Deutsche Bank.
She provides thought leadership and expertise to business leaders, human resources, corporate social responsibility, marketing, and communications on D&I strategy and best practices to accelerate the pace of change. Kathryn also directs the efforts of Deutsche Bank's employee resource groups.
She is a Task Force Co-Chair of the Center for Talent Innovation and a steering group member of the Partnership for Global LGBTQI+ Equality, an initiative of the World Economic Forum. Kathryn is also an active member of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association D&I Advisory Council.
A frequent speaker at D&I conferences, Kathryn was named a Most Powerful & Influential Woman of the Tri-State Area by the National Diversity Council. In 2016, she co-authored the article ''Data and diversity '' strength in numbers'' for the Deutsche Bank Research magazine, Konzept.
Kathryn's background includes roles in employee relations, graduate recruiting, and human resources business partner. She is a graduate of Smith College.
Jay Nibbe Global Vice Chair - Markets, EY
Jay is a member of the Global Executive and is the Global Vice Chair '' Markets.
Jay is responsible for EY's go-to-market approach and its commitment to exceptional client service to our clients across service lines, sectors and geographies. He also oversees our Markets functions, including Global Sector/Industry, Global Accounts, EY Private, Business Development, Strategic Alliances, Managed Services, EY Knowledge, EY Insights, Global Solutions, and the EY Alumni program. Jay is also the Global Executive sponsor of Unity, EY's LGBT+ Network.
Jay joined EY in 1985 and has held numerous leadership positions. Before taking his current role he was Global Vice Chair '' Tax. As the leader of our Tax practice, he was responsible for all aspects of EY's Tax strategy and operations. Prior to this Jay served as Chair of our Global Accounts Committee, representing EY's largest accounts on the Global Executive. He also served as Deputy Managing Partner of our EMEIA Area and was responsible for delivering EY's EMEIA Markets agenda. Prior to this Jay served as Americas Vice Chair Tax and also Americas Tax Managing Partner '' Markets.
Jay has extensive global experience, serving as a Partner in Minneapolis, Moscow, New York and London.
Jay continues to work with many of our largest global accounts, and continues to be active with our emerging markets practices. He chairs the EY sponsored Institute for Emerging Markets Studies (IEMS) with our academic partners at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong) and The Skolkovo School of Management (Moscow).
Jay was a Board Member at Minnesota State University Moorhead Alumni Foundation (2007-2009) and Board Member on the European Executive Council (2009-2014).
He is currently on the Executive Committee and Board of the US-Russia Business Council, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) Board, and the International Advisory Board to the Skolkovo School of Management (Moscow).
He has an Accounting and Finance degree from Minnesota State University Moorhead and a Master's degree in Business Taxation from the University of Minnesota.
Gurpreet BrarGlobal Client Leader, Edelman
Gurpreet is a Global Client Leader at Edelman. He works with some of the firms largest private sector clients, and across key intergovernmental organisations, such as the United Nations and European institutions, to drive effective communications campaigns and change programs. He also Co-Chair's the Atlantic Council's MLP Board, driving global impact, community connectivity and leadership training.
Born and raised in the United Kingdom, he has lived in Brussels, Japan, and India, and now resides in the United States with his husband. Gurpreet is passionate about the PGLE's work and mission and eager to drive take up across the business community globally.
Graeme Reid Director, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program'¯, Human Rights Watch
Graeme Reid'¯is an expert on LGBT rights. He has conducted research, taught and published extensively on gender, sexuality, LGBT issues, and HIV/AIDS. He is author of'¯How to be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-Town South Africa'¯(University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013). Before joining Human Rights Watch in 2011, Reid was the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa, a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and a lecturer in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at Yale University, where he continues to teach as a visiting lecturer. An anthropologist by training, Reid received a master's from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a PhD from the University of Amsterdam.
Julia EhrtExecutive Director, ILGA
Julia Ehrt (she/her) is the Executive Director at ILGA World, assuming the role as of November 2021. She previously served as the organisation's Director of Programs, developing ILGA World 's programmatic work and managing the Programmes team. She is a widely respected LGBTI activist and community leader.
Before joining ILGA World she was the Executive Director of Transgender Europe where she contributed significantly to how trans issues are perceived and debated today in Europe and beyond. She served as a founding Steering Committee member of the International Trans Fund (ITF) until 2019, is a board member of the Association for Womens' Rights in Development (AWID) and a signatory to the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10.
Julia holds a PhD in mathematics and lives with her partner and child in Berlin and in Geneva.
Simon HagueLGBTQI Global Transformation Lead, Kerry Group
Having lived in a number of countries including the UK, Hong Kong and now Singapore, Simon brings a global perspective on LGBTQI rights and issues. As LGBTQI Transformation Director for Kerry Group and as part of the overall Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging global strategy, Simon believes in a highly inclusive workplace where everyone can be at their best, contribute to the company's success and excel personally and professionally. Within the overall DI&B strategy at Kerry Group, Simon has been leading the global LGBTQI Initiative, working closely with team members, senior leaders and external organizations to build awareness and activate initiatives that contribute to a more inclusive and LGBTQI friendly working environment. He is focused on inspiring and educating teams and leadership, enabling them to have better conversations and creating an environment where people are armed with the knowledge to inspire and have discussions in the LGBTQI space.
Throughout his career, Simon has worked as a champion in the LGBTQI area and in 2020 he was nominated for an OUTstanding LGBT+ Future Leader award. While living in the UK, he was an active member of London Pride, sitting on the organizing committee and supporting to bring alive one of the biggest LGBTQI events globally, to life in London.
Randall TuckerChief Inclusion Officer, Mastercard
Randall Tucker is Chief Inclusion Officer for Mastercard, where he is responsible for aligning the company's global diversity and inclusion initiatives with the corporate business strategy to ensure that every employee has the opportunity to reach their greatest potential.
Before joining Mastercard, Randall served as the senior director of inclusion and diversity at Darden Restaurants Inc., where he led the development of a company-wide inclusion strategy to more closely align to the business and support an inclusive environment. Prior to joining Darden, he led the transformation of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide's diversity and inclusion strategy from a U.S.-focused model to a global model. During his tenure, he led the development of the organization's first global initiative to enhance career opportunities for women at senior levels. Earlier in his career, he served in various sales and human resource roles at Marriott International.
Randall holds a Bachelor of Arts from James Madison University and serves on the James Madison University Hart School Advisory Board. He has been a guest lecturer at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies and is a Six Sigma Black Belt. Randall lives in New York City with his husband.
Telaireus ''T.K.'' HerrinVice President, Inclusion and Diversity Programs
Telaireus ''T.K.'' Herrin, Psy.D., (he/him) has more than 25 years of experience within the medical device, financial services and non-profit sectors. Leveraging extensive global experience and expertise in organizational development and change management, T.K. specializes in talent management, diversity and inclusion, and executive coaching.
Currently T.K. is the vice president of Inclusion and Diversity Programs at Medtronic where he is responsible for the management and execution of employee resource group strategies, diversity survey management, and inclusion and diversity programs across Medtronic. He serves on the company's PRIDE Network advisory council, African Descent Network leadership team, and is the executive sponsor for the PRIDE Orange County hub based in Irvine, California.
Prior to Medtronic, T.K. held HR leadership roles with Covidien, Edwards Lifesciences, Affinity Bank, Cal National Bank, The Aquarium of the Pacific and Wachovia Securities.
As a lifelong learner, he earned a bachelor's degree in Psychology, master's degree in Systematic Theology, master's degree in Human Resource Design, and a doctorate in Organizational Development '-- and he's working on his second doctoral degree in religion focused on liberation theology and queer Black Pentecostals. Additionally, he is a member of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Organization Development Network (ODN), the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), and the American Academy of Religion (AAR).
His personal passion and mission in life is to enable and empower. You'll often hear him say, ''If not me, who? If not now, when?''
Senior Director, Global Government Affairs, Corporate External and Legal Affairs, Microsoft Corporation
John Galligan leads Microsoft's Global Government Affairs team, whose role is to support the company's international network of corporate affairs professionals in their public policy advocacy outreach, as well as developing global campaigns to promote the trusted, responsible, and inclusive use of technology. In addition to this role, John also co-leads CELA Pride, the LGBTQI+ employee network for the Corporate External and Legal Affairs department.
Prior to this role, John was Microsoft's Regional Director for Government Relations based in Singapore, where he coordinated the company's public policy, government affairs, and industry relations across the Asia-Pacific region.
John is a current board member of the Public Affairs Council and the US ASEAN Business Council. He holds degrees in Business Communication from the Queensland University of Technology and Political Science from Australian National University. He lives with his husband in Seattle, WA.
Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Nestl(C)
Nil¼fer Demirkol is Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Nestl(C) since December 2019. She is based in Nestl(C) Headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland. In her role she drives the Diversity and Inclusion agenda through Nestl(C)'s clear ambition and strong internal and external commitments. Prior to this role, she served as Head of Human Resources for Nestl(C) in Turkey from August 2016 until December 2019, and as HR Business Partner for Nestl(C) Waters Zone Asia, Oceania, Africa and Middle East, based in Dubai from 2012 until July 2016.
Nil¼fer began her professional career at Nestl(C) in August 2000, in Turkey. She held various leadership roles in Human Resources in the area of Recruitment, Training, Organization Development and as HR Business Partner in Turkey.
Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Technical Operations & Global Quality and Global LGBTI Equity Lead, Novartis
Nejc Jaka Sekula leads Diversity & Inclusion for Novartis division of Technical Operations and Global Quality. His role focuses in bringing the Novartis D&I strategy and initiatives to people working in the area of manufacturing and quality around the globe, understanding and respecting the local culture and embracing the global corporate culture of inclusion.
As a member of Novartis Global D&I leadership team, he leads the global LGBTI Initiative, working closely with Employee Resource Group leaders in countries, senior leaders and external organizations to create awareness and actions that contribute to a more inclusive and LGBTI friendly working environment. He focuses on inspiring and engaging associates to understand the essence of human rights and creating a change in leadership styles that fosters psychological safety in the workplace environment.
He spent his last 10 years in the area of Human Resources, from recruitment to leading HR at a pharmaceutical manufacturing site. Prior to that, he has held a number of IT positions on a local and global level within IBM. This is also where he started his career and has worked in the area of D&I ever since, passionate about making a difference for underrepresented communities. He holds a bachelor degree of Economics and lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia with his husband.
Veronica BirgaChief of the Women's Rights and Gender Section, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
Veronica Birga is the Chief of the Women's Rights and Gender Section at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Veronica has been working with the UN Human Rights Office since 1999, both in HQ and in the field. In her different positions, her work has focused on equality and non-discrimination, with a focus on gender equality.
Maria Sj¶dinActing Executive Director, Outright Action International
Maria Sj¶din is the Acting Executive Director of OutRight Action International, based in New York. Maria has over 20 years of experience advocating for LGBTIQ equality. Between 2005-2014 she was Executive Director of RSFL, Sweden's largest LGBTIQ organization. While in this position Maria established RFSL's international program, played a key role in ensuring that the human rights of LGBTIQ people become ingrained in the Swedish government's agenda for development and foreign affairs, advocated for marriage equality (won in 2009) and the abolishment of forced sterilization of trans people as a requirement for legal gender recognition (outlawed in 2013). Maria has led leadership trainings for over 200 LGBTIQ activists from around the world on topics including strength-based coaching and appreciative inquiry. At OutRight, she leads the development and communications team, where she has diversified and increased the organization's funding, pioneered engagement with international businesses, and provided expert opinions to governments, UN agencies, and corporations.
Maria is frequently quoted by the media, including by outlets like Time magazine and Thomson Reuters.
Tina BigalkeGlobal Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer, PepsiCo
As Global Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer, Tina Bigalke is responsible for leading PepsiCo's global DEI strategy that focuses on progressing toward PepsiCo's aspirations, including racial equality, gender parity, and pay equity. Tina has leveraged her wealth of human capital management experience to enhance PepsiCo's position as an employer of choice committed to catalyzing positive change in the talent landscape.
Prior to her current role, Tina was Senior Vice President, Human Resources - Commercial for PepsiCo Foods North America division, where she shaped the human resources strategy for customer sales, marketing and transformation. In this role, she and her team supported transformational initiatives, including developing and implementing future go-to-market systems and organizational models, new ways of working, and technology enhancements.
Throughout her 20+ year tenure at PepsiCo, Tina has held a wide range of human resources positions supporting frontline, business unit and corporate global groups, overseeing all aspects of human resources management to advance business growth and profitability. Passionate about ''delivering the best talent on the field,'' Tina leverages her current role to develop practices and programming to ensure a more equitable and inclusive culture where all associates can achieve their maximum potential, our business partners can progress, and the communities PepsiCo serves can thrive.
Tina holds an MS degree in Industrial and Labor Relations, and a BSA degree in International Studies/Spanish from West Virginia University. Currently, she participates in the WVU Practicum series, sits on the Dean's Advisory Board of the College of Business & Economics, and serves on the WVU Foundation Board of Directors. Tina is the proud parent of two daughters.
Sarah Churchman OBEGlobal I&D Leader, PwC International and Chief Inclusion, Community & Wellbeing Officer, PwC UK
Sarah is a senior HR professional with over 30 years' experience in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and is one of the UK's leading practitioners in this field.
Sarah operates ahead of the curve. She worked with PwC's LGBTQ+ network in 2003 to ensure equality in benefits provision for staff with same sex partners; experimented with unconscious bias awareness training in 2005, developing an award winning product; identified the link between diversity and talent management as an obvious mechanism for target setting in 2011; she established an award winning sponsorship programme in 2013 and, under her leadership, PwC was the fifth private sector organisation in the UK to publish their gender pay gap in 2014 before the Regulations came into force. She led her organisation to sign the Race at Work Charter and publish their ethnicity pay gap since 2017 and led PwC to #1 in the Social Mobility Employers Index in 2019 and 2020. Since November 2021 she has been both the UK leader and the Global I&D Leader for the PwC Network.
Sarah also leads on Wellbeing Strategy for PwC UK, proactively taking steps to deliver a wellbeing promoting working environment. This has prioritised mental health since 2016 to compliment all other aspects of the employee health and wellbeing agenda. Early initiatives such as the Green Light to Talk campaign went on to be adopted widely by other employers and PwC is one of only 2 employers to achieve the ''Health Creating Accreditation'' by the City Mental Health Alliance Thriving at Work assessment.
Sarah was awarded an OBE in the 2018 New Year's Honours List for services to women in business, equality & diversity.
Ruth HickinSenior Director of Strategic Equality Initiatives, Salesforce
Ruth Hickin is Senior Director of Strategic Equality Initiatives at Salesforce, working to drive forward key organization-wide Equality priorities to create a workplace that reflects the diverse communities around us and where everyone feels seen, heard, valued, and empowered to succeed.
Prior to Salesforce, Ruth worked at the World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network, where she led strategy and communications, and partnerships - and co-led the development of Out Forum, the organization's first LGBTQI+ ERG. Before that, she worked in the Head Office of the Virgin Group, running special projects and impact investing focused on equity and human rights. Ruth has an M.B.A in Design Strategy, an M.A. in Global Leadership, and an M.A. (Hons) in English Literature.
Dominic Cole-MorganSenior Vice-President Total Rewards, Scotiabank
After graduating from University with a degree in Psychology with Statistics, Dominic did a Masters in Industrial Relations and Personnel Management at the London School of Economics.
Dominic started work at National Australia Bank in London in a generalist HR role and moved to Royal Bank of Scotland with the Total Rewards team. After three years at Goldman Sachs as VP Compensation Europe, Dominic rejoined Royal Bank of Scotland and moved to Hong Kong as Regional Director of Reward. While in Hong Kong, Dominic joined Prudential Plc as Regional Reward Director Asia. Returning to the UK after five years, he joined Standard Life Plc as Group Reward and Employment Policy Director.
Dominic joined Scotiabank on August 1, 2018 as SVP Total Rewards with responsibility for compensation and benefits, organisation effectiveness and diversity, equity and inclusion.
M(C)lisande Kingchatchaval SchifterProject Lead, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, World Economic Forum
M(C)lisande is the Project Lead, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the World Economic Forum. She manages the Forum's Community of Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officers, and leads the Forum's action initiatives that support companies in advancing their diversity, equity, inclusion and human-centric strategies for more workplace equality. She focuses on issues around gender parity, racial justice, LGBTQI+ equality, disability inclusion, and modern slavery. Prior to joining the Forum, M(C)lisande worked within the field of international affairs, development work and ethics. She holds a MTh in Theology from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and is currently a PhD candidate in Ethics at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Concern over record high water levels in the Netherlands | NL Times
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 05:44
Thursday, 28 December 2023 - 08:37
There are concerns over the high water levels in the Netherlands. The Rhine River appears to have reached its peak level at Lobith, where the river flows into the Netherlands. The water level of the Vecht River in Overijssel has reached a record high, reports the Vecht Currents regional water board.
At 4:10 a.m. on Thursday, the Rhine water level was 14.52 meters above NAP, the average sea level at the North Sea used for measurements across Europe. The peak will move across the rivers in the Netherlands in the coming days.
Deventer, among others, is bracing itself for the rising water. As a precaution, the municipality has used sandbags to raise the quay wall in the Overijssel city.
A water level of 13.14 meters above NAP was measured at the Vecht River on Wednesday. That is seven centimeters higher than in 1998. At the time, the region experienced several major problems, according to the water board .
The board warned that the level will remain high in the near future. At De Haandrik in Hardenberg, where the Vecht enters the Netherlands, the discharge was approximately 185 cubic meters per second, which could rise to 190 cubic meters on Wednesday. "The Vecht is therefore quite full and is exceeding its banks here and there," according to the water board.
Vecht Currents also reports that the discharge of the Dinkel and the Regge tributaries is expected to decrease slightly.
The Vecht also flows through the working area of ''the Drents-Overijsselse Delta Water Board. It was reported earlier on Wednesday that the water levels in the Vecht and the IJssel were expected to slowly continue to rise until Thursday or Friday.
The Loevestein castle was also forced to close on Thursday due to the high waters, while the Vecht River in Overijssel measured its highest water levels ever breaking the record set in 1998.
Loevestein will close from 4 p.m. onwards on Thursday. The castle is in Zaltbommel, Gelderland, which is now unreachable due to the high water, said the castle manager, Tim Schrijver. "The water is one centimeter under the Munnikenlandse Maaskade's entrance path," Schrijver explained.
"There is expected to be another 30 centimeters added. If the path is flooded and you cannot see where it leads to, it will become too dangerous." the parking places for visitors and personnel were also entirely flooded.
All activities at the castle have been suspended until January 1.
The Art and Science of Technomancy - The Lord of Spirits | Ancient Faith Ministries
Fri, 29 Dec 2023 19:10
December 15, 2023 Length: 2:51:08
How did the ancients understand the source of technology? How does that relate to the Fall? What does that mean for our own age and the age to come? Why do printers never work? Join Fr. Stephen and Fr. Andrew for an ages-long look at the work of men's hands.
Play now
FACT CHECK: Video Claiming To Show Houthi Rebels Hijacking Israel Cargo Ship Is Miscaptioned | Check Your Fact
Fri, 29 Dec 2023 17:35
A post shared on social media purportedly shows a recent video of Houthi rebels hijacking a cargo ship in the Red Sea.
@b911_i #yemen #yemen #yemeni #palestineðµð¸ #foryourpage #CapCut #freepalestineðµð¸''¤¸ #muslim #palestineðµð¸ #freepalestineðµð¸''¤¸ #palestineðµð¸ #save #palestine '¬ original sound '' ð¾ Verdict: False
The caption is inaccurate. The video predates the current conflict in the Middle East.
Fact Check:
President Joe Biden has told Israel to do more to avoid the death of Palestinian civilians, The Associated Press reported. The U.S. told the Israeli government if they resume their offensive into southern Gaza to eradicate Hamas, they must avoid civilian displacement.
The TikTok post purports forces from Yemen took control of an Israeli ship. The video shows a several smaller boats surrounding a cargo ship before men in militant uniforms board the vessel.
The text overlay reads, ''Yemeni Armed Forces Seize Israeli Ship in Red Sea.'' The description features hashtags for free Palestine and Palestinian flags.
The claim is inaccurate. There is no credible news report that suggests this video shows the recent hijacking by the Houthis. The video dates back to 2022. The small boats in the video show that they are flying Polish flags and some on board are speaking in Polish.
The Houthis did recently hijack an Israeli cargo ship in the Red Sea and take 25 hostages, according to AP News. However, this video is not related to the recent Hamas-Israeli conflict. The Iran-backed group claimed that it hijacked the ship because of its connection with Israel. They further stated that they will continue to attack Israeli ships in international waters. (RELATED: Video Of Pakistani Air Force Is Old)
This is not the first piece of misinformation that has been shared online. Check Your Fact debunked a claim 100 Turkish Navy warships have moved toward Gaza.
Note: Check Your Fact is working to debunk false and misleading claims from the recent event. Please send tips to [email protected] .
Army tests long-range quantum radio communication - Defense One
Fri, 29 Dec 2023 16:34
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The NY Times Lawsuit Against OpenAI Would Open Up The NY Times To All Sorts Of Lawsuits Should It Win | Techdirt
Fri, 29 Dec 2023 15:35
from the it's-okay-when-we-do-it,-we're-the-new-york-times deptThis week the NY Times somehow broke the story of'... well, the NY Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft. I wonder who tipped them off. Anyhoo, the lawsuit in many ways is similar to some of the over a dozen lawsuits filed by copyright holders against AI companies. We've written about how silly many of these lawsuits are, in that they appear to be written by people who don't much understand copyright law. And, as we noted, even if courts actually decide in favor of the copyright holders, it's not like it will turn into any major windfall. All it will do is create another corruptible collection point, while locking in only a few large AI companies who can afford to pay up.
I've seen some people arguing that the NY Times lawsuit is somehow ''stronger'' and more effective than the others, but I honestly don't see that. Indeed, the NY Times itself seems to think its case is so similar to the ridiculously bad Authors Guild case, that it's looking to combine the cases.
But while there are some unique aspects to the NY Times case, I'm not sure they are nearly as compelling as the NY Times and its supporters think they are. Indeed, I think if the Times actually wins its case, it would open the Times itself up to some fairly damning lawsuits itself, given its somewhat infamous journalistic practices regarding summarizing other people's articles without credit. But, we'll get there.
The Times, in typical NY Times fashion, presents this case as thought the NY Times is the great defender of press freedom, taking this stand to stop the evil interlopers of AI.
Independent journalism is vital to our democracy. It is also increasingly rare and valuable. For more than 170 years, The Times has given the world deeply reported, expert, independent journalism. Times journalists go where the story is, often at great risk and cost, to inform the public about important and pressing issues. They bear witness to conflict and disasters, provide accountability for the use of power, and illuminate truths that would otherwise go unseen. Their essential work is made possible through the efforts of a large and expensive organization that provides legal, security, and operational support, as well as editors who ensure their journalism meets the highest standards of accuracy and fairness. This work has always been important. But within a damaged information ecosystem that is awash in unreliable content, The Times's journalism provides a service that has grown even more valuable to the public by supplying trustworthy information, news analysis, and commentary
Defendants' unlawful use of The Times's work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times's ability to provide that service. Defendants' generative artificial intelligence (''GenAI'') tools rely on large-language models (''LLMs'') that were built by copying and using millions of The Times's copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more. While Defendants engaged in widescale copying from many sources, they gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs'--revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works. Through Microsoft's Bing Chat (recently rebranded as ''Copilot'') and OpenAI's ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.
As the lawsuit makes clear, this isn't some high and mighty fight for journalism. It's a negotiating ploy. The Times admits that it has been trying to get OpenAI to cough up some cash for its training:
For months, The Times has attempted to reach a negotiated agreement with Defendants, in accordance with its history of working productively with large technology platforms to permit the use of its content in new digital products (including the news products developed by Google, Meta, and Apple). The Times's goal during these negotiations was to ensure it received fair value for the use of its content, facilitate the continuation of a healthy news ecosystem, and help develop GenAI technology in a responsible way that benefits society and supports a well-informed public.
I'm guessing that OpenAI's decision a few weeks back to pay off media giant Axel Springer to avoid one of these lawsuits, and the failure to negotiate a similar deal (at what is likely a much higher price), resulted in the Times moving forward with the lawsuit.
There are five or six whole pages of puffery about how amazing the NY Times thinks the NY Times is, followed by the laughably stupid claim that generative AI ''threatens'' the kind of journalism the NY Times produces.
Let me let you in on a little secret: if you think that generative AI can do serious journalism better than a massive organization with a huge number of reporters, then, um, you deserve to go out of business. For all the puffery about the amazing work of the NY Times, this seems to suggest that it can easily be replaced by an auto-complete machine.
In the end, though, the crux of this lawsuit is the same as all the others. It's a false belief that reading something (whether by human or machine) somehow implicates copyright. This is false. If the courts (or the legislature) decide otherwise, it would upset pretty much all of the history of copyright and create some significant real world problems.
Part of the Times complaint is that OpenAI's GPT LLM was trained in part with Common Crawl data. Common Crawl is an incredibly useful and important resource that apparently is now coming under attack. It has been building an open repository of the web for people to use, not unlike the Internet Archive, but with a focus on making it accessible to researchers and innovators. Common Crawl is a fantastic resource run by some great people (though the lawsuit here attacks them).
But, again, this is the nature of the internet. It's why things like Google's cache and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine are so important. These are archives of history that are incredibly important, and have historically been protected by fair use, which the Times is now threatening.
(Notably, just recently, the NY Times was able to get all of its articles excluded from Common Crawl. Otherwise I imagine that they would be a defendant in this case as well).
Either way, so much of the lawsuit is claiming that GPT learning from this data is infringement. And, as we've noted repeatedly, reading/processing data is not a right limited by copyright. We've already seen this in multiple lawsuits, but this rush of plaintiffs is hoping that maybe judges will be wowed by this newfangled ''generative AI'' technology into ignoring the basics of copyright law and pretending that there are now rights that simply do not exist.
Now, the one element that appears different in the Times' lawsuit is that it has a bunch of exhibits that purport to prove how GPT regurgitates Times articles. Exhibit J is getting plenty of attention here, as the NY Times demonstrates how it was able to prompt ChatGPT in such a manner that it basically provided them with direct copies of NY Times articles.
In the complaint, they show this:
At first glance that might look damning. But it's a lot less damning when you look at the actual prompt in Exhibit J and realize what happened, and how generative AI actually works.
What the Times did is prompt GPT-4 by (1) giving it the URL of the story and then (2) ''prompting'' it by giving it the headline of the article and the first seven and a half paragraphs of the article, and asking it to continue.
Here's how the Times describes this:
Each example focuses on a single news article. Examples were produced by breaking the article into two parts. The frst part o f the article is given to GPT-4, and GPT-4 replies by writing its own version of the remainder of the article.
Here's how it appears in Exhibit J (notably, the prompt was left out of the complaint itself):
If you actually understand how these systems work, the output looking very similar to the original NY Times piece is not so surprising. When you prompt a generative AI system like GPT, you're giving it a bunch of parameters, which act as conditions and limits on its output. From those constraints, it's trying to generate the most likely next part of the response. But, by providing it paragraphs upon paragraphs of these articles, the NY Times has effectively constrained GPT to the point that the most probabilistic responses is'... very close to the NY Times' original story.
In other words, by constraining GPT to effectively ''recreate this article,'' GPT has a very small data set to work off of, meaning that the highest likelihood outcome is going to sound remarkably like the original. If you were to create a much shorter prompt, or introduce further randomness into the process, you'd get a much more random output. But these kinds of prompts effectively tell GPT not to do anything BUT write the same article.
From there, though, the lawsuit gets dumber.
It shows that you can sorta get around the NY Times' paywall in the most inefficient and unreliable way possible by asking ChatGPT to quote the first few paragraphs in one paragraph chunks.
Of course, quoting individual paragraphs from a news article is almost certainly fair use. And, for what it's worth, the Times itself admits that this process doesn't actually return the full article, but a paraphrase of it.
And the lawsuit seems to suggest that merely summarizing articles is itself infringing:
That's'... all factual information summarizing the review? And while the complaint shows that if you then ask for (again, paragraph length) quotes, GPT will give you a few quotes from the article.
And, yes, the complaint literally argues that a generative AI tool can violate copyright when it ''summarizes'' an article.
The issue here is not so much how GPT is trained, but how the NY Times is constraining the output. That is unrelated to the question of whether or not the reading of these article is fair use or not. The purpose of these LLMs is not to repeat the content that is scanned, but to figure out the probabilistic most likely next token for a given prompt. When the Times constrains the prompts in such a way that the data set is basically one article and one article only'... well'... that's what you get.
Elsewhere, the Times again complains about GPT returning factual information that is not subject to copyright law.
But, I mean, if you were to ask anyone the same question, ''What does wirecutter recommend for The Best Kitchen Scale,'' they're likely to return you a similar result, and that's not infringing. It's a fact that that scale is the one that it recommends. The Times complains that people who do this prompt will avoid clicking on Wirecutter affiliate links, but'... um'... it has no right to that affiliate income.
I mean, I'll admit right here that I often research products and look at Wirecutter (and other!) reviews before eventually shopping independently of that research. In other words, I will frequently buy products after reading the recommendations on Wirecutter, but without clicking on an affiliate link. Is the NY Times really trying to suggest that this violates its copyright? Because that's crazy.
Meanwhile, it's not clear if the NY Times is mad that it's accurately recommending stuff or if it's just'... mad. Because later in the complaint, the NY Times says its bad that sometimes GPT recommends the wrong product or makes up a paragraph.
So'... the complaint is both that GPT reproduces things too accurately, AND not accurately enough. Which is it?
Anyway, the larger point is that if the NY Times wins, well'... the NY Times might find itself on the receiving end of some lawsuits. The NY Times is somewhat infamous in the news world for using other journalists' work as a starting point and building off of it (frequently without any credit at all). Sometimes this results in an eventual correction, but often it does not.
If the NY Times successfully argues that reading a third party article to help its reporters ''learn'' about the news before reporting their own version of it is copyright infringement, it might not like how that is turned around by tons of other news organizations against the NY Times. Because I don't see how there's any legitimate distinction between OpenAI scanning NY Times articles and NY Times reporters scanning other articles/books/research without first licensing those works as well.
Or, say, what happens if a source for a NY TImes reporter provides them with some copyright-covered work (an article, a book, a photograph, who knows what) that the NY Times does not have a license for? Can the NY Times journalist then produce an article based on that material (along with other research, though much less than OpenAI used in training GPT)?
It seems like (and this happens all too often in the news industry) the NY Times is arguing that it's okay for its journalists to do this kind of thing because it's in the business of producing Important Journalism' whereas anyone else doing the same thing is some damn interloper.
We see this with other copyright disputes and the media industry, or with the ridiculous fight over the hot news doctrine, in which news orgs claimed that they should be the only ones allowed to report on something for a while.
Similarly, I'll note that even if the NY Times gets some money out of this, don't expect the actual reporters to see any of it. Remember, this is the same NY Times that once tried to stiff freelance reporters by relicensing their articles to electronic databases without paying them. The Supreme Court didn't like that. If the NY Times establishes that merely training AI on old articles is a licenseable, copyright-impacting event, will it go back and pay those reporters a piece of whatever change they get? Or nah?
Filed Under: ai, ai training, copyright, fair use, generative ai, reading, restrictive prompts, summarizing, trainingCompanies: common crawl, microsoft, ny times, openai
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VIDEO - Texas migrants in Chicago suburbs: Grundy County places signs along I-55 to ward off buses as suburbs scramble to make plans - ABC7 Chicago
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 21:01
ELBURN, Ill. (WLS) -- Grundy County has joined other Chicago suburbs in an effort to deter buses from dropping off migrants from Texas outside of the city.
As the rhetoric surrounding this issue grows more heated, a growing number of suburbs are convening emergency meetings and taking action to keep those migrant buses away.
Buses have been dropping off asylum seekers unannounced in towns like University Park, Aurora and more.
Two more buses are expected Thursday near Des Plaines and Polk streets in Chicago, and more migrants were dropped off there Wednesday night, huddling in the cold.
In south suburban Matteson, the village board passed an ordinance threatening hefty fines for bus drivers unloading migrants without notice in an effort to skirt Chicago's regulations.
"The message is don't just drop off individuals into our community. Don't do that to anyone. It's inhumane to do that," said Village President Sheila Chalmers-Currie.
"If these migrants are being dropped off in the wee hours of the morning, and they're, let's say, they walking or wandering near I-57, that's not safe," said Matteson Vlilage Attorney Felicia Frazier.
Just days before Christmas, Grundy County, which is southwest of Chicago, put up two digital signs along Interstate 55 to deter buses from stopping in the fairly rural area.
"The mayor of Chicago has created a situation that's creating a crisis for us in setting their standards much more difficult for their buses to arrive in Chicago," Grundy County Sheriff Ken Briley said.
The signs have since been taken down but the sheriff's office is on alert for any arrivals.
"Law enforcement officers are to respond to that area, speak with the bus driver, make sure that they know where they're going, and try to encourage them to keep going," Briley said.
Grundy County leaders made a plan over the weekend to encourage buses to move on if they stop there, or, if migrants are abandoned, they will get them to Joliet and put them on trains to transfer them to sanctuary cities.
"We wanted to make sure that we had a plan so that we didn't leave these people stranded out in the cold with no place to go," Briley said.
During a special board meeting Wednesday night, Chicago Ridge voted to crack down on random drop-offs.
The village of Elburn also voted to demand five days advanced notice of a bus arrival and background checks of migrants on board.
Violations will cost the bus company up to $750 per passenger.
RELATED: Evanston man fixing up bicycles to give to Chicago migrants
This comes after more than 30 buses have dropped off hundreds of migrants all over the map at all hours of the day with no warning.
The city of Chicago passed an ordinance earlier this month prohibiting buses from arriving and dropping off new arrivals with no prior notice. Mayor Brandon Johnson said over 100 citations have been given.
In a joint press conference with the mayors of New York City and Denver, Johnson acknowledged how Chicago's crackdown on rogue buses has led to suburbs now being inundated with migrants.
"What these mayors are looking for is like much of what you're seeing right now, and they're prepared to pass similar ordinances to not just defend the sanctity of our nation but to make sure that we are responding responsibly," Johnson said.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's busing operation has transported more than 80,000 migrants to Democratic-led cities since last year. His administration recently stepped up the practice with chartered planes.
Alderman Brian Hopkins appeared on CNN and was critical of the White House, saying efforts this week to engage Mexican officials come a year too late.
"I'm a Democrat, but I'll say the Biden administration has absolutely dropped the ball. I'm not going to let him off the hook. They have, they have left us in the ditch with this, and that's unacceptable," he said.
Hopkins and other Chicago alderpersons said they're expecting an update on the crisis in a call with the mayor's office in the morning. A mayor's spokesperson did not respond to our request for comment. In
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Copyright (C) 2023 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.
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VIDEO - Controversy arises from activist group's toolkit for educators on Israel-Hamas war | WPDE
Sat, 30 Dec 2023 19:01
WASHINGTON (TND) '-- Activist groups created and released a critical media literacy toolkit to guide educators when discussing the war between Israel and Hamas, now sparking controversy around the language and content aimed toward teachers and students across the country.
Parents Defending Education Director of Outreach Erika Sanzi joined The National Desk's Dee Dee Gatton to discuss the Coalition for Liberated Ethic Studies' Curriculum Toolkit for Palestine.
"A good way to think about this is for people who have seen these holiday disruptions of people blocking the roads to get into JFK airport or the airport in Los Angeles, or the airport in Chicago, that's largely what this is," Sanzi said. "So, in addition to this toolkit, you know, being about totally anti-American, totally anti-Israel, totally against Western values and, you know, the usual stuff we hear about the oppressor versus oppressed, et cetera, it calls for action and the action that it calls for is what we were seeing in the streets with people blocking traffic."
Sanzi added the curriculum includes petitions for students or staff to send to elected officials that accuse Israel of genocide.
"The language is very extreme and if you can imagine sort of the most extreme protests and demonstrations that people have been seeing, just across the country, the language is largely the same as what we're seeing in this toolkit," she said.
The toolkit says it is created by educators with a goal of fostering critical humanizing and liberatory conversations about what is happening in our world today and states all media is political, all media is subjective and all media has a purpose and serves who owns and creates the media.
"Because they use the word critical, it's important to know that what they're talking about there is the word critical as it's used with critical studies, critical race theory, critical gender theory, and again, this is all about power dynamics. And so what they're basically, this isn't really just a comment about media bias, which certainly does exist and we could debate that, this is essentially saying that if the media is even, you know, commenting on the brutal murder, rape and torture that occurred on Oct. 7, that then the media is wrong," Sanzi said. "This is essentially that if you are criticizing Hamas for what happened on Oct. 7, this group is going to have a problem with you."
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VIDEO - Yemen's Houthis release footage of takeover of Israeli-linked cargo ship
Fri, 29 Dec 2023 17:33
Houthi rebels hijack Israeli-linked cargo ship in Red Sea
( )
The Hezbollah-run TV channel Al-Manar on Monday evening broadcast footage of Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels taking over a cargo ship with supposed links to Israel in the southern Red Sea and capturing 22 crewmembers on board the day before. << Follow Ynetnews on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | TikTok >>Read more:
In the almost four-minute video, a helicopter bearing a Palestinian flag lands on board the ship. Masked gunmen disembark from the helicopter and proceed to capture the ship's crew. The footage concludes with several smaller boats escorting the vessel.
6 View gallery
Houthi rebels hijack Israeli-linked cargo ship in Red Sea
The Bahamas-flagged vessel, Galaxy Leader, is reportedly owned by the shipping company Ray, owned by Israeli businessman Rami Ungar. There were no Israelis on board.
The IDF called the hijacking of the cargo ship "a very grave incident of global consequence." The army added that the vessel was "staffed by civilians of various nationalities, not including Israelis. It is not an Israeli ship."
6 View gallery
Israeli businessman Rami Ungar
(Photo: Amit Shaal )
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the incident an "Iranian attack against an international vessel."
"The ship, owned by a British company and operated by a Japanese firm, was hijacked under Iranian direction by the Houthi militia in Yemen,'' a statement from his office read.
''The vessel had 25 crew members of various nationalities, including Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Filipinos and Mexicans; no Israelis were on board.
"This is another act of Iranian terrorism, representing a significant escalation in Iran's aggression against the citizens of the free world, and has international implications for the security of global shipping routes."
The vessel's owner said on Monday said it was "illegally boarded by military personnel via a helicopter" on Nov. 19 and is now in the Hodeidah port area in Yemen.
"All communications were subsequently lost with the vessel," Isle of Man registered Galaxy Maritime Ltd, owner of the pure car carrier Galaxy Leader, said in a statement.
"The company, as a shipping concern, will not be commenting further on the political or geopolitical situation."
The United States denounced the ship's seizure as a breach of international law and demanded the immediate release of the vessel and its crew.
6 View gallery
Galaxy Leader
(Photo: Owen Foley /Handout via REUTERS )
"The Houthi seizure of the motor vessel Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea is a flagrant violation of international law," U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told a briefing. "We demand the immediate release of the ship and its crew and we will consult with our allies and U.N. partners as to appropriate next steps."
The Bahamas-flagged Galaxy Leader's crew is made up of nationals from Bulgaria, Ukraine, the Philippines, Mexico and Romania, Galaxy Maritime said. The vessel is chartered by Japan's Nippon Yusen.
"Owners and managers believe the seizure of this vessel represents a gross violation of freedom of passage for the world fleet and a serious threat to international trade," Galaxy Maritime said.
It added that the "key concern at this time is the safety and security of the 25 crew members currently being held by the perpetrators of this criminal act."
