A Declaration for Life

As our nation nears the terrible milestone of 50 years of legalized abortion—an era that has robbed an estimated 60 million Americans of their very right to life—we lament the extermination of an entire generation of talent, productivity, and potential. Now we face aggressive efforts to even expand this tragic practice. This is not progressive or compassionate; it is madness. Therefore …

WE PROCLAIM that abortion at any stage of development represents the taking of a human life. Science, reason, and common sense attest to this. Because this is true, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must extend to babies in the womb just as much as to every other citizen.
WE EMBRACE the indisputable scientific reality that life in the womb is worthy of protection from the moment of conception. The same DNA and genetic markers that testify to our uniqueness at birth are also present when we are conceived. Life in the womb is “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Sacred scripture and prenatal science both proclaim this.
WE DECLARE that legalized abortion is wholly incompatible with the virtues of compassion, freedom, and equality that characterize a healthy and just society. As state legislatures expand abortion up to the moment of birth and some leaders advocate outright infanticide, our culture’s decades-long embrace of legalized abortion has reached a tragic new low point.
THEREFORE, as concerned citizens, we are reinforcing our commitment to speak up on behalf of the most vulnerable among us. It is imperative that churches, individuals, and communities—people of faith and all people of goodwill—work together to end this tragedy.
WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, do hereby affirm our commitment to: 1) advocate for pro-life legislation at the state level, including a ban on late-term abortions and those targeting babies on the basis of disability, sex or race; 2) promote the end of government funding of the abortion industry; 3) vote for candidates who respect the sanctity of life; 4) urge the appointment of constitutionalist judges who will protect the fundamental right to life; 5) support both women in unplanned pregnancies and their babies through the good work of Pregnancy Resource Centers; 6) encourage and promote the beauty of adoption; and 7) pray fervently for a nationwide reawakening to the value and sanctity of every human life.
Until that day comes, we will continue to push back against the culture of death. This is the moment we unite with one voice and proclaim, “No more.”
We are pro-life.

Source: A Declaration for Life.

So, only three democrats voted for Bill Protecting Babies Born Alive After Abortion? The rest are baby killers. That’s too bad. I guess the Left are modern day Moloch worshipers. "And I will set My face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile My sanctuary, and to pollute My holy name." Leviticus 20:3.

House Democrats Block 19 Times Vote on Bill to Protect Babies Who Survive Abortion

Fascism: Socialism with a Capitalist Veneer

From FEE.org:

As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.

Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.)

Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.

Fascist Economics

Fascism is to be distinguished from interventionism, or the mixed economy. Interventionism seeks to guide the market process, not eliminate it, as fascism did. Minimum wage and antitrust laws, though they regulate the free market, are a far cry from multiyear plans from the Ministry of Economics.

Under fascism, the state, through official cartels, controlled all aspects of manufacturing, commerce, finance, and agriculture. Planning boards set product lines, production levels, prices, wages, working conditions, and the size of firms. Licensing was ubiquitous; no economic activity could be undertaken without government permission.

………………

Fascism embodied corporatism, in which political representation was based on trade and industry rather than on geography. In this, fascism revealed its roots in syndicalism, a form of socialism originating on the left. The government cartelized firms of the same industry, with representatives of labor and management serving on myriad local, regional, and national boards—subject always to the final authority of the dictator’s economic plan. Corporatism was intended to avert unsettling divisions within the nation, such as lockouts and union strikes. The price of such forced “harmony” was the loss of the ability to bargain and move about freely.

…………………….

The fascist leaders’ antagonism to communism has been misinterpreted as an affinity for capitalism. In fact, fascists’ anticommunism was motivated by a belief that in the collectivist milieu of early-twentieth-century Europe, communism was its closest rival for people’s allegiance. As with communism, under fascism, every citizen was regarded as an employee and tenant of the totalitarian, party-dominated state. Consequently, it was the state’s prerogative to use force, or the threat of it, to suppress even peaceful opposition.

The Founder of Fascism

Both nations [Germany and Italy] exhibited elaborate planning schemes for their economies in order to carry out the state’s objectives. Mussolini’s corporate state “consider[ed] private initiative in production the most effective instrument to protect national interests” (Basch 1937, p. 97). But the meaning of “initiative” differed significantly from its meaning in a market economy. Labor and management were organized into twenty-two industry and trade “corporations,” each with Fascist Party members as senior participants. The corporations were consolidated into a National Council of Corporations; however, the real decisions were made by state agencies such as the Instituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale, which held shares in industrial, agricultural, and real estate enterprises, and the Instituto Mobiliare, which controlled the nation’s credit.

Hitler’s regime eliminated small corporations and made membership in cartels mandatory. The Reich Economic Chamber was at the top of a complicated bureaucracy comprising nearly two hundred organizations organized along industry, commercial, and craft lines, as well as several national councils. The Labor Front, an extension of the Nazi Party, directed all labor matters, including wages and assignment of workers to particular jobs. Labor conscription was inaugurated in 1938. Two years earlier, Hitler had imposed a four-year plan to shift the nation’s economy to a war footing. In Europe during this era, Spain, Portugal, and Greece also instituted fascist economies. [read more]

EXCLUSIVE: Special ops to turn focus from war on terror to China, Russia

From The Washington Times.com (Feb. 24):

America’s elite special operations forces are getting new marching orders as the Pentagon moves away from its post-9/11 focus on radical terrorist groups and trains its eye on big-power rivals such as China and Russia.

In a major shift of mission, officials at U.S. Special Operations Command are drafting new guidance to reorient its cadre of top-tier military units to fight the expanding armies and navies of what U.S. strategists call “near-peer” powers.

Under the guidance, which is still pending approval by command chief Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, U.S. special operations fighters will be taking a larger role in cyberwarfare, information and “influence” — digital age propaganda — operations, sources say, as well as training allies in the new skills.

“It is fair to say you will see a rebranding of special operations forces,” Andrew Knaggs, deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism, said earlier this month. “Our problems will not be addressed through conventional deterrence alone.”

Since 9/11, U.S. special operations forces have been at the forefront of the U.S.-led global war on terror, from leading the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001 to taking the fight to the Islamic State’s “caliphate” in Syria in 2014. But the new Pentagon National Defense Strategy, fashioned in large part by former Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, is ushering in a shift away from the fight against nonstate radical terrorist groups to traditional big power rivals.

Under the new strategy, Europe and Asia once again become the “priority theaters” for U.S. forces. The Middle East will become a theater to be managed, not a region of consuming focus.

Whether that shift is an opportunity or an attempt to clip the special operations forces’ wings is a matter of sharp debate in military circles. The combined special operations forces, including separate arms of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, grew from 45,000 in 2001 to an estimated 70,000 today, and some critics say the expansions in size and mission have not been healthy. [read more]

This is all good and well, but America still shouldn’t forget about the crazy Islamists.

11 Economic Stats That Tell Venezuela's Story

From FEE.org (Mar. 8):

A tragedy common to human history is unfolding in Venezuela. It’s impossible to predict how it will end or what the human toll will be.

As we watch events and hope for a peaceful resolution that restores liberty in Venezuela, here are some noteworthy facts about the Land of Grace.

1. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. While the US is the top producer of oil, its total reserves represent a mere fraction—roughly 10 percent—of Venezuela's 300-plus billion barrels of oil. (Source: UPI)
2. In Venezuela today, the median monthly income is $8. (source: FEE)
3. A two-pound bag of onions currently costs about $2 in Venezuela. (source: FEE)
4. In 2016, the price of a gallon of gasoline in Venezuela was less than one cent per gallon. (source: Washington Post)
5. Roughly 90 percent of Venezuelans today live below the poverty line. (source: The Borgen Project)
6. In 1950, Venezuela ranked among the top ten most prosperous nations in the world. (source: Human Progress)
7. In 2018, inflation in Venezuela topped 1 million percent. (source: Reuters)
8. Economic projections show inflation in Venezuela is expected to hit 10 million percent in 2019. (source: Miami Herald)
9. In 1959, the Venezuelan GDP per capita was 10 percent higher than America’s. (source: Human Progress)
10. As of June 2018, about 2.3 million people had emigrated from Venezuela following its economic collapse, or 13 percent of its population. (Source: The Panam Post)
11. When Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, the Venezuelan GDP per capita was 27 percent higher than the average in Latin America. (source: Human Progress)

[read more]

The story of how socialism can screw up a once productive country. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen to America.

The Truth About Border Walls’ Effectiveness

From The Daily Signal.com (Feb. 10):

Schumer and his House counterpart, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., are entitled to their opinions about Trump’s proposed border wall, but they aren’t entitled to their own facts.

In their rebuttal to the president’s Jan. 9 nationally televised address outlining the need for a border barrier and his request for $5.7 billion in funding for them, both described the proposed wall as “ineffective”—Pelosi once and Schumer twice.

In her rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams didn’t echo Schumer and Pelosi’s “ineffective” claim, but she advanced an argument that was equally fallacious.

……………

Walls along four Customs and Border Protection sectors—El Paso; San Diego, California; and Tucson and Yuma, Arizona—have reduced illegal immigration “by at least 90 percent,” according to the Republican National Committee’s Borderfacts.com page.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner recently cited figures from the Center for Immigration Studies showing that before construction of border barriers in Yuma, the Border Patrol apprehended 138,438 illegal immigrants in 2005, compared with 26,244 last year. While not 90 percent, that’s still a dramatic drop.

The comparable before-and-after figures for the San Diego sector, according to the Border Patrol, were more than 565,581 in 1992 and 26,086 in 2017—a 95 percent reduction.

Meanwhile, USA Today reported last May that “[s]ince the start of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, at least 800 miles of fences have been erected by Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia, and others.”

Do Schumer and Pelosi know something all these other countries don’t? Not according to Hungary, which said that fencing on its border with Serbia helped reduce illegal immigration by nearly 100 percent since 2015, according to the USA Today report.

Israel’s fencing along its borders with the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as well as with Egypt and Jordan, has likewise all but eliminated illegal immigration and terrorist attacks. (The Jewish state announced Feb. 3 that it was beginning construction of an additional 40 miles of 20-foot-high, state-of-the-art fencing.) [read more]

The only walls the Dems like are the ones around their homes. They use those to keep out the irredeemable deplorables or if the reader prefers the “common man.”

Worried About Privacy? Worry More About Your Data

From News Max.com (Feb. 4):

Facebook isn't some Big Brother or HAL 9000 listening to your every conversation like you probably fear, tech experts say.

Actually, they warn, it's far worse.

"Privacy as we normally think of it doesn't matter," Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, told NBC News. "What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what’s effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something."

Though it may seem like Facebook and other social media sites are listening to your conversations about, say, your car problems, then try to sell you a new car, in reality they've simply built such a perfect simulation of who you are it literally knows what you'll do or think before you do it, says Raskin.

"Imagine it's a stick figure at first, and as you use the system, it's collecting fingernail scraps and bits of hair," he said. "What do you care that you lost a fingernail scrap? But they’re putting it together into a model of you."

Facebook, Raskin notes, "has one of these models for one out of every four humans on earth. Every country, culture, behavior type, socio-economic background.” [read more]

Creepy.

Failing Forward

Characteristics:

• Taking Responsibility
• Learning from Each Mistake
• Knowing Failure Is a Part of Progress
• Maintaining a Positive Attitude
• Challenging Outdated Assumptions
• Taking New Risks
• Believing Something Didn't Work
• Persevering

No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others; or failing therein it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist. – Calvin Coolidge

Seven abilities needed to fail forward:

1. Achievers reject rejection.
2. Achievers see failure as temporary.
3. Achievers see failures as isolated incidents.
4. Achievers keep expectations realistic.
5. Achievers focus on strengths.
6. Achievers very approaches to achievement.
7. Achievers bounce back.

The benefits of adversity:

1. Adversity creates resilience.
2. Adversity develops maturity.
3. Adversity pushes the envelope of accepted performance.
4. Adversity provides greater opportunities.
5. Adversity prompts innovation.
6. Adversity recaps unexpected benefits.
7. Adversity motivates.

Characteristics of Don’t-Dare-Miss-It People:

1. They find opportunities.
2. They finish their responsibilities.
3. They feed on impossibilities.
4. They fan the flame of enthusiasm.
5. They face their inadequacies.
6. They figure out why others failed.
7. They finance the cost into their lifestyle.
8. They find pleasure in the goal.
9. They fear futility, not failure.
10. They finish before they rest.
11. They follow leaders.
12. They force change.
13. They fish for solutions.
14. They fulfill their commitments.
15. They finalize their decisions.

Steps to Failing Forward:

1. Realize there is one major difference between average people and achieving people.
2. Learn a new definition of failure.
3. Remove the "you” from failure.
4. Take action and reduce your fear.
5. Changing your response to failure by accepting responsibility.
6. Don’t let the failure from outside get inside you.
7. Say good-bye to yesterday.
8. Change yourself, and your world changes.
9. Get over yourself and start giving yourself.
10. Find the benefit in every bad experience.
11. If at first you do succeed, try something harder.
12. Learn from bad experience and make it a good experience.
13. Work on the weakness the weakens you.
14. Understand there is not much difference between failure and success.
15. Get up, get over it, get going.

Source: Failing Forward. Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success (2000) by John C. Maxwell.

Artificial intelligence is learning not to be so literal

From Science News.org (Feb. 5):

HONOLULU — Artificial intelligence is starting to learn how to read between the lines.

AI systems are generally good at responding to direct statements, like “Siri, tell me the weather” or “Alexa, play ‘Despacito’.” But machines can’t yet make small talk the way humans do, says Yejin Choi, a natural language processing researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. When it comes to conversational nuances like tone and idioms, AI still struggles to understand humans’ intent.

To help machines participate in more humanlike conversation, researchers are teaching AI to understand the meanings of words beyond their strict dictionary definitions. At the recent AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, one group unveiled a system that gauges what a person really means when speaking, and another presented an AI that distinguishes between literal and figurative phrases in writing.

One key conversation skill is picking up on subtext. Someone’s facial expression or intonation can significantly change the implication of their words, says Louis-Philippe Morency, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Describing a movie as “sick” with a grimace conveys something totally different than calling it “sick” with an excited tone and raised eyebrows.

Morency and colleagues designed an artificial intelligence system that watched YouTube clips to learn how nonverbal cues, like facial expressions and voice pitch, can affect the meaning of spoken words. [read more]

More AI news:

• Is Skynet a reality? As Trump signs executive order on artificial intelligence, tech giants warn of danger
• This AI is so good at writing that its creators won't let you use it
• At this fast food drive through, the person taking your order might not be a person at all
• Report: Home Assistants with ‘Moral AI’ Could Call Police on Owners
• Why a data scientist warns against always trusting AI’s scientific discoveries
• Creepy AI will reportedly spot shoplifters before they steal

Bees Can Solve Math Problems That Would Stump the Average Toddler

From Live Science.com (Feb. 6):

Bees don't just buzz around and make honey; they also do math problems in their free time that would stump the average 4-year-old.

Last year, a group of researchers in Australia reported that bees understand the concept of "zero." Now, a new study by the same group suggests that the insects can also do basic addition and subtraction. The team reported its findings today (Feb. 6) in the journal Science Advances.

A couple of decades ago, scientists thought that such higher-level processing was limited to human and some other primate brains. But then, researchers looked a bit closer, finding that dolphins could understand what zero meant and that Alex the parrot (and even some spiders) could do basic arithmetic.

The findings called into question the "position that there's something special about the human brain," said the new study's senior author, Adrian Dyer, an associate professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. [read more]

That’s pretty cool. But can bees solve differential equations or understand tax law? I don’t think so.

CS Lewis on Equality

The demand for equality has two sources; one of than is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority....

Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many.... Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical,  or aesthetic democracy is death.

A truly democratic education--one which will preserve democracy--must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly 'high-brow'.... Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
--‘Notes on the Way', Time and Tide (29 April 1944)

Here Are 3 Cyber Takeaways From the Recent Report on Global Threats

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 31):

The United States is facing a wave of new threats from abroad. Unlike in previous decades, some of the most serious of these threats are cyber-related.

On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats released the intelligence community’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment, which identifies and evaluates these various threats to the nation.

Here are three key cyber-related takeaways from the report.

1. China and Russia have unprecedented power to target our infrastructure and population.

America’s global rivals, especially China and Russia, are aggressively challenging us economically, socially, and politically—and they’re doing so effectively. Just consider these conclusions from the report:

• “[T]he innovations that drive military and economic competitiveness will increasingly originate outside of the United States as the overall U.S. lead in science and technology shrinks.”
• “We assess that China’s intelligence services will exploit the openness of American society, especially academia and the scientific community … .”
• “Moscow is now staging cyber-attack assets to allow it to disrupt or damage U.S. civilian and military infrastructure during a crisis and poses a significant cyber influence threat … .”
• “China has the ability to launch cyber-attacks that cause localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure—such as disruption of a natural gas pipeline for days to weeks—in the United States.
• “U.S. adversaries and strategic competitors almost certainly will use online influence operations to try to weaken democratic institutions, undermine U.S. alliances and partnerships, and shape policy outcomes … .”

Note especially that Russia and China are not simply trying to establish the capability to attack our critical infrastructure and to influence our population. The intelligence community states they can undertake those attacks today.

2. Economic health and competitiveness are critical to national security.

The director of national intelligence’s assessment clearly explains that the technology sector is a key battleground in this strategic competition.

• [T]he U.S. economy will be challenged by slower global economic growth and growing threats to U.S. economic competitiveness.”
• “China will continue to use legal, political, and economic levers—such as the lure of Chinese markets—to shape the information environment.”
• “[F]oreign actors [will] increase their efforts to acquire top talent, companies, data, and intellectual property via licit and illicit means.”

Bottom line: The American private sector is now a decisive actor, capability, and battleground in the modern national security context.

3. The age of cyberwarfare is here, and the scale of the threat is outstripping our ability to defend.

In addition to the statements about Russia and China’s current capabilities mentioned above, the Worldwide Threat Assessment reports the following:

• “China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasingly use cyber operations to threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways—to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.”
• “For years, they have conducted cyber espionage to collect intelligence and targeted our critical infrastructure to hold it at risk. They are now becoming more adept at using social media to alter how we think, behave, and decide.”
• “As we connect and integrate billions of new digital devices into our lives and business processes, adversaries and strategic competitors almost certainly will gain greater insight into and access to our protected information.”

Having served as an intelligence officer for more than 15 years, I can attest that our intelligence community is not prone to hyperbole. They understand very well that their words and analysis shape life-and-death decisions as well as billion-dollar budgets.  [read more]

Under Trump, US Economic Freedom Rises Significantly

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 25):

The U.S. economy is roaring like no other time in recent memory. The job market is hot, unemployment is down to record lows, and small business optimism is soaring.

But this newfound dynamism didn’t come from nowhere. It required a package of market and consumer-friendly reforms passed by Congress and adopted by the Trump administration. These reforms have boosted economic freedom.

According to The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom, America’s economic freedom has seen a dramatic boost—from 18th place in the world to 12th place in the span of just one year. America’s score ticked up by more than a full point from last year, reaching the highest level in eight years.

The annual index—now celebrating its 25th year—provides an overall snapshot of almost every country’s level of economic freedom. It takes into account a variety of factors, like taxation, regulation, and trade. It is relevant to our job prospects and the prices we pay for goods and services, not to mention what kind of appliances and cars we can choose and buy.  [read more]

Nice to know. Will the lame-stream-press report this? Probably not.

The Stirring Elocution of Frederick Douglass

From FEE.org:

At the age of 29 in 1847, he [Frederick Douglass] delivered an address in Syracuse, New York, titled “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country” in which he outlined a central point of many speeches to come:

There is no conceivable reason why all colored people should not be treated according to the merits of each individual. It is not only the plain duty, but also the interest of us all, to have every colored man take the place for which he is best fitted by education, character, ability, manners, and culture. If others insist on keeping him in any lower and poorer place*, it is not only his injury, but our universal loss. Yet which of our white congregations would take a colored pastor? How many of our New England villages would like to have colored postmasters, or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers in the public schools? A very slight difference in complexion suffices to keep a young man from getting a place as policeman, or fireman, or conductor, even on the horse cars. The trades-unions are closed against him, and so are many of our stores; while those which admit him are obliged to refuse him promotion on account of the unwillingness of white men to serve under him.

…………….

This was a man who could speak with conviction about the importance of character because he possessed it in abundance himself. He understood that slavery was a blot on the character of the country, evidence that a moral renaissance was required. “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous,” he said. Slavery was an equal opportunity curse because it would sooner or later come back to bite even those who seemed to benefit from it: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”  [read more]

*Like the Left today.

These robots can follow how-to diagrams

From Science News.org (Jan. 16):

Robots imbued with a certain kind of common sense may soon be able to follow instructional diagrams to build things.

When studying pictures for assembling IKEA furniture or LEGO villages, humans are naturally good at inferring how to get from A to B. Robots, on the other hand, normally have to be painstakingly programmed with exact instructions for how to move. “Even when you try to teach robots by demonstration, they’re just repeating the exact same motions you show them, not the concept underlying them,” says Dileep George, an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher at the San Francisco company Vicarious AI.

George and colleagues have now designed a robot operating system that can understand the basic ideas conveyed in schematic instructions and translate those ideas into action. These common sense robots, described online January 16 in Science Robotics, could work on a wider variety of tasks under different conditions than machines restricted to explicitly coded instructions or physical demonstrations.

The new robotic system learned more than 500 general concepts, such as “stack green objects on the right” and “arrange objects in a circle,” by studying before and after images for each type of action. When given a new set of instructions with a before-and-after diagram, the fully trained system considers all the concepts it has learned, and chooses and executes the maneuvers that will help it reach its goal. [read more]

Other articles on robots:

• A new AI training program helps robots own their ignorance
• Scientists invent 'self-aware' robot that operates ON ITS OWN and able to REPAIR ITSELF

A rare kind of black hole may be wandering around our Milky Way

From Fox News.com (Jan. 18):

Scientists think that they've spotted a rare, Jupiter-size black hole casually strolling through the Milky Way galaxy.

Of course, scientists can't see any black holes directly — but new research tracking a celestial cloud structure saw strange behavior that may have been caused by just such an invisible object. That data came courtesy of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a set of 66 telescopes scattered across the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

"When I checked the ALMA data for the first time, I was really excited because the observed gas showed obvious orbital motions, which strongly suggest an invisible massive object lurking," lead author Shunya Takekawa, a physicist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, told New Scientist.

Takekawa and his colleagues were using ALMA to study two gas clouds, which the team nicknamed Balloon and Stream for their shapes, during a two-day period in May 2018. During that time, they watched the gas moving strangely, seeming to spin around a center.

That movement allowed the team to calculate that 30,000 times the mass of our sun was packed into an object the size of Jupiter at the center of the movement. Those characteristics, combined with the lack of light coming from the location, suggest that the culprit is medium size for a black hole.  [read more]

I hope the black hole doesn’t enter our solar system. That would not be good at all.

Herbert Marcuse: The Philosopher Behind the Ideology of the Anti-Fascists

From FEE.org:

Marcuse Is of No Use

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist.

Born in Berlin in 1898, he was drafted into the German Army in 1916 at age 18 and later participated in the Spartacist uprising. Following the war, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, where he would continue to study (and write a paper with Martin Heidegger on Hegel) before arriving at the Institute of Social Research in 1933.

While at the Institute of Social Research—better known today as the Frankfurt School—Marcuse would publish several works on Marx that would abandon the Marxist focus on labor and class struggle and develop the controversial philosophy of critical theory.

Critical theory is defined as “a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it.”

This might sound benign, but in practice, critical theory is the shallow analysis of politics, history, art, and society through the lens of power dynamics. It places the world into a box of oppressor vs. oppressed and insists that those who are oppressed are “good” and those who are oppressors are “evil.”

………………..

Critical Theory in Practice

Marcuse applies this theory in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”—a true example of doublespeak—wherein he argues that free speech and tolerance are only beneficial when they exist in conditions of absolute equality. When there are power differentials at play, which there most certainly always will be, then free speech and tolerance are only beneficial to the already powerful.

He calls tolerance in conditions of inequality “repressive” and argues that it inhibits the political agenda and suppresses the less powerful.

To account for this, Marcuse calls for a “liberating tolerance” that represses the strong and empowers the weak. He explained that a liberating tolerance “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

The problem is that if you view the world through the obfuscated lens of conflict, then you see little other than power dynamics, and the only way to restore power imbalances is to use force. This essentially means that the weak (“the Left”) can do no wrong because they are virtuous, and the powerful (“the Right”) are oppressive no matter what they do, due to their perceived position of dominance. [read more]

Thousands of stars, including the sun, will turn into huge crystals

From CNet.com:

Eventually, the sun will cool off and become a giant crystal floating through space. It's not a bizarre science fiction plot, but the takeaway of new scientific research published this week in the journal Nature.

You may have heard that billions of years down the road the sun will swell to a ravenous red giant star that will eventually swallow Earth. But long after our planet has been ended, the sun will shrink to a cool white dwarf star and then slowly solidify into a massive white crystal, the study says.

That's a lot of bling wasted on the empty vacuum of space.

"All white dwarfs will crystallize at some point in their evolution, although more massive white dwarfs go through the process sooner," Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay from the University of Warwick's Department of Physics in the UK explained in a statement.

"This means that billions of white dwarfs in our galaxy have already completed the process and are essentially crystal spheres in the sky. The sun itself will become a crystal white dwarf in about 10 billion years." [read more]

Cool. I knew about the sun swelling into a red giant star but not turning into a crystal. Glad I won’t be around when the sun swells.

The Ironies of Illegal Immigration

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 10):

Estimates suggest that there are 11 million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens.

A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having a population of about 130 million, that amounts to some 44 million would-be immigrants.

Such massive potential emigration into the United States makes no sense.

First, Mexico is a naturally rich country. It ranks 19th in the world in proven oil reserves and is currently the 12th-largest oil producer. Mexico certainly has significantly more natural advantages than do far wealthier per capita Singapore, Taiwan, or Chile.

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Second, popular progressive narratives in both Mexico and the United States cite America for all sorts of pathologies, past and present. The United States is often damned for prior colonialism and imperialism, as well as current racism and xenophobia.

Why, then, would millions of people south of the border leave their own homeland and potentially risk their lives to encounter a strange culture and language, to live in such a purportedly inhospitable place, and to adopt an antithetical system based on supposedly toxic European and Protestant traditions?

The answers to these two paradoxes are as obvious as they are politically incorrect and therefore seldom voiced. Life in Mexico is relatively poor, dangerous, and often unfree. In contrast, the United States is rich, generous, and secure.

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More importantly, millions of Mexican citizens recognize (at least privately) that the United States is not the bogeyman of mostly elite critiques. Instead, it is one of the world’s rare multiracial, equal-opportunity societies. It is generous with its entitlements even to those who cross its border illegally, and far more meritocratic than most of the world’s highly tribal societies.

Maybe that is why millions of impoverished people from Mexico have left their homes in expectation that they will be treated far better as foreign, non-English speakers in a strange land than they will at home by their own government.

Indeed, if the U.S. treated immigrants in the fashion that Mexico does, then Mexican citizens would probably never emigrate to the U.S.

In sum, illegal immigration is both logical and nonsensical. [read more]

Interesting article.

Ex-political consultant Dick Morris has an interesting take on the building the wall. He says if America builds a wall between Mexico and us then that would force the Mexico gov’t to solve its own problems. Otherwise Mexican gov’t wants people to immigrate to America—less people to worry about. I don’t know. He might be right.

How Public Schools Suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons

From FEE.org:

Ownership by All

The idea of public schooling means they are open to the public, and in this way, we might truly call them public. But in a more realistic sense, the “public” in public school means they are owned by everyone and no one. For instance, if local public schools are supported in part by local taxation, then anyone who pays taxes in that district owns part of the school, in a sense. They don’t literally own a brick or a classroom, but in a republic, taxpayers are supposed to have a say in the things they pay for, or in this example, their local public school. In this way, your average public school is owned by everyone in that community. When we factor in the reality that a large part of funding for public education comes from the federal and state levels (as opposed to the local level only), then every taxpayer in an entire state and/or country “owns” the schools. These ISD’s are in reality not so independent after all.

Despite being collectively owned in theory, they are in reality owned by no one, which is another interpretation of the word “public.” This, of course, is the tragedy of the commons: When something is collectively owned, it is simultaneously owned by everyone and no one. Going back to our public school example, would an average tax-paying parent have substantial influence when it came to routine decisions about curriculum, course offerings, athletics, school lunches, etc.? After all, they own part of the school, at least in theory, so it stands to reason they would have a say in making decisions. But this isn’t how it works.

Because schools are “publicly” owned, they can’t possibly cater to the individual desires of each family. Susie’s mom wants a soccer team, Johnny’s dad wants increased funding for the band, and the elderly couple down the road just wants their property taxes to quit increasing. Just as a matter of practicality, publicly-owned services like schools cannot function in the same way that private schools do.

Why Markets Work Better

Although we can’t be certain of anything in this era of media saturation, I doubt whether we would ever see a story debating the legality of teaching Bible literacy courses in a private school. Private schools are funded by the parents of the students (not the abstract “community”), and just like a shopper who chooses Target over Tom Thumb, parents make a willful decision to send their child to a private school where they presumably know what product they are getting. Because an identifiable group of parents pays for the school, they have a substantially increased level of influence within the school. This isn’t to say that every parent will get what he or she wants simply because they write the check, but just as private businesses are subject to market tests of profit and loss, a private school must react promptly to the desires of its patrons if it wishes to stay in business.  [read more]

It’s too bad that today’s Leftists don’t know or understand the tragedy of the commons principle.

When Bill Clinton Tackled Me

From Dick Morris on Dick Morris.com (Jan. 8):

In May of 1990, I was meeting with my client Governor Bill Clinton in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion when he totally lost it. He ran after me as I stormed out of the building and tackled me from behind, drew his fist back and started to punch me. Hillary screamed and held Bill’s arm back. Then she walked me around the grounds of the Mansion trying to calm me down. “Dick, Dick, she said. Don’t leave. Bill needs you. He’s just upset. Don’t go. He only does this to people he loves.”

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Bill decided to run for Governor in 1990 and faced only nominal opposition in the Democratic Primary. But people were so tired of him that he began to lose ground to his challenger and it looked like he might lose the election.

I gave him the bad news at a private meeting in May of 1990 and he exploded in anger, cursing and yelling at me. He even accused me of “throwing” the election to help my new Republican friends (I had become a Republican in the interim).

I stormed out of the Governor’s Mansion saying, over my shoulder as I left “OK! I quit! Now I’ll be a fifty state Republican. Go lose this election on your own.”

That’s when I heard his hoof beats behind me and he came up and tackled me. It was why our relationship cooled. He remained my client but no longer my friend.  [read more]

Dick Morris also mentioned this episode briefly in his 2016 book Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary.

Another article about the Clintons by Dick Morris: “How the Clintons Made Money from Huawei”