March 13, 2024

Debussy - Pelleas et Melisande (reference recording: Hebert Von Karajan, Frederica Von Stade ..)

March 13, 2024

Suicide - Cheree (Official Audio) + Frankie Teardrop (Official Audio) + Ghost Rider + Rocket USA (Official Audio) 1977

Label: Red Star Records – RS 1, Red Star Records – RS1
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: US
Released: 28 Dec 1977
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Synthwave, Minimal, Avantgarde, Abstract, No Wave

March 13, 2024

Richard & Linda Thompson - Shoot out the Lights (1982)

Label: Hannibal Records – HNBL 1303
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: UK
Released: 1982
Genre: Rock
Style: Rock

March 13, 2024

Salty! Sweet! Sour! Your mind is about to be blown with this pairing 🤯. Based off a popular Finnish snack of gherkins,

cream and honey. Dollop of creme fraiche, a drizzle of honey, a crackle of pepper, and a sour little pickle.

March 12, 2024

Exclusive: U.S. Must Move 'Decisively' to Avert 'Extinction-Level' Threat From AI, Government-Commissioned Report Says

https://time.com/6898967/ai-extinction-national-security-risks-report/



“Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. “The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.” AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less. The three authors of the report worked on it for more than a year, speaking with more than 200 government employees, experts, and workers at frontier AI companies—like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta— as part of their research. Accounts from some of those conversations paint a disturbing picture, suggesting that many AI safety workers inside cutting-edge labs are concerned about perverse incentives driving decisionmaking by the executives who control their companies.

The finished document, titled “An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI,” recommends a set of sweeping and unprecedented policy actions that, if enacted, would radically disrupt the AI industry. Congress should make it illegal, the report recommends, to train AI models using more than a certain level of computing power. The threshold, the report recommends, should be set by a new federal AI agency, although the report suggests, as an example, that the agency could set it just above the levels of computing power used to train current cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini. The new AI agency should require AI companies on the “frontier” of the industry to obtain government permission to train and deploy new models above a certain lower threshold, the report adds. Authorities should also “urgently” consider outlawing the publication of the “weights,” or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time, the report says. And the government should further tighten controls on the manufacture and export of AI chips, and channel federal funding toward “alignment” research that seeks to make advanced AI safer, it recommends.

The report was commissioned by the State Department in November 2022 as part of a federal contract worth $250,000, according to public records. It was written by Gladstone AI, a four-person company that runs technical briefings on AI for government employees. (Parts of the action plan recommend that the government invests heavily in educating officials on the technical underpinnings of AI systems so they can better understand their risks.) The report was delivered as a 247-page document to the State Department on Feb. 26. The State Department did not respond to several requests for comment on the report. The recommendations “do not reflect the views of the United States Department of State or the United States Government,” the first page of the report says.

The report's recommendations, many of them previously unthinkable, follow a dizzying series of major developments in AI that have caused many observers to recalibrate their stance on the technology. The chatbot ChatGPT, released in November 2022, was the first time this pace of change became visible to society at large, leading many people to question whether future AIs might pose existential risks to humanity. New tools, with more capabilities, have continued to be released at a rapid clip since. As governments around the world discuss how best to regulate AI, the world’s biggest tech companies have fast been building out the infrastructure to train the next generation of more powerful systems—in some cases planning to use 10 or 100 times more computing power. Meanwhile, more than 80% of the American public believe AI could accidentally cause a catastrophic event, and 77% of voters believe the government should be doing more to regulate AI, according to recent polling by the AI Policy Institute.

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March 10, 2024

How one of the coldest, darkest towns on Earth is trying to get more energy from the sun

A quest to build renewable energy at the frozen top of the world

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/09/greenland-renewable-energy/

https://archive.is/Q1NnW



QAANAAQ, Greenland — Out on the ice, Toku Oshima often says, “there is no time.” No calendar but the migrations of sea creatures. No clock but the cadence of the tides. She can hunt and fish the same way her parents did, and their parents before them: traveling by dog sled, sleeping in a wooden hut she built with her own hands. In the rugged mountains and frozen fjords that surround Greenland’s northernmost town, the old ways are still alive.

But those ways are under threat. Human-caused climate change has scrambled weather patterns and pushed the rhythms of animals out of sync with the ice and sun. Residents struggle to earn a living through hunting and fishing, which leaves them unable to afford the imported oil that keeps their homes warm and lit during the long Arctic night. The high cost of electricity and heat has forced some people to abandon their traditional livelihoods — or to leave the town altogether. Qaanaaq residents should be able to heat their homes without sacrificing their culture, Oshima said. But that will require them to cast off the culprit behind their dual challenges of climate change and energy security: fossil fuels.

Together with scientists and engineers from Dartmouth College, Oshima is working to bring renewable energy to one of the most remote places on Earth. Drawing power from local wind and sunshine can reduce the cost of living in Qaanaaq, easing financial pressures on residents who already live at the edge of survival. And it can help the town do its part to rein in the planet-warming pollution that threatens its very existence.


The effort is in its infancy, with Oshima’s Dartmouth partners still developing the equipment they hope to install. To succeed in such an isolated and harsh environment, they are leaning on the expertise of those who thrived in this landscape for generations. Each prototype is designed specifically for conditions in Qaanaaq and tested by the residents themselves.

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March 10, 2024

Republican public schools nominee supports political killings and 'death' to Bill Gates

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/michele-morrow-north-carolina-election/

https://archive.is/YiAsd



GREENSBORO, N.C. — Michele Morrow, the newly minted Republican nominee for superintendent of public instruction in North Carolina, wishes “death” on Bill and Melinda Gates. She’s advocated killing people she considers “traitors.” Despite seeking to oversee public education in a state of 10.5 million people, she is herself a homeschooler.

She has no prior political experience. She attended the Jan. 6 rally to support Donald Trump’s quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election. She received candidate training alongside a Proud Boys member. And yet, Morrow upset incumbent Catherine Truitt in the Republican primary on Tuesday.

Morrow, who rallied for Trump in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, has repeatedly made false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, while calling for death to Trump’s political enemies — and to former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and his former wife Melinda Gates for promoting vaccines.

In a post on Twitter (now X) on Dec. 29, 2020, Morrow wrote: “I do support death to vaccine mongers like Bill and Melinda Gates.” (Raw Story reviewed the post on Wednesday, but it has since been removed for violating X’s rules. The post has been archived.)





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March 9, 2024

Russia Hosts Large Far Right Conference Attacking LGBTQ+ Rights, "Russophobes," and "Globalists"

https://globalextremism.org/post/russia-hosts-large-far-right-conference-attacking-lgbtq-rights-russophobes-and-globalists/



While the international far right was busy meeting in Washington, D.C., for the CPAC 2024 conference in late February, on the other side of the world, a grab bag of “anti-Western” groups, including a handful of far-right leaders from Europe, North America, and South America, gathered in the Lomonosov innovation cluster in Moscow for two conferences held in parallel. One was the Multipolarity Forum (Форум многополярности ) and the other, the Second the Congress of the International Russophile Movement (Второй конгресс Международного движения русофилов, МДР ). The two meetings, which centered on support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, attacking the LGBTQ+ community, opposition to “Western hegemony,” and opposition to the “russophobia” of the West, brought together an odd assortment of leaders. There were representatives from the Global South, National Bolsheviks, acolytes of far right Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, European neo-fascists, revolutionary leftists, and leaders of various religious denominations. All in all, the gathering included more than 300 representatives from 130 countries.

While Moscow has hosted large conferences attended by significant far-right groups in the past, these two events mark a shift towards official institutional support as high-ranking government officials officially sanctioned the gathering. Present were two members of Putin’s cabinet, Maria Zakharova, the director of the information and press department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who presented opening remarks from Putin. Other foreign state officials were invited to the congress as well. They included Darko Mladić, the son of General Ratko Mladić, convicted war criminal for genocide and former general of the Republika Srpska (RS), Zhang Weiwei, an ideologue for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Syrian diploma and current ambassador to Russia Bashar Al Jaafari, former Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic Jan Czarnogursky, and South African MP for the African National Congress (ANC) and grandson of Nelson Mandela, Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela. Pierre de Gaulle, the grandson of former French President Charles de Gaulle, who has expressed pro-Russian sympathies throughout the war, noted his grandfather’s alleged support for relations with Russia.

“Russophobia,” the “racism” of the West, and the “canceling of Russia” were common themes at the event. Tsargrad TV founder Konstantin Malofeev claimed that the current wave of alleged xenophobia and racism against Russians was comparable to what happened in Nazi Germany. Going further, he underlined that, “we understand that this is the hatred of the globalist elite, not the people.” However, at times, some speakers revealed that the “russophobia” they were referring to was not simply a perceived xenophobia towards Russians, but the West’s insistence that LGBTQ+ people simply not be discriminated against. In fact, one of the three thematic sections for the International Russophile Movement Congress included a section on “traditional values.” In his speech, Alexander Dugin mentioned the following: “The West has racistly and imperialistically identified itself with humanity. There was a time when Britain claimed all seas and oceans as its own. Western civilisation declared all of humanity its property — primarily its consciousness. This led to the formation of a unipolar world. In this world, there are only Western values. Only one political system — liberal democracy. Only one economic model — neoliberal capitalism. Only one culture — postmodernism. Only one conception of genders and family — LGBT. Only one version of development — technological perfection up to post-humanism and the complete displacement of humanity by AI and cyborgs.”

Dugin, the leader of the International Eurasian Movement (Международная евразийская движения, MED), and theorist of “Eurasianism,” and the neo-fascist “Fourth Political Theory” which aims to unite far right and far left groups around the world to destabilize Western democracies, was a key speaker at the event. He received widespread attention from conference attendees and Russian propaganda outlets RT, Sputnik, and Tsargrad. Other followers of the “Fourth Political theory” present at the conference included Raphael Machado, leader of the far right Brazilian group Nova Resistência (New Resistance), which the U.S. State Department recently classified as a source of “Pro-Kremlin Disinformation” in Brazil. According to Machado, the conferences, which were first organized in 2023, are the brainchild of he and Dugin, with support from the Thinkers Forum in China and the International Movement of Russophiles. Following the 2023 conferences, Machado was named the Latin American coordinator for the event. During Machado’s trip to Moscow, he met with many of the speakers, including Maria Zakharova, the President of the Eurasian Youth Union (Евразийский союз молодежи ) chapter in Russia, Pavel Kiselev, and Leonid Savin, the longtime editor of Dugin’s website Geopolitika.ru.

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March 9, 2024

This granular life

That the world is not solid but made up of tiny particles is a very ancient insight. Is it humanity’s greatest idea?

https://aeon.co/essays/is-atomic-theory-the-most-important-idea-in-human-history





According to tradition, in the year 450 BCE, a man embarked on a 400-mile sea voyage from Miletus in Anatolia to Abdera in Thrace, fleeing a prosperous Greek city that was suddenly caught up in political turmoil. It was to be a crucial journey for the history of knowledge. The traveller’s name was Leucippus; little is known about his life, but his intellectual spirit proved indelible. He wrote the book The Great Cosmology, in which he advanced new ideas about the transient and permanent aspects of the world. On his arrival in Abdera, Leucippus founded a scientific and philosophical school, to which he soon affiliated a young disciple, Democritus, who cast a long shadow over the thought of all subsequent times. Together, these two thinkers have built the majestic cathedral of ancient atomism. Leucippus was the teacher. Democritus, the great pupil who wrote dozens of works on every field of knowledge, was deeply venerated in antiquity, which was familiar with these works. ‘The most subtle of the Ancients,’ Seneca called him. ‘Who is there whom we can compare with him for the greatness, not merely of his genius, but also of his spirit?’ asks Cicero.

What Leucippus and Democritus had understood was that the world can be comprehended using reason. They had become convinced that the variety of natural phenomena must be attributable to something simple, and had tried to understand what this something might be. They had conceived of a kind of elementary substance from which everything was made. Anaximenes of Miletus had imagined this substance could compress and rarefy, thus transforming from one to another of the elements from which the world is constituted. It was a first germ of physics, rough and elementary, but in the right direction. An idea was needed, a great idea, a grand vision, to grasp the hidden order of the world. Leucippus and Democritus came up with this idea. The idea of Democritus’s system is extremely simple: the entire universe is made up of a boundless space in which innumerable atoms run. Space is without limits; it has neither an above nor a below; it is without a centre or a boundary. Atoms have no qualities at all, apart from their shape. They have no weight, no colour, no taste. ‘Sweetness is opinion, bitterness is opinion; heat, cold and colour are opinion: in reality only atoms, and vacuum,’ said Democritus.

Atoms are indivisible; they are the elementary grains of reality, which cannot be further subdivided, and everything is made of them. They move freely in space, colliding with one another; they hook on to and push and pull one another. Similar atoms attract one another and join. This is the weave of the world. This is reality. Everything else is nothing but a by-product – random and accidental – of this movement, and this combining of atoms. The infinite variety of the substances of which the world is made derives solely from this combining of atoms. When atoms aggregate, the only thing that matters, the only thing that exists at the elementary level, is their shape, their arrangement, and the order in which they combine. Just as by combining letters of the alphabet in different ways we can obtain comedies or tragedies, ridiculous stories or epic poems, so elementary atoms combine to produce the world in its endless variety. The metaphor is Democritus’s own.

There is no finality, no purpose, in this endless dance of atoms. We, just like the rest of the natural world, are one of the many products of this infinite dance – the product, that is, of an accidental combination. Nature continues to experiment with forms and structures; and we, like the animals, are the products of a selection that is random and accidental, over the course of aeons of time. Our life is a combination of atoms, our thoughts are made up of thin atoms, our dreams are the products of atoms; our hopes and our emotions are written in a language formed by combinations of atoms; the light that we see is composed of atoms, which bring us images. The seas are made of atoms, as are our cities, and the stars. It’s an immense vision: boundless, incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful, on which the knowledge of a civilisation would later be built. On this foundation Democritus wrote dozens of books articulating a vast system, dealing with questions of physics, philosophy, ethics, politics and cosmology. He writes on the nature of language, on religion, on the origins of human societies, and on much else besides. All these books have been lost. We know of his thought only through the quotations and references made by other ancient authors, and by their summaries of his ideas. The thought that thus emerges is a kind of intense humanism, rationalist and materialist.

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March 9, 2024

Democracy at work and in society: populist antidote

Trade unions and other civil-society organisations are key to fending off the threat from the far right.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/democracy-at-work-and-in-society-populist-antidote





Dark valley

This could be the year that brings back the plague at full scale. Around the world, many ask why intolerance, right-wing populism, the far right, even fascism, have returned to politics and our societies. There will be elections in at least 64 countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, India and Indonesia, to mention but a few. There will also be important elections to the European Parliament. As Camus’ character, Dr Rieux, observed, no victories last forever. This year marks a potential turning-point for democracy, but also for the postwar compromises between labour and capital challenged in countries such as Finland and the UK.

The interwar period was a spiral of contradictions. But the trend towards war was not inevitable. Conflicting interests and human decisions took the world into an abyss. During a single winter, between 1932 and 1933, much went wrong: Adolf Hitler came to power, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Jehol and abandoned the League of Nations, Benito Mussolini looked towards Africa, France changed governments three times and so on. Collective mentalities and popular beliefs sent nations on the path to war. Hope about the future was lost in too many camps. Pessimism got the upper hand and the world entered a dark valley. Today many seem to have forgotten that interwar fascism was a global phenomenon. The fight for the survival of democracy took place on every continent. The darkness that could descend on us today is reminiscent of the 1930s, yet different.

Market fundamentalism

The recent outbreak of right-wing populism and far-right activism has evoked mainly two explanations. One is primarily economic, with economists such as Thomas Piketty emphasising the impact of a growing gap in living standards. It is argued that the populist counter-movement grows out of the growing economic divide. The other approach is cultural, with the American political scientists Pippa Norris and the late Ronald Inglehart at its centre. The return of the far right and right-wing populism is explained as a shift in values. It is described as a reaction to increased gender equality, multiculturalism, environmental awareness and identity politics. Yet behind both explanations lurks the political doctrine of market ‘freedom’ and deregulation.

Neoliberalism, with its market fundamentalism—a religious faith in the self-correcting ability of markets—has had a profound effect on our societies in recent decades. Institutions and compromises that supported democracy have been weakened, even uprooted. The prominent right-wing populists and far-right politicians of today are well established: Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin. Jair Bolsanaro, Boris Johnson and Jarosław Kaczyński may have faded but there are newcomers such as Giorgia Meloni and Javier Milei. They all limit the voice of civil society and fundamental rights, including the rule of law. Cavalier towards the actual pandemic, they all carry the plague. Unlike fascists and Nazis, most of them do not declare war on democracy directly. The right-wing populists of our time have learnt to coexist with democracy—while voiding it of its basic conditions. And the age of neoliberalism did not only weaken trade unions: it made democracy less resilient.

Pillars of democracy......................

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