Ask your doctor (or psychologist) if this post is right for you…

This original post (OP) is strictly for my fellow wonderers here.  Others need not apply, or even read it.  Just move along.  We'll take it from here. 😊

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Thanks to scientific instrumentation, we are aware of many conditions outside our visual spectrum.  Centuries ago, before such instruments were developed, we humans believed that, visually, what we saw is what there was; nothing else.  Seeing was believing, case closed.  Claiming otherwise would have been considered absurd (delusional, witchcraft, looney-bin stuff).

At that time, we did not know that, for example, butterflies and other insects could see things we could not.  We did not know that gamma rays and microwaves and other phenomena were all around us.  

With the advent of future instrumentation, it turned out that our insistence of “what we see is what we get” was wrong; shockingly wrong.  We found out that another “slice of reality” existed right there alongside ours, at the same time, in parallel time, though we did not have direct access to it without such instrumentation.  Yes, it was "there, but not there," as it were.

Here’s another example of currently inaccessible phenomena.  We know that, on the chalkboard, there has to be more than the four dimensions (length, width, depth, and time) that we experience directly.  My understanding is that scientists in the know postulate that there are some 10 or 11 other dimensions that we currently do not have any access to whatsoever; and no instrumentation yet exists to give us such access.  It’s all theoretical except for the perfect chalkboard math.  And who can deny math?  When all is said and done, I'd say math is about the only perfect, solid, “can’t get around it” type phenomenon there is left.   

Where am I going with this?  Bottom line, even with today’s technological inventions and advancements, I still have to wonder just how “lacking” our knowledge is of what’s going on around us.  We have already surprisingly and unexpectedly found out so much, since those clueless days of ancient times.

Now, finally, for the questions:

1. Do you think that someday even more advanced technology will be developed to detect other phenomena that is currently outside our so-called modern-day instrumentation?  Or do you believe that we’ve gone as far as we can, instrumentation-wise? 

2. Regardless of having the needed instrumentation, do you believe there is something else (more) out there, other than what we currently know about?  If no, and if past centuries don't serve as prologue, what makes you so cocksure there’s nothing more?

3. If yes, there is something else (more), what could that something possibly be? (e.g., gods, spirits, afterlife, soul separation from the body, other parallel realities, multiple side-by-side versions of oneself, nonsensical oxymorons such as those square circles, solid liquids, other.)

Let your mind wander as it wonders.  Let’s brainstorm together.

(by PrimalSoup)

Exxon move to expand power to pollute; DJT lies gain traction

The Lever reports:

Exxon Declares War On Its Dissenters

The fossil fuel giant is suing investors to intimidate them from ever trying to influence corporate decisions.

ExxonMobil has launched an extraordinary lawsuit against two investment firms for the alleged offense of filing climate-focused shareholder proposals. The fossil fuel giant’s underlying goal: killing a federal regulatory effort that would make it easier for all U.S. shareholders to voice environmental and social concerns about the companies they own.

Critics say the company is also trying to intimidate shareholders from ever proposing such resolutions again in the future — under threat of being tied up in expensive litigation and incurring punitive financial penalties.

If successful, the Exxon lawsuit could set a legal precedent wrestling control away from regulators and cracking down on activist investors working to enact more climate-friendly policies.

And if DJT gets re-elected, we can rest assured that ExxonMobil will be free to pollute, cause the sea level to rise 50 feet, and make species go extinct as it wishes. 

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The WaPo reports about DJT's progress in converting lies into truths among his supporters:

Trump has made significant inroads in convincing Republicans that his lies are the truth. That applies to election integrity especially — the basis of Trump’s “big lie.”

Even more significant, Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself. Among Republicans, fewer now say that Trump regularly makes misleading statements. Slightly more view him as more honest than they did in 2018, despite an extraordinarily large amount of evidence that Trump often does not tell the truth. During Trump’s presidency, The Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 misleading or outright false claims, and since he began his second campaign for the White House against Joe Biden, he’s introduced new falsehoods to his catalogue: Inflation is “almost 50 percent” under President Biden; “nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans” have been lost to immigrants. In a single December interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump made 24 false or misleading claims in five minutes — one every 12.5 seconds.

Six years ago, just about 1 in 4 Republicans (26 percent) agreed that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election. Now, 38 percent of Republicans — and 47 percent of strong Trump supporters — believe that is the case. Among all Americans, belief in this false claim hardly changed because Democrats moved sharply in the opposite direction from Republicans. Trump often made this claim to justify his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the electoral college propelled him to the Oval Office.

Trump has convinced 70 percent of Republicans — and 81 percent of his strong supporters — that Biden won the 2020 election because of voter fraud, though not a single allegation has been proven. Slightly more than one-third of Americans overall believe this.

 

Voters who support DJT tend to be very low information voters and significantly deceived by years of DJT's lies. The power of those people to vote based on truth has been taken from them by deceit. Unfortunately, votes based on lies count just as much as votes based on truth. 

Puttin' your foot into it

 Man oh man, did I ever put my foot in my mouth yesterday (Germaine knows what I mean).

It got me thinking. How often we do it. How embarrassing when we do.

Makes me think of big time and important people when they do it. 

Trump does it a lot. But manages to shrug it off. Biden does it a lot. And we apologize for him.

Some is deliberate. Some is speaking without thinking. Some is reacting (as I did yesterday) without fully comprehending what we are reacting to.

Here is the irony.

It depends on who does it. We won't excuse it in someone but will excuse it in others. Again - thinking of important people. If a Republican says something - not asinine, just off the cuff and therefore silly, we have a different reaction than when a Democrat does the same. 

Human nature? Or just laziness? We should think twice before speaking or reacting? AND how should we feel when we get caught with our foot in our mouth?

Ok for you, but not for me? In short, I know Germaine has already forgiven me (I hope) but how quick are we to judge others who put their foot into it without realizing that we are prone to doing the same?

Whether online, in real life, or in politics - especially in politics. 

If you were asked to be on the jury at a Trump trial

 I don't need to rehash everything that has been said about how impossible it will be to find an impartial juror for any of Trump's trials. But since the NY hush money case is the first to be tried, and jury selection has begun, let's use that one as an example.

I also don't need to rehash all the worries that all it will take is for one pro-Trumper to answer all the questions put to him or her in a manner that makes them acceptable only to be the one that hangs a jury.\

I instead gave the following questions a lot of thought and was prompted to those thoughts by a radio program I was listening this morning hosted by Michael Smerconish.

Let me ask the questions straight up without the political slant.

1. Do you have strong feelings one way or another about the guilty or innocence of charges against Trump, before hearing the evidence or taking part in the trial?

2. Do you have strong personal feelings about Trump, whether for or against, that would disqualify you from being an impartial juror?

3. Regardless of your personal feelings about the charges or about Trump, whether for or against, could you nevertheless render a verdict SOLELY based on the evidence presented at trial and the instructions given to you by the judge?

4. Are you impartial towards the charges and Trump himself. Are you neither for or against the charges or Trump. Are you going into this trial with a  totally impartial view and so are not tainted by personal feelings about the charges or about Trump?

Here is how I would have answered - to the best of my ability.

1. I think the hush money charges are rather weak so I have an already preconceived notion. But I am nevertheless willing to listen to the evidence.

2. I detest the man, but do not believe my detestation would disqualify me. I feel I could put my personal dislike of the man aside.

3. I believe I COULD render the verdict SOLELY based on the evidence and the judge's instructions. Even if it means that my verdict is in conflict with my personal feelings. I believe I could follow the evidence and the law. 

4. I am not impartial. I have strong feelings that may or may not guide how I react to the trial. So my answer here is NO, I am not impartial but hope I can perform my duty as juror as explained in my answer #3.

I suspect on those answers I would be disqualified but I would look at those answers and consider the person giving those answers as at least being honest and I would be tempted to accept them as a juror.

AND NO, I am not saying that to toot my own horn, but to raise the question: How would YOU answer those questions, and what answers would YOU find acceptable in accepting a juror?

Global warming updates: Reconductoring the grid; Financial fizzle

A NYT article reports about the need to update the electrical grid (not paywalled off for 30 days):

A rarely used technique to upgrade old power lines could play a big role in fixing one of the largest obstacles facing clean energy, two reports found.

Replacing existing power lines with cables made from state-of-the-art materials could roughly double the capacity of the electric grid in many parts of the country, making room for much more wind and solar power.

This technique, known as “advanced reconductoring,” is widely used in other countries. But many U.S. utilities have been slow to embrace it because of their unfamiliarity with the technology as well as regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles, researchers found.

“We were pretty astonished by how big of an increase in capacity you can get by reconductoring,” said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to one of the reports released Tuesday. Working with GridLab, a consulting firm, researchers from Berkeley looked at what would happen if advanced reconductoring were broadly adopted. 

Today, most power lines consist of steel cores surrounded by strands of aluminum, a design that’s been around for a century. In the 2000s, several companies developed cables that used smaller, lighter cores such as carbon fiber and that could hold more aluminum. These advanced cables can carry up to twice as much current as older models.

Experts broadly agree that the sluggish build-out of the electric grid is the Achilles’ heel of the transition to cleaner energy. The Energy Department estimates that the nation’s network of transmission lines may need to expand by two-thirds or more by 2035 to meet President Biden’s goals to power the country with clean energy.

But building transmission lines has become a brutal slog, and it can take a decade or more for developers to site a new line through multiple counties, receive permission from a patchwork of different agencies and address lawsuits about spoiled views or damage to ecosystems. Last year, the United States added just 251 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, a number that has been declining for a decade.  

Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have been widely deploying advanced conductors in order to integrate more wind and solar power, said Emilia Chojkiewicz, one of the authors of the Berkeley report.

“We talked with the transmission system planners over there and they all said this is a no-brainer,” Ms. Chojkiewicz said. “It’s often difficult to get new rights of way for lines, and reconductoring is much faster.”

One can rationally consider this to be (1) another major failure of American governments to act, and (2) how the private sector does things. We leave most everything to brass knuckles capitalist markets running wild, free, butt naked and unaccountable. Meanwhile, neutered governments dither, blither and slither their way under rocks for protection from accountability. Everyone with power is asleep at the switch.

Another NYT article reports about how banks are not doing much to deal with global warming despite pledges to do something in 2021 (not paywalled):

Banks Made Big Climate Promises. A New Study Doubts They Work.

Using European Central Bank lending data, researchers said there was not evidence that voluntary commitments were effective in reducing emissions.

Hundreds of banks, insurers and asset managers vowed to plow $130 trillion in capital into reducing carbon emissions and financing the energy transition as they introduced the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. But a recent study, published by the European Central Bank, disputed the effectiveness of those promises.

“Our results cast doubt on the efficacy of voluntary climate commitments for reducing financed emissions, whether through divestment or engagement,” wrote economists from the central bank, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia Business School who analyzed lending by European banks that had signed on to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, the banking group of the Glasgow initiative.

The researchers found that since 2018 the banks had reduced lending 20 percent to sectors they had targeted in their climate goals, such as oil and gas and transport. That seems like progress, but the researchers argued it was not sufficient because the decline was the same for banks that had not made the same commitment.

“It’s not OK for the net-zero bank to act exactly like the non-net-zero bank, because we need that to scale up financing,” said Parinitha Sastry, an assistant professor of finance at Columbia Business School and one of the paper’s authors. “We want there to be a behavioral change.”

Expectations for banks from policymakers and climate activists are high. Every year trillions of dollars need to be invested in clean energy if the world is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Most of that cost will need to be financed privately, and banks are the key facilitators in those deals.

Many banks clamored to make net-zero pledges around the summit in Glasgow, known as COP26. But as pressure builds to lower emissions, climate activists are concerned about waning commitments from banks because of mounting political pressure, demand for cheap energy and shifting geopolitical alliances.  

GLS, a German bank, pulled out as a founding member of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance last year after a report by European nonprofit groups said the largest banks in the alliance had funneled $270 billion into fossil fuel expansions since they joined.

“What sense does it make to be in an alliance like that?” said Antje Tönnis, a spokeswoman for GLS. “Plus, it is a fair bit of work. Reporting is involved but doesn’t have any consequences.”

Climate science deniers deny the science

Regarding war machines without humans

In the last couple of days, PD has posted links to info about automated war machines and the use of artificial intelligence as a tool for military use in selecting targets to be destroyed. Here is some of what some of those links lead to.

This 2021 WaPo article (not behind paywall) has a great 4:22 video about US thinking behind developing machines that can seek human or non-human targets and destroy them. The thinking by US experts appears to be develop these machines as fast as possible and make them as deadly as possible. The reasoning behind this course of action is that (1) other countries will build and use killer machines regardless of what the US does, and (2) trying to ban or control killer machines by international treaty would be very hard to monitor and enforce, so don't bother trying. 

The WaPo article comments:

Picture a desert battlefield, scarred by years of warfare. A retreating army scrambles to escape as its enemy advances. [Over a desert battlefield] dozens of small drones, indistinguishable from the quadcopters used by hobbyists and filmmakers, come buzzing down from the sky, using cameras to scan the terrain and onboard computers to decide on their own what looks like a target. Suddenly they begin divebombing trucks and individual soldiers, exploding on contact.

[This is] a real scene that played out last spring as soldiers loyal to the Libyan strongman Khalifa Hifter retreated from the Turkish-backed forces of the United Nations-recognized Libyan government. According to a U.N. group of weapons and legal experts appointed to document the conflict, drones that can operate without human control “hunted down” Hifter’s soldiers as they fled.

The Harvard Gazette wrote this last January:

Long the stuff of science fiction, autonomous weapons systems, known as “killer robots,” are poised to become a reality, thanks to the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

In response, international organizations have been intensifying calls for limits or even outright bans on their use. The U.N General Assembly in November adopted the first-ever resolution on these weapons systems, which can select and attack targets without human intervention.

What exactly are killer robots? To what extent are they a reality?

Killer robots, or autonomous weapons systems to use the more technical term, are systems that choose a target and fire on it based on sensor inputs rather than human inputs. They have been under development for a while but are rapidly becoming a reality. We are increasingly concerned about them because weapons systems with significant autonomy over the use of force are already being used on the battlefield.

What are the ethical concerns posed by killer robots?

The ethical concerns are very serious. Delegating life-and-death decisions to machines crosses a red line for many people. It would dehumanize violence and boil down humans to numerical values.

A July 2023 article published by MIT News focuses on efforts to "democratize" access to machine learning by vastly reducing the time cost to set up and operate AI software focused on solving specific problems: 

“It would take many weeks of effort to figure out the appropriate model for our dataset, and this is a really prohibitive step for a lot of folks that want to use machine learning or biology,” says Jacqueline Valeri, a fifth-year PhD student of biological engineering in Collins’s lab who is first co-author of the paper.

BioAutoMATED is an automated machine-learning system that can select and build an appropriate model for a given dataset and even take care of the laborious task of data preprocessing, whittling down a months-long process to just a few hours. Automated machine-learning (AutoML) systems are still in a relatively nascent stage of development, with current usage primarily focused on image and text recognition, but largely unused in subfields of biology, points out first co-author and Jameel Clinic postdoc Luis Soenksen PhD '20.  

This work was supported, in part, by a Defense Threat Reduction Agency grant, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency SD2 program, ....

The open question here is whether this can be applied to AI mated with killer war machines. In this case AI was applied to biology, not warfare. But even if not, it is obvious that US and other global militaries are willing to spend vast amounts of money on automating war and human slaughter. That is going to happen whether the dangers are carefully considered or not.

Wikipedia on failure to regulate killer machines (LAWS or lethal autonomous weapons systems):

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is a coalition of non-governmental organizations who seek to pre-emptively ban lethal autonomous weapons.

First launched in April 2013, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has urged governments and the United Nations to issue policy to outlaw the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems, also known as LAWS. Several countries including Israel, Russia, South Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom oppose the call for a preemptive ban, and believe that existing international humanitarian law is sufficient enough regulation for this area. 

Some photos of existing LAWS that operate on land or in the air:

US Army training with a LAWS

A long, detailed 2017 article the US Army Press published considers the moral implications of LAWS:

Pros and Cons of Autonomous Weapons Systems

Arguments in Support of Autonomous Weapons Systems

Support for autonomous weapons systems falls into two general categories. Some members of the defense community advocate autonomous weapons because of military advantages. Other supporters emphasize moral justifications for using them.

Military advantages. Those who call for further development and deployment of autonomous weapons systems generally point to several military advantages. First, autonomous weapons systems act as a force multiplier. That is, fewer warfighters are needed for a given mission, and the efficacy of each warfighter is greater. ....

Arguments Opposed to Autonomous Weapons Systems

While some support autonomous weapons systems with moral arguments, others base their opposition on moral grounds. Still others assert that moral arguments against autonomous weapons systems are misguided.

Opposition on moral grounds. In July 2015, an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons was released at an international joint conference on artificial intelligence. The letter warns, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is—practically if not legally—feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

We note in passing that it is often unclear whether a weapon is offensive or defensive. Thus, many assume that an effective missile defense shield is strictly defensive, but it can be extremely destabilizing if it allows one nation to launch a nuclear strike against another without fear of retaliation.

It seems that the US military has done a lot of thinking about automated warfare. However, the US government and the public seems to have limited understanding or influence. The process of automating war is well underway in the military. Arguably, the federal government has gone to its normal mode of inaction because it is busy with whatever else it is doing. What is government doing? Apparently, mostly continuing to blindly fund the US military, including funding for developing automated war machines, blithering and wasting time as far as I can tell.