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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-96
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
India:
Covid vaccines:
Covid research:
Dystopia:
Swindle:
Use as open thread …
The transcript of the “main discussion at the Artificial Intelligence Journey Conference (AI Journey 2020), titled Artificial Intelligence as the Prime Technology of the 21st Century,” as far as Putin’s participation is now complete, and it’s well worth reading. There’s a great deal I could excerpt, but as I usually do I’ll limit myself to looking at what Putin proposes educationally:
“Friends, to reiterate, the pace of technological progress is growing exponentially. Therefore, our education system – I am going to say a few words about it – must, of course, preserve the best traditions of Russian education, but also increase the pace of change. The necessary changes must be made by all means. Our universities, the industry-specific universities and departments where students study mathematics, computer science, big data technology and information security must become real flagships and sources of advanced knowledge and discoveries. The content and teaching methods of these disciplines, which are essential for creating artificial intelligence algorithms, need significant updating, and this should be done by the beginning of the next academic year. This is my first point.
“Secondly, I believe that training courses, the AI and big data analysis modules should be made part of the curricula across all areas of professional activities. This means that starting next academic year, future medical doctors, teachers, agronomists and lawyers, as well as manufacturing industry, communications and transport employees, including, of course, rising managers, should start studying these technologies. That is, the students who will, after graduation, work at our regional and municipal government bodies will need to personally promote the digital development agenda.”
I’m skipping many paragraphs here to make this shorter with the following in conclusion:
“We will increase the digital potential of our schools and universities with the future in mind; we will work for the future now. Here I would like to emphasise that in order to be leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, we need to be leaders in the field of school and even preschool education. Although some experts say that there is no and there should be no preschool education, there should be upbringing and preparation for school instead, but it does not matter what you call it. What is important is the content of the childcare programme. Therefore, I would ask my colleagues to formulate the tasks in the field of education in this way.
“In this regard, I instruct the Government to take specific decisions to improve the teaching of mathematics and computer science in schools and to involve our international mathematics centres. They are wonderful, with great potential, leading universities, and Sirius, which I have already mentioned here. And of course, the best Russian physics and mathematics schools, which top the world rankings in terms of the quality of student training. Thank God, back in Soviet times, this system, a network of physics and mathematics schools, was created throughout the country. I repeat, colleagues, I look forward to your thoughtful proposals and practical steps in this direction.”
Putin’s vision and related proposals are vast, all encompassing, and retains pace with China’s development while vastly outpacing anything the EU or Outlaw US Empire have planned or suggested. Do recall that I skipped a lot that is very important. If you want to remain informed, the entire transcript demands to be read. And for those thinking Putin’s not serious, I leave you with a portion of his concluding remarks:
“But our plans for the widespread introduction of artificial intelligence and digital transformation are certainly unparalleled in terms of the depth of change in all areas. They are unprecedented. In fact, they have never existed anywhere. They will really influence every person, every family, every economic and social sector, every organisation and enterprise. And every level of authority, every level of government, the entire system of government.
“We allocate significant resources, both financial and administrative, to create and introduce technology. This is not about using these resources to purchase gadgets as status symbols or other everyday technology. Artificial intelligence is not a so-called fashionable hype, not prestigious trends that will disappear altogether tomorrow or the day after. No, that will never happen. World history has seen many cases when large global corporations and even countries literally slept through a technological breakthrough and were swept off the historical stage overnight. I will not cite the sad examples of these countries and peoples now. There are plenty of them. And we must remember this.
“I want all my colleagues in the ministries and agencies, Russian regions, our state companies, heads of research institutes, university rectors to hear me now – we have to take on issues of a radically new level of complexity. This is a hard test for many of their capability to shed obsolete ideas, routines and stereotypes, a test of their readiness to change, to learn and to lead the way.” [My Emphasis]
Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 6 2020 21:45 utc | 55
SSometimes, in this times of internet, one feels the impulse to stop the reading of a book to indagate on certain issue or term that appears through the reading.
While reading the cahpter dedicated to Gladio in the excellent book provided above, I came across the term “Black International” of which the book informs fascist Italian terrorists were part of, like Della Chiae…
As I went to investigate on the term, found about the “Black Nobility” a privielged class related to armed forces of the ancient Vatican States which resulted scattered when new winds fblowed in Italy and the Church.
One of its last members is said to have stablished links with schismatic “traditionalist” Monsignor Lefevre…At this point I recalled that the movement leaded by Donald Trump, so called “alt-righ”, claims for the end of modernity and return to “traditional” values, and also recalled that Daniel Estulin, Lithuanian analyst, has always said that Trump belongs to Black International in the “brigdge match” ( not chess any more…) that is taking place amongst old powers and surging ones…
I fear all these people and actors mentioned have a relation with what is happening in the world today..
While doing this same short research I run into this interesting pre-pandemic article of 7 years ago, ingeniously linking Black Novel, Black International and the death of the left, which makes a lot of sense today when we are already witnessing the end of capitalism as we knew it and the preparations for the “Great Reset”…a new order which needed first, to be born, the erradication of the left, a process which took a while.
As the author uses black novel terminology, one gets to the conclusion that the assassination of the left started with the terrorists attacks by the Gladio network, passing through the fall of the Berlin Antifascist Wall and dismantling of prosperous socialist country in East Germany ( all with the unestimable help of the self-demise of the USSR through Perestroika ) ending in the trasvestization of socialdemocracy into what ammounts to Western “single thought” of right wing “liberal democracy”, which then killed itself on behalf of the “new normal”, that is the return of neofeudal order of sharp top-down hierarchies and authoritarian rule to avoid that the masses politcize agsin in a new harshly adverse environment…
I found interesting that Gerhard Schröder is mentioned, as the initiator of the narrative of “neither the right nor the left, but good or bad government”, which put an end not only to anything sounding social, but also to the politization of the masses, which then would gave birth to the “era of the managerial class”, and here we are…
La Internacional Negra
(…)It is often said that Oedipus Rex is the first police officer, or his tragic antecedent. Ricardo Piglia, relying on Borges, fixes the origin of the genre in Edgar Allan Poe and his detective Auguste Dupin. The nuance, according to Piglia, is that with Oedipus the investigation was born and Poe inaugurated the police genre through the figure of the private investigator. It is no coincidence that the genre is contemporary with capitalism, that money is one of its central machines and that, regardless of whether it succeeds or not, the ultimate goal of the detective novel is to sell because there is a specific market for it. On the other hand, the figure of the detective, a private figure that moves outside the state, solves the enigmas escaping it.
If the crime novel is contemporary with capitalism, so is social democracy.
One might wonder, then, assisted by the experience of the crime novel and before the corpse of the social democracy or at least in front of its badly wounded body, who is the murderer (or who is trying to get rid of it) and although it seems obvious, to verify if the guilty is capitalism that executes with its own hand.
On March 1, 1863, Ferdinan Lassalle, a citizen of Wroclaw, wrote a text demanding changes in the face of the injustices of the first industrial revolution that produced the creation of the General Association of German Workers. The belief in an eternal industrialization – such as that of a perennial consumption, a religion assumed by our society until the arrival of the great crisis – encouraged this movement whose genesis is the DNA of social democracy: the right to vote to increase with its majority force the state power, a state that would force banks to subsidize producer cooperatives and thus actively participate in a new system.
It will be Gerhard Schröder, also a German, who explicitly points out that there is no capitalist economy and a socialist economy, but a good and a bad one. This produced two things in Germany, one was Oskar Lafontaine’s departure from this neosocial democratic program and the other, the current situation of the German SPD: a possible co-government with Angela Merkel, which evolves Schröder’s words towards the postulate that there is no governments of the right or of the left, but good or bad governments.
Zygmunt Bauman observes that the left has come to tell the right: “whatever you do we will do better.” That is to say, instead of presenting an alternative program, as Lassalle urged at the end of the nineteenth century, socialism tries to show that it can do the same as the conservatives. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Francois Hollande are in that line. As Gramsci would affirm, the right has won the cultural battle with the left.
The detective, looking at the scene of the crime, would wonder, where did the bullet come from?
The fall of the Berlin Wall, freeing the Western power from the Soviet weight, could lead one to think that it came from the East. Today the world is a dead end environment: the only way to turn your back is to escape from its orbit, something absurd. There are no alternatives. Bauman himself suggests that solidarity today is expressed in a festive or explosive way, like that of 15-M, a solidarity that only invites us to unite to synchronize the shouting without knowing how to go from noise to the transformation of social conditions. As the philosopher Edgar Morin affirmed, in this sense, the outraged make fair criticisms, denounce, but cannot enunciate. Could the shot have come from the idea of a new happiness? It is one that indicates that its essence resides in department stores or at any point of purchase where you can acquire an object that satisfies the infinite impulse for consumption. Consume and not live. Because living was, in the past, the expression of happiness: sharing work, affective and community spaces.
We could also add more deaths and turn the criminal into a serial murderer if we include the workers who have perished in the current social framework. And, along with them, the great deceased: politics. It is not by chance that in the meetings that the crime novel summons much more is spoken of politics than of books. We must not forget that in some way the plot appears in politics brought about by fiction: the dark forces that operate in the functioning of governments. Or are not the markets the dark oracles that mark the passage of the rulers? Can we, then, accuse the markets of the death of the left and of the disappearance of socialism in Europe as a moderating force, from the public point of view of social relations, of class interaction?
The Swedish writer Maj Sjöwall, co-author with her partner Per Wahöö of the series of novels starring Inspector Martin Beck, interviewed by this newspaper in the context of the latest edition of Barcelona Negra, told us that “from the sixties to the present day, the Social Democracy is increasingly on the right. Now we have a bourgeois regime and the Social Democrats are trying to regain power but the two parties, the right-wing and the left-wing, are almost identical, they are as if they were one, practically”.
What if instead of being a victim of a crime, the Social Democracy committed suicide?
Let’s hear one last testimony.
When Margaret Thatcher was asked what the greatest achievement of his tenure had been, he answered without hesitation: Anthony Blair.
A great reader of the genre and especially Agatha Christie, Thatcher did not avoid the classic answer: the murderer is the butler.
Posted by: H.Schmatz | Dec 6 2020 21:59 utc | 59
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