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You know, now that there is a repeatable method of determining if a "distinctly identifiable pattern of brain activity, which seemed to exclude the capacity for empathy" exists in any human, using the PET-scan neuroimaging, perhaps this is a test that every political leader from State Legislator/Governor level on up should have to pass to be able to even run for office. Everyone in every corporate C-Suite & board of directors in corporations above a certain size too....

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Are you implying that only psychopaths should be allowed at the top?

That seems to already be the case.

No problem exists. No PET scans needed.

:-)

(And who would read the PET scans?)

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LOL - no, just the opposite! :) "Passing the test" means showing the ability to have empathy. A s far as a fair and expeditious way to interpret all the scans - for aerial/satellite image analysis in my field of GIS (say for land cover or presence of wetlands, etc) a model can usually be trained pretty thoroughly if the classification criteria are very well defined. This might be one of the things a machine learning application could do, at least for the first pass. If someone "fails", and wants to appeal the decision, then a reivew board of actual humans who are trained in the discipline would be in order....

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"I was just being playful", Arnold Schwartzenegger .

So AI decides who is a psychopath vs who can run for office?

Would compromising the system once be enough?

Problems everywhere I look, yet again.

sigh...

Let's see if we can find a way to even the playing field , since enough money almost certainly buys the office for the money older these days. That may not be the "candidate".

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Not "AI" - a machine learning classification model is not artificial intelligence - it's a carefully defined set of criteria for classifiying each pixel in an image based on both it's DN (digital number / color / spectral value / etc) and the larger pattern it is part of. It takes human experts to design the model. There's no intelligence in the computer - it just runs the classification algorithm that the humans have designed and implemented. And since all human created software does have some level of bugginess, that's why for something so important, an appeal process to review by humans with expertise in the field of interpreting this type of PET scan would always be needed...

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OK, I concede exaggeration.

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Thank You John, you have a blog like no other, getting my feet wetter, politically, more than I ever have. Back in the days of making mixtapes, I put the spinning wheel song on one, but I never realized then the profundity of the words. Maybe all that acid was to prepare us for....!something like this!

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Thanks Jacquelyn, it even sounds pretty good on a laptop sound-bar.

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Ordinary Ukrainians through the meat grinder yet again. There has to be something special/different about the geography and people that it continues to be fought over.

I thought, the PhD is too fat, but he wouldn't admit that!

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Best farmland in Europe, like the American midwest, "breadbasket". Monsanto wants it.

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I am bemused frankly in regards to the situational escalation in the Ukraine in the context of commentator statements asserting this Gospel Truth. "Western military can't prevail against Russia in this land war, whether Ukrainian or NATO troops are dying, but they do not have an exit strategy.". Prevail can take many shapes as a strategy. If in the sense I feel is meant- that the Russian armed forces are destined to be invincible in combat with NATO as proven in the Ukraine to date I shrug. My Ouija board and Tarot card spread show a hazy future unknown. Russia might have a coup due to Ukraine A new government in Russia might have different possibilities open.

Russia is fighting in the Ukraine and fighting with Ukraine and NATO yes, but each combatant has strategy and tactics. Further we think different objectives but from a higher spy sat view perhaps not really so different in the end under the WHO New World Order. Paul Craig Roberts observed that Putin has not prevailed so far and NATO continues escalation to the point of Russia repeating nuclear war is possible. In turn he thinks this makes Russia look weak. A Potemkin adversary castrated by Oligarchs perhaps. He thinks otherwise himself though -he feels Putin made mistakes, he does not think Putin did not and had other objectives and a different strategy. Maybe though the true objectives have little to do with the Ukraine per se. Perhaps the Chinese are using world leaders to create the conditions for global totalitarianism. And behind the Chinese are Globalist Oligarchs. And behind the Oligarchs Baba Yaga.

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That's all to be considered as we go on, except Baba Yaga. Not Baba Yaga.

What's interesting is how Russia is not committing to the big offensive that everybody predicts they are about to start. Russia has said since late last winter that they do not see Ukrainians as their enemy, nor Americans, for that matter, rather a less easily defined enemy, which I think of as the system or the-system-of-the-western-financial-empire, which pays for the western military, which enforces compliance with the extractive financial system.

The Dragon Family would do things differently, but ultimately to similar ends, I think.

That's part of my working hypothesis. I'm always reconsidering and readjusting my mental model as physical reality proceeds.

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My mental model is the evil that men do lives after them and the good interred in their graves. Situational ethics is evil. For national governments the necessity is self evident. Cooperate and war. Intrigue and integrate until Empire. Soon BCE will mean Before COVID Era.

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"A nation," he heard himself say, "consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation." (William Gibson, Spook Country)

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Not United Nor States.

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