It’s too early for this crap. I opened my inbox and got blasted with some extravagant HTML, like something from a 1990s Geocities site, and I’m left blinking in pain. I’m going to put a small sample below the fold. You might want to put on your sunglasses before you look.
The UN has a few words of condemnation for Israel.
The top court for the United Nations on Friday ordered Israel to take measures to prevent and punish direct incitement of genocide in its war in Gaza, although it stopped short of ordering a ceasefire in a case brought forth by South Africa.
“The state of Israel shall… take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the genocide convention,” the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said.
In a sweeping ruling, a large majority of the 17-judge panel of the ICJ voted for urgent measures which covered most of what South Africa asked for with the notable exception of ordering a halt to Israeli military action in Gaza.
The court ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the genocide convention and also ensure that its troops do not commit any genocidal acts in Gaza.
It’s something. It may be a rather ineffectual finger-wagging, but they openly state what’s obvious: Israel is a genocidal state that is killing and starving and depriving the people of Gaza of basic humanitarian aid, and should stop. Stop right now.
Unfortunately, we all know what the top genocider would say about that. Netanyahu says nuh-uh.
“The charge of genocide levelled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people should reject it,” said Netanyahu.
“Our war is against Hamas terrorists, not against Palestinian civilians,” he added. “We will continue to facilitate humanitarian assistance and to do our utmost to keep civilians out of harm’s way, even as Hamas uses civilians as human shields.”
All 26,000 (so far) dead Palestinians were Hamas terrorists, I guess. Including the 10,000 dead children?
Somebody should explain to Netanyahu that even if they win on the body count score, even if they were to kill every Palestinian, they’d still lose the moral conflict, and the PR campaign. I know I’ll be voting against support for Israel whenever I get a chance.
Remember, well over a million civilians were killed in Vietnam, while about 60,000 Americans died. Who won that war?
There’s a new movie out, titled Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark, which makes the Ark Park its MacGuffin. It’s perfect. Free PR for creationism, and it’s targeted directly at the prospective clientele for Ken Ham’s fake “museum” and “theme park”: old people with dementia.
Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark is a heartwarming blend of comedy and drama, set against the backdrop of a modern-day odyssey. The film follows Jon Koski, a 69-year-old battling early dementia in a Michigan mobile home park. Defying his children’s plans to place him in a nursing home, Jon teams up with Miller Gibbs, a new friend with a frail heart. Their mission is to reach a life-sized Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, symbolizing a sanctuary of hope and rebirth. Their journey is marked by clever tactics, including trading cars and swapping license plates, to outmaneuver those chasing them. This film is a testament to the indomitable human spirit and the bonds forged in adversity.
“Heartwarming,” huh. If any of you have any elderly loved ones with dementia, this is a movie about your nightmares. The problem with dementia is the intermittent lucidity and the ability of the patient to make decisions that might, without malicious intent, endanger themselves and others. Well, here’s a movie that says that your old parent with reduced mental capacity is charming, and sure, let him drive off to a goofy destination, it’ll make him feel better. If he has to steal cars to do it, gosh, that’s just an intellectual challenge for him to surmount.
Their destination, by the way, is not a “sanctuary of hope and rebirth.” It’s a venal roadside attraction for exploitive evangelical Christianity.
But OK, the movie could be a story about sensitivity and the importance of human dignity, if it has a good script and talented actors. Does it? You can watch the trailer and decide for yourself.
Oh god. The main character is simply cringe. On the plus side, the first few minutes where he’s emoting to project his frustration did convince me of his dementia. Everyone else is just flat — the scene with the joke wasn’t funny. They meet an old friend and say “Hey, you’re still tall I see, huh!” and he replies “And you’re still short, ha ha ha” is a scene that will have the old people rolling in the aisles.
It’s streaming on Amazon, and I could watch it right now for $4.99. Unfortunately, that trailer convinced me that I’d be unable to sit through 2 hours and 27 minutes of that dreck, so sorry, I’m not going to review it.
You say you want to go to heaven, but you’ve got all this money. You don’t know how to squeeze your camel through the eye of a needle…but have no fear! Just slather that camel in crypto and it’ll slide right on through, and the Lord won’t even notice! Just ask Eli and Kaitlyn Regalado.
A Colorado pastor who is charged with stealing more than $1m from his Christian community in a cryptocurrency scheme has admitted to the fraud but argued that God instructed him to carry it out.
Eli Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn, are charged with creating and selling their cryptocurrency, known as “INDXcoin”, to Christians based in their home town of Denver, Colorado, allegedly telling would-be investors that the Lord had told him people would become rich if they invested, the state’s division of securities announced in a press release on Thursday.
But INDXcoin was “practically worthless” in reality, prosecutors said in the statement. Investors lost millions of dollars while the Regalados used their investments for lavish living.
They are quite brazen about it all, and Eli admits that he stole over a million dollars.
In a video statement about the charges, Eli admitted that the couple had squandered $1.3m that was raised through cryptocurrency.
“The charges are that me and Kaitlyn pocketed $1.3m,” Regalado said in the video published to INDXcoin’s website on Friday. “I just wanted to come out and say those charges are true.”
Regalado added: “A few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel the Lord told us to do.
“We took God at his word and sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit.”
Regalado added that the couple still believes that God will “work a miracle in the financial sector”.
God told them to profit from a cryptocurrency scheme. God further specifically told them to spend the money on a home remodel, and jewelry, and an au pair, and of course, to spend lots of money on their church, which doesn’t actually exist.
The Regalados also pocketed at least $290,000 for their online-only church, Victorious Grace church, despite there being no physical location for it, BusinessDen reported.
They do send a little resentful that they “took God at his word.”
About nine months ago, Mr. Regalado said, the undertaking “started falling apart,” adding that he didn’t know what he was doing.
“One of two things have happened,” Mr. Regalado said, “One: Either I misheard God and every one of you who prayed and came in, you as well, or two: God is still not done with this project and he’s going to do a new thing.”
Also, it wasn’t his fault. God made him do it.
“I said: Lord, I don’t want to do this. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t have any experience in this industry,” said Eli. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t want to be caught up in something.”
God and crypto sure do work in mysterious ways. It always amazes me how anyone falls for either of them.
Apparently, there’s a growing problem in the US.
Growing vaccine hesitancy is just a small part of a broader rejection of scientific expertise that could have consequences ranging from disease outbreaks to reduced funding for research that leads to new treatments. “The term ‘infodemic’ implies random junk, but that’s wrong,” said Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. “This is an organized political movement, and the health and science sectors don’t know what to do.”
Yes, yes, yes, I agree, there is a terrible strain of motivated ignorance running rampant in the nation. I rather resent the idea that this is an emerging problem — it’s been around as long as I’ve been alive, and longer. The focus shifts is all. The current focus in this article on vaccine disinformation is a symptom of the same old arrogance that fueled the anti-evolution movement. The people who promoted that nonsense are now the same people pushing climate change denial and COVID conspiracy theories — they’ve just expanded their Bible colleges and built conservative think tanks that are somehow regarded as reasonable sources of opinion, and they’ve set themselves up in institutions like the Federalist Society that have acquired the authority to corrupt the fabric of our government.
Don’t even try to imply that this is something new. We’ve let the seeds of decay incubate for many decades. Now news stories deplore this situation on one hand, while on another, in other news stories from the same organizations, they’ll blandly cite the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute or or the Cato Institute or, god help us, Republican Party figureheads as sources, never questioning ho they’re building up the reputations of these fallacious “authorities.” They don’t question. So when some Republican liar says a trivially recognizable lie, like the following, they just report it and don’t say what’s wrong with it.
As a result, many people felt betrayed when COVID vaccines only moderately reduced the risk of infection. “We were promised that the vaccine would stop transmission, only to find out that wasn’t completely true, and America noticed,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chair of the Republican-led coronavirus subcommittee, at a July hearing.
No. No credible authority claims a vaccine will simply stop transmission with 100% certainty in its effectiveness. Brad Wenstrup is a liar and a fraud. Brad Wenstrup is an asshole. The media won’t say that, despite it’s truth, and so the infection spreads. Even in an article reporting on the deplorable state of critical thinking, a news source can’t bring itself to state the facts. They are still obligated to pander to the know-nothings who buy the crap they advertise.
They’ll never openly recognize the common fuel that drives this American problem: a fanatical religiosity. This problem will never go away as long as we continue to grant churches unwarranted privilege.
I’m not even Japanese.
Strangely, the local government has not asked me to help with the Xmas decorations.
A man has torn down the Satanic Temple’s display in the Iowa state capitol.
A former congressional candidate from Mississippi has been charged with allegedly vandalizing the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s statue depicting the pagan idol Baphomet at the Iowa State Capitol.
Michael Cassidy, 35, of Lauderdale, Mississippi, was charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief on Thursday, according to the Iowa Department of Public Safety. The charge could carry one year in prison and a $2,560 fine.
Good.
The whole point of the display in the first place was to highlight the intolerance and hypocrisy of conservative Christianity, and it served that purpose well. It got national attention. It was great PR. When the Baptists put up a manger in a public place, no one cares. A Satanist display provokes outrage, and everyone who is not a conservative Christian is made aware that there are haters out there who want to demand that you follow their religion.
Then some sanctimonious wackaloon tears it down, and there’s a second surge of PR that paints certain Christians as assholes and non-Christians as victims. Ha. Keep making our point for us, arrogant xian thugs, especially when it’s as ineffectual as knocking down cheap statues.
Nobody worshipped that display, and it doesn’t even need to come back as a Force Ghost. The bully has been exposed, that’s all anyone wanted.
Every year around this time conservatives twist themselves in knots trying to argue against freedom of religion. One flashpoint this time around is the erection of a monument to satanism in the Iowa state capitol. It’s shiny and pretty.
I have noticed that every news story about it drags in this same weird religious wackaloon, Shellie Flockheart, who organized a prayer meeting to protest the display (about 4 people showed up), so in a sense it’s actually been effective in getting the conservative Christian perspective on air. In any other circumstance Flockheart would be getting no attention at all.
If you must witness true conservative hypocrisy, though, Michael Knowles has a ten minute rant about how religious freedom does not include those other religions. His argument is that a religion worthy of display must be leavened with “tradition”, and that the founding fathers weren’t thinking of Satanism when they wrote up the Constitution. That’s curious: so 17th century colonists did not actually believe in the evil being that they burned people to death over? I think it’s easy to argue that Americans have a long tradition of believing in Satan that’s still thriving today — just ask Shellie Flockheart. On the other hand, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, and Scientology didn’t exist when the Constitution was written, can we deny them their right to worship?
Heck, Christian Fundamentalism in the US is a post-civil war invention. Many of the founding fathers would have been appalled by biblical literalism, for instance, and they never heard of the Niagara Bible Conference, and they hadn’t read the twelve volumes of The Fundamentals. Religion evolves. The form it has taken in the 21st century, including the radical conservative Catholicism of Knowles, would have disgusted educated 18th century leaders.
But, you know, despite the contemporary existence of religions they did not care for (including Catholicism, by the Protestants, or atheism, which is a very old idea and also has a long tradition), those 18th century politicians declared freedom of religion with no qualifiers. They could have said that American was a Christian nation, or at least a nation that opposed Satan, but they didn’t, despite having full knowledge of the diversity of religious thought. They said:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Period. They qualified the second amendment by prefacing it with the words “a well-regulated militia,” a phrase the conservatives have pretended doesn’t exist ever since, but on the matter of religion they didn’t even insist on a formal priesthood. You can believe what you want. That’s our tradition that demented Christian traditionalist Knowles wants to abandon.
As one of those people who grew up in the 60s, and who tended to ignore the need for trimming one’s hair (still do, actually), I often heard that phrase “get a haircut!” It’s an attitude that has largely faded with time, fortunately, but it still lingers in Baptist churches from the pastors there.
“There are times my heart breaks, and this is one of those times. This past weekend, November 12, 2023, First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana invited a group of men into their church to teach on creation. Then on Monday, these same men went to Hyles-Anderson College and taught the students. These men were not Baptists and do not claim to be Baptists. In fact, one is a member of a Reformed church, and another claimed from their pulpit that he is a Methodist,” wrote Domelle in his publication.
He then went on to criticize David Litty, one of the organization’s presenters as “a long-haired hippie” who should not be in the pulpit teaching Christians.
“A long-haired hippie teaching in the pulpit is in direct contradiction to Scripture. 1 Corinthians 11:14 says, ‘Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?’” wrote Domelle. “I don’t know anything about this man, but I do know that to have long hair is a shame. It does not matter what he was going to teach, the fact that he blatantly disobeys God’s Word should have alerted anyone to his spiritual discernment and that he is to be disqualified to teach people.”
Wow. I haven’t heard that kind of complaint in ages. Litty also used the wrong translation of the Bible. Burn the heretic!
By the way, Litty ran out and cut his hair. Some of these Baptists also went on to complain that they shouldn’t be fighting over hair length when they should be combatting Darwinian evolution. A pox on both sides!
It’s mystifying. I’m not a fan of the company, OpenAI — they’re the ones hyping up ChatGPT, they’re 49% owned by Microsoft that, as usual, wants to take over everything, and their once and future CEO Sam Altman seems like a sleazy piece of work. But he has his fans. He was abruptly fired this past week (and what’s up with that?) and there was some kind of internal revolt and now he’s being rehired? Appointed to a new position?. Confusion and chaos! It’s a hell of a way to run a company.
Here, though, is a hint of illumination.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was unexpectedly fired by the board on Friday afternoon. CTO Mira Murati is filling in as interim CEO.
OpenAI is a nonprofit with a commercial arm. (This is a common arrangement when a nonprofit finds it’s making too much money. Mozilla is set up similarly.) The nonprofit controls the commercial company — and they just exercised that control.
Microsoft invested $13 billion to take ownership of 49% of the OpenAI for-profit — but not of the OpenAI nonprofit. Microsoft found out Altman was being fired one minute before the board put out its press release, half an hour before the stock market closed on Friday. MSFT stock dropped 2% immediately.
Oh. So this is a schism between the controlling non-profit side of the company, and the money-making for-profit side. It’s an ideological split! But what are their differences?
The world is presuming that there’s something absolutely awful about Altman just waiting to come out. But we suspect the reason for the firing is much simpler: the AI doom cultists kicked Altman out for not being enough of a cultist.
There were prior hints that the split was coming, from back in March.
In the last few years, Silicon Valley’s obsession with the astronomical stakes of future AI has curdled into a bitter feud. And right now, that schism is playing out online between two people: AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman. Since the early 2000s, Yudkowsky has been sounding the alarm that artificial general intelligence is likely to be “unaligned” with human values and could decide to wipe us out. He worked aggressively to get others to adopt the prevention of AI apocalypse as a priority — enough that he helped convince Musk to take the risk seriously. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit with Altman in 2015, with the goal of creating safer AI.
In the last few years, OpenAI has adopted a for-profit model and churned out bigger, faster, and more advanced AI technology. The company has raised billions in investment, and Altman has cheered on the progress toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI. “There will be scary moments as we move towards AGI-level systems, and significant disruptions, but the upsides can be so amazing that it’s well worth overcoming the great challenges to get there,” he tweeted in December.
Yudkowsky, meanwhile, has lost nearly all hope that humanity will handle AI responsibly, he said on a podcast last month. After the creation of OpenAI, with its commitment to advancing AI development, he said he cried by himself late at night and thought, “Oh, so this is what humanity will elect to do. We will not rise above. We will not have more grace, not even here at the very end.”
Given that background, it certainly seemed like rubbing salt in a wound when Altman tweeted recently that Yudkowsky had “done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else” and might someday “deserve the Nobel Peace Prize” for his work. Read a certain way, he was trolling Yudkowsky, saying the AI theorist had, in trying to prevent his most catastrophic fear, significantly hastened its arrival. (Yudkowsky said he could not know if Altman was trolling him; Altman declined to comment.)
Yudkowsky is a kook. What is he doing having any say at all in the operation of any company? Why would anyone sane let the LessWrong cultists anywhere near their business? It does explain what’s going on with all this chaos — it’s a squabble within a cult. You can’t expect it to make sense.
This assessment, though, helps me understand a little bit about what’s going on.
Sam Altman was an AI doomer — just not as much as the others. The real problem was that he was making promises that OpenAI could not deliver on. The GPT series was running out of steam. Altman was out and about in the quest for yet more funding for the OpenAI company in ways that upset the true believers.
A boardroom coup by the rationalist cultists is quite plausible, as well as being very funny. Rationalists’ chronic inability to talk like regular humans may even explain the statement calling Altman a liar. It’s standard for rationalists to call people who don’t buy their pitch liars.
So what from normal people would be an accusation of corporate war crimes is, from rationalists, just how they talk about the outgroup of non-rationalists. They assume non-believers are evil.
It is important to remember that Yudkowsky’s ideas are dumb and wrong, he has zero technological experience, and he has never built a single thing, ever. He’s an ideas guy, and his ideas are bad. OpenAI’s future is absolutely going to be wild.
There are many things to loathe Sam Altman for — but not being enough of a cultist probably isn’t one of them.
We think more comedy gold will be falling out over the next week.
Should I look forward to that? Or dread it?
It’s already getting worse. Altman is back at the helm, there’s been an almost complete turnover of the board, and they’ve brought in…Larry Summers? Why? It’s a regular auto-da-fé, with the small grace that we don’t literally torture and burn people at the stake when the heretics are dethroned.
