Posts Tagged ‘reality’

Some Israel Gaza Tweets Worth Seeing

Posted: February 28, 2024 by datechguy in Israel, Israel vs Hamas, middle east
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With the league Draft a few days away ( and a 2nd league draft one week farther out) let’s turn to twitter for some updates on the war between Israel & Hamas:

A really big roundup here

Check out #7 from the above tweet:

7. Mid and upper-level Hamas government administrators, political members, and families of senior Qassam Brigade fighters & commanders are super set with access to all the tents, aid, food, supplies, medicine, and resources needed to sit the rest of the war out.

Cue my shocked face

What’s that old saying? Familiarity breeds contempt.

Well in fairness none of the leaders in the middle east jobs are at stake over this war.

Perhaps he should be called an anti-social worker

However bad you think the UN in general and UNRWA in particular are, it’s not enough.

A tragic reminder of the dangers of delusions:

Reality doesn’t care what positive attributes you assign to those trying to kill you.

Although some people are capable of learning after the fact:

Help Help I’m being repressed!

Do you really want to live in a society where you can’t hijack planes and throw Molotov cocktails? If you don’t the US won’t stop you from leaving.

And finally in response to the insane lionization of the fellow who burned himself to death.

That fellow was the ultimate useful idiot.

So Google AI Knew Col Lawson was right all along!

Posted: February 22, 2024 by datechguy in culture, tech
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Col. Tad Lawson: [drunkenly] There are no Nazis in Germany. Didn’t you know that, Judge? The Eskimos invaded Germany and took over. That’s how all those terrible things happened. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans. It was the fault of those damn Eskimos!

Sometimes we let our myths get ahead of us.

Decades of TV and Movies depicting computers and AI as something sentient, capable of independent thought or even beyond humans in terms of humanity or right and wrong has corrupted public perception in the same way that 60 years of Disney movies full of talking animals has made some people forget that animals are dangerous and if given the chance will kill and eat you.

Thus we see the shock SHOCK that Google’s AI seems to be incapable of showing a white person thus the Vikings, the founding fathers and all the popes become people of color.

As far as the AI is concerning Col Lawson was right. Given the choice between showing the Nazi’s of 1944 as Caucasians or Eskimos they’ll give them that Inuit look every time.

Why? For the same reason that it doesn’t dare show an image of Tiananmen Square…Because it’s a computer program doing what it’s been ordered to do by the people who wrote it.

The reality that Google AI is just a computer program, a complex computer program, with access to all kinds of data, but a computer program that operators under the parameters that the programmers have given it and if people understood that this is what it is then all of this stuff would be no big deal.

But folks have been sold by language and culture to convince you that it’s something it’s not.

Just like “The cloud” People upload all kinds of things to “The Cloud” not thinking that what they’re doing is uploading things to large server farms run by various companies.

If people thought of their data being freely to these folks they might think twice, but because it’s called “the cloud” that thought doesn’t hit them.

Anyone who trusts AI to do anything other than what it’s been told by the people who programmed it and thus the people who paid the people who programmed it are fools.

Don’t be a fool, no matter what Google Gemini tells you, it wasn’t the Eskimos.

Breakfast With the Man Who Wasn’t There

Posted: January 25, 2024 by datechguy in election 2024, elections, politics, primaries
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I’ve always known how to count

Tip O’Neill

After Ron DeSantis pulled out of the race and I endorsed Trump I wrote the following in closing:

I’ll close with the same words I ended my endorsement of DeSantis with:

Closing thought: I’m convinced that if we nominate Donald Trump we will lose but if my advice is ignored and he wins the votes to be the nominee I will support him in the general election and make the best possible arguments for Trump (there is no lack of good arguments for his re-election) to convince those Blue collar folks to abandon their irrational hatred and vote for him, even though I think said effort is doomed to failure.  After all with God all things are possible.

Short of my sons each finding a nice Catholic wife there is nothing that is likely to make me happier then to be proven wrong in my assessment of our chances come November 2024.

After writing this there was a comment left by a strong Trump supporter who declared:

there are no blue collar haters of Trump … period … they may not all be fans … but no TDS among blue collar … anyone with TDS who claims to be “blue collar” is just lying …

and the Dems would have, will try to steal the next election from WHOEVER the GOP runs … so may as well go with the guy who gives us the best chance … and that was always going to be Trump

Well today after mass I had breakfast with a close friend. A guy as blue collar as they come who has been with the GOP since long before I met him. In fact he was a republican a solid decade and a half before I decided to join the side I was on.

One or twice a month or so we go out for breakfast and talk Religion, politics and sports and today we talked about Trump’s impending nomination.

To my surprise this fellow, who had voted for Trump in 2020 bluntly stated he was disgusted with him and would be voting for RFK Jr. this time around.

This is a fellow who is as conservative as they come, this is a fellow who acknowledges that Trump did a good job as president and noted both his problem solving style and his tendency to, if he could not achieve a desired aim directly, create the condition so that said desired aim could take place.

He further acknowledged that Joe Biden has been an absolute disaster as president and has bluntly stated that a second Biden term will be even worse.

None of that matters however. He’s disgusted with the cult of personality, he’s disgusted with the toadyism whereby when a person is running against him their the worst person in the world (and the subsequent falsehoods involved) but if they turn around and endorse him they’re suddenly wonderful again.

I spent an hour making the case that this is a binary choice and that a Biden 2nd term will mean the end of our civil liberties because if you reward someone who uses the full power of the state to destroy political opposition you are giving incentives to such a practice and once established can’t be stopped. The GOP voters choose Trump and that was our only choice to stop them.

He counted that Trump would cost the house and the senate not only in this election but in elections to come and Trump would produce majorities for the Democrat with an even worse long term result. Even if by some miracle Trump won a 2nd term Absolutely nothing I could say would change his mind, he is convinced that Trump’s second term, if it happened, will be the revenge tour and that he will be unable to fill a cabinet or achieve what he had done before

Absolutely nothing I could say would change his mind and as I dropped him off at his place noted that a commentator on my site specifically said that people like him simply didn’t exist. He answered:

“Well you can tell him that you just had breakfast with one.”

In fairness this is less an irrational hatred than a rational disgust and distrust but the end result is the same.

I greatly fear that this conversation is taking place all over the country to the same result, and while that might suit some in the Trump camp who do not wish the votes of the insufficiently devout, for a person like me who knows how to count it means it will take this administration making a move so inept producing a disaster so horrible that even those who hate Trump will decide they can’t let this continue.

Well either way I’m going to play this out and make the case for Trump as best I can until it’s over like Jackie Robinson after Bobby Thompson’s home run where he was the last off the field keeping an eye on Thompson on the off chance he failed to touch each base because he knew the game wasn’t officially lost until he did. If proved wrong nobody will be more delighted than I.

It’s a very long time between now and November and a I’ve said before with God all things are possible. I just wish that the defeat of the communist left didn’t rely so much on that maxim.

Who Are You Going to Believe Our Narrative on Gaza Or Your Own Eyes

Posted: January 20, 2024 by datechguy in Israel, Israel vs Hamas
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Sir Humphrey Appleby: A minute is a note for the record and a statement of action, if any, on what was agreed upon. Now what happened at the meeting in question?

Bernard Wooley: Well the book was discussed and the Solicitor General advised there were no legal grounds for suppressing it.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: And did the Primer Minister accept what the Solicitor General had said?

Bernard Wooley: Well he accepted the fact that there were no legal grounds for suppression but….

Sir Humphrey Appleby: [Interrupting] “He Accepted the fact that there were no legal grounds for suppression.” You see?

Bernard Wooley: [Suddenly understanding] Oh!

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Is that a lie? 

Bernard Wooley: No. 

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Can you write it in the minutes?

Bernard Wooley: Yes

Sir Humphrey Appleby: How’s your conscience?

Bernard Wooley: Much better thank you.

Yes Prime Minister Official Secrets 1987

One of the most valuable things about doing shoe leather reporting in person is the ability to actually see what is going on and hear what is being said as opposed to the filers of the media, who, particularly by omission, create a path to the narrative they wish or if there is no path to such narrative simply omit info completely or refuse to cover a story.

This is why first hand observation is huge and while folks like Robert Stacy McCain and James O’Keefe are so valuable to those who want to know actual truth.

A great example of this came out this week. For a long time we have heard the narrative of the Yesterday there was a report that was tweeted out concerning the Israel Hamas War. 

The war has gone on long enough that troop rotations are taking place. IDF soldiers are coming home and they are telling what they’ve seen and apparently it doesn’t match either the “open air prison” or the “innocent civilians” business.

an excerpt:

There is poverty, and there are also entire areas of cities full of buildings packed with apartments and homes full of appliances, modern comforts, vehicles, and a standard of living that could rival many places in Israel, that easily surpass most of the Arab world. This is not a deprived blockaded population in concentration camps. Soldiers describe being shocked by this – GAZA is under Egyptian & Israeli blockade but you would never know it, it (was) a modern prosperous thriving territory. – The tunnels, the weapons, the preparations & infrastructure to ‘go get the Jews’ are everywhere. In the houses, under the businesses, in the mosques, the UNRWA schools, the hospitals and clinics, GAZA is not an open prison – it is a giant terror base.

and this isn’t the only source:

Earlier this month, one of the 646’s battalions began going through central Gaza’s al-Azhar neighborhood, dubbed by Israeli officials the “Towers neighborhood” for the 31 apartment buildings allegedly populated by Hamas officials.

“We discovered that every house has a shaft, and a whole underground network connects them, including the school and the mosque,” said Shushan.

We have to abandon the fiction that peace is possible between the Gazans and Israel. 

Update: Rush Limbaugh understood this years ago:

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