The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News Alan Macleod   Illustrationg by MintPress News One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios  article  describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the  pager attack  against Lebanon. The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former  analyst  with Israeli spying agency Unit ...

 Billionaires do... DO IT BETTER!      

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article. The Road to AI Utopia, Paved with (Empty) Splendors Simplicius Last month Sam Altman wrote a fanciful blog post which has stirred discussion within the tech industry. He titled it  The Intelligence Age . The chief thesis which the narcotically optimistic post espouses is the following: In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. It’s almost all you need to know to understand the gist behind much of Altman and his cohort’s foundational beliefs, or even  ethos , driving their near-pathologically obsessive accelerationism toward AI singularity—or what they conceive as such. It has all the hallmarks of blind Utopianism. The examples of coming achievements he gives seem myopically ratcheted to first order effects, never considering second or third order consequences as should responsibly be the case. Let’s go through some of them befor...