Israel’s Netanyahu to Lebanese civilians: ‘Take this warning seriously’ House to take up new funding bill as some Republicans fear a 'galactically stupid' shutdown Donald Trump pressured Republicans to pass a citizenship voting bill or shut down the government. This week, Speaker Mike Johnson will try to move forward without it......... Johnson and other GOP leaders are pleading with their party not to allow a shutdown just five weeks before Election Day, which would be unprecedented in modern times. Swing-district Republicans say it would be a terrible move, as their party would likely get blamed by voters. ......... “It’s, in my opinion, galactically stupid to do a government shutdown even after an election. Before an election, it’s even worse. It’s self-immolating as a party if we do that right before an election,” said Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Calif., who represents one of several dozen competitive districts that could decide the House majority. “So we should not shut the government down.” .......... Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who also faces a competitive race, said: “Shutting down the government is bad politics, bad governance.”
Massive radio survey reveals our universe's structure at the largest scales Indian-origin billionaire tears into Elon Musk over 'no plebs allowed' post: 'You owe me apology' U.S. "losing a generation" to fentanyl as agents fight Mexican cartels supplying the drug, DEA head says We are in the midst of the worst drug crisis in U.S. history. The drug is fentanyl, and unlike cocaine and heroin, it's a purely chemical, man-made drug. It's cheap to produce, easily smuggled, and packs an incredibly addictive punch – 50 times more powerful than heroin. Nearly all the fentanyl flooding into the U.S. is made in Mexico by two powerful drug cartels, with chemicals primarily purchased from China. And as you're about to hear, it is frequently hidden in counterfeit pills made to look just like prescription drugs. It's the scourge of our time. Last year more than 70,000 Americans died from fentanyl; that's a higher death toll than U.S. military casualties in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined.......... We were so naive to fentanyl. We thought fentanyl, you hear about it, but you think 'Oh that's just affecting people on the streets, homeless people, drug addicts.' No. It is so insidious. ........... Angela King: Absolutely. Which is shocking to me because at the rate that fentanyl is killing people in this country, it is absolutely ludicrous that this is not on the front page of every newspaper and every news broadcast daily. ......... Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid – a chemical cousin to morphine – originally designed for hospital patients in extreme pain. Now it is in cities and towns in all 50 states. Frequent users heat up fentanyl powder and inhale it. But more often it's sold in pill form – deliberately made to look like real prescription drugs – the one on the left contains fentanyl. Just two milligrams, an amount that fits on the tip of a pencil, can kill. ............ Anne Milgram: The cartels don't sell fentanyl as fentanyl. They hide it in other drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine or heroin. They make it into these fake pills that look identical to pharmaceutical drugs that Americans would recognize, like Oxy or Xanax, Percocet, Adderall. It will be a very massive high that is very short. And that person, they're betting if they survive, will come back again and again and again to buy more. ........... Anne Milgram: As complex and as massive a problem as this is, it's also not a whodunit. We know who's responsible. It's the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel that are based in Mexico. They dominate and control the entire global fentanyl supply chain, starting in China, going to Mexico, coming into the United States. ........... Troy Miller: The majority the fentanyl that we're seeing, about 90%-plus is coming in passenger vehicles. .............. Commissioner Troy Miller, a 30-year veteran of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told us almost all the fentanyl coming into the country is smuggled through legal ports of entry like here at San Ysidro, between San Diego and Tijuana. It's the busiest land port in the Western Hemisphere. .............. More than 60,000 cars snake through 34 lanes 24-7. Officers have a minute or less to decide who gets a second look, and they only have the resources to search 8% of the cars. Dogs trained to sniff out fentanyl are some of their best assets. The cartels are constantly adapting, for example, hiding pills in gas tanks to mask the scent............ Troy Miller: Well, in the San Diego field office, we're seeing 200,000 people a day. Every one of these 200,000 people is presenting themselves as a legitimate traveler. .......
We were astonished to learn two-thirds of the people arrested smuggling fentanyl are American citizens paid by the cartels.
............... the bipartisan border bill killed by the Senate at the urging of former President Donald Trump. It would have provided 1,500 new border and customs officers and 100 high tech detection machines. ............ Sherri Hobson: Cartels are very business-oriented. They look for profit. They look for perpetual power. They're institutionalized. ..... They do their homework. They do their analysis. ............. the cartels' move into fentanyl was entirely predictable. When the U.S. opioid crisis triggered a crackdown on the drug industry and many companies were sued by ravaged communities, the supply of legal opioids dried up – but the demand from Americans addicted to the drugs did not. .............. So I think what happened was they said, "You know what? We have an open market. We have millions of people that are addicted to Oxycodone. We can do fentanyl. We can create these counterfeit pills and we can, we can sell them." .......... Anne Milgram: And what's happening on social media? The cartels use it to organize themselves to get individuals who will carry the drugs across the border from Mexico, to post ads for drugs, and to sell drugs. Whether it's SnapChat, Instagram, TikTok, there are drugs being sold there every single day. .......... And seven out of 10 of those counterfeit pills the DEA tests have a potentially deadly dose of fentanyl.
............ Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, has even dared Israel to invade southern Lebanon, a move that could just as plausibly lead to a protracted stalemate as an Israeli victory. .......... Military analysts have debated the feasibility of Israel’s attempting to fight three land conflicts at once, especially given the challenges posed by an invasion of Lebanon......... After 11 months of fighting, Israel’s military still has not fully defeated Hamas in Gaza. And Hezbollah controls a larger and more mountainous area than Hamas does in Gaza. The Lebanese militia also is generally considered to have a better trained army than Hamas has, in addition to more sophisticated fortifications.
Human beings in a mob
What's a mob to a king?
What's a king to a God?
What's a God to a non-believer
Who don't believe in anything?
Will he make it out alive?
Alright, alright
No church in the wild
Tears on the mausoleum floor
Blood stains the Coliseum doors
Lies on the lips of a priest
Thanksgiving disguised as a feast
Rollin' in the Rolls-Royce Corniche
Only the doctors got this, I'm hidin' from police
Cocaine seats
All white like I got the whole thing bleached
Drug dealer chic
I'm wonderin' if a thug's prayers reach
Is Pious pious 'cause God loves pious?
Socrates asks, "Whose bias do y'all seek?"
All for Plato, screech
I'm out chere' ballin', I know y'all hear my sneaks
Jesus was a carpenter, Yeezy, laid beats
Hova flow the Holy Ghost, get the hell up out your seats, preach
Human beings in a mob
What's a mob to a king?
What's a king to a God?
What's a God to a non-believer
Who don't believe in anything?
Will he make it out alive?
Alright, alright
No church in the wild
I live by you, desire
I stand by you, walk through the fire
Your love is my scripture
And let me in through your encryption, yeah, yeah
Coke on her black skin made it stripe like a zebra
I call that jungle fever
You will not control the threesome
Just roll the weed up until I get me some
We formed a new religion
No sins as long as there's permission
And deception is the only felony
So never fuck nobody without tellin' me
Sunglasses and Advil
Last night was mad real
Sun comin' up five AM
I wonder if they got cabs still
Thinkin' 'bout the girl in all-leopard
Who was rubbin' the wood like Kiki Shepard
Two tattoos, one read "No apologies"
The other said "Love is cursed by monogamy"
That's somethin' that the pastor don't preach
That's somethin' that a teacher can't teach
When we die, the money we can't keep
But we prolly spend it all 'cause the pain ain't cheap, preach
Human beings in a mob
What's a mob to a king?
What's a king to a God?
What's a God to a non-believer
Who don't believe in anything?
Will he make it out alive?
Alright, alright
No church in the wild
No church in the wild
No church in the wild
No church in the wild
Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain Yuval Noah Harari’s study of human communication may be anything but brief, but if you can make it to the second half, you’ll be both entertained and scared.
The breakthrough AI needsA race is on to push artificial intelligence beyond today’s limits ........... The energy used to train OpenAI’s gpt-4 model could have powered 50 American homes for a century. ....... today’s biggest models cost $100m to train; the next generation could cost $1bn, and the following one $10bn. On top of this, asking a model to answer a query comes at a computational cost—anything from $2,400 to $223,000 to summarise the financial reports of the world’s 58,000 public companies. ........... fracking made it possible to reach oil and gas reserves that had previously been uneconomical to extract. As a consequence, America now produces more oil than any other country. ......... Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all designing their own ai chips. ........... Bigger models that rely on the brute force of computational power are giving way to smaller and more specialised systems. OpenAI’s newest model, o1, is designed to be better at reasoning, but not generating text. Other makers are employing less onerous calculations, so as to make more efficient use of chips. Through clever approaches, such as using a mixture of models, each suited to a different type of problem, researchers have drastically cut down on processing time. .............. If the trend towards smaller and more specialised models continues, then the ai universe could contain a constellation of models, instead of just a few superstars. ............ This means that investors are in for a rocky ride. Their bets on today’s leaders look less certain. Nvidia could lose ground to other chipmakers; OpenAI could be supplanted. ........... progress in ai is as much about having the right talent and a flourishing ecosystem as it is about amassing capital and computing power. Countries in Europe and the Middle East may find that the hard graft of cultivating ingenuity matters as much as buying in computer chips. America, by contrast, is blessed with chips, talent and enterprise. It has many of the world’s best universities and, in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, an enviable and long-established cluster of talent.
Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain Yuval Noah Harari’s study of human communication may be anything but brief, but if you can make it to the second half, you’ll be both entertained and scared. .......... “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things” .......... real action in the form of hard regulation has been little in evidence. ......... Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. .......... They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding. ........
Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves.
.............. democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves.
Review: ‘Homo Deus’ Foresees a Godlike Future. (Ignore the Techno-Overlords.) the thought-leader industrial complex .......... Bill Gates told The New York Times it would be one of the 10 books he’d bring to a desert island — and why ever not? If you’re going to be Tom Hanks, your volleyball might as well be a breezy history of your missing fellow humans. ......... “The future masters of the world will probably be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals,” he wrote. “Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.” ........... “For the first time in history,” Harari writes, “more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined.” ............. Eternal happiness. Everlasting life. “In seeking bliss and immortality,” he writes, “humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves into gods.” ........... If you’re acquainted with the story of Icarus, you know that these prideful efforts don’t tend to end well. Harari imagines that in attempting to refine ourselves to utter perfection — the logical apotheosis of humanism, whose history and evolution he traces over many pages — we will destroy humanism itself. ........ “Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons,” he points out, “were enough to transform Homo erectus — who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives — into Homo sapiens, who produce spaceships and computers.” Why should we assume that Sapiens are the end of the evolutionary line? .......... A small, breakaway republic of superhumans and techno-elites will eventually split off from the rest of humanity. Those who acquire the skills and proprietary algorithms to re-engineer brains, bodies and minds — the main products of the 21st century, Harari suspects — will become gods; those who don’t will be rendered economically useless and die off. ............. The nanobots in our bodies tracking cancer could be hacked by North Koreans and start doing lord knows what. “Once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence,” Harari writes, “it might simply exterminate mankind.” ........... A world run by strongmen and kleptocrats is nothing compared with a world run by robot overlords. Governments in that situation would be much less powerful than Google. .......... “If your CT indicates you have cancer, would you prefer to receive the news from a cold machine, or from a human doctor attentive to your emotional state?” he asks. “Well, how about receiving the news from an attentive machine that tailors its words to your feelings and personality type?”
Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI Can artificial intelligence really enrich fossil-fuel companies and fight climate change at the same time? The tech giant says yes.............. a “planetary crisis” that AI could help solve. Imagine an AI-assisted tool that helps reduce food waste, to name one example from the document, or some future technology that could “expedite decarbonization” by using AI to invent new designs for green tech. ........... the tech giant has sought to market the technology to companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron as a powerful tool for finding and developing new oil and gas reserves and maximizing their production—all while publicly committing to dramatically reduce emissions.
