Today is April 1st. I would expect to see more fake news than usual. However, I see the same, or even less.
We had a couple of prank ideas that we thought might be funny, but unfortunately the world is so weird, they would either be believed permanently or just meld into the blend of fake news.
Some of the AI generated videos pretend to be from Professor Jiang, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others who “might say” the things the AI makes them say. There are entire AI generated channels that commentors seem to react to as if they were the real people.
Jiang’s history lessons are interesting, even if we did find a few facts wrong on Benjamin Franklin. His assertion that certain battles against Carthage never happened might seem like a conspiracy theory. You can agree or disagree with Jiang, authentic Jiang content is at least entertaining (and like shows like “The Chosen,” opinionated history can get people interested in proper history.) We think mature people can learn from Jiang and not have to agree with everything that he says. But the foreign policy motives his AI avatar attributes to China and Russia are not consistent with authentic Jiang content.
MTG has come out against US spending on Israel. However, she has retired from politics, and the recent videos that purport to depict her talking about the Iran war might or might not represent her true views. They seem mostly consistent with her views in what we’ve seen so far, but the channel could be harmful if it gets her in trouble for saying things she didn’t. Is the channel aiming to just get views, or is there some more sinister end goal, like scamming viewers into paying money for something that they will not receive?
These are not as harmful as some of the other pieces of fake news. We know that Victor Orban is disliked for some of his actual policies. However, his government’s motives have been skewed in a harmful way that could provoke unrest.
An expat in Cluj has what he calls the Mugabe effect. Robert Mugabe started out as a freedom fighter, who seemed to be on the right side of history (even if some of his allies weren’t). However, as he held onto power for too long, as an old man, he found it difficult to let go. This resulted in not only the well documented persecution of “white farmers,” but also violence against opposition parties and other ethnic minorities within Zimbabwe (including the persecution of Bantu peoples).
Some war crimes were committed during Mugabe’s rise to power. The longer he held onto power, and the older he got, the more Mugabe fought to suppress any information about these war crimes. Now, even American academic institutions are complicit in covering up the Mugabe regime’s war crimes against other Bantu groups, and even whitewashing them as a form of “reconciliation.”
Here in Romania, there was a similar crackdown on rights as Ceausescu’s term was getting old. And as his body was growing older, his mind also weakened. An old man fighting to stay in power, while losing his mind to age, seems willing to do more evil to stay in power. We could also call the Mugabe effect “the Ceausescu effect.”
We see leaders throughout the world who declare war as they age. Some biographies of Napoleon even claim that the last disasterous marches of the Napoleonic era were based on a fear of death which stemmed from his health problems.
Some leaders, however, go mad before they age. We see an example of George W Bush junior, who misquoted the Bible with his infamous “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”
The divisive spirit of Bush has now invaded the European Union. If you oppose any policy, if you oppose any debt, if you prefer diplomacy to war, then you are labelled as being “with” the enemy.
This is where I stand. If honey is cheaper than opium, and it is just as effective, I prefer to use honey. Honey has fewer long term side effects, fewer dependency issues. (This is a metaphor, of course, for our current situation. I am sorry to have to point that out, but many “with us or against us” fools are too stupid to understand metaphors if you don’t spell it out for them.)
I do not entirely disagree with the main parties on what the problems are. I might disagree with some of the problems, as they disagree with each other, so it is impossible to agree with people who disagree with each other. But my greatest disagreements are with their solutions.
I do not see how making the weapons manufacturers richer, or making the drug companies richer, could be a solution to our problems. More spending doesn’t solve a problem. If you bury money in the ground, it doesn’t grow into a money tree. If you set money on fire, it doesn’t put out the fire. If you give a poor man’s money to a rich man, that doesn’t solve the problems of the poor man.
Let’s take universities. Imagine a university hires fifty officers; whether they are patriotism officials, morality contemplators, or diversity experts, if these officials sit around and do nothing but complain about the current state of the world, hiring those officers is a waste of money. It doesn’t improve anything for the students, the researchers, or the community at large. It doesn’t matter what politics these officials have, they are worthless blowhards. Just spending money on them helps no one, other than them.
However, if you spend the money on meals for students, on teachers, on better training for teachers, that might lead to an improvement. (The training shouldn’t include listening to these blowhards, but rather useful things like what to do in an emergency, or how to spot learning difficulties like short sightedness and dyslexia.) Glasses for poorer students, nutrition, cleaner hallways, high quality textbooks, phonics coaches, and other useful improvements are often cheaper than expensive experts who do nothing but talk.
Furthermore, the talking blowhards do not intend to solve any problems. Instead, they aim to point out new problems, perhaps even problems that do not exist. They need to justify their existence.
Why don’t the blowhards want to solve problems? Well, if the problems they claim we face do go away, they can no longer justify their exorbiant price tags.
If we look at EU policy, we need to ask ourselves a very important question. Is the aim of these policies to solve the problems at hand? Or do they aim rather to perpetuate them, to keep us in an eternal state of emergency, so they can continue to grab money through corruption?
Why was there talk of assassinating the hungarian prime minister and not of assassinating Putin? Surely, assassinating Putin would be a better way to end the war. Hungary is not a threat, even if it wanted to be. It stopped one money shipment which contained less than one tenth of one percent of Ukraine’s annual income from the EU. Why was the money not simply wired over? Why ship it in such a risky manner? We have many questions that we cannot even ask without the corrupt blowhards accusing us of being unpatriotic or “with” their enemies.
The powers that be do not want to win the war in Ukraine. They wish to prolong it. How long will they prolong it? They hope to at least have another crisis brewing, one that they can profit from, before the war is over.
Operation Epstein Fury is another manufactured crisis that helps the corrupt war machine. They spend money not only on war manufacturers, but also on computers.
Just as Microsoft was about the go bankrupt, it started some useless AI projects. If these can’t even help consumers, they are no help to the military. Military spending on AI is just corruption, nothing more. All the EU spending on Artificial Intelligence stems from corruption.
