Generational Dynamics World View News

[Guest]

** 16-Mar-2024 World View: Haiti and Benin

As I understand it, many Haitians have
ancestry in Benin. That might help.

Very distant and partial ancestory at best. I don't see how being 1/10th French via a distant relative who was French in the 18th century would necessarily making learning how to make French food easier.

The point being that blacks really don't care what happens to other blacks unless it is being down by non-blacks. It's bizarre mentality that they have. I have lived in black countries, I have seen it repeatedly. They are a violent bunch of dim bulbs.

As for Haiti: get ready to accept 11 million more black migrants into the US.

I can only shake my head.

[Trevor]

I remember John saying a couple years ago that he believed Russia's invasion of Ukraine would ultimately trigger a wider war. In the last few days, we've taken a big step closer to that.

For all intents and purposes, we've cut them off from further aid. Trump wanted the aid bill killed, so it was killed right on the cusp of a deal being made. The House Speaker faces a lot of pressure from both sides to bring it to a vote, but so far, he's remained adamant. Even if it's eventually passed, that's months in which Russia was allowed to gain strength.

Russia still hasn't managed any huge breakthroughs, but despite paying a massive price in blood, they possess the initiative. The prospect of the U.S. leaving the rest of NATO to its fate seems to have prompted them to action. Macron's speaking of sending French troops to Ukraine, albeit in a non-combat role. Poland, Lithuania, and Finland are mentioning the possibility as well. https://www.businessinsider.com/finish- ... table-2024

Yes, we've had special forces in Ukraine for some time, mostly in a training capacity. While they wouldn't technically be on the front lines, similar to Soviet and Chinese troops in North Vietnam, that's still a major step toward the wider conflict John mentioned.

Public opinion's swung all over the place. When war broke out, most thought it would be like a Russian Desert Storm. When Ukraine held firm and repelled them from Kiev and Kharkiv, they switched to believing Putin would be forced out, and after the 2022 counteroffensive, convinced Russian lines would soon collapse. Instead, Putin has several hundred thousand troops in occupied territory and moved to a wartime footing, something the EU has only made tentative steps toward doing.

If Russia makes to take significant ground in a short period similar to 2022, it might just spook the EU enough to send troops of its own. May you live in interesting times, indeed.

[Guest]

The US will be forced to go in. The US electorate won't accept millions of more Haitians. Biden can't win the election unless he gives US citizenship to every illegal immigrant in America.

But he might just do that...

[DT Subscriber]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what- ... n=DM294290

A former Nato commander predicts our future – and it looks terrifying

From ‘remote gene-editing’ to an insurrection in America, we’d best hope that 2054, a co-written novel, stays pure fiction

Jake Kerridge
16 March 2024 • 1:00pm
Related Topics
Artificial Intelligence, Sci-fi movies, Thriller books

Ever since Erskine Childers’s 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands urged the British government to treat Germany, not France, as the leading threat of the new century, thrillers have often been co-opted as a means of warning policymakers about under-appreciated perils – with the advantage that such a book may be more likely to keep the reader awake than a dispassionate report.

Three years ago, the novelist and decorated ex-Marine Elliot Ackerman collaborated with former Nato Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis on a political thriller called 2034. The novel imagines – or predicts; we’ll see – that in the next decade a complacent America will suddenly find its military technologies outclassed by those of its rivals, and when pulled into a conflict with China in 2034, will resort to tactical nuclear strikes, resulting in the tit-for-tat annihilation of Shanghai and San Diego. The book ends on the brink of a new world order, with a truce called but the US and China so badly damaged that India and parts of Africa are able to vie with them for superpower status.

Now, Ackerman and Stavridis have dusted down their crystal ball for a sequel: 2054. This time, the threat facing humanity isn’t nuclear destruction, but the event that keeps futurists awake at night, “the Singularity”, defined here as “an ‘intelligence explosion’, the equivalent of thousands of years of biological evolution crammed into months or even weeks when machine and human learning [will] integrate into a single consciousness”. The Singularity may bring about such advantages as immortality, if you’re happy to have your brain uploaded into a mechanical super-body: useful in a future in which pandemics are commonplace. But it’s going to be bad news for the enemies of whichever nation or corporation wins the race to develop the tech.

This all forms the background for a spy novel-cum-whodunit that begins with the US president dropping dead during a speech, the autopsy uncovering an “inexplicable mass of cells” in his heart. It appears to be murder by remote gene-editing, suggesting that one of the late commander-in-chief’s enemies has access to the sort of tech that will bring about the Singularity. The president’s death prompts a popular insurrection: where 2034, which came out a few weeks after the 2021 Capitol attack, was criticised for ignoring the dangers posed to America by internal division, here the authors stridently redress the balance.

Ackerman and Stavridis follow a large cast of characters – many of whom appeared in the previous book, some as children – who set about trying to resolve or take advantage of the situation. A few of them make a river journey to the remote Brazil fastness of the computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, a real-world figure who helped to popularise the concept of the Singularity in a 2005 book, and will apparently still be a leading figure in the field in the 2050s when well into his second century. One hopes that, if the thrillers of the future are written by AI, they will make room for this sort of pleasing oddity in their plots, and also that they’ll have the sort of cheek that sees this novel’s possibly dodgy US vice-president being a member of the Shriver-Kennedy dynasty.

Apart from having the characters travel around in “auto taxis”, and making a droll reference to how the young people of the future haven’t heard of Harry Potter, Ackerman and Stavridis don’t go in for much world-building. But if, like most dystopian novels, this book tells us more about the present than the future, it does so with dry wit, neatly expressed, and it manages to offer some philosophical insights into the human relationship with technology – are we even now so in thrall to tech that the Singularity could be said to have already happened? – without impeding the rush of events.

As the novel ends, a child is born who has good reason to hold a grudge, suggesting that this series could bound into the future till all the seas gang dry. Whether it will alert sleepy lawmakers to dangers they have failed to notice, like The Riddle of the Sands – who can say? But the average reader should find 2054 a satisfying combination of two very different things: “chilling vision of things to come” and “page-turning beach-read”.

[Guesf]

In 1995, America was doing so well economically that even liberals lost sight of things beyond consumerism. Who cares about community, meaning, heritage, identity, when the Pepsi-Cola tastes so good? And look, Windows 95 is a terrific improvement on Windows 3.1 - this society works! Everything is getting better and better!

Today?

[Bob Butler]

In 1995, America was doing so well economically that even liberals lost sight of things beyond consumerism. Who cares about community, meaning, heritage, identity, when the Pepsi-Cola tastes so good? And look, Windows 95 is a terrific improvement on Windows 3.1 - this society works! Everything is getting better and better!

Today?

That sort of confirms the S&H cycles. The unraveling is a time of exploitation and greed. Ask not what you can do for your country... The crisis is a time of conflict and upheaval. If we are heading into a high we will see new values and infrastructure building.

[Guest troubadour]

In 1995, America was doing so well economically that even liberals lost sight of things beyond consumerism. Who cares about community, meaning, heritage, identity, when the Pepsi-Cola tastes so good? And look, Windows 95 is a terrific improvement on Windows 3.1 - this society works! Everything is getting better and better!

Today?

That sort of confirms the S&H cycles. The unraveling is a time of exploitation and greed. Ask not what you can do for your country... The crisis is a time of conflict and upheaval. If we are heading into a high we will see new values and infrastructure building.

We are more likely to see the utter collapse of the United States.

We are heading for 'a dirt nap' as Warren Pollock used to say (before he moved to Florida and deleted himself from the Internet).

[Guest]

Stephen Pinker and Lex Fridman and others were meant to be your new intellectual information feed. Both of them unlikable lightweight midwits not fit to shine the shoe of your average s___poster. Despite both of them emerging from their incubation pods (with a media blast thunderclap!) with a list of credentials and a fake aura of authority.

[Guest]

Is war in Korea close? Or will Taiwan be first?

[John]

Is war in Korea close? Or will Taiwan be first?

Or maybe the Philippines. Or maybe Australia. Or Japan.
Or maybe the Mideast or Europe.