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Salvador Dalí Mi esposa desnuda 1945

Over the past 5 years I’ve addressed this numerous times, and it just goes on. When the MSM, WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, started to feel a real threat to their existence and survival from social media, they changed course radically. They no longer attempted to inform people, they began to shape their readers’ and watchers’ opinions. And it worked.

That change appears to bear fruit. The WaPo announced the other day they’re hiring 150 more “reporters”. Who are not really reporters, in the new setting they’re more like narrators. They’re servants to the narratives favored by editors and owners, the ones they expect -and know- to generate the most clickbaits.

Superficially, the media landscape sort of still looks the same, same logos, same slogans, but below the surface everything has changed. What’s important is no longer News, but the favored interpretation of it. It seems to work miracles for the MSM, but it’s dangerous for the nation. Because: where are you going to get your news, on the basis of which you can form your own opinion?

And if you can’t get news that doesn’t already have an inbuilt opinion, how are you supposed to have a opinion of your own? At the end of the day, you will be left with a nation that is poorly informed and has no opinions of its own. Everyone just regurgitates opinions forced upon them 24/7.

The main difference with 5 years ago is probably that social media have joined the MSM in their strategy. They now all force-shape opinions for clickbait. And nobody puts a loophole in their way:

Facebook Joins Twitter In Reverting To Pre-Election News Feed Algorithms

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Politics and Algorithms

July 28, 2019

Politics and Algorithms

It’s a development that has long been evident in continental Europe, and that has now arrived on the shores of the US and UK. It is the somewhat slow but very certain dissolution of long-existing political parties, organizations and groups. That’s what I was seeing during the Robert Mueller clown horror show on Wednesday.

Mueller was not just the Democratic Party’s last hope, he was their identity. He was the anti-Trump. Well, he no longer is, he is not fit to play that role anymore. And there is nobody to take it over who is not going to be highly contested by at least some parts of the party. In other words: it’s falling apart.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s a natural process, parties change as conditions do and if they don’t do it fast enough they disappear. Look at the candidates the Dems have. Can anyone imagine the party, post-Mueller, uniting behind Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris? And then for one of them to beat Donald Trump in 2020?

I was just watching a little clip from Sean Hannity, doing what Trump did last week, which is going after the Squad. Who he said are anti-Israel socialists and, most importantly, the de facto leaders of the party, not Nancy Pelosi. That is a follow-up consequence of Mueller’s tragic defeat, the right can now go on the chase. The Squad is the face of the Dems because Trump and Hannity have made them that.

The upcoming Horowitz and Durham reports on their respective probes into “meddling into the meddling” will target many people in the Democratic Party, US intelligence services, and the media. In that order. Can the Dems survive such a thing? It’s hard to see.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Reason Why Globalists Are So Obsessed With Artificial Intelligence

March 3, 2019

The Real Reason Why Globalists Are So Obsessed With Artificial Intelligence

It is nearly impossible to traverse web news or popular media today without being assaulted by vast amounts of propaganda on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is perhaps the fad to end all fads as it supposedly encompasses almost every aspect of human existence, from economics and security to philosophy and art. According to mainstream claims, AI can do almost everything and do it better than any human being. And, the things AI can’t do, it WILL be able to do eventually.

Whenever the establishment attempts to saturate the media with a particular narrative, it is usually with the intent to manipulate public perception in a way that produces self fulfilling prophecy. In other words, they hope to shape reality by telling a particular lie so often it becomes accepted by the masses over time as fact. They do this with the idea of globalism as inevitable, with the junk science of climate change as “undeniable” and they do it with AI as a technological necessity.

The globalists have long held AI as a kind of holy grail in centralization technology. The United Nations has adopted numerous positions and even summits on the issue, including the “AI For Good” summit in Geneva. The UN insinuates that its primary interest in AI is in regulation or observation of how it is exploited, but the UN also has clear goals to use AI to its advantage. The use of AI as a means to monitor mass data to better institute “sustainable development” is written clearly in the UN’s agenda.

The IMF is also in on the AI trend, holding global discussions on the uses of AI in economics as well as the effects of algorithms on economic analysis.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deepfake News The Next Frontier In Phony Journalism

February 19, 2019

Deepfake News The Next Frontier In Phony Journalism

Computers can now imitate human writing. Is it the start of a fake news avalanche?

Fake news may be the issue of the day, but what about “deepfake” news – that is, articles written by an artificial intelligence (AI) machine only pretending to be human? OpenAI, a company backed by several Silicon Valley heavyweights, claims it has developed a software that can mimic human writing so convincingly that those who invented it are too scared to divulge the full details. After being fed an initial sentence or question to start the ball rolling, the AI program GPT2 generates text in either fiction or non-fiction genres, matching the style of the initial human-input prompt.

“…it’s possible to generate malicious-esque content quite easily.”

“Deepfakes” are phony content created by “deep learning” (artificial intelligence) computers. This is a quickly developing field, but the researchers behind GTP2 have refused to release the full version of the product, due to concerns about it “being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale.” In other words, fake news and objectionable material can now be composed at speeds beyond the capabilities of human writers and sent out to spam the world.

Breaking News: Scientists Discover Unicorn!

Previous attempts at such technology stumbled when the bots were unable to “remember” details of the story and context; the GPT2 program, however, can compose a narrative without losing track of these elements. After receiving one or two lines as a prompt, the technology went on to write convincing fake news stories about nuclear material being stolen in Cincinnati, scientists discovering a unicorn (albeit one with four horns), performer Miley Cyrus being caught shoplifting, as well as Lord of the Rings fan fiction and an essay on why the American Civil War occurred – of which the first paragraph reads:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Singularity is already here – it is the market

December 7, 2018

The Singularity is already here – it is the market

The market economy exhibits most of the traits of the much hyped – and feared – singularity, where an artificial intelligence takes over the show and humans are enslaved.

We have all heard the stories of the powerful algorithms. They control our choices and they learn by analyzing an ever increasing amount of data. In the book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari says that we have replaced the idea of God with an algorithm. In this emerging ideology, which he names Dataism, the ultimate goal is to increase the amount of information flow through the algorithm.

“Hitherto, data was seen as only the first step in a long chain of intellectual activity. Humans were supposed to distil data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. However, Dataists believe that humans can no longer cope with the immense flows of data, hence they cannot distil data into information, let alone into knowledge or wisdom. The work of processing data should therefore be entrusted to electronic algorithms, whose capacity far exceeds that of the human brain.”

Harari makes a link to the markets in his analysis, for example he says that:

“We often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they were “good”. In truth, they won because they improved the global data-processing system.”

These are good observations, but in my view he doesn’t draw the full conclusions of his own observation.

That the market is the super AI and the Singularity.

According to the singularity hypothesis, an intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) would enter a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would far surpass all human intelligence. (Wikipedia)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Smear Slander Rinse and Repeat

December 3, 2018

Smear Slander Rinse and Repeat

Frans Masereel Montmartre 1925

The way ‘news’ is reported through known outlets changes so fast hardly a soul notices that news as we once knew it no longer exists. This is due to a large extent to the advent of the internet in general, and social media in particular. On the one hand this has led to an absolute overkill in ‘news’, forcing people to pick between sources once they find they can’t read or view it all, on the other hand it has allowed news outlets to flood the former news waves with so much of the same that nobody can compare one source with the other anymore.

Once you achieve that situation, you’re more or less free to make the news, rather than just report on it. The rise of Donald Trump has made the existing mass media realize that one-sided negative reporting on the man sells better than anything objective can. The MSM have sort of won the battle versus the interwebs, albeit only in that regard, and only for this moment, but that is enough for them for now; just like their readers, they don’t have the scope or the energy to look any further or deeper.

This is in a nutshell, and we really should take a much more profound look but that’s another chapter, what has changed the news, and what will keep on changing it until the truth sets us all free. This is what drives outlets like CNN, the New York Times and the Guardian today, because it provides them with readers and viewers. Which they would not have if they didn’t conduct a 24/7 war on a set list of topics they know their audience can’t get enough of.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bear Market Growls As Market Remains Weak 11-16-18

November 18, 2018

Bear Market Growls As Market Remains Weak

Several months ago, I penned an article about the problems with “passive indexing” and specifically the problem of the “algorithms” that are driving roughly 80% of the trading in the markets. To wit:

“When the ‘robot trading algorithms’ begin to reverse (selling rallies rather than buying dips), it will not be a slow and methodical process, but rather a stampede with little regard to price, valuation, or fundamental measures as the exit will become very narrow.”

Fortunately, up to this point, there has not been a triggering of margin debt, as of yet, which remains the “gasoline”to fuel a rapid market decline. As we have discussed previously, margin debt (i.e. leverage) is a double-edged sword. It fuels the bull market higher as investors “leverage up” to buy more equities, but it also burns “white hot”on the way down as investors are forced to liquidate to cover margin calls. Despite the two sell-offs this year, leverage has only marginally been reduced.

If you overlay that the S&P 500 index you can see more clearly the magnitude of the reversions caused by a “leverage unwind.”

The reason I bring this up is that, so far, the market has not declined enough to “trigger” margin calls.

At least not yet.

But exactly where is that level?

There is no set rule, but there is a point at which the broker-dealers become worried about being able to collect on the “margin lines” they have extended. My best guess is that point lies somewhere around a 20% decline from the peak. The correction from intraday peak to trough in 2015-2016 was nearly 20%, but on a closing basis, the draft was about 13.5%. The corrections earlier this year, and currently, have both run close to 10% on a closing basis.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fake News and Weaponized Bots: How Algorithms Inflate Profiles, Spread Disinfo and Disrupt Democracy

October 8, 2018

Fake News and Weaponized Bots: How Algorithms Inflate Profiles, Spread Disinfo and Disrupt Democracy

Photo Source Mike Corbett | CC BY 2.0

Algorithms are getting so sophisticated that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell which online comments are real and which are generated by “bots”; which sites are genuinely popular and which are generating fake hits. In my new book Real Fake News (Red Pill Press), I argue that fake news can be traced back to ancient Babylon (at least) and that today’s hi-tech fakery is merely a continuation of policies designed to reinforce elite domination, be the given elite “right-wing” or “left-wing.”

DO BOTS AFFECT PERCEPTIONS?

Online fake news has become a phenomenon. By the time President Trump came to power, few Americans had heard of the “alt-right,” the ideological grouping partly responsible for Trump’s electoral success. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.6 million, but he won the Electoral College vote. In other words, “alt-right” voters were numerous enough to give Trump a plurality in the overall vote and thus the Electoral College. How do we explain this discrepancy, that online fake news is a phenomenon, yet its main champions remain obscure to most Americans?

It turns out that bots are pushing fake news s to make stories go “viral” by sharing them among fake bot accounts (“sock puppets”) on social media. In 2011, a team at Texas A&M University created gibberish-spewing Twitter accounts. Their nonsense could not have possibly interested anyone, yet soon they had thousands of followers. They found that their Twitter “followers” were, in fact, bots.

In 2017 under a Pentagon grant, Shao et al. analysed 14 million Tweets spreading 4,000 political messages during the 2016 US Presidential campaign. They found that “[a]ccounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots.” Fake news, they say, includes “hoaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories, fabricated reports, click-bait headlines, and even satire.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Did DARPA Just Develop Autonomous Drones To Hunt Humans?

August 6, 2018

Did DARPA Just Develop Autonomous Drones To Hunt Humans?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) latest creation of the Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program, a new class of algorithms for quick drone navigation in cluttered environments, reminds us of the 2013 American post-apocalyptic science fiction film, Oblivion.

Here is a short clip of Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) in the movie, battling against killer drones that use artificial intelligence to navigate and hunt ‘alien scavengers’, and moments before this scene, it was revealed to Harper that alien scavengers were actually humans.

While DARPA’s FLA program has yet to mount a directed energy weapon with enough kilowatts to blast a human into smithereens, it seems like the agency responsible for emerging technologies for use by the military has entered into Phase two flight tests — demonstrating advanced algorithms in drones could autonomously perform tasks dangerous for humans — such as pre-mission reconnaissance on the modern battlefield in a hostile urban setting.

So, yes, this confirms DARPA is developing human-hunting drones, however, it is more on a reconnaissance basis, rather than human-killing drones in Oblivion.

According to the DARPA press release, Phase one flight tests were completed in 2017, as engineers were able to refine their software and improve sensors on the drones to increase efficiency. Experiments were conducted in a controlled environment at the Guardian Centers training facility in Perry, Georgia, and aerial tests showed the quadcopters were able to navigate in urban settings as well as indoors autonomously. Some of the autonomous flight scenarios included:

Flying at increased speeds between multi-story buildings and through tight alleyways while identifying objects of interest;
Flying through a narrow window into a building and down a hallway searching rooms and creating a 3-D map of the interior; and
Identifying and flying down a flight of stairs and exiting the building through an open doorway.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the Internet Turned Bad

April 27, 2018

How the Internet Turned Bad

The 1990s Vision Failed

It has been 25 years since I formed my first impressions of the Internet. I thought that it would shift the balance of power away from large organizations. I thought that individuals and smaller entities would gain more autonomy. What we see today is not what I hoped for back then.

In 1993, I did not picture people having their online experience being “fed” to them by large corporations using mysterious algorithms. Instead, I envisioned individuals in control, creating and exploring on their own.

In hindsight, I think that four developments took place that changed the direction of the Internet.

The masses came to the Internet. Many of the new arrivals were less technically savvy, were more interested in passively consuming entertainment than in contributing creatively, and were less able to handle uncensored content in a mature way. They have been willing to give up autonomy in exchange for convenience.
At the same time, the capability of artificial intelligence grew rapidly. Better artificial intelligence made corporate control over the user experience more cost-effective than had been the case earlier.
The winner-take-all mentality took over. Entrepreneurs and consultants were convinced that only one firm in each market segment would dominate. In recent years, this has become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, as stock market investors poured money into leading firms, giving those firms the freedom to experiment with new business ventures, under-price competitors, and buy out rivals.
The peer-to-peer structure of the Internet and the services provided over it did not scale gracefully. The idea of a “dumb network” of fully distributed computing gave way to caching servers and server farms. The personal blog or web site gave way to Facebook and YouTube.

Blogs vs. Facebook

To me, blogs symbolize the “old vision” of the Internet, and Facebook epitomizes the new trend.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Brave New ”’Markets”’

July 30, 2017

Our Brave New ”’Markets”’

How HFT algorithims risk a massive sudden sell-off

One thing is clear: These aren’t your daddy’s markets anymore.

Why? Because about 10 years ago the Rise of the Machines (aka high frequency trading algorithms) completely altered the terrain of what we call the ‘capital markets.’

Let’s look at this as a before and after story.

Before the machines, markets were a place that humans with roughly equal information and reflexes set the prices of financial assets by buying and selling. Fundamentals mattered.

After the machines took over, markets became dominated — in terms of volume, liquidity and pricing — by machines that operate in time frames of a millionth of a second. The machines and their algorithms use remorseless routines and trickery — quote stuffing, spoofing, price manipulations — to ‘get their way.’

Fundamentals no longer matter; only endless central bank-supplied liquidity does. Because such machines and their coders are very expensive and require a lot of funding.

The various financial markets are so distorted that I first resorted to putting that word in quotes – “markets” – to signify that they are not at all the same as in the past. In recent years I’ve taken to putting double quote marks – “”markets”” – in attempt to drive home their gross distortion. Not only are todays “”markets”” something the human traders of a generation ago would fail to recognize, they’re no longer a place where human actions of any sort have much of a remaining role.

Why care about this? Two big reasons:

Such “”markets”” are easily manipulated by central banks and other state actors by virtue of their automated responses to liquidity injections. Are the markets going down when you don’t want them to? Just use any one of several highly leveraged means of signaling to the computers that it’s time to buy instead of sell. Common leverage points include the Japanese Yen-to-USD price level, selling VIX to lower volatility, and buying massive quantities of index futures ‘all at once.’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms

May 5, 2017

NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms

Exclusive: The New York Times is cheering on the Orwellian future for Western “democracy” in which algorithms quickly hunt down and eliminate information that the Times and other mainstream outlets don’t like, reports Robert Parry.

Just days after sporting First Amendment pins at the White House Correspondents Dinner – to celebrate freedom of the press – the mainstream U.S. media is back to celebrating a very different idea: how to use algorithms to purge the Internet of what is deemed “fake news,” i.e. what the mainstream judges to be “misinformation.”

New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)

The New York Times, one of the top promoters of this new Orwellian model for censorship, devoted two-thirds of a page in its Tuesday editions to a laudatory piece about high-tech entrepreneurs refining artificial intelligence that can hunt down and eradicate supposedly “fake news.”

To justify this draconian strategy, the Times cited only a “fake news” report claiming that the French establishment’s preferred presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron had received funding from Saudi Arabia, a bogus story published by a Web site that mimicked the appearance of the newspaper Le Soir and was traced back to a Delaware phone number.

Yet, while such intentionally fabricated articles as well as baseless conspiracy theories are a bane of the Internet – and do deserve hearty condemnation – the Times gives no thought to the potential downside of having a select group of mainstream journalistic entities feeding their judgment about what is true and what is not into some algorithms that would then scrub the Internet of contrary items.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Banks Are Evil

March 19, 2017

Barandash Karandashich/Shutterstock

Banks Are Evil

It’s time to get painfully honest about this

I don’t talk to my classmates from business school anymore, many of whom went to work in the financial industry.

Why?

Because, through the lens we use here at PeakProsperity.com to look at the world, I’ve increasingly come to see the financial industry — with the big banks at its core — as the root cause of injustice in today’s society. I can no longer separate any personal affections I might have for my fellow alumni from the evil that their companies perpetrate.

And I’m choosing that word deliberately: Evil.

In my opinion, it’s long past time we be brutally honest about the banks. Their influence and reach has metastasized to the point where we now live under a captive system. From our retirement accounts, to our homes, to the laws we live under — the banks control it all. And they run the system for their benefit, not ours.

While the banks spent much of the past century consolidating their power, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Actin 1999 emboldened them to accelerate their efforts. Since then, the key trends in the financial industry have been to dismantle regulation and defang those responsible for enforcing it, to manipulate market prices (an ambition tremendously helped by the rise of high-frequency trading algorithms), and to push downside risk onto “muppets” and taxpayers.

Oh, and of course, this hasn’t hurt either: having the ability to print up trillions in thin-air money and then get first-at-the-trough access to it. Don’t forget, the Federal Reserve is made up of and run by — drum roll, please — the banks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The World is Awash in Bullshit

January 23, 2017

The World is Awash in Bullshit

This is really the best paragraph I have read so far in 2017:

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. So-called higher education often rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture has elevated bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit, then take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with second-order bullshit. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, often seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

It’s from The Bull$hit Syllabus, which was created by University of Washington Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, who are trying to combat The Bull$hit. The syllabus includes questions and standards for data scientists to think about and use.

They believe that with the advent of “Big Data” and tools to deal with it, the amount of BS in the world has really risen too much. It has become too easy for BS to be taken out of context, and to be spread and made to go “viral.” Big Data has given us ginormous datasets to study and manipulate. While we might not be quick to draw conclusions from a smaller data set, we have become very comfortable putting credence to implications and patterns in big data sets. Bergstrom explains:

Before big data became a primary research tool, testing a nonsensical hypothesis with a small dataset wouldn’t necessarily lead you anywhere. But with an enormous dataset, he says, there will always be some kind of pattern. “It’s much easier for people to accidentally or deliberately dredge pattern out of all the data,” he says. “I think that’s a bit of a new risk.”

He is also skeptical of machine learning algorithms. They often give very strong results, but the data they analyze and draw from is not questioned often enough:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eric Hunsader: The Financial System is ‘Absolutely, Positively Rigged’

April 19, 2016

Eric Hunsader: The Financial System is ‘Absolutely, Positively Rigged’

And the abuses are getting worse, not better

Eric Hunsader, founder of Nanex, has been at the vanguard of warning about the dangers and the rampant fraud that the rise of high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithims have let loose in today’s financial markets.

While he usually feels like a lone voice in a world happy to deceive itself, he was shocked to receive a $750,000 whistleblower award from the SEC for his efforts. He’s been sadly less shocked to see that since the award was publicly announced, the abuses he reported have only become more extreme and frequent.

Of the situation that led to his award, he says:

The folks at the NYSE were selling their direct feed for north of $30,000 a month versus the SIP which is under a thousand dollars a month. Their customers are not buying it because it has that much more rich data. The thing that makes it worth $29,000 more is that it is faster, but that is illegal. Up until this point they deny that that is the case. And somehow it works. So the exchanges make all their money from their highest paying customers which are the high frequency traders. And the high frequency traders pay the exchanges exorbitant amounts of money to have a slight advantage.

That’s how the whole system works. It is absolutely, positively rigged. There is no question about it. It is rigged on many different levels in many different ways — for example, no retail order ever gets to see the light of day of the stock exchange. That’s one of the many eye openers. People who aren’t pros in the market don’t realize that it’s all a rigged game.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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