The Silicon Curtain Is Fast Descending On Our Democracy.

Posted on | October 1, 2024 | 4 Comments

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Mike Magee

Whether you’re talking health, environment, technology or politics, the common denominator these days appears to be information. And the injection of AI, not surprisingly, has managed to reinforce our worst fears about information overload and misinformation. As the “godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, confessed as he left Google after a decade of leading their AI effort, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using AI for bad things.”

Hinton is a 75-year-old British expatriate who has been around the world. In 1972 he began to work with neural networks that are today the foundation of AI. Back then he was a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. Mathematics and computer science were his life. but they co-existed alongside a well evolved social conscience, which caused him to abandon a 1980’s post at Carnegie Mellon rather that accept Pentagon funding with a possible endpoint that included “robotic soldiers.”

Four years later in 2013, he was comfortably resettled at the University of Toronto where he managed to create a computer neural network able to teach itself image identification by analyzing data over and over again. That caught Google’s eye and made Hinton $44 million dollars richer overnight. It also won Hinton the Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computing” in 2018. But on May 1 2023, he unceremoniously quit over a range of safety concerns.

He didn’t go quietly. At the time, Hinton took the lead in signing on to a public statement by scientists that read, “We believe that the most powerful AI models may soon pose severe risks, such as expanded access to biological weapons and cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.” This was part of an effort to encourage Governor Newsom of California to sign SB 1047 which the California Legislature passed to codify regulations that the industry had already pledged to pursue voluntarily. They failed, but more on that in a moment.

At the time of his resignation from Google, Hinton didn’t mix words. In an interview with the BBC, he described the generative AI as “quite scary…This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario.”

Hinton has a knack for explaining complex mathematical and computer concepts in simple terms. As he said to the BBC in 2023, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. We’re biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.”

Hinton’s report card in 2023 placed humans ahead of machines, but not by much. “Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning. And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.”

This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom sided with venture capitalists and industry powerhouses, and against Hinton and his colleagues, declining to sign the AI safety legislation, S.B. 1047. His official statement stated “I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public.” Most believe his chief concern was losing the support and presence of the Information Technology corporations (32 of the world’s 50 largest AI companies are based in California) to another state should the regulatory environment become hostile.

Still Newsom along with everyone else know the clock is ticking as generative AI grows more capable of reasoning and potentially sentient day by day. Guardrails are a given, and eventually will likely resemble the European Union’s A.I. Act with its mandated transparency platform.

That emphasis on transparency and guardrails has now popularized the term “Silicon Curtain” and drawn the attention of world experts in human communication like Yuval Noah Harari, author of the 2011 classic “Sapiens” that sold 25 million copies. In his newest book, Nexus, Harari makes a good case for the fact that the true difference between the democracy of Biden/Harris and the dictatorship which appears the destination of choice for Trump is “how they handle information.”

According to Harari, while one form of governance favors “transparent information networks” and self-correcting “conversations and mutuality”; the other is focused on “controlling data” while undermining its “truth value”, preferring subjects exhibiting “blind, disenfranchised subservience.”

And AI? According to Harari, democratic societies maintain the capacity to control the dark side of AI, but they can’t allow tech companies and elite financiers to control themselves. Harari sees a “Silicon Curtain” fast descending and a near future where humans are outpaced and shut out by the algorithms that we have created and unwittingly released.

Advise From A Young Woman: Vote For Someone You Admire.

Posted on | September 23, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

We have six weeks to go before choosing a new leader for our still young and evolving democracy. The results will have a profound impact on the health of our citizens, their relationships with each other, and the health of our form of government under the rule of law.

When making a choice, there’s plenty of advice to go around. But the best advice I’ve heard in a long while came this weekend from a young woman. She said, “I think you should vote for someone you admire, someone you’d like to be like.”

In my younger years, we used to call that a “role model.” And by the luck of the draw, I’ve had many women and men over the years who have earned that title. Chief among them was my father who I admired, believed, trusted, and loved.

What did I love about my father?

First and foremost, he loved my mother, and everything flowed from that. We kids understood that we were an extension of their love.

I loved his physical presence – that he embraced us, held us tight, kept us safe.

I liked that he taught me to whistle, which remains a useful skill.

I was proud that he took care of people as a job, and that the people who he took care of loved him so much.

I liked that every Christmas our dining table was full of baked goods that his patients gave him to thank him for his many kindnesses – giving them time, having open office hours day and night, making house calls when they were scared or worried.

I loved that he was honest, that he didn’t cheat or fudge, that he believed your name had to stand for something.

I loved that he was a gentleman and a gentle man.

I liked that he liked to build things, that he owned tools he rarely got to use, and that he’d get upset because we were always messing with his stuff.

I liked that he liked clothes, especially shoes. He liked to look good, and he wore clothes well.

I liked that he always had lots of change in his pockets, and that it jingled when he walked.

I liked that he knew the owners of the local stores across the street by their first names.

I liked that he was patriotic and courageous. I learned after his death that he earned a Bronze Star on May 9, 1945. We never saw that medal or ever heard him talk about that day, ever.

I like that he was modest. He didn’t brag. He didn’t have to. I liked that.

I liked that he delegated. He and my mother expected us kids to help teach each other skills like bike riding, and catching a ball, and climbing a tree.

I liked that he took risks, and wanted us to take risks as well – even though a few of those risks turned out to be unwise and too costly.

I liked that he wasn’t perfect – it meant we didn’t have to be perfect, but we did have to try, and we did have to be independent.

I liked that he was often watching in the background, a last stop before disaster, and that his intervention was usually at the direction of our mother.

I loved that the two of them were a team – and that we kids were the players.

I liked that he could take a hit, that he would never fall apart, no matter how bad things were, he would get up the next morning. Our father was reliable, consistent, upright, sturdy, alive.

I thought he was handsome. Others thought so too.

I liked that he had a spiritual core – not because of his religious belief system, because his values were secure with or without religion.

I admired my father because he was such a good person.

Our country deserves to be led by good people like him. I think you should vote, and when you do, I think you should vote for a good person.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: 2024 > Harris > leadership > presidential election > role model > trump

How Common Are Miscarriages in America?

Posted on | September 21, 2024 | No Comments

A miscarriage, or pregnancy loss before 20 completed weeks, is not an uncommon affair. Approximately 15% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, mainly the result of chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. That amounts to some 540,000 women in crisis, which most believe is under counted. 80% of miscarriages occur in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy.

Treatment Prior to Dobbs

If miscarriage occurs before 13 weeks, there is a good chance of clearing the blood clots and uterine tissue with medication and no surgical intervention. But if bleeding is severe, or the loss is occurring beyond 13 weeks, dilation and curettage (D&C) is both necessary and at times life saving. Under anesthesia, the cervix is dilated and any remaining pregnancy-related tissue is gently scraped and suctioned from inside the uterus. Patients are then closely monitored for several weeks for any evidence of continued bleeding or infection.

Treatment After Dobbs

In 14 states, normal treatment has been criminalized. Delay leads to preventable maternal death from bleeding or infection.

Category: Uncategorized

Miscarriage & Justices

Posted on | September 18, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

“What did they know, and when did they know it?”

These are the questions Americans have become accustomed to asking of their leaders, dating back to Nixon and extending to Trump, and all Presidents in between. But now the same questions have surfaced, to the extreme discomfort of conservative Justices, as death and destruction of lives begins to mount in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

As predicted, graphic cases of young women bleeding out in parking lots after being refused life-saving acute care for miscarriage in 14 states across the nation are being documented and described. These stories are not only affecting the lives of couples across the land, but also threatening the “political lives” of downstream Republicans facing an upcoming election.

The responsible Supreme Court Justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) and their legions of Ivy League clerks had scoured the literature far and wide before making the decision to eliminate women’s reproductive freedom in the U.S. and inflict lasting harm to their life-saving relationships with their local doctors.

Their review had to include Blue Cross & Blue Shield’s timely publication, “Trends in Pregnancy and Childbirth Complications in the U.S.” That report, surveying over 1000 pregnant women ages 18 to 44 in April, 2020, was, in part, designed to understand the impact the Covid epidemic had had on prenatal care nationwide. But what it revealed was that pregnancy complications were up 16% over prior years, in part due to “social barriers such as availability of appointments, lack of transportation or nearby providers.”

A comparison of 1.8 million pregnancies in 2014 versus 2018 demonstrated a severely compromised women’s health support system. 14% did not receive prenatal care in their first trimester, and 34% missed scheduled prenatal visits with 1 in 4 of these suffering complications in pregnancy. The BC/BS summary “underscores the importance of focusing on the health of pregnant women in America, especially as health conditions increase in this population…”

The Conservative Justices were forewarned. Yet they still elected to throw fuel on a maternal health system which was already in flames. They were also aware of a 2021 study that confirmed that miscarriage was 43% more likely in Black women than in their white counterparts.

On May 2, 2022, Justice Alito and his allies engineered the release of a draft of a majority opinion in part to freeze attempts by Chief Justice Roberts to secure a compromise. The leaked document labeled Roe v. Wade “egregiously wrong from the start.” As predicted, the ruling spawned chaos. When 14 Red states established total bans on all abortions, miscarrying women seeking help in ER’s literally had to fight for their lives. Their doctors were criminalized. Was this an abortion gone bad?

25% of pregnant women experience some vaginal bleeding in the first trimester. For most (6 in 10) this is self-limiting and they go on to deliver a healthy baby. But for 4 in 10 (or 10% who present with bleeding) they go on to miscarry. All pregnant women who experience vaginal bleeding in early pregnancy need to have a medical examination. Doctors and midwifes check blood work, perform a physical examination, and do an ultrasound examination.

Most pregnancy loss (95%+) occurs before 20 weeks gestation. If miscarriage occurs before 13 weeks, there is a good chance of clearing the blood clots and uterine tissue with medication and no surgical intervention. But if bleeding is severe, or the loss is occurring beyond 13 weeks, dilation and curettage (D&C) is both necessary and at times life saving. Under anesthesia, the cervix is dilated and any remaining pregnancy-related tissue is gently scraped and suctioned from inside the uterus. Patients are then closely monitored for several weeks for any evidence of continued bleeding or infection.

What did the Justices know, and when did they know it?

They knew that Miscarriages were a medical emergency and exceedingly common.
They knew that 80% occur during the first trimester, and that existing state abortion laws on the books would restrict access to acute life-saving treatments in 14 states.
They knew that pregnancy loss was far more common in non-whites and in rural underserved communities.
They knew that the medical community opposed overturning Roe v. Wade in overwhelming majorities, and predicted maternal loss of life if the Justices proceeded.
They read, two years after their deadly decision, the Commonwealth Report which stated , “The United States continues to have the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation, despite a decline since the COVID-19 pandemic. And within the U.S., the rate is by far the highest for Black women. Most of these deaths — over 80 percent — are likely preventable.”

They knew all this, and they did it anyway.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Commonwealth Report Maternal Health > Conservative justices > Dobbs > medical emergency > miscarriage > reproductive freedom > Roe v. Wade > supreme court

AI and The Future of American Medicine

Posted on | September 13, 2024 | Comments Off on AI and The Future of American Medicine

Mike Magee MD

(This paper is provided Open Source as a public service. It may be republished and distributed with proper attribution. Reading Time: 30 minutes.)

The history of Medicine has always involved a clash between the human need for compassion, understanding, and partnership, and the rigors of scientific discovery and advancing technology. At the interface of these two forces are human societies that struggle to remain forward looking and hopeful while managing complex human relations. It is a conflict in many ways, to hold fear and worry at bay while imagining better futures for individuals, families, communities and societies, that challenges leaders pursuing peace and prosperity.

The question has always been “How can science and technology improve health without undermining humans freedom of choice and rights to self-determination.” . . . (Continue reading.)

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: AI > AI and the future of Medicine > AI Bias > Alpha Fold > ChatGPT > Geminin > Health Tech > medical ethics > Sickle Cell Anemia

Political Jiu-Jitsu: Trump As A Liability to Deep State Republicans

Posted on | September 12, 2024 | Comments Off on Political Jiu-Jitsu: Trump As A Liability to Deep State Republicans

Mike Magee

Funny think about that Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” Trump declared in this week’s debate, “I know nothing about it.” But in addition to the vast majority of authors and editors of the document having served in the prior Trump administration, the former President’s name is mentioned in the 887 page document over 300 times.

Described by Pulitzer Prize winning economics columnist, Carlos Lozada, the work itself is an “off-the-shelf governing plan.” It’s packed with conservative fan favorites, not simply “militarizing the southern border” and reversing what they call “climate fanaticism”, but especially placing DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) efforts in the waste bin, banning abortion nationally, and pushing deregulation and tax cuts for the richy rich.

None of that is surprising if you’ve run into these characters on K street and beyond. This is who they are, and largely who they have always been. Over the years, I’ve bumped elbows with them in Washington and in corporate C-suites galore. What makes this effort a bit unique is, of course, the presence of a cooperative headliner who will clearly endorse “the elevation of religious beliefs in government affairs” and actively diminish “the powers of Congress and the Judiciary.”

This is political jiu-jitsu practiced at its highest level. Rather than dismantling the “deep state,” these operators are fast at work “capturing the administrative state” for their own self-serving purposes.

Understanding jiu-jitsu takes one a long way toward understanding the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society’s puppet masters. The word “Jū” means “gentle, soft, supple, flexible, pliable, or yielding.” It’s companion, “jutsu” is the “art or technique.” Combine the two, and you have the ”yielding-art.” The intent in bodily (or political) combat is to harness an opponent’s power against himself, rather that confronting him directly.

Political jiu-jitsu may be deceptive and confusing in the absence of visible weaponry, but it is anything but gentle. In the physical version, you are instructed in joint locks and chokeholds of course, but also biting, hair pulling, and gouging. Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation and editor of Project 2025, is a master of the political version. While he and Trump outwardly employed a “nothing to see here” stance, demographic realities were cued up in the document. The solution to the growing minority status for Republicans? “Voter efficiency” and a rigged census. Or in the Project’s words: “Strong political leadership is needed to increase efficiency and align the Census Bureau’s mission with conservative principles.”

Roberts’ language is soft, but its impact hard indeed. In the introduction he suggests that the Declaration of Independence’s words “pursuit of happiness” were better understood to be “the pursuit of blessedness” while providing corporations a market free hand “to flourish.” Career civil servants are recast as “holdovers” without “moral legitimacy.” And the Justice Department suffers this put-down – “a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda.”

Majority rules and demographic changes being what they may, alternative facts and voter suppression have been added to the tools of “political jiu-jitsu” artists. But Kelly Anne Conway was nowhere to be seen this week, and their headliner was long-winded, boring, and tired. As for voter integrity, the Democrats are fully funded and lawyered up. Finally, good Republicans everywhere have begun to recognize that towing the MAGA line much further puts their down-ballot hopes in the direct line of fire. Those 300 mentions are beginning to look like a liability instead of an asset.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: carlos lozada > dei > Harris-Walz > heritage foundation > kelly anne conway > kevin roberts > political jiu-jitsu > presidential election 2024 > Project 2025 > trump

Project 2025: Cheat Sheet for Tonight’s Debate.

Posted on | September 9, 2024 | Comments Off on Project 2025: Cheat Sheet for Tonight’s Debate.

Mike Magee

Donald Trump says he’s never heard of Project 2025. Denials aside, expect the term Project 2025 to come up multiple times in this evening’s debate. But you are less likely to hear the name Kevin Roberts. He’s been president of the Heritage Foundation, and the voice for Project 2025 until it became too hot to handle and Trump publicly threw him and the controversial 900 page document overboard.

But few loyalists deny that both Roberts and the Project’s policy objectives will be front and center if a 2nd Trump presidency were to prevail. Like Leo Leonard, the Chairman of the Board of the Federalist Society that engineered a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, the Grand Old Party is rich in these shadowy figures. They are content to wield power behind the scenes, and work doggedly, sometimes for decades, to achieve their policy objectives.

As a result, the public is largely unaware of the full story. For example, you are probably unaware that Project 2025’s predecessor was the 7th edition of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” released in the lead up to the 2016 election. 64% of its policy proposals were embraced by Trump in the first year of his presidency.

And you may be surprised to learn that 8 out 10 of the contributors to Project 2025 were members of Triump’s administration – including conservative fan favorites like Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cucinelli, adviser to the president Peter Navarro, Defense Secretary Chris Miller, and OMB head Russel Voight.

Off course, when you are dealing with a 900 page tome, its not surprising that most Americans get lost in the weeds and lose interest. So financial guru, Steve Rattner, has helped out by directing you to a few pages:

Page 326: Title I funding is a rural and red state favorites that has to go. It is a major funder of public schools in low income areas, and has supported the growth of charter schools. Nationwide projections suggested a 6% loss of teachers effecting nearly 3 million students. In some states like Louisiana, the projections are more dire with 12% of teachers left unemployed.

Page 337: Look for monthly payments for student debt for those who never gained their diplomas to rise from $78 dollars per month to $308 dollars per month. Biden’s proposed Student Loan Forgiveness would be a goner.

Page 365 & 440: Few are aware that the Inflation Reduction Act is mainly intended to aid our nation’s shift to renewable clean energy. And most agree it has been very successful, and has had a side benefit of helping to curb inflation. Other Biden legislation is targeted for destruction as well including the government’s ability to negotiate drug prices, and successful implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Page 458: 63% of all abortions now are first trimester medication abortions using mifepristone. As a result, the need for surgical abortions has declined from 1.5 million to just .4 million in the past year. Project 2025 asks that the FDA ban the use of mifepristone.

Page 468: If you’re low income and live in Wisconsin, hold onto you hat. This proposal places a lifetime cap on enrollment in the Medicaid program. This would result in 41% of Wisconsin enrollees losing their Medicaid benefits. Nationwide, 19 million of the 95 million Medicaid enrollees (that’s 5% of our population) would lose their health insurance coverage.

Page 482: Get ready for “familial in-home child care” because Project 2025 has Head Start, another popular program especially in rural counties and red states, up for the chopping block.

Page 524: Civil service employees enjoy a range of protections to prevent politically motivated threats to their ongoing employment. Project 2025 has identified 50,000 civil servants for reclassification as political appointees. This would greatly expand Trump’s executive power were he to be elected, essentially creating the “deep state” he’s been warning us all about.

Page 696: Here you’ll find the promise to condense seven tax brackets down to two – 15% and 30%. That would insure lower tax rates for the rich, and higher taxes for our lower-income citizens. The richy rich well remember Trump’s cutting their corporate taxes from 35% to just 21%. Project 2025 says Trump will double down and lower corporate rates further.

And of course there’s more. And you won’t hear Trump quoting chapter and verse of Project 2025 tonight. So what’s the point? It’s this. Regardless of the debate performance of these two candidates this evening, keep in mind that whether it be the Federalist Society or the Heritage Foundation, they have been working for at least two decades to achieve a theocratic autocracy – and they’ve gotten pretty damn close. They can smell victory.

So it is not enough to simply reject Trump. We can not limp to the finish line. To neutralize the Kevin Roberts and the Leo Leonard’s of our world, Republicans up and down the ballot (even the good ones) must be soundly rejected. The message must clear to reset our democracy. If you threaten our freedoms, as you have with women’s reproductive rights, you will never again successfully run for elective office in America.