Compensated Emancipation Of Slaves

Posted: 6/22/2019

An Unnecessary War

I have long and repeatedly argued here that the American Civil War was totally unnecessary and unconstitutional! Secession of states was legal, but the preservation of the union by any means including war was blatantly illegal!

The negative ramifications of the American Civil War have been many and they still affect today. Big Government is one of the consequences of this civil war!

Compensated Emancipation

I have to thank Larry Elder to direct my attention to this subject in one of his recent Facebook posts. However, Larry Elder quoted the Independent article (S1) in support of defeating those ridiculous compensation claims by the left!

Whether you like it or not, compensated emancipation (S2) was certainly one way to end slavery without blood shed! In their great wisdom, Great Britain and other countries chose this route to end slavery! “The British Empire enacted a policy of compensated Emancipation for its colonies in 1833, followed by Denmark, France in 1848, and the Netherlands in 1863.” (S2; emphasis added)

So the U.S. Congress as well as the northern states egregiously failed to pass legislation to compensate slave owners despite the obvious lessons of these European countries! So failed the abolitionists to come together and offer to buy slaves in large numbers or to compensate individual slave owners to give up slavery!

“Only in the District of Columbia, which fell under direct Federal auspices, was compensated emancipation enacted. On April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act. This law prohibited slavery in the District, forcing its 900-odd slaveholders to free their slaves, with the government paying owners an average of about $300 for each.” (S2; emphasis added)

Sources (S):

1. Britain's colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition
2. Compensated emancipation

Was The Pentagon Ill Prepared In Responding To Iran's Downing Of A U.S. Drone?

Posted: 6/21/2019  Updated: 6/24/2019, 6/22/2019

Update Of 6/24/2019

It appears that President Trump is quite adept in using diversionary tactics when he told the world that he called off a military strike against Iran. Or was another branch of the Pentagon eager to get in on the action resenting that cyber warfare had precedence this time?

Meanwhile, we learnt that President Trump launched an offensive cyber attack against Iran. This in itself is still fairly a novum for the U.S. unless other attacks went unreported (of course there was Stuxnet; S1). We know that Russia has in the recent past resorted to cyber attacks against e.g. Baltic states.

We also learned that “Thursday’s [6/20/19?] strikes against the Revolutionary Guard represented the first offensive show of force since Cyber Command was elevated to a full combatant command in May.” (S1; emphasis added)

Apparently, Iran itself has created a presumably formidable cyber force. Iran is also accused of having employed cyber attacks against several countries (e.g. Israel; UK, Saudi Arabia; S1, S2). 

Sources (S):

1. Trump approved cyber-strikes against Iran’s missile systems (published 6/22/19)
2. Cyberwarfare in Iran (this Wikipedia entry appears to be dated)

Update Of 6/22/2019

Just read this very recommendable article by Michael Rubin: Is Iran close to collapse? Three things you need to know about the US-Iran showdown. Here Rubin pointedly mocks the flawed and long prevailing attitude of “conciliation trumps coercion on Iran” (nice play on words).

The very knowledgeable Rubin thinks that the regime in Iran is collapsing in the near term. The gerontocracy/theocracy has serious succession issues and issues to hold on to power much longer. Will there be a military coup?

Michael Rubin is also the author of the book with a very fitting title: “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes”, which Rubin refers to in the above article as “... a history of US diplomacy with rogue regimes and terrorist groups, there is precedent to the Islamic Republic caving under pressure ...” (emphasis added)

Original Post

The unusual story that President Trump was “cocked and loaded” for a military strike against Iran in response to the recent downing of a U.S. drone hovering near or above Iranian air space before he aborted the mission last minute, has created quite a stir in the media.

Was Trump just giving Iran an ultimate warning to behave and negotiate or was there something else?

May I speculate that the U.S. Defense Department was perhaps ill prepared for this scenario. Even though this scenario should have been rehearsed many times over the years. Apparently, the strike was cancelled due to possibly large loss of human life or because it was not proportionate. In either case, it suggests that the Pentagon did some shoddy planning!

Former President Bush Jr. made already the enormous mistake not to warn or attack Iran when Iran was obviously and persistently killing significant numbers of U.S. soldiers in the 2003 Iraq war. President Obama, in his grand naivete and stupidity, signed a horrible nuclear deal with Iran. One can also surmise that the Pentagon did not plan for any conflicts with Iran during the Obama administration.

Over The Counter Birth Control

Posted: 6/19/2019

The Cato Institute just came out with a paper titled “Over-The-Counter Birth Control? Bring It On” (published 6/13/19). Sounds enticing to any classical liberal without looking at the details. Unfortunately, the author, i.e.  Jeffrey A. Singer (Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute), is very naive and simplistic in his approach like a typical libertarian!

Of course, paternalism is to be reduced, women would have easier and more convenient access, and lower prices for contraceptives if over the counter becomes reality. The arguments in favor of over the counter are clearly winning!

However, the author of this article completely ignores to address the litigious situation in the U.S. If women become pregnant despite taking over the counter contraceptives, who will pay for the litigation and damages? Probably not Mr. Singer!

P.S.

I have recently blogged about the decline of the Cato Institute here.

Germany Ranked Only 6th On Top500

Posted: 6/18/2019

If you want to present just one number to show how backward Germany has become, take the Top 500 list of installed supercomputers in the world!

Germany is only ranked No 6th (14 supercomputers) on the Top500. It is in good company with the Netherlands (No. 8, 13 supercomputers) and Ireland (No. 7, 13).

Compare that to China (No. 1, 219), USA (No. 2, 116), and Japan (No. 3,  29). France (No 4; 19) and the UK (No. 5, 18) are also ahead of Germany.

Sources (S):

1. HIGHLIGHTS of the 53rd edition of the TOP500.

AI 2019: The Year Of Virtual Reality Environments

Posted: 6/17/2019

Perhaps, 2017 was the year when Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) took off and became a serious and fast expanding research subject in AI.

Now in the middle of 2019, it appears that new and drastically improved, very realistic simulators or AV/VR environments might well be the highlight of AI for this year. This is a new class of interactive environments for AI research.

It appears that these new software platforms/environments/simulators are coming ever closer to being very realistic environments for AI. These new environments promise a great speed up in training of robots and other advances in AI.

Here are some relevant quotes (emphasis added):

1. “But researchers believe these systems will learn best if the simulated environments capture the subtle details — like mirror reflections and rug textures — necessary to make them virtually identical to the real thing.” (S1)
2. ““The Replica data set sets a new standard in the realism and quality of 3-D reconstructions of real spaces,”” (S1)
3. “Replica can be loaded up in AI Habitat, a new open platform for embodied AI research. Facebook AI created AI Habitat to be the most powerful and flexible way for researchers to train and test AI bots in simulated living and working spaces.” (S1)
4. “But it is also an important research tool for creating next-gen AR experiences that begin to merge the physical and digital worlds” (S1)
5. “While other simulation engines commonly run at 50 to 100 frames per second, AI Habitat runs at over 10,000 frames per second (multi-process on a single GPU). This enables researchers to test their bots much more quickly and effectively — an experiment that would take months on another simulator would take a few hours on Habitat.”
6. “For example, Facebook AI researchers will explore ways to build realistic physics modeling into AI Habitat so an AI bot can learn what happens when it knocks a virtual glass off a virtual table” (S1) [Too bad that physics modeling is not yet integrated]
7. “We present Habitat, a new platform for research in embodied artificial intelligence (AI). Habitat enables training embodied agents (virtual robots) in highly efficient photorealistic 3D simulation, before transferring the learned skills to reality.” (S2)
8. “Replica, a dataset of 18 highly photo-realistic 3D indoor scene reconstructions at room and building scale. Each scene consists of a dense mesh, high-resolution high-dynamic-range (HDR) textures, per-primitive semantic class and instance information, and planar mirror and glass reflectors.” (S3)
9. “On the other hand, this variety of [previous] simulation environments can cause fragmentation, replication of effort, and difficulty in reproduction and community-wide progress. Moreover, existing simulators exhibit several shortcomings … Most critically, work built on top of any of the [previous] existing platforms is hard to reproduce independently from the platform, and thus hard to evaluate against work based on a different platform, even in cases where the target tasks and datasets are the same.”
10. “By operating at 10,000 frames per second we shift the bottleneck from simulation to optimization for network training” (S3) [This sounds very desirable!]

Sources (S):

1. How Facebook researchers’ realistic simulations help advance AI and AR Replica and AI Habitat are key to developing experiences like social presence and intelligent assistants (published 6/14/19)
2. Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research (published 4/2/19)
3. The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces (published 6/13/19)
4. EvalAI: Towards Better Evaluation Systems for AI Agents (published 2/10/19)
5. Evaluating state-of-the-art in AI

Extraordinary Popular Delusions

Posted: 6/17/2019

Guess when this book was written (1844)? The title is so prescient even in our times!

Credit goes to this YouTube video: William Happer - Climate, an Extraordinary Popular Delusion (published 3/29/2017; a talk given at the Heartland Institute Conference on Climate Change)

I am quite confident that Charles Mackay, were he still alive, would add following chapters to his book:

1. Global Warming (a.k.a. Climate Change) hoax, the greatest hoax perpetrated in generations. Scientists are major culprits and protagonists! A new religion for the crowds
2. Diversity obsession, a new form of racism
3. LGBTQ, a peculiar tribalism trying to dominate our daily lives. What a gay joy to be LGBTQ!
4. Socialism is the opium of the intellectuals and they are heavily intoxicated by it
5. The global abolishment of incandescent light bulbs! What a bubble mania
6. And so on and so on ...

Did anybody claim that history does not repeat itself? Please, many humans are still so medieval in their thoughts and approaches! The Enlightenment and classical Liberalism movement of the 18th and 19th century was only a fleeting moment in history ...

What can be done? E.g. privatize public education ASAP!

Sources:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds

Hong Kong: David Against Goliath Again

Posted: 6/15/2019

In Hong Kong (David) versus China (Goliath) history repeats itself!

Citizens of the world stand with the citizens of Hong Kong in their long struggle for freedom and democracy! What an auspicious time at the 30th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.

I am sure, I have said before here somewhere in my blog posts that Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore have the power to help transform one of the last major Stalinist dictatorships!

Time For Female Athletes To Strike Against Transgender Competitors

Posted: 6/15/2019  Update: 6/18/2019

Update Of 6/18/2019

Just read Girls file federal discrimination complaint after transgender track wins (published 6/18/19):

“Three Connecticut girls who participate on high school track teams have filed a federal discrimination complaint against a statewide policy [Connecticut] on transgender athletes, saying it has cost them top finishes in competitions and possibly college scholarships.” (emphasis added)

The top picture of this article shows a girls high school race where even two transgender juveniles competed with the girls.

Original Post

Every day now there are news about another male athlete transgendered to compete with female athletes. More and more kinds of sport are affected.

I suggest female athletes just refuse to compete against these recently transgendered competitors

Why Do U.S. Movies Suck In Recent Years?

Posted: 6/14/2019

For the past 20 or more years, Hollywood has aimed its big budget movies at a global audience, because of tremendous revenue growth and opportunities overseas. As a result, a lot of movies have become an awful compromise to please as many people as possible. Add to that the obsession with political correctness and progressive leanings and you have a recipe for disaster!

Just read The Connection Between Hollywood and China. Here we learn (emphasis added):

1. “The majority of Americans probably have no idea when they buy a ticket to the latest blockbuster that the film they’re about to see was either partially financed by China or altered because of it.”
2. “In the last several years, there hasn’t been a more powerful influence over Hollywood than the communist regime—and with Chinese ticket sales set to overtake the U.S., the situation is only going to get worse.”
3. “”And they’re [Hollywood movie makers] quite open about it. They don’t hide it. They’re quite happy to submit to the censorship of the Chinese Communist Party.””

As for me, I have not watched any new U.S. movie in almost a decade or so. I want to remember the great American movie tradition as it was up until Hollywood went global!

Good Bye Common Cold

Posted: 6/13/2019

I had drafted this blog post about 5 years ago, but never got around to follow up on it.

Today (6/13/19), I read another promising article about vulnerabilities of a large class of pathogenic viruses, i.e. Picornavirus, which cause a number of diseases like the common cold, meningitis, encephalitis and polio and much more: New vulnerability found in major human viruses

“Although Picornavirus have been studied for decades, the authors discovered a previously unknown pocket, or indentation, on the surface of the virus, in which the compound had lodged, thereby stabilizing it against the kind of shape change that would allow interaction with host cells.”

Let’s hope this indentation is not mutated very often!

“They performed cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) of the drug-virus complex to determine how the drug exerted its effect. Cryo-EM involves combining thousands of two-dimensional images to develop a highly detailed three-dimensional image of the target.”

This cryo-electron microscopy seems to one of the new, very powerful tools in medicine and biology. We will probably learn a lot more in the coming months and years!

Five years ago, I read here titled “The Nastiest of the Cold Viruses Reveals Its True Form”. Meanwhile, there were other promising research results, but still no cure!

Will mankind rid the world from the common cold in the foreseeable future? It is high time and long overdue!

Compared with the successful defeat of AIDS/HIV it has taken way too long to rid humanity of influenza or the common cold!