President Trump Holds MAGA Rally in Minneapolis

Trump’s speech starts at about 60 minutes into the video!

I do mega rallies “without a guitar”. What about a blue T-shirt with “Where is Hunter [Biden]?” on it

Biden was only his VP because he kissed Obama’s ass! Trump finished Biden!

Nancy Pelosi is “really stupid”!

What is the toughest nation to deal with? Is it China, India … It’s my nation!

Minnesota U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar is a disgrace! How did this happen!

I did not need Beyonce or Jay Z or Bruce Springsteen to win 2016

Touching stories about fallen soldiers returning to the U.S. and the Walter Reed Hospital

Franz Kafka: Chronicler of Darkness

Very recommendable!

Career Politician Rep Adam Schiff Needs To Resign ASAP

Shifty Adam Schiff is a disgrace for the U.S. House of Representatives. Horrible Pelosi is totally incapable and inept of reigning in this madness!


Official ethics complaint against Adam Schiff

191008-TPPA-OCE-Complaint-to-OCE-re-Rep-Adam-Schiff-w-signature-002.pdf

Deep Learning For Differential Diagnosis Of 26 Common Skin Diseases

Very impressive! This system can differentiate 26 of the most common skin ailments! Soon your smartphone doctor can do this for you anytime and anywhere!

Credit to Andrew Ng and his deaplearning.ai newsletter!

[1909.05382] A deep learning system for differential diagnosis of skin diseases: Skin conditions affect an estimated 1.9 billion people worldwide. A shortage
of dermatologists causes long wait times and leads patients to seek
dermatologic care from general practitioners. However, the diagnostic accuracy
of general practitioners has been reported to be only 0.24-0.70 (compared to
0.77-0.96 for dermatologists), resulting in referral errors, delays in care,
and errors in diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, we developed a deep
learning system (DLS) to provide a differential diagnosis of skin conditions
for clinical cases (skin photographs and associated medical histories). The DLS
distinguishes between 26 skin conditions that represent roughly 80% of the
volume of skin conditions seen in primary care. The DLS was developed and
validated using de-identified cases from a teledermatology practice serving 17
clinical sites via a temporal split: the first 14,021 cases for development and
the last 3,756 cases for validation. On the validation set, where a panel of
three board-certified dermatologists defined the reference standard for every
case, the DLS achieved 0.71 and 0.93 top-1 and top-3 accuracies respectively.
For a random subset of the validation set (n=963 c

Robots To The Kitchen!

Robot please report for duty in the kitchen! What is now your sharpest knife in the drawer?
Credit to Andrew Ng and his deaplearning.ai newsletter!

[1910.00127] A Mobile Manipulation System for One-Shot Teaching of Complex Tasks in Homes: We describe a mobile manipulation hardware and software system capable of
autonomously performing complex human-level tasks in real homes, after being
taught the task with a single demonstration from a person in virtual reality.
This is enabled by a highly capable mobile manipulation robot, whole-body task
space hybrid position/force control, teaching of parameterized primitives
linked to a robust learned dense visual embeddings representation of the scene,
and a task graph of the taught behaviors. We demonstrate the robustness of the
approach by presenting results for performing a variety of tasks, under
different environmental conditions, in multiple real homes. Our approach
achieves 85% overall success rate on three tasks that consist of an average of
45 behaviors each.

Better Warnings About Drug Interactions Thanks To AI

Finally, patients will have a chance to receive better medical advice on supplement-drug or drug-drug or even supplement-supplement interactions!


Credit goes to Andrew Ng who made me aware of this interesting AI startup (supp.ai spun off by the Allen Institute for AI and following, accompanying paper.


[1909.08135] Extracting evidence of supplement-drug interactions from literature: Dietary supplements are used by a large portion of the population, but
information on their safety is hard to find. We demonstrate an automated method
for extracting evidence of supplement-drug interactions (SDIs) and
supplement-supplement interactions (SSIs) from scientific text. To address the
lack of labeled data in this domain, we use labels of the closely related task
of identifying drug-drug interactions (DDIs) for supervision, and assess the
feasibility of transferring the model to identify supplement interactions. We
fine-tune the contextualized word representations of BERT-large using labeled
data from the PDDI corpus. We then process 22M abstracts from PubMed using this
model, and extract evidence for 55946 unique interactions between 1923
supplements and 2727 drugs (precision: 0.77, recall: 0.96), demonstrating that
learning the task of DDI classification transfers successfully to the related
problem of identifying SDIs and SSIs. As far as we know, this is the first
published work on detecting evidence of SDIs/SSIs from literature. We implement
a freely-available public interface supp.ai to browse and search evidence
sentences extracted by our model.

Hippocratic Oath For AI Researchers & Engineers

Posted: 10/10/2019

Andrew Ng, with some of whose political views I tend to disagree, raised the issue of the ethical use of AI to the benefit of the people in his latest newsletter (S1). Among other things, he wrote:

“... Or consider healthcare. Doctors have a duty to care for their patients, and also enjoy legal protections so long as they are working to discharge this duty. In AI, what is the duty of an engineer, and how can we make sure engineers are empowered to act in society’s best interest? ...”

It has also crossed my mind whether something like a Hippocratic Oath would be a way to increase professional responsibility, liability, and awareness.

I am not naive to believe that such a Hippocratic Oath would significantly alter the development and deployment of AI based weapon systems (autonomous drones, robots, etc.). However, a Hippocratic Oath would e.g. make it easier to prosecute anyone involved in the perpetration of e.g. crimes against humanity or war crimes were such weapon systems were used.

Sources (S):

1. deeplearning.ai, The Batch, Essential News For Deep Learners (10/9/19)

Google Brain's ROBEL robots for under $4,000

Time to program my first kitchen aid!

Google Brain's ROBEL benchmark lets devs track AI quality on affordable robots | VentureBeat: Google Brain and UC Berkeley researchers teamed up to make the ROBEL robotics platform and benchmark for two robots that cost less than $4,000.

A City To Match The Jewish Year 5780

Another cradle of civilization found!

"An even earlier settlement, dating to the Chalcolithic period from 7,000 years ago, was uncovered beneath this city’s houses. It is is the largest and the most central ancient city ever uncovered in Israel."

Ruins of 5,000-year-old city discovered in Israel - ISRAEL21c: Archaeological excavations uncover vast Bronze Age city, one of the first and largest of the ancient Near East, as well as a temple.

Steaks In Space

What do they taste like?


Israel's Aleph Farms Makes Lab-Grown, Slaughter-Free Steak…In Space | News Brief: Where's the beef? Looks like it's in space where the Israeli startup was part joint project to make clean meat aboard the ISS. | NoCamels

LinkedIn Marxist Class Struggle Propaganda

Posted: 10/10/2019

Every morning LinkedIn provides its users with a Daily Rundown feature of selected news. On many days, I have to cringe my teeth given the utter leftist propaganda LinkedIn is spreading.

Here is a wonderful example how LinkedIn tries to stoke the flames of economic inequality and to stir resentment between rich Americans and the rest:
“Lower tax rate goes to the richest
For the first time in U.S. history, billionaires in America paid a lower tax rate than those in the working class, according to a study by U.C. Berkeley economists. The richest 400 families in the country paid an average effective rate of 23%, or a full percentage point lower than the 24.2% rate paid by the bottom 50% of American households. While the tax rate paid by the poorer half has changed little over time, the 400 richest U.S. households had an effective tax rate of 47% in 1980.” (S1; emphasis added)

What is the takeaway:

1. LinkedIn is absolutely clueless about economics and taxation!
2. If these UC Berkeley economists indeed produced such a study with those conclusions, then they are laughable amateurs and clueless as well
3. It is well known that e.g. the top decile of income tax payers pay about 50% or more of all federal income taxes. Too look only tax rates and not at tax revenues is as stupid as it gets!
4. Few of the rich and wealthy American households receive any welfare benefits, but many of the bottom 50% of households do and these welfare benefits and tax refunds are a substantial form of tax free additional income to those households

My advice to LinkedIn: Do not blindly rehash stupid articles from the Washington Post (S2)!

The underlying economic study was recently published as a book (S3). This book costs $26.55 on Amazon. Just look at the ridiculous title: “The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay”. What a waste of money!

Last but not least: One of the study’s authors is assistant economics professor Gabriel Zucman at UC Berkeley:
“Zucman has co-written several papers with Thomas Piketty” (S3). Thomas Piketty was also his doctoral advisor. Piketty, a French economist whose work focuses on wealth and income inequality, has been thoroughly discredited as an economist based on his best selling book “ Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. Only leftists still admire Piketty!
In 2015, Zucman published his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens”. So called “tax havens” are another favorite scapegoat of leftists! Tax havens are by far not only used by the rich and wealthy, but also by dictators and their families and by corrupt politicians. Tax havens are often a canary in the coal mine indicating excessive taxation by greedy politicians!

Sources (S):

1. Lower tax rate goes to the richest (LinkdIn 10/10/19)
2. For the first time in history, U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class last year (Washington Compost 10/8/19)
3. The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay 1st Edition
4. Gabriel Zucman, French economist, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of

Renewable Energy is a Scam

Very recommendable! India is betting on Thorium reactors so should Germany! However, the SED chancellor of Germany Merkel is long overdue to resign!

Witch Trials and Forgotten History

Recommendable! The witchcraft of our time is Global Warming, Climate Change, racism, gender inequality, social justice and so on!

Madurai and Lucknow | Rick Stein's India | Full Documentary

Very recommendable! Every episode of this excellent series makes you salivate! Lots of great impressions of daily life in India! Italian and the French cuisine pale compared to Indian cuisine!

The last episode is by far not even as good as those that came before!

Report: EU value-added tax system fraud funding terrorism

Not only Islamist terrorists exploit refunds and loopholes in the EU value added tax system! The terrorists are probably a minority and gain much less money than other criminals and tax evaders. By the way this issue has been known for decades before Islamist terrorists took advantage!

WT Stead: The Father of Investigative Journalism

Recommendable! How an investigative journalist turned into a weirdo who died with the Titanic, but had previously written about other tragic ship sinkings where life boats were in short supply!

The Dangerous Mix: Big Tech & Social Justice Ideology—Michael Rectenwald...

Very recommendable! Beware of the Red Guards of Google and Facebook!

President Donald J. Trump Is Combating Bureaucratic Abuse and Holding Federal Agencies Accountable

Bravo President Trump! Former President Obama was the most business averse president since FDR!


President Donald J. Trump Is Combating Bureaucratic Abuse and Holding Federal Agencies Accountable: President Donald J. Trump is protecting Americans by restoring transparency and fairness to the bureaucracy.

Trump Rids Major U.S. Container Port of Chinese Communist Control | Judicial Watch

Good news! Incredible more evidence as to what a fool former President Obama was!

Trump Rids Major U.S. Container Port of Chinese Communist Control | Judicial Watch

Selected News Commentary (1)

Posted: 10/9/2019 

Introduction: News in a very wide sense of the word. Selected means eclectic! News and my commentary are presented in no particular order. Emphasis is added! The news might not always be very current ...

1. Rearmed FARC guerrilla leaders build criminal alliances with Venezuela and ELN (9/4/19)
   Bad news! In the several decades long war against FARC up to or more than 200,000 people were killed. Very disappointing if the peace agreement has been violated! 
2. Kabinett beschließt Mietpreisbremse und Meisterpflicht (10/9/2019)
   German government under SED (former GDR Socialist Unity Party) Chancellor Merkel extends nationwide, tight government rent controls. Merkel taketh and giveth away: Not long ago Germany relaxed licensing requirements for trades, but now her government decided to bring back some of the antiquated licensing requirements
3. EU court rules Facebook can be forced to remove content worldwide (10/3/19)
   What a hubris! The EU still thinks it is the navel of the world!
4. DER BANKEN-TRICK: Negativzinsen werden als höhere Gebühren weitergegeben (10/9/19)
   German banks raise fees to compensate for negative interest rates on bank accounts. The grandiose folly of the European Central Bank’s irresponsible and reckless extremely low interest rate policy goes around and comes around! When foolish politicians try to circumvent the laws of economics …
5. More solar means more maintenance costs, study finds (10/9/19) “The annual cost of operating and maintaining solar energy plants is expected to double in five years, reflecting an increase in future demand while maintaining current installed capacity”
   Solar energy is neither cheap nor green! Not to mention the consumption of geographic area or roof tops!
6. Golda Meir’s Yom Kippur letter to bereaved families has been discovered Israel had one of the first female prime ministers (1969-74) of all Western countries. “In the years following the establishment of the Jewish state, it was customary for the prime minister to have contact with the families of killed soldiers, including sending letters for holidays and official occasions. Meir was scrupulous about the custom and frequently corresponded with bereaved families both privately and officially.”. “... she has been described as the "Iron Lady" of Israeli politics; the term was later applied to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.”(Source). Some of her wise quotes still ring very true today, e.g. “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us” (1973, Source)  
7. Idiotic Environmental Predictions (10/9/19) Nice collection by Walter E. Williams. Apocalyptic predictions by humans are plenty and as old as the history of humanity itself. They are part and parcel of human follies! Like conspiracy theories, they do not go away!
8. First General Conference speech by an African American general authority thrills black Latter-day Saints (10/9/19)
   Who said that Mormons (a.k.a. Church of Latter Day Saints) are all white people?

Multiverse is one plausible explanation for the Big Bang

I have previously blogged here about the Big Bang and here about the multiverse.

A new book explores how the concept of the multiverse has evolved Science journalist Tom Siegfried discusses The Number of the Heavens

The Genius of Mozart 2 of 3 A Passion for the Stage.

Very recommendable!

Shape shifting Amazonian dolphins I Curator's Corner S5 Ep8

Recommendable! So river dolphins transform into humans and then go to a bar to have drink? :-)

Cambodia, China’s latest triumph? - VisualPolitik EN

Very recommendable

Former Transgender Woman on Sex Change Regret: ‘People Are De-Transition...

Recommendable!

Facebook Recently Became Very Aggressive Blocking Member Postings

Posted: 10/7/2019  Amended/revised: 10/8/2019

Update Of 10/8/2019

Facebook just (10/8/2019, 10:40 AM MST) blocked me from publicly posting this Front Page magazine article on my Facebook page: Why the Syria Pullout Makes Sense America's president stands firm for America’s national interest. As usual my comment was simply “Recommendable” as I think this article captures fairly well President Trump’s latest decision to pull out of Syria.

Here are two screenshots documenting the censorship by capturing my Facebook page support inbox (the second screen shot below is an enlargement of the tiny image used by Facebook:

I thought, I had figured it out why Facebook was possibly blocking my posts. My habit is to use my Google Blogger account to publicly share YouTube videos on Facebook using Google Chrome browser. However, I tried to copy the YouTube video URL to a Chrome browser instance on my notebook, where I was logged in with my Google Gmail account and again Facebook would block these postings instantly! 

Following two posts were also blocked by Facebook in the same manner as described below in the Original Post:

1. All I Want to Do Is Make Cookies (Prager University video, released 10/7/19). My Facebook posting comment: “Highly recommended! The insanity of excessive government regulations!”
2. Sekulow responds to second Trump whistleblower (Fox news with Sean Hannity, 10/7/2019). My Facebook posting comment: “Sekulow responds to second Trump whistleblower”

All the incidences of censorship by Facebook reported in this blog happened within less than 2 hours between 10:30 PM on 10/7/2019 and 12:15 AM 10/8/2019 MSTD.  I have requested Facebook to review all of them!

Original Post

I have just become fully aware that Facebook has become much more aggressive in  its policies how it blocks postings in the past several weeks or so! I can trace it back to October 2, 2019. It is absolutely shameful and outrageous! 

Moreover, Facebook does it in a very stealthy way. They do not clearly tell the Facebook account holder what posting was actually blocked. You have to drill in and request a review before you find out which one of your postings was blocked! Plus, every time it happened (two times now) Facebook forces me to change the password for my account!

Today, I watched a biographic video about Pat Garett on the Biographics channel of Simon Whistler. As usual, I shared this video as public on my Facebook page with the usual comment “Very recommendable”. This triggered Facebook to block this posting as “Your post goes against our Community Standards so only you can see it.” (Facebook email language) and “This post goes against our Community Standards on spam” (Facebook account Support Inbox language).

Here is are the Facebook notifications:

Here is the email I received from Facebook:

Not only that, Facebook also blocked today a video from the British Museum that I watched and also publicly posted on my Facebook page with the same incendiary language as above. My comment for this post was “Recommendable! River dolphins transform into humans and go to a bar at night :-)”. The 7 minutes long video titled “Shape shifting Amazonian dolphins I Curator's Corner S5 Ep8”

It has been my routine for many months to watch Simon Whistler videos on the YouTube Biographics and Visual Politics channels. Many times, I recommend his videos in the same way as today by posting them on my Facebook page. In the past, I never had any issues with Facebook blocking such posts of mine.

As I wrote this post, apparently Facebook has already reviewed the two blocked videos and lifted the block as I can see it now in my Facebook Activity Log. And both videos seem now posted as public.

I am deeply shocked by such ridiculous policies enforced by Facebook! This is truly insane by Facebook!

I have been a very active member of Facebook since 2008! Since June 2018, I even manage a separate kind of social news media Facebook page. So Facebook know exactly who I am and what I post for a long time and I am a very consistent and systematic person! 

All Female Team Of Editors For Flagship Political Science Journal

Posted: 10/7/2019

“In a bold move, the American Political Science Association recently appointed us — a team of 12 women — to edit the flagship journal of the discipline of political science, the American Political Science Review (APSR).”(S1, S2)

This is blatant and open sex discrimination! The Matriarchy tries to displace the patriarchy! Men watch out! Women have not been known for being as chivalrous as men!

Sources (S):

1. We’re an all-women team chosen to edit political science’s flagship journal. Here’s why that matters. Here’s the ninth in our series on the gender gap in political science (8/29/19)
2. Parallax monthly newsletter of the Santa Fe Institute (Sep. 2019)

When The Center Of The Milky Way Exploded

Posted: 10/7/2019

This enormous event happened only about 3.5 million years ago and lasted for about 300,000 years. “The phenomenon, known as a Seyfert flare, created two enormous 'ionization cones' that sliced through the Milky Way—beginning with a relatively small diameter close to the black hole, and expanding vastly as they exited the Galaxy.”(S1) These flares stretched out about 200,000 light years from the center. ““… This shows that the center of the Milky Way is a much more dynamic [dangerous] place than we had previously thought. It is lucky we're not residing there!"”(S1; emphasis added)

Unfortunately, the article does not say anything on the possible impact on planet Earth. Earth is only about 25,000 light years away from the center of the galaxy. About 3 million years ago the first hominids appeared on Earth like the Australopithecus.

Sources (S):

1. Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

On The Decriminalization Of Psychoactive Drugs

Posted: 10/3/2019 Amended/revised: 10/9/2019

The decriminalization of drugs has been a perennial favorite topic of libertarians and others! Unfortunately, most of its advocates seem rather naive and ignorant!

From a pure individual liberty perspective there is little doubt that any adult should be allowed to consume such drugs responsibly and without harm to others. 

The rarely mentioned crux of the matter is that with such individual liberty comes significantly increased personal responsibility! Anyone who consumes psychoactive drugs should be held responsible to a higher standard. This includes e.g. more severe criminal or civil punishments for injuries or harm to others when committed under the influence of such drugs. I am not sure many of the advocates are ready for that!

Some of the pros of decriminalization:

1. Medical use and benefits if taken responsibly
2. More scientific research into the benefits of psychoactive drugs
3. More tax revenues e.g. from the sale of such drugs
4. Considerable shrinking of the black markets for such drugs
5. Considerable reduction in criminal offenses, organized crime activity and the like related to such drugs
6. Better medical treatments for addicts 
7. Far fewer accidental overdosing and far lower consumption of low quality drugs
8. Availability of affordable high quality drugs
9. Development of less addictive and less psychoactive drugs

Some of the cons of decriminalization:

1. How to effectively prevent minors from consuming such drugs? A very serious con!
2. How to effectively prevent pregnant women from consuming such drugs that have serious side effects on the unborn?
3. Potentially a massive and long-term increase in the numbers of severe addicts. Alcohol prohibition was a result e.g. of perceived high levels of daily intoxication of large numbers of individuals. The current opioid epidemic/crisis in the USA should be a warning. A very serious con!
4. Potentially an enormous increase in mental disorders due to consumption of such drugs. A very serious con!
5. Potentially a substantial increase in individual decadence and hedonism. A very serious con!
6. Potentially a severe breakdown of human relations and society (e.g. family, volunteer associations etc.). Reminder: China’s Opium wars!
7. How much power and control for governments over production, distribution, and sales of such drugs?
8. Potentially a considerable increase in traffic and other accidents due to intoxicated individuals thereby killing or harming other individuals in the act.

It should be abundantly clear from the above that the subject of decriminalization of psychoactive drugs is rarely pure and never simple at all (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde)! It is a complicated matter that defies easy solutions!

I have previously blogged here about this subject.

Concerns About Holy Saint Greta Thunberg

Posted: 10/3/2019

I am personally concerned that Holy Greta Thunberg might one day commit suicide or that her health will dramatically deteriorate in following years. This teenager is reportedly diagnosed with “diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), and selective mutism”(S1).

The adults involved in the enormous instrumentalizing of this teenager, in her child abuse and her child exploitation should be held accountable! One day in the not so distant future, Holy Greta Thunberg may well realize what has been done to her!

 

Sources (S):

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