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Reactionaries are playing for keeps in the provinces Under the guise of “election integrity,” Republican secretaries of state held a two-day conference in Washington in February to discuss efforts to restrict voter access to the ballot box. The watchdog group Documented shared documents from the Heritage Foundation-sponsored event with the Guardian. “A list of attendees namechecks the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia,” write Ed Pilkington and Jamie Corey: The keynote speech was given by Ken Blackwell, former secretary of state in Ohio. He was an early adopter of Trump’s lie about rigged elections, championing the idea in the 2016 presidential race which Trump won. Blackwell now chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute, a rightwing thinktank led by former Trump officials. The center has been touting election-related model legislation. Heritage was careful to organize the conference amid tight secrecy.

by Cole Thompson

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is attracting great attention as working AI systems become accessible to the public. The AI claim is that it can digest the mass of knowledge that humanity has made public, then perform cognitive tasks with that knowledge or answer questions with speed and accuracy. This has many implications, some potentially worrisome. But when AI works well, it can serve up some interesting “truths.”

While AI does not generate authoritative or definitive information—you wouldn’t bet your savings on its output—my sense is that its findings often deserve a hearing.

The post Even AI Understands Limits to Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Col. Larry Wilkerson describes how the media barely covered the damage wrought by the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” in Iraq

[The following is excerpted from David Barsamian’s recent interview with Noam Chomsky at AlternativeRadio.org.] David Barsamian: On March 20th, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report. The new IPCC assessment from senior scientists warned that there’s little time to lose in tackling the climate crisis. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “The rate of temperature rise in the last half-century is the highest in 2,000 years. Concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least 2 million years. The climate time bomb is ticking.” At COP 27 he said, “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator. It is the defining issue of our age. It is the... Read more

Source: Savage Capitalism appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

What might the world look like if we refined our understanding of progress?

This is a post a lot of readers will misunderstand or refuse to understand, because our society requires us to do evil regularly and we want to pretend it isn’t evil.

Some acts are always evil.

To understand this you need to make the correct division between an act and the consequences of that act.

The act and the consequences are two different things.

Let’s take something which is, I hope, universally agreed among my readers. Rape is always evil. It is always an evil act. Even if someone comes up with a convoluted scenario under which some good came as a consequence rape is always an evil act.

We start her to show something simple: that some acts are evil.

This is necessary because our society has gone too far in cultural determinism. “Evil and good are completely social constructs.”

EDITED BY PETER ORNER AND LAURA LAMPTON SCOTT

Jean Marseille recorded these dispatches on his phone while surviving on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from October through December 2022. As the chaos that followed the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 devolved into further lawlessness, Jean witnessed firsthand a city in free fall.