As I have warned you the weaponization of misinformation aided by AI is threatening democracies all over the world. It is getting harder and harder to get accurate information about anything. It isn’t just China, although this report focuses on that. It is also and particularly, for me, the christofascists. I am spending more hours each day than I used to because I have to be sure that what I am posting for you is accurate and reliable. Also, SR is under daily attack, to a point where Beth, my wonderful webmaster of many years and I, spent an hour today on the phone trying to work out what we can do to make SR more secure. It is just getting very difficult and more expensive, and SR is just one information site out of the many. It is going to change our culture and Congress is doing nothing to help.
Credit: Getty / iStock
Faking a political endorsement in Taiwan ahead of its crucial January election, sharing memes to amplify outrage over Japan’s disposal of nuclear wastewater, and spreading conspiracy theories that claim the U.S. government was behind Hawaii’s wildfire and Kentucky’s train derailment last year. These are just some of the ways that China’s influence operations have ramped up their use of artificial intelligence to sow disinformation and stoke discord worldwide over the last seven months, according to a new report released Friday by Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
Microsoft has observed notable trends from state-backed actors, the report said, “that demonstrate not only doubling down on familiar targets, but also attempts to use more sophisticated influence techniques to achieve their goals.” In particular, Chinese influence actors “experimented with new media” and “continued to refine AI-generated or AI-enhanced content.”
Among the operations highlighted in the report was a “a notable uptick in content featuring Taiwanese political figures ahead of the January 13 presidential and […]
Ron Lieber, Contributing Writer - The New York Times
Stephan:
If you lived in Norway as one of a number of possible examples your healthcare would cost you nothing, being covered by federal taxes, and your college would also be without out of pocket costs. Why because in Norway the policies of the government are designed to foster wellbeing for every Norweigan, whereas in the U.S. both healthcare and colleges are structured for maximum profit. One hundred thousand dollars for a year of college, to be honest, I don’t know how an average middle-class family could do it. Even the average price seems unbelievable to me. As this report notes, “According to the College Board, the average 2023-24 list price for tuition, fees, housing and food was $56,190 at private, nonprofit four-year schools. At four-year public colleges, in-state students saw an average $24,030 sticker price.”
Illustration by Robert Neubecker / The New York Times
It was only a matter of time before a college would have the nerve to quote its cost of attendance at nearly $100,000 a year. This spring, we’re catching our first glimpse of it.
One letter to a newly admitted Vanderbilt University engineering student showed an all-in price — room, board, personal expenses, a high-octane laptop — of $98,426. A student making three trips home to Los Angeles or London from the Nashville campus during the year could hit six figures.
This eye-popping sum is an anomaly. Only a tiny fraction of college-going students will pay anything close to this anytime soon, and about 35 percent of Vanderbilt students — those who get neither need-based nor merit aid — pay the full list price.
But a few dozen other colleges and universities that reject the vast majority of applicants will probably arrive at this threshold within a few years. Their willingness to cross it […]
Israel under Netanyahu is turning itself into an international pariah for the genocide it is perpetrating. Its response is social media misinformation and sending undercover agents to American universities. Read this account and be appalled. The stupidity of these policies, I think, is going to create an anti-Israeli pushback, particularly amongst the young. It will affect Jews all over the world because most people will not be able to distinguish between Jews and Zionism as this report describes. I think Biden is also making a major miscalculation.
Demonstrators march in solidarity with two Columbia University student groups which were recently banned from campus for their support of Palestine, on November 15, 2023, outside of Columbia University in New York City. Credit: Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty
As worldwide protest escalates over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, academic freedom and free speech are under all-out attack on university campuses in the United States, not just from university administrations and pro-Israeli groups, but now directly from the highest levels of the Israeli state. In a story that has been largely ignored in the Western press, the Israeli news website Ynetnews, one of the largest media outlets in the country, reported that the Israeli government has launched what appears to be a wide-ranging covert campaign to harass and intimidate students, faculty, and administrators into silence.
According to the report, the Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora Affairs ministries have established a task force to carry out “shaming and pressuring” operations at U.S. universities. The task force, chaired by […]
Humanity just doesn’t get it. We do not recognize the Matrix of Consciousness and that all life is interconnected and interdependent and our first priority must be to foster wellbeing at every level. As a result of our ignorance, we are cutting down the forests and destroying the ecosystem of the oceans. We need an awakening to the truth of our reality, and it has to start with each of us.
A quarry in the Cerro Blanco Forest the outskirts of Guayaquil, Ecuador, in April 2023. Credit: Marcos Pin / AFP / Getty
The tropics lost the equivalent of 10 soccer (football) fields of forest per minute last year due to logging, human-set fires and climate change, according to a new report from the World Resources Institute (WRI).
Why it matters: Declines in rainforest deforestation rates in Brazil and Colombia were counteracted by increases in other countries, which set the world further off track from meeting forest loss goals critical to curbing climate change.
Everything about the American tax system is rigged to favor the rich in everyway. Here are the actual facts, and the true story.
IRS commissioner Charles Rettig. Credit: Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Newscom
Liar, liar: Back in August 2022, when some of us were fresh-faced and naive, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assured us that their $80 billion infusion of cash (over the course of a decade, so they could hire some 87,000 new workers, including but not limited to men with guns) would actually be a means of targeting millionaire and billionaire scofflaws, not ordinary middle-class earners.
At the time, I voiced skepticism: Correspondence audits and other audits on low- and middle-income earners are simply the easiest to conduct. The IRS has historically spent an awful lot of time targeting these groups, not monied tax dodgers who can hire teams of accountants, so why would this time be different?
