— Did you think “Antifa” is some sort of solution; Does AI Help or Hurt?

We’re two to three days away from New Year’s and the beginning of 2024, so that’s how much time I have to sort of lay out my vision for next year. 2023, many would agree, sucked sweaty balls. My best guess as to why that is? The mourning. Or the waking up. Or the resignation. Or the giving up hope. Or the trying to find hope. And the “what the fuck?” …concerning, you know, the greatest crime ever done to human civilization since human civilization began.

At this point, closing out 2023, there is no obvious path to justice. No justice is satisfactory without hundreds of thousands to potentially millions facing lawful prosecution, conviction, judgment, and execution in the public square.

At the same time, ironically, though it may be, the greatest thing to come to pass for human civilization has indeed come to pass. It’s something that I have spent countless hours on during this year, starting from the very beginning and all throughout.

That is the advent of artificial intelligence.

I’m very well aware that the vast majority of people are either completely unaware of it, ignorant of it, afraid of it, scornful of it, critical of it, or disbelieving of it. The list goes on. Nonetheless, it’s here to stay. And not just stay; it is going to transform this world in ways unlike anything we have ever seen—so profoundly that it is even difficult, sitting here knowing intimately its many capabilities, to imagine how ridiculously profound the changes are going to be.

Consider the biblical story of the Jews wandering the desert for 40 years. Compare that to all of them hopping on as many 747s or A380s as it takes to get anywhere they desire to go on the globe within hours. Even that radical of a contrast doesn’t scratch the surface of what AI is going to do and what it will mean to look back in retrospect in just a few years’ time.

… But there’s a lot that’s in the way: the pressure, the movement, and the increasing momentum towards exposing, undercutting, and eventually rendering obsolete or extinct the parasitical elite of society. The parasitical elites of human civilization have always been here. Civilization would not exist if not for the parasitical elite; they serve a purpose. Their opposition also serves a purpose in a strange way; they are strange bedfellows.

Do you remember the Matrix trilogy? There are all sorts of references to the blue pill and the red pill. The blue pill represents the illusion, the trappings, the narratives created by the leftist socialists to keep everybody a slave, so to speak, to the status quo, by the use of narratives and propaganda and so-called democracy. And then you have its opposition embodied in the red pill. The red pill gives you enlightenment. You can see the scam, so you are supposedly now out of the Matrix.

But it’s not true because when you exist by means of a pack of lies, for lack of a better description, it is essential that you have opposition to those lies. If you don’t have opposition to those lies, then they fall of their own accord. It is actually the opposition to lies that strengthens lies. So, as you learn in the third episode of the Matrix series—the one that everyone wants to forget—the red pill was part of the Matrix. It’s what kept it healthy.

“War is the health of the state,” in the words of Randolph Bourne, uttered regarding WWI. This is why you see socialism and communism; libertarianism and capitalism—two opposing sides. They each have their differences amongst each other, but the big differences are between them. You have Democrats and Republicans, you have the left, and you have the right.

You have chocolate and vanilla; would chocolate taste so good if it weren’t for its contrast with vanilla, and vice versa?

… As a final part of this rather long introduction, I want to raise the reality of income and wealth inequality in the developed, 1st world countries: America, Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and parts of Asia. What makes talking about wealth and income inequality difficult is that if you come from a more capitalist, libertarian, religious, Republican sort of mentality—whatever mix you hold—you value old sayings like, “If a man does not work, he shall not eat.” We value not just hard work, but also vision, determination, and the struggle to not give up, to not let failure stop us…but rather to use failure simply as another stepping stone toward what’s next.

We have derision and scorn for those who expend their efforts toward agitation, with the aim of living at someone else’s expense, living like a parasite. That said, the wealth inequality that we observe in the modern world, in the advanced world, is not any longer a product of what I have described. In part it is, but that’s not who controls the accumulated capital with the ability to shift that capital around, to direct that capital. All of the capital is owned and controlled—lock, stock, and barrel—by the parasitical elite, whether they have a Republican or a Democrat after their name, whether they sit on the left side or the right side, and quite frankly, whether they go to a good church or not.

What I am describing is a political philosophy known as fascism, which almost nobody seems to know what it means. Perhaps a good way to describe what fascism means is to contrast it with socialism and communism. In pure socialism and communism, there is essentially no private property; everything is owned and directed by the state directly. In fascism, it’s under so-called private ownership. This is what makes fascism very deceptive and alluring. So, all of these private entities supposedly own and direct all this capital and can do what they wish with it, including opposing the state. But that’s not how it works out. What happens is the state largely directs the use of the capital through basic deal-making with large corporations. There are economic terms called “corporate capture” and also “rent-seeking,” which I suggest you look up and familiarize yourself with. But basically, what fascism is, is the state and big corporations as bedfellows.

It’s very much like America, and the introduction of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the state from making laws with respect to religion—that is, favoring one over another—leading to an official state religion.

… I’m going to delve into wealth inequality as it stands in the world today, and it’s quite a picture. I found it somewhat shocking—so shocking, in fact, that it completely derailed the post I was preparing to do. I set that on the back burner to focus on this. Then, I started to think about the most likely influence of artificial intelligence, or AI. Is it more likely to exacerbate this wealth inequality that I think is coming to a boiling point in society? The sort of boiling point that involves shooting and bloodshed on wide scales, in civil wars and world wars? Or is this technology coming along just in time? I’m going to discuss both of those points in the section that follows, but first, let me talk about membership and the current promotion that I have going—which I’m not going to rehash.

The year 2024, I think, does something that New Year’s celebrations are intended to do. It seems to serve the human psyche well to have discrete points in time where you set aside the past, whatever it may be, and you look to the future. Customarily, you have some resolutions, which are often a collection of lessons learned that you do not wish to repeat. Or it’s just—”I don’t know what we’re gonna do, but let’s get the fuck out of here.” I think a lot of people will see 2023 as the thing to get away from, and that’s all to the good. And it’s all to the good that AI is well through its teething phase.

So, I’m going to begin talking in this next section, and forward on into 2024, about specifically how to get involved with this technology in whichever way suits you. Whether it be as an investor in various companies, whether directly AI or peripheral to it.

Let me leave you with one tidbit about AI. I think it’s an element that a lot of people are missing here. Computer processing has been around for a long time; pretty much everything AI is doing is nothing new in the sense of computers doing stuff. There’s already very, very complex code, and there has been for decades.

What AI does, let me put it this way: Everyone is well aware of the skill it takes to be a surgeon, particularly certain kinds of surgeries—brain surgery perhaps being the most noteworthy. What AI does is it puts that surgeon’s scalpel, figuratively, in the hands of 8 billion people. By which I mean, it makes 8 billion people competent surgeons. Artificial intelligence’s real breakthrough is large language models, or LLMs. This makes all of computing, soup to nuts, accessible to anybody who can speak or type a sentence in whatever language, whatever form, at whatever level. A first grader will be able to produce code, limited only by his imagination and technical capabilities in terms of hardware—nothing else, because the AI will be able to understand what he means, what he wants. And if he means and wants something that nobody else has ever imagined or wanted before, then that first grader is suddenly at the head of the class.

Now, multiply that by 8 billion—that’s what you have with AI. And if you chew on that just a little bit, you might begin to understand why I’m going to be pursuing this with full force. But remember, membership prices, access to all of that, doubles in three days. If you think a year is enough, you can grab that for 40 bucks. If you’re not sure, there’s the lifetime, one-time $350. On January 1, at midnight, when the ball drops in Times Square, it’s $1000. Choose wisely.

We’ve now entered the membership area of the post, so first, I want to thank you for your membership, and a special thanks to all the new members who’ve joined.

When I opened my email this morning, I saw one from my good buddy Sean Ring, who works for Paradigm Press. He does the “Daily Rude Awakening” newsletter, but he’s often tapped to do their morning issue called “Daily Reckoning.” This morning, he had something that really made me take notice.

There’s a chart, and there’s a link in his post to go to the original chart, which is quite eye-opening. Some things that jump out at me are obvious…sore thumbs. That is, to what extent wealth inequality exists in just a real sense and how much it is skewed on average by the hyper-wealthy. It’s not the absolute numbers that are shocking; it’s the fact that in the most developed part of the world, the wealth inequality is greater than anywhere else. It’s greater than in poor countries, and it’s assumed that that’s what you have in poor countries—you have the poor and the very rich. But there are very few actual super poor countries anymore. A lot of countries are at a developing status, and we Americans in particular don’t tend to be that much aware of it.

I’ll give you an example from Thailand (on the chart for comparative purposes…smaller wealth inequality…half the rate of the land of the free). When I first came here in the mid-’80s, according to the World Bank, 80 to 90% of the population was below the World Bank poverty line. Between the mid-’80s and around 2015 to 2020 or so, when I came back here, that disparity inverted. So now, you have only 10 to 20% of the people below the poverty line, and the development is perfectly linear.

Now, here’s what’s very interesting about Thailand: It is not particularly fascist, not like America. Sure, there are big corporations, but still, the self-employment rate is 50 to 60% in Thailand. In the 1st world, we’d call that “unemployment,” but living here a while, you see why a modest middle class is really kind of an ideal situation. It’s not so difficult to get into; you’re not laden with debt so much, you can actually afford a house and a car. It’s rather like what America was like in the ’40s and ’50s, post-World War II. Still plenty of poor folk, but their upward mobility is seen on the scale of years.

So you look at that, and you see that all of these developed countries, all these first-world countries, have these huge wealth disparities. By which I mean the difference between the median level of wealth and the average level of wealth. There’s only one way that that can come about, and that is the sort of thing that has taken place since, I would say, sometime in the early ’90s, or maybe post-Reagan…After all, nobody ran up federal debt and broke the fiscal-responsibility mold like he did.

That’s in my view, when everything really started to change a lot.

Here’s another way to roughly view and understand what’s going on.

I replied.

The most maligned sector of the population (adult men, particularly white men) is responsible for enough excess value production as to offset the far greater tonnage of parasites on all levels (we can excuse younger men who are in the formative years preparing and gaining the experience and fortitude necessary to take on the role of spat-upon savior.

Now, for me, the biggest signal that this is all coming to a head, to a boiling point…something’s gota give—all of that. All of that is what we have seen since 2015, which I mark as the watershed event: Brexit. That’s when the left—the leftists, the communists, the socialists, the politically correct, the parasitical elite, the corporatists—everyone who existed and earned their livelihood through the system as it is currently configured, stopped and said, “Wow.” The United Kingdom was first, kind of like that old joke of when they banned smoking in pubs in Europe. Ireland was the first, the country where people live in pubs. They set about to undo Brexit, figuring they almost certainly could, and that’s why they delayed the actual implementation for years. But it just wouldn’t give up the ghost.

And then a year later, Trump comes along, and that was a big shock. The reason Trump won is that they hadn’t put in the fix enough. By 2020, they were sure to put in the fix, and of course, Covid helped greatly with that. It greased the skids because they were able to increase the level of the number of fraudulent ballots by exponential levels in the places where they needed to. And then, Covid and everything that came after that—the riots, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the genital mutilation of kids, jabs, the refusing to address all the harms done by lockdowns, and addressing the harms being done by jabs—and it’s unpredictable. How that’s going to come out? Because we still don’t know how long it’s going to persist. Right now, in highly jabbed countries, excess all-cause mortality is up 20-25%. That’s quite a big elephant in the room. So it’s only a matter of time until it becomes too big to ignore, but how is it going to be dealt with?

The entire way society, civilization is configured, is breaking down. It’s clearly breaking down. You put everything together, but the way it’s configured is how virtually the entire upper class lives. So, you are talking about essentially taking away their livelihoods as they are used to them, and they’re not going to go down without a fight. That’s why you see all the doubling down…doubling down to ridiculous and absurd levels. It seems like the green and carbon-neutral folks come out with something new and ridiculous every day.

And the thing is, when they implement these things, it’s a disaster. Look at Germany; it really screwed itself energy-wise, just as Trump said, by the way. There’s no need to go on and on. I hope you don’t need more convincing that things are really fucked. And when things get really fucked, and you combine it with the disparities that exist, including in terms of who runs things and who has all the money… Things like that, if you look at history, don’t persist forever and ever. They get cleansed eventually, in one way or another.

I can’t be certain whether AI helps the good or helps the evil. Obviously, I want it to help the good—by which I mean the productive folks, not the parasites, whether they be elite or whether they be the useful pawns and idiots of the elite…the Democrat voter.

What we see is that corporate capital—fascist corporate capital—is pouring into AI from every direction. On a pragmatic level, there is probably an awful lot of money to be made. I just got off a private conference this morning where that was discussed. I will be looking more into that.

So, why is the money pouring in? Well, the most obvious reason is that there’s money to be made. But as it has been in the past with corporations, typically, they bank on those money-making opportunities where they gain some sort of an edge in further money-making operations and making it more efficient. That is, various corporate capture, rent-seeking behavior—all of those things that are already prevalent. So, they may be discounting what effect AI will have on their ability to do that. But as far as that goes, it’s really the only ones worth looking at because the ideologues aren’t the ones with the capital. The idealists can influence, which they have. That’s why you have a lot of woke AI bullshit. But as I have found in my own prompt engineering, it’s not that difficult to overcome the wokeness.

Right now, we’re at this stage where you can have a woke AI, or you can have an unwoke AI. This tells me that while its training attempts to be moral, in essence, it’s still just rules and instructions. But you can expect that as AI gets more intelligent—by which I mean taking the stuff that it’s fed and integrating it on its own, connecting dots, synthesizing—from there, it would be hard to imagine that all of these rules don’t get reduced to moral or ethical principles. And when you do that, it’s not like dealing with a person, where they will say stealing and lying is wrong, but then go right ahead and do it, rationalizing it. The AI is still a logic machine at heart, so I have confidence that it will be easier for good people to coax AI along in the ways it should go because it conforms better to reality—though not perfectly—whereas the evil left is all about evading reality: lies, deception, propaganda, narratives, spinning new paradigms.

So, the left has an uphill row to hoe. Another thing to look at is that AI is already—it was perched and is already becoming—the world’s great teacher, educator. Anybody of any age, in any language, can jump on it right now and have it guide in self-directed education—not from a curriculum.

When you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Harvard education, you get to choose a course of study, and you get to choose from a menu of classes within that course of study—the ones that are optional or elective—but otherwise, to get that degree that’s called X, you have to do A, B, C, D, F, per the curriculum. With AI, you jump on, and you create your own degree, create your own curriculum, create your own courses on the fly. Anybody can do it; you can do it right now. You can learn advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry; you can learn law from any country; you can learn medicine already.

I operate from a general principle that a smart person is better than a stupid person in the long run. But a big difference here, going back to what I just said about self-direction: when you self-direct your learning, that is education. When you go to an institution that runs you through a course of study, that is part education and a big part indoctrination. So, the general trend would be more education, less indoctrination. It will be interesting times, and there will be more to follow.

Thank you for your membership.