Cryptocurrency and War – Cousins in Absurdity – Challenged by AI

Cryptocurrency – a way to supposedly create wealth by wasting massive amounts of water and energy to do meaningless computer calculations that solve no actual real life problems or serve any useful purpose but somehow create economic wealth for a few select people.

And War – a way to stimulate the economy supposedly creating economic growth, not by creating anything but by destroying infrastructure and killing people, while creating wealth for a few select people.

Both are absurdities of capitalism recently being challenged by so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI) which also wastes massive amounts of water and energy to create gibberish and wealth for a few select people.

Ain’t capitalism grand.

On The Record

Having accepted the evidence, without reciting it all here, The Fifth Column is going On The Record as recognizing that, among other things, Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.

How to Build an Intelligent Online Answer Machine

Ever since Facebook and Amazon people have become lazier, or perhaps more accurately addicted to convenience over all else, including ethics or accuracy.

When it comes to information we used to search out reliable sources and read information in detail to find answers to our questions Now people just seek to ask so-called “chatbots” the question and accept whatever it gives them based on so called artificial intelligence (AI) which has nothing to do with intelligence or even accurate knowledge, being based on Large Language Models (LLMs) which probe the depths of the Internet to try to guess at what type of answer a real person would give based on all the garbage ever posted on the Internet, ignoring the Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO) principal.

If people insist on not doing their own research there must be a better way for an “Online Answer Machine” to do it for them.

First you need a decent search engine that can handle AND, OR, NOT and “quotation marks for exact phrase searches” Boolean operators. Google Advanced Search at it’s prime before enshitification would be ideal.

You also need a sophisticated algorithm (some people might call this AI) that can translate natural language questions into Boolean search terms and identify the subject of the question.

The next part is the key to the whole process. You need a human curated database of accurate, reliable and authoritative information sources (web sites or other online sources) indexed by subject matter.

When a question is asked the algorithm would translate it into search terms, determine the subject and search the appropriate sources for that subject to extract an answer for the user, along with citations and links to the sources the answer was taken from.

This certainly will not be as good as doing your own research choosing your own sources but this would not be built for people who want to, or know how to, do their own research.

Historical Mythology – WWII: The Anti-Fascist War

As we watch the direction the American Trump regime is taking today we are seeing a lot of commentary and memes referencing how the allies went to war against German facism in the Second World War.

While it is true that Hitler’s Nazi Regime was fascist, that is not why the allied countries went to war with Germany. If they opposed fascism they would have acted against the fascist regime in Spain rather than calling those of the anti-fascist International Brigades dangerous communists and worst. They would have opposed Germany when it went fascist.

As to opposing German antisemitism, there was enough antisemitism to go around including within the allies, some of whom sent away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany during the war. Also it is likely that some, if not most, of the western support for the creation of the State of Israel was to avoid Jewish immigration. The war only became about saving the Jews during the war, particularly when the allies discovered that Germany’s concentration camps were not work camps but extermination camps. It should be noted that the United States and Canada had internment camps of their own for undesirable “foreigners” of the wrong race, that included Canadian and American citizens.

The Second World war was not about fascism but about German expansionism. If Hitler had stopped at The Sudetenland there likely would have not have been World War II.

But post-war, the mythology became useful as a way to portray the western countries as places where fascism or genocide would never be tolerated even as we watch the history currently unfolding before us today.