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offsite link North Korea Increases Aid to Russia, Mos... Tue Nov 19, 2024 12:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Trump Assembles a War Cabinet Sat Nov 16, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Slavgrinder Ramps Up Into Overdrive Tue Nov 12, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link ?Existential? Culling to Continue on Com... Mon Nov 11, 2024 10:28 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link US to Deploy Military Contractors to Ukr... Sun Nov 10, 2024 02:37 | Field Empty

Anti-Empire >>

The Saker

Indymedia ireland

Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.

offsite link Fraud and mismanagement at University College Cork Thu Aug 28, 2025 18:30 | Calli Morganite
UCC has paid huge sums to a criminal professor
This story is not for republication. I bear responsibility for the things I write. I have read the guidelines and understand that I must not write anything untrue, and I won't.
This is a public interest story about a complete failure of governance and management at UCC.

offsite link Deliberate Design Flaw In ChatGPT-5 Sun Aug 17, 2025 08:04 | Mind Agent
Socratic Dialog Between ChatGPT-5 and Mind Agent Reveals Fatal and Deliberate 'Design by Construction' Flaw
This design flaw in ChatGPT-5's default epistemic mode subverts what the much touted ChatGPT-5 can do... so long as the flaw is not tickled, any usage should be fine---The epistemological question is: how would anyone in the public, includes you reading this (since no one is all knowing), in an unfamiliar domain know whether or not the flaw has been tickled when seeking information or understanding of a domain without prior knowledge of that domain???!

This analysis is a pretty unique and significant contribution to the space of empirical evaluation of LLMs that exist in AI public world... at least thus far, as far as I am aware! For what it's worth--as if anyone in the ChatGPT universe cares as they pile up on using the "PhD level scholar in your pocket".

According to GPT-5, and according to my tests, this flaw exists in all LLMs... What is revealing is the deduction GPT-5 made: Why ?design choice? starts looking like ?deliberate flaw?.

People are paying $200 a month to not just ChatGPT, but all major LLMs have similar Pro pricing! I bet they, like the normal user of free ChatGPT, stay in LLM's default mode where the flaw manifests itself. As it did in this evaluation.

offsite link AI Reach: Gemini Reasoning Question of God Sat Aug 02, 2025 20:00 | Mind Agent
Evaluating Semantic Reasoning Capability of AI Chatbot on Ontologically Deep Abstract (bias neutral) Thought
I have been evaluating AI Chatbot agents for their epistemic limits over the past two months, and have tested all major AI Agents, ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, and DeepSeek, for their epistemic limits and their negative impact as information gate-keepers.... Today I decided to test for how AI could be the boon for humanity in other positive areas, such as in completely abstract realms, such as metaphysical thought. Meaning, I wanted to test the LLMs for Positives beyond what most researchers benchmark these for, or have expressed in the approx. 2500 Turing tests in Humanity?s Last Exam.. And I chose as my first candidate, Google DeepMind's Gemini as I had not evaluated it before on anything.

offsite link Israeli Human Rights Group B'Tselem finally Admits It is Genocide releasing Our Genocide report Fri Aug 01, 2025 23:54 | 1 of indy
We have all known it for over 2 years that it is a genocide in Gaza
Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has finally admitted what everyone else outside Israel has known for two years is that the Israeli state is carrying out a genocide in Gaza

Western governments like the USA are complicit in it as they have been supplying the huge bombs and missiles used by Israel and dropped on innocent civilians in Gaza. One phone call from the USA regime could have ended it at any point. However many other countries are complicity with their tacit approval and neighboring Arab countries have been pretty spinless too in their support

With the release of this report titled: Our Genocide -there is a good chance this will make it okay for more people within Israel itself to speak out and do something about it despite the fact that many there are actually in support of the Gaza

offsite link China?s CITY WIDE CASH SEIZURES Begin ? ATMs Frozen, Digital Yuan FORCED Overnight Wed Jul 30, 2025 21:40 | 1 of indy
This story is unverified but it is very instructive of what will happen when cash is removed
THIS STORY IS UNVERIFIED BUT PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO OR READ THE TRANSCRIPT AS IT GIVES AN VERY GOOD IDEA OF WHAT A CASHLESS SOCIETY WILL LOOK LIKE. And it ain't pretty

A single video report has come out of China claiming China's biggest cities are now cashless, not by choice, but by force. The report goes on to claim ATMs have gone dark, vaults are being emptied. And overnight (July 20 into 21), the digital yuan is the only currency allowed.

The Saker >>

Public Inquiry
Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005

offsite link RTEs Sarah McInerney ? Fianna Fail?supporter? Anthony

offsite link Joe Duffy is dishonest and untrustworthy Anthony

offsite link Robert Watt complaint: Time for decision by SIPO Anthony

offsite link RTE in breach of its own editorial principles Anthony

offsite link Waiting for SIPO Anthony

Public Inquiry >>

Voltaire Network
Voltaire, international edition

offsite link Will intergovernmental institutions withstand the end of the "American Empire"?,... Sat Apr 05, 2025 07:15 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?127 Sat Apr 05, 2025 06:38 | en

offsite link Disintegration of Western democracy begins in France Sat Apr 05, 2025 06:00 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?126 Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:39 | en

offsite link The International Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism by Amichai Chikli and Na... Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:31 | en

Voltaire Network >>

PHILIPPINES: The Emotional Calculus of Armed Conflict

category international | anti-war / imperialism | news report author Friday December 07, 2012 03:30author by Jurgette Honculada Report this post to the editors

HOW DO I TREAT THEE? Let me count the ways. Statistics from the AFP-PNP over a 33-year period (1978-2010) report an aggregate of 29,553 fatalities in the ongoing conflict between GPH and the CPP-NPA categorized thus: 13,412 Communists (45%), 8,264 military and police (28%) and 7,877 civilians (21%). This further translates into 80 deaths daily for the period: 36 Communists, 23 soldiers and police, and 21 civilians.
CPP NPA
CPP NPA

When the GPH and CPP-NPA-NDF peace panels met in June in Oslo to declog a peace process mired in a contrapuntal word and ground war, both sides raised their bills of particulars. The CPP-NPA-NDF listed over half a dozen issues pertaining to safety and immunity guarantees for their consultants (JASIG), bilateral agreements, the release of political prisoners, terrorist listing of the CPP-NPA and Jose Ma. Sison, and indemnification of human rights victims. (These issues have been, and will be, addressed elsewhere.)

The GPH panel focused on a demand to “lower the level of violence on the ground”, with particular reference to the use of land mines and child soldiers by the NPA.

“There is no meeting of the minds there” Satur Ocampo wrote in his Philippine Star column on Sept. 1, 2012. NDF chair Luis Jalandoni echoed this sentiment when he said, in a forum also on the same day, that peace talks must not be reduced to mere ceasefire negotiations.

For GPH, the issues of child soldiers and land mines are not marginal or peripheral to peace negotiations. Children, in the barest sense, are our future; when we imperil them we risk our future. International humanitarian law and Philippine law prohibit the use of child soldiers, a practice staunchly denied by the CPP-NPA but belied by regular news reports, among the latest, that on a 17-year old (recruited when he was 13) among NPA casualties in an Aug. 31, 2012 Davao encounter.

The CPP-NPA-NDF takes pains to point out that the NPA uses “command-detonated” land mines (as against “pressure-activated” ones which kill anyone) whose use is allowed by international conventions. But land mines do not always obey instructions, time and again killing and maiming hapless civilians, (Recently a grenade targeted at a military site landed on merry making barangay folk in a Davao perya or fair in Paquibato district, injuring 47; the NPA has belatedly owned up to the deed.)

Unlearning war must begin here and now, not who knows when, or with the inking of the final pact. Violence has taken too high a toll on our families and villages and communities, rending them asunder. In the poem Brave Woman by Grace Monte de Ramos, a village woman (perhaps widow?) soliloquizes about her two sons, unschooled and unskilled, joining the army “when they were young”; and her third and youngest son, abducted at 17--by soldiers or rebels? She cannot say. As she seeks his bones, she laments that perhaps her older sons have “given other mothers sorrow … Perhaps my (youngest) son had to pay for what they borrowed.’

And violence has taken too high a toll on our psyches, most especially those who have come within arm’s length of it. The former pastor of a campus Protestant church was one of three children in the 70s serving the NPA as errand boys. His peasant father jailed by the military, his mother in the US to earn money somehow, he had to survive by his wits, thus ending up with the NPA in Isabela, his home province. Decades later, by dint of hard work, struggle and sacrifice, and luck, he became a pastor, as did one of his fellow errand boys. The third took his own life.

The inner wounds inflicted by violence take a lifetime (and amazing grace) to heal. The inner demons one cannot always slay. King Badouin I of Belgium has said, “Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him”.

This is where GPH is coming from. This is the emotional calculus that compels the GPH panel to raise the issues of land mines and child soldiers and press for reduced levels of violence during negotiations. These do not negate the GPH’s commitment to socio-economic-political reforms. For GPH, seeking peace in the here-and-now is a foretaste or token of the just and enduring peace that we all want. Muting the gunfire during peace talks, keeping children and civilians out of harm’s way, will mean one life, or two or three or more saved, and that will have been worth it.

American peace mentor John Paul Lederach once said, when we choose gunfire as the modality by which we communicate, it becomes difficult to go back to words.

Herein lies the challenge: of finding a common ground, of finding the right words to cut through the crap and the gunfire, of matching word with deed, resolve with will, of restoring integrity to words so that we do not engage in wordplay (and verbal sleight-of-hand) but mean what we say and say what we mean, of unlearning war in order to wage peace. :-(

The author is a member of the Philippine peace panel negotiating with the Communist Party of the Philippines, New People's Army and the National Democratic Front.

Philippines - Child Soldiers (CPP-NPA)
Philippines - Child Soldiers (CPP-NPA)

MILF
MILF

author by Mike Novackpublication date Fri Dec 07, 2012 17:48author address author phone Report this post to the editors

33 years x 365 days/year = 12045 days so 29,553 deaths would be more like 2.5 per day, not 80 per day.

Please, I am NOT meaning this to be interpreted as 2.5 deaths per day not being bad. But we do our causes no good at all by such carelessness. Once people see something like that they tend to disregard whatever you say as possibly being in error.

Note --- I did not start by doing the math. Jumped right out at me as a THAT can't be right (80 is close to 100 so the ballpark for ONE year would be ~30,000 were it 80/day).

 
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