John's Politics and Futurism blog

  Jewish Identity, Nationhood, and the Question of a Homeland The modern debate over Israel and Zionism often becomes heated because several distinct questions are treated as if they were one and the same. Questions of religion, ethnicity, ancestry, nationalism, history, and morality are frequently merged together, making careful discussion difficult. One useful starting point is to separate the question of whether Jews constitute a distinct people from the question of whether any people possess a right to a particular territory. Are Jews a Distinct People? The answer depends partly on what is meant by "people". Modern population genetics does not support the idea that Jewish populations are genetically pure descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Judea. After nearly two thousand years of dispersion throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, substantial admixture with surrounding populations has occurred. Ashkenazi Jews show significant European ancest...

  Shifts in U.S. Religiosity and European Comparisons Recent data from the Gallup World Poll show a substantial decline in religious commitment in the United States. In 2015, about 66 % of U.S. adults said religion is an important part of their daily life. By 2024, that figure had dropped to 49 %. https://www.news.gallup.com/poll/697676/drop-religiosity-among-largest-world.aspx   The size of the drop – 17 percentage points – places the U.S. among a small group of countries that have seen such steep declines. For example: in Greece the drop was 28 points (2013-2023), and in Italy about 23 points (2012-2022). Among the 38 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD), the median share of adults who say religion is important in their daily life is 36 %. The U.S. is now moving closer to that level. Globally, secularisation is also evident. According to the Gallup International Association report “Two Decades of Change”, the share o...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-WJN3L5eo “I Think You Can Say I’m a Fascist”: Mehdi Hasan vs the American Far-Right By the time you hear a man say “Whites are Native Americans” (nazi at 5:19) or another proudly declare “I think you can say I’m a fascist” (nazi at 26:24) , the debate is already long gone. What Mehdi Hasan walked into was not a panel, not even a forum — it was a showcase of ideological decay and moral rot in broad daylight. In a recent episode of Surrounded , Hasan stood — almost entirely alone — against 20 far-right Americans, many of whom were either openly fascist or teetering dangerously close. His goal? To argue three basic truths: Donald Trump is pro-crime. Donald Trump is defying the Constitution. Immigrants are good for America. The results were harrowing. 1. Trump Is Pro-Crime Hasan methodically cited example after example of Trump pardoning violent criminals — including those who “stomped on police officers' heads” (nazi at 2:06) or ...

  Ditto Music Blocks Anti-Fascist Release: A Statement on Free Speech and Corporate Censorship This week I received a message from Ditto Music regarding my forthcoming release titled Dulce et Decorum Est . In their words: “In compliance with music platform guidelines your release contains content that is deemed insensitive or showing political or cultural bias. For this reason we are unable to distribute your content to stores.” Let’s be clear: what they mean is that my music is politically engaged — and more to the point, it is intolerant of fascism . The track in question deals with the realities of war, nationalism, and settler-colonial violence. In other words, it dares to challenge the status quo. It refuses to be neutral in the face of injustice. It honours Wilfred Owen’s legacy not by sanitising it, but by updating it for the brutalities of our time. If Ditto Music finds such content objectionable, then the inference is hard to avoid: they are protecting fascism from c...

So, Ramaphosa met Trump. Cue the performative outrage. But behind the cameras, away from the staged handshakes, something bigger happened. Something quieter, and a lot whiter. Let’s talk about the new policy direction that suddenly appeared in our Government Gazette on 23 May 2025. Titled with all the dull, bureaucratic camouflage they could find, it’s really about one thing: letting multinational ICT corporations into South Africa without forcing them to sell equity to black South Africans — as long as they “invest” in transformation through what they call Equity Equivalent Investment Programmes (EEIPs). Sounds progressive? Read slower. It’s a corporate bypass valve, one already designed and requested long ago by the same big players who always seem to need a “special exemption” from black economic empowerment. Now, let’s talk timing. You don’t have to be a political analyst to notice that this policy shift drops immediately after Ramaphosa’s charm offensive in the US — where he rolle...

 As usual the trick is the url: it says portmap.io instead of standardbank.co.za

  It's like I say about Picasso. Most people if asked to be honest think his later work sucks. BUT if you look at his earlier work you can see he had talent to do realism. This means as a coder, first learn to program and develop something independently so you can go through the work and know what it takes, and ACTUALLY understand what the GPT is providing you. My observation is that ChatGPT for example provides good code but often does things like delete sections of code or use variables or methods that just do not exist. If you don't actually know what you are doing and don't actually understand coding, you will basically make something that is inherently buggy and full of security holes. The damage that AI is doing to coding skills. Can confirm. #coding #developers #ai #artificialintelligence https://futurism.com/young-coders-ai-cant-program

Update: They now call themselves NetherExPro instead of PrimeAurora.  So there's this new scam which claims to be a trading platform that delivers like 10% per day or so. It appears in many languages but the basic format of the article is always the same. I won't post the link/s to the article/s because I do not want you to fall for it, as it seems quite convincing. In order to make sure SEO finds this page and alerts you to its being a scam, I have pasted the wording of the South African edition here in white ink so that you can't read it but it is here. The South African one has a few huge giveaways that it is fake: 1. The news article is from News24, one of our major outlets, but the URL is not news24.com or news24.co.za. 2. NewzRoomAfrika does not contain the relevant interview. This is the only one, clearly different: 3. The bank balance statement comes allegedly from SARB rather than say, ABSA, Standard, Nedbank, Capitec, etc. SARB is the RESERVE BANK it NEVER deals w...

Someone please pass this information on to Trump: National Murder Rate: In 2022/23, South Africa had 21,325- 27,494 murders with a population of about 60 million, resulting in a murder rate of ~45 per 100,000 people. In 2017/18, the national murder rate was 35.8 per 100,000 people. Farm Murders as a Proportion of National Murders: In 2017/18, there were 62 farm murders, which constituted ~0.3% of the 20,336 total murders in South Africa. According to the Institute for Security Studies, about 13% of police precincts in South Africa had lower murder rates than the global average of 6.9 per 100,000 people. These precincts include affluent areas such as Brooklyn (Pretoria), Garsfontein (Pretoria), Camps Bay, Claremont, and Rondebosch (Cape Town). Suburbs like Sandton and Parkview in Johannesburg, Durban North, Table View, and Woodstock in Cape Town had murder rates of just under 10 per 100,000 people.  In contrast, certain precincts have reported higher murder rates. For instance, the ...

 Having fiddled with ChatGPT for a while now, I have identified the following two risks. 1. Hallucination . It sometimes just makes stuff up. This is particularly annoying when you give it the information and it goes on a tangent and makes stuff up that was not in the source information. For example, when I gave it some meeting notes, it went on a tangent about N-P completeness in computer science. OK?!? 2. Memory errors . The memory feature that they have added messes up a lot. I have noticed that it performs two mistakes: Recites what it gave you previously , even if the topic was utterly different . For example I gave it some meeting notes to summarise and it spat out some Python code that I had asked for last year. Totally irrelevant! Recites what it gave you previously, because the content was similar , in its opinion. I created a new chat, gave it the meeting notes, and it gave me the PREVIOUS summary of the previous set of meeting notes. In one case it was even worse! It g...

Had an interesting discussion and took the following notes.  Differentiating epistemic positions and beliefs What is the difference between fake news and a conspiracy theory? First, let me define my understanding of a conspiracy theory. I understand it to mean: a) There is a theory (belief, proposition, hypothesis) that b) There exists a conspiracy (secret plan amongst a group of two or more people) c) To do something malevolent (harmful) to society. So for example, if we know Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth worked with others, then they were conspirators. At the time they were planning to perform their malevolent acts (assassination), they were effectively, conspiring (Latin: Con- together; -spirare: to breathe or hope; compare e.g. to be inspired). So, if someone at the time suspected them of plotting murder, then, that person would have a theory that there was a conspiracy afoot. A person believing in that theory would, in fact, on my definition, have a conspiracy theory....

This is the second of two posts on Generative AI. Late last year (November), OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. However, it took a few months for the internet at large to catch on and realise the potential of this new tool. The trend started to take off in December, and by February everyone was talking about it. ChatGPT is an example of a "Generative AI". To recapitulate, let's see what this means. For convenience, let's call AIs that are not generative, "regular" AIs. Regular or "Narrow" AI (Artificial Intelligence): Regular AI, often referred to as "narrow" or "specific" AI, focuses on building systems that can perform specific tasks or solve specific problems. These AI systems are designed to operate within predefined boundaries and excel at specialised tasks. For example, a regular AI could be created to classify images, play chess, or process natural language. Another example is the AI that chooses your words in predict...