Author: Payam

Chemist, philosopher, vagrant.
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Great Actor Stands Up for Great Art

It is not a mystery why the ratings for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards Ceremony, better known as the Academy Awards or The Oscars, have seen rapidly declining ratings over the past decade: they are nominating and rewarding every shittier movies. Gone are the times when the awards committee would go to extraordinary lengths to promote movies that told worthwhile, original stories with breathtaking skill in direction and cinematography. Now, The Oscars are little more than auxiliary marketing campaigns for the vapid blockbuster movies that earn billions solely by virtue of outsized marketing campaigns and dominant distribution deals that leave movie fans with little choice of what to see.

Naturally, it falls to the old, established and accomplished actor to give The Academy the criticism it deserves. It is a tired cliché that the masses want pablum. Hollywood could make money by making good movies. Now, they are suffering the consequences of the commodification of their products: people can only eat so much pablum. Overfed on the tasteless stuff, movie fans can scarcely stand three-hour telecasts praising the stuff they have been force fed far beyond the point of satiety.

If anyone had any backbone in Hollywood, then they would heed Penn’s criticism, but much like a dictatorship, they have become prisoners in the system they created.

Sean Penn has blasted the organizers of the Oscars of being cowards who, in effect, limit the kind of films that can be funded and made. Source: Sean Penn accuses Academy Awards of cowardice at Marrakech Film Festival

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“Humanitarian” Among Dictators

Reuters reports that

Syria’s former President Bashar al-Assad is in Moscow with his family after Russia granted them asylum on humanitarian grounds, a Kremlin source told Russian news agencies on Sunday, and a deal has been done to ensure the safety of Russian military bases.

The two claims made in this short paragraph are staggeringly inaccurate and infinitely ironic. First, only a ruthless dictator who has killed a million of his own soldiers and about as many civilians and soldiers in Ukraine could ever offer asylum on “humanitarian” grounds to a dictator who, with the aid of Russia and Iran, killed a million of his own people and caused 8 million of his own population to flee the country, creating the largest refugee crisis since WWII. The notion of “honor among thieves” absolutely pales in comparison with “honor among dictators”.

Second, it is hard to imagine that Russia actually believes that the rebels who have taken over Syria will follow through on their promise to protect the Russian port in Tartus, Syria. It is hard to imagine that the rebel armies who were laid to waste indiscriminately by the Russian forces on those bases will grant these ruthless murderers forbearance as a practical consideration for building power in the state they now control. Keeping the Russian foothold in Syria will, after all, pose a risk to the new regime that he rebels form in the future.

Exhausted financially and militarily, Russia will, apparently, spin any story to pretend that its disastrous defeat in Syria is a graceful exit. No one will shed a tear if the Russians in the Tartus military base are laid to waste.

Syria’s former President Bashar al-Assad is in Moscow with his family after Russia granted them asylum on humanitarian grounds, a Kremlin source told Russian news agencies on Sunday, and a deal has been done to ensure the safety of Russian military bases.

Source: Syria’s Assad is in Moscow after deal on military bases: Russian state media | Reuters

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Why the US Green Party are Bona Fide Losers

The Green Party in the United States has been nothing but a joke. Measured by the goals it has set for itself, it is an unmitigated disaster and an absolute, complete, pathetic and unqualified loser because it has successfully helped elect administrations that forcefully realized the exact opposite of all of the party’s goals: George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.

In contrast, faced with the prospect of a racist regime, fringe French political parties have the good sense to bow out in order to ensure the racist party’s loss. These French parties will sacrifice their own victory in order to assure a greater victory for the greater good. The US Green Party (and Robert F Kennedy, Jr.) has so little sense that when faced with the prospect of electing a tyrant, it elects to jump in order to siphon off enough votes from democrats and to elect the party it opposes. The Green Party has never won a race. It has never elected anyone to the US Congress, it has never garnered a majority in any district, and it has never formed any meaningful alliance with another party toward accomplishing a single policy objective. French parties will sacrifice actual parliamentary presence for the greater good, but the US Green Party works diligently to expand its losing ways to the national scene. Sacrifice and compromise are neither realities nor ideals in the American political system. They are concepts aped by infantile egomaniacs who will never mature enough to grasp either concept.

Continue reading “Why the US Green Party are Bona Fide Losers”
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Too Much Press for the Craven and Cowardly

If one is not comfortable with employment in a company whose CEO is fawning over the chief competitor’s CEO, then why would one vote for a politician who fawns over the nation’s mortal enemy? Nigel Farage’s unalloyed admiration for Vladimir Putin makes him nothing short of a traitor to his nation and to humanity. Were the UK dominated by a sensible government like that of Winston Churchill’s, Farage would have been isolated as Oswald Mosely was. Instead, Farage is granted every courtesy of a normal politician, rather than jail time. Prison is the only appropriate dwelling for craven reprobates who worship despots. The United Kingdom is another bastion of freedom dangerously close to losing its way and its privileges.

The Reform UK leader told the BBC that “of course” the war was President Vladimir Putin’s fault.

Source: West provoked Ukraine war, Nigel Farage says

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“I’m with Stupid”: OpenAI’s Naked Desperation and Cynicism

Given that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is only slightly less prone than other artificial “intelligence” engines to hallucination, outright deceit and manifest stupidity, the only reason that one can surmise for their decision to train their engines on the output of a media company that is proudly committed to deception, propaganda and ideological and racial biases is that the ostensible newspaper of record is suing them in court. The decline of the New York Times is not a matter of debate, but it has, thus far, not plunged to the depths of irrelevance and rank incompetence as the NewsCorp properties. It is the manifestation of Sam Altman’s mania and ruthlessness. Though he is running a business that hinges entirely on whether his “intelligent” algorithms return correct answers, he is willing to sacrifice the entire endeavor to avenge the New York Times. Sam Altman is committing himself to the ugliest legacy in Silicon Valley: Musk’s.

Sam Altman-led OpenAI has signed a deal that will give it access to content from some of the biggest news publications owned by media conglomerate News Corp , the companies said on Wednesday. Source: Sam Altman’s OpenAI signs content agreement with News Corp | Reuters

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Lenny Rome Continues to Innovate with Vaults

I am thrilled to have contributed a minor detail to the lore of vaults under the tutelage of Lenny Rome at UCLA (https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0500929102), and I am even more excited to read about the phenomenal science that Lenny’s lab continues produce in exploiting vaults for therapies, even if the purpose of vaults remains beyond his reach. Lenny is a one of a kind trifecta that one could ever want as a colleague and mentor: the hardest working, the most rigorous and the most pleasant scientist. He is also so humble that he happily accepts the title of “the vaults guy” with supreme humor.

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Machine Learning Finds a Higher Purpose

I have ranted at length in previous posts on the fact that “predictive” patterns discovered by machine learning cannot add up to, cannot imitate and cannot constitute good taste, but the beer barons at KU Leuven (Louvain) may have arrived at the first counterargument by correlating the chemical signatures of good taste with potentially representative assessments of the same beers by people ostensibly possessed with good taste in matters of beer. Thus, this is the first attempt at correlating the chemistry of the taste of beer with the perceived taste and quality of beer. Sadly, even this attempt seems to have fallen short because the machine learning algorithms failed to identify unique chemical signatures that identified each beer type’s flavor and quality profile.

For now, one should continue to trust human experts more than “expert” algorithms.

Algorithm correlates online reviews with chemical profiles of hundreds of beers, providing a roadmap to enhance taste

Source: Machine learning improves beer flavor

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Netanyahu’s Political Parachute is not a War

The gross insult in the entire affair in Gaza is that most media buy into the Netanyahu propaganda point that this is a war. Wars are fought between nations, between governments or between armies organized by one of the former entities. Hamas is neither a government nor a representative body of any Palestinian constituency. Hamas is not an organized military by any stretch of the definition, and the only task of which it is capable is the wholesale slaughter of unarmed civilians: a hallmark of imbeciles, not of trained soldiers. Hamas’s ineptitude at conducting warfare is manifested repeatedly when they have to be ferreted out by force from hospitals and schools and by the ease with which Israel has reduced the region to rubble.

The military incursion into Gaza is just that: a military incursion. It is not a war. In the absence of any military resistance, the Israeli military is not conducting war. It is just as gross an insult to the Israeli military to pretend that Hamas’s imbeciles are worthy adversaries. Those who accept the “war” ascription are deprecating the vaunted Israeli military to the level of Hamas’s imbecile terrorists. It will be a point of shame and utter humiliation for the Israeli army to assert that it is fighting a worthy adversary.

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By Embracing Cynicism, ADL Risks Its Authority

The Antidefamation League fulfills an important, essential function in exposing, explaining and countering hate in the world, but it’s difficult to paint its high profile “Campus Antisemitism Report Card” as anything other than a cynical concession to pressures it is getting as a member of the Israeli media PR juggernaut. Uncharacteristic of the ADL, the document completely lacks context for the activities that it claims to use in rendering the grades. No explanation is offered of what CCI means, of what “active Jewish life” means, of what “recent anti-zionist student government activity” means. There is nuance in what students express, and none of these measures offers any insight into or indication of whether antisemitism has gained converts on campuses, or whether The ADL’s grading criteria can measure the acceptance of antisemitism on campuses. Critically, ADL makes no attempt to disprove the notion that the same minority of biased students are simply more vocal now. Even worse, the ADL makes no attempt to distinguish between activities that are protected by the first amendment and activities that do not violate campus rules.

Antisemitism on campuses is not news. Antisemitism has been equally pervasive on campuses as it has been in the society at large. The ADL has gone against its mission to bring clarity to issues of hate by muddying the waters. What makes this “report card” so pernicious is that it is so cynical: the ADL is propagating many stereotypes that it is committed to fight as a part of its mission. The US may have lost one more feeble speed bump against madness.

Source: Campus Antisemitism Report Card | ADL

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New York Papers Eat It on Disparaging San Francisco

The two top New York newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have been conducting two seemingly coordinated campaigns of disparagement against San Francisco’s cultural and economic preeminences over the past decade. The two papers amplify the most irrelevant stories of misery in San Francisco and quash stories of San Francisco’s economic resilience and its irreplaceable and unrivaled creative and generative DNA. The paradigmatic stories revolved about the massive coverage they gave the departure of Tesla and Oracle headquarters to Austin, TX, and the total lack of coverage they gave to the fact that the most critical Tesla and Oracle HQ staff ultimately returned to the Bay Area. Even the meatiest portion of this story in the Journal carefully avoids providing scale to San Francisco’s economic prowess:

San Francisco has largely weathered the broader crunch in startup funding. Investment in Bay Area startups dropped 12% to $63.4 billion last year. By contrast, funding volumes for Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles, two smaller tech hubs, dropped 27% and 42%, respectively. In Miami, venture investment plunged 70% to just $2 billion last year.

Source: Tech Leaders Fled San Francisco During the Pandemic. Now, They’re Coming Back. – WSJ

It is particularly telling that the story cites the $2 billion mark for Miami in order to disparage Miami in relation to SF’s $63 billion startup capital availability, but the Journal deliberately avoids citing the same numbers for Austin, Los Angeles and New York. In fact, New York is not even mentioned because it would draw attention to the fact that New York’s economy revolves around the motion of money rather than its application to creating businesses. Thus, the story exists solely to disparage all cities except New York, whose most prominent citizen is an ex president who was bolstered by these two papers for decades and who is now a convicted fraudster and slanderer and will soon be a multiply convicted felon.

The “culture wars” propagated in the media is a fiction carefully crafted by New York media to detract from the real culture war: New York’s desperation to be more relevant than San Francisco after it lost its leadership to San Francisco under the weight of its own conservativeness (read sloth) and unrivaled corruption (need anyone say anything more than the presumptive GOP nominee?). New York’s economic might comes from the deals that its revered names like Goldman Sachs broker for the Bay Area companies that are building the future. New York’s wealth is coming from the puny commissions it earns from SF companies, and clearly this irks publications like the Journal, who will likely confirm their own irrelevance by endorsing the criminal candidate for presidency in September.

The greatest American intellect, Mark Twain, became a legend as a writer in San Francisco, and ultimately elected to die in New York. Much more so than the rumors of Twain’s demise, the rumors of San Francisco’s demise are and forever will be exaggerated and totally bogus.

Founders and investors who ditched the Bay Area for Miami and elsewhere are returning to a boom in artificial intelligence and an abundance of tech talent. Source: Tech Leaders Fled San Francisco During the Pandemic. Now, They’re Coming Back. – WSJ