'AI and a New Humanity'

 

For the more visionary members of the scientistic elite, AI isn’t merely another tool for mankind to use but rather a means by which he will be transformed into a superior organism.  An interview in the online magazine Noēma between Tobias Rees and Nathan Gardels provides many details of this ‘upgrade’ of humanity.

It begins with a redefinition of what it means to be alive and to have intelligence:

 

In her essay in Noema, the astrophysicist Sarah Walker said that “we need to get past our binary categorization of all things as either life or not.”

 

What interests me most is rethinking the concepts we have inherited from the modern period, from the perspective of the in-betweenness made visible to us by AI.

 

 . . . Deep learning, in general, and generative AI in particular, have broken with this human-centric concept of intelligence and replaced it with something else: The idea that intelligence is pretty much two things: learning and reasoning.

 

 . . . I am emphasizing this absence of the symbolic because it is a beautiful way to show that deep learning has led to a pretty powerful philosophical rupture: Implicit in the new concept of intelligence is a radically different ontological understanding of what it is to be human, indeed, of what reality is or of how it is structured and organized.

 

Understanding this rupture with the older concept of intelligence and ontology of the human/the world is key, I think, to understanding your actual question: Are we entering what you call a new AIxial age, where AI will amount to something similar to what writing amounted to roughly 3,000 to 2,000 years ago?

The Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church speak of man as the king and priest of creation, the one for whom it was all made and prepared by the All-Holy Trinity.  By virtue of this, mankind has a special place in the created order.  But the anti-Christian scientists, mimicking their predecessor Charles Darwin, are eager to demote man to a lower level, to make him simply one of the many myriads of lifeforms on the earth.  In the context of AI, they are doing this by portraying AI as a new form of life with human-like intelligence.

The AI enthusiasts wear their evolutionist dogma on their sleeve:

 

Where does AI depart from, and where is it similar to the neural Darwinism described here by Gerald Edelman, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist? What Edelman refers to as “reentrant interaction” appears quite similar to “backpropagation.”

Because of this, they have no compunction nor hesitation about transforming mankind into a new kind of being via technology.  They see the latter as a catalyst for accelerating the evolutionary process:

 

Let me summarize this simply by saying that the technology of writing had absolutely dramatic consequences for what it is to be human, for how we experience and understand ourselves as humans. Among the two, perhaps, most important of these consequences was the systematic emergence of self-reflection and abstract thought.

 

 . . . We could take any theme and approach it from whole new perspectives. Imagine what this kind of co-cogitation between humans and AI would do to our current concept of interiority! Can you imagine what it would do to how we understand terms like mind, thought, having an idea or being creative?

 

 . . . I am entirely aware that I am giving AI philosophical and poetic dignity. And I do so consciously because I think AI has the potential to be an extraordinary philosophical event. It is our task as philosophers, artists, poets, writers and humanists to render this potential visible and relevant.

 

All this certainly has the makings of a new pivotal age.

The stated goal is to create a new symbiotic creature by permanently combining men and women with AI:

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/ai-and-a-new-humanity/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

'Educating for Wisdom'

 

Education for the last several decades in the States has been focused much more on vocational training than on any higher goals:  learning the classical liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium), advancing in the Christian faith, etc.  This leaves students at a terrible disadvantage:  They are not learning how to discern truth from falsehood, only how to apply utilitarian tools.  Because of this, they tend to be overly accepting of the pronouncements of ‘experts’ in various fields while dismissing any voices outside The Establishment.  We have seen what a disaster this has created, as large majorities have been content to yield to the experts that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were going fine for 20 years, that face-masking would stop the spread of covid, that there are no downsides to the childhood vaccine schedule, etc.

Thanks to this educational programming, people have accepted outright lies for years now.  A good example of the scale of the dishonesty of The Powers That Be was uncovered recently by DOGE:

‘President Donald Trump highlighted this morning the finding that the Department of Defense (DOD) paid the leftist media outlet Reuters $9 million for a program labeled “large scale social deception,” and he has demanded that they return the money.

‘“DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study ‘large scale social deception.’ GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!” wrote Trump on Truth Social.

‘ . . . A more detailed overview of the contract on highergov.com shows the description “SIMULATION TESTING AND MEASUREMENT LARGE SCALE DECEPTION” but does not further expand upon the activities the award intends to fund’ ( Emily Mangiaracina, ‘Trump admin reveals Pentagon gave $9 million to Reuters for program called ‘large scale social deception’’, lifesitenews.com).

This isn’t entirely new, as Miss Emily notes:

‘Some commentators highlighted the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has used American news media for propaganda purposes, most notably in a project known as “Operation Mockingbird.” At the time, the CIA admittedly hired at least 400 journalists to serve its aims, in part by writing “fake stories,” according to the journalist who exposed the scandal in 1977’ (Ibid.).

One of the leading technocratic globalists of the 20^th century, Bertrand Russell, much earlier than Operation Mockingbird, was writing about how globalists like himself could brainwash children to believe that snow was black using the educational system:

‘The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey.

‘Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen’ (The Impact of Science on Society, Blackie and Son, Bombay, India, 1942, pgs. 65-6).

We have been living through exactly this kind of devious schoolhouse propaganda in the States, as the federal government has imposed its own false ideologies upon students for many years now:  Darwinian evolution, the ability of males to become females, etc.

President Trump’s stated goal of eliminating the federal Department of Education is therefore welcome news and a great opportunity for States, counties/parishes, and cities to undo the damage that has been visited upon them by federal ‘guidance’.  The opportunity lies mainly in returning the religious dimension to public schools.  By doing so, they will give children the ability to discern truth from lies, good from evil.  For the most basic elements of learning begin with those latter distinctions, that Truth and Light are of God, and lies and darkness are of the devil:  ‘In Him [Jesus Christ] was life, and the life was the Light of men’ (The Holy Gospel according to St John 1:4, NASB); ‘Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, “I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life’ (John 8:12); ‘You are of your father the devil . . . .  He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.  Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is liar and the father of lies’ (John 8:44).

That is the foundation of all learning.  Furthermore, the degree of virtue one has attained allows one to advance in learning.  Wise and holy men throughout the ages have given testimony to these truths.

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/02/garlington-educating-for-wisdom/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Bird Flu Is a Replay of Covid’

 

Now is a good time to revisit this essay, with a new round of scaremongering about bird flu being whipped up:

https://www.knoe.com/2025/12/18/louisiana-wildlife-officials-warn-deadly-bird-flu-outbreak/

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You didn’t think the globalists would just slink away and give up, did you?  The current bird flu outbreak has all the hallmarks of a repetition of the covid operation they launched.

Gain-of-Function Origin

Dr Peter McCullough et al. published research on this aspect of bird flu as 2024 came to a close.  The following is from the abstract:

‘We investigate the possible laboratory origins of the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b genotype B3.13, currently affecting various animal species and causing sporadic human infections. The proximal origins may be the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, Georgia, and the Erasmus medical center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The first detection of HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b in the Netherlands in 2020 raises concerns about earlier gain-of-function research. Genetic analysis indicates genotype B3.13, emerging in 2024, and links to genotype B1.2, which originated in Georgia in January 2022 after the start of serial passage experiments with H5Nx clade 2.3.4.4 in mallard ducks at SEPRL in Athens, Georgia, in April 2021. Genotype B1.2 was found in a bottlenose dolphin in March 2022 in Florida, indicating sudden new adaptations. The NP gene of H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b (genotype B3.13) likely originated from avian influenza A virus in mallard ducks. Significant mutations found in recent human cases suggest possible links to serial passage experiments’ (‘Proximal Origin of Epidemic Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b and Spread by Migratory Waterfowl’, longdom.org).

Faulty PCR Tests

High thresholds and false positives are back, to help drive public anxiety:

‘A pandemic of false positives looms on the horizon. H5N1, a virus with legitimate clinical concern, is being detected using RT-PCR tests in animals that rely on arbitrarily high cycle thresholds (Ct), EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE EMPRICALLY BASED, they are used PER SAMPLE without negative controls or verification through sequencing. If left uncorrected, the flawed methodologies that led to massive false positive COVID-19 diagnoses could now result in an equally devastating—yet entirely preventable—culling of livestock, economic collapse, and global panic.

‘We have seen this before. The misuse of non-quantitative RT-PCR (nonQ-RT-PCR) testing in COVID-19 led to mass quarantines, economic disruption, and policy failures based on inflated case counts. Now, the same high Ct values are being used in H5N1 testing, despite overwhelming evidence that non-specific amplification at these levels produces vast numbers of false positives. Worse still, the absence of rigorous negative controls and reliance on fixed Ct thresholds means that entire industries—including poultry, dairy, and livestock—could be decimated unnecessarily.

‘We are on the precipice of a crisis that is not virological but methodological. We must act now to prevent the H5N1 pandemic of false positives by enforcing scientific best practices: mandating negative controls, implementing the ΔΔCt method, and requiring Sanger sequencing confirmation for all positive cases’ (James Lyons-Weiler, ‘PREVENTING the H5N1 False Positive Pandemic: The Urgent Need for Negative Controls, ΔΔCt, and Scientific Integrity NOT ARBITRARILY HIGH CYCLE THESHOLD CUT-OFFS in RT-PCR Testing’, https://popularrationalism.substack.com/).

New Vaccines

The solution to bird flu, as with covid, is new vaccines, of course, which will help Big Pharma replace the revenue they have lost as covid shot uptake has declined:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/02/garlington-bird-flu-is-a-replay-of-covid/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘An Underhanded Act of Renaming by Hegseth’

 

This tale begins back in 2020, during Trump’s first term in the White House.  Sen Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, in a very typical act of Yankee spite, introduced legislation to remove the names of Confederate heroes from any property owned by the federal government’s Dept of Defense.  The provisions of that legislation migrated to a military funding bill, which Trump vetoed, but the foolish Republicans in the US Senate joined with the Democrats and overrode it.  The removal of those Confederate names began in 2023. 

The woke DoD under Biden told the story this way:

‘Some Army bases, established in the build-up and during World War I, were named for Confederate officers in an effort to court support from local populations in the South. That the men for whom the bases were named had taken up arms against the government they had sworn to defend was seen by some as a sign of reconciliation between the North and South. It was also the height of the Jim Crow Laws in the South, so there was no consideration for the feelings of African Americans who had to serve at bases named after men who fought to defend slavery [on this misleading point, see the work of Kizer and Seabrook on black folks in the Confederate Army—W.G.].

‘All this changed in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Many people protested systemic racism and pointed to Confederate statues and bases as part of that system. Congress established the commission in the National Defense Authorization Act of fiscal 2021. Then-President Donald J. Trump vetoed the legislation because of the presence of the commission, and huge bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress overrode his veto’ (Jim Garamone, ‘DOD Begins Implementing Naming Commission Recommendations’, defense.gov).

Now Trump is back in the White House, and his SecDef, Pete Hegseth, is doing some renaming of his own:

‘Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday signed a memorandum directing that Fort Liberty, North Carolina, be renamed to Fort Bragg.

‘The new name honors Army Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a native of Sabattus, Maine, who enlisted in July 1943 at age 23. He served during World War II with the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 17th Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps. 

‘Bragg received the Silver Star for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity and a Purple Heart for wounds sustained during the Battle of the Bulge. As part of his actions, Bragg saved a fellow soldier's life by commandeering an enemy German ambulance so that he could transport a wounded service member 20 miles to an allied hospital in Belgium. The ambulance was under enemy fire the entire time. 

‘Following WWII, Bragg returned home to Maine and married. He owned an auto body shop and later a company that moved buildings. In 1984, he also ran a business that operated a portable sawmill. Bragg died in January 1999 and is buried in Nobleboro, Maine’ (C. Todd Lopez, ‘Defense Secretary Renames Fort Liberty as Fort Bragg, Honoring WWII Soldier’, defense.gov). 

Regrettably, Hegseth and Trump are being disingenuous with this move.  Hegseth lays out his and Trump’s reasoning for it:

‘"I was honored to be able to put my signature on that [memorandum,] by the way, with the support of the president of the United States, who set the tone on this and said 'I want Fort Bragg back,'" Hegseth told reporters during a briefing today in Stuttgart, Germany. "We're honored to support a private first class who received a Purple Heart and the Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge."

‘ . . . Hegseth said the move to rename Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg was about restoring the legacy of the service members who trained and served there. 

‘"It's about that legacy; it's about the connection to the community, to those who've served," he said’ (Ibid.). 

If Hegseth and Trump really wanted ‘Fr Bragg back,’ if they wanted to reestablish the legacy that grew up at the base and to mend broken ties with the local community, they would have immediately gone back to the original dedication to Braxton Bragg, the Confederate general whose name adorned the base for decades before ol’ Liz Warren et al. intervened.  To rededicate it to another soldier named Bragg (who isn’t even a Southerner but a Yankee from Maine) is a dirty act of deceit.  With this move, Hegseth and Trump are in effect saying that the crackers in North Carolina and the rest Dixie are such retarded ignoramuses that they won’t be able to tell the difference between their own native-born General and a private from up North.  What kind of legacy are they establishing at Ft ‘Bragg’ with this new beginning grounded in dishonesty?

Trump’s willingness to challenge the entrenched interests in DC in his second term has astounded longtime political watchers.  But there is one interest group that he has thus far not dared to oppose:  the Dixie-haters.

Both Trump and Hegseth are dyed-in-the-wool Yankees, so their inconsideration towards the South vis-à-vis the new Ft Bragg is not any great surprise.  However, Southerners have been some of the strongest supporters of Trump and his MAGA project over the years.  If he wants us to continue to stick with him, he and his appointees will need to show more fortitude when it comes to defending the South, her history and culture, and her heroes.  That means giving us back the real Ft Bragg, Ft Hood, Ft Gordon, the Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington Cemetery, and all the rest of it.

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Originally posted at Identity Dixie, https://identitydixie.com/2025/02/19/an-underhanded-act-of-renaming-by-hegseth/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!