Doomed, doomed.     As advertised in my September 22nd podcast, I have been listening, via Audible, to Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, just published this month. If you’ll excuse me repeating myself:

The subtitle is: ”Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.” It’s about the, yes, coming wave of technology—most particularly Artificial Intelligence and bio-tech—that will transform the world we live in.

Suleyman, that Turkish-sounding name notwithstanding, is another Brit (although he now lives in Silicon Valley), and one well qualified to pronounce on his subject. He was a co-founder of DeepMind back in 2010, and has been a leader in AI research ever since. He has interesting and important things to say …

He sure does. No one knows better than Suleyman how fast things are moving in those two areas of technological advance.

That phrase in the book’s subtitle, ”the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma,” refers to the great good these changes could accomplish, the great evil they might unleash, and how we steer the human race towards the good and away from the evil. The latter part of that—steering us away from the evil—Suleyman discusses at much length under the heading ”containment.”

The central problem for humanity in the 21st century is how we can nurture political power and wisdom, technical mastery, and robust norms to constrain technology and ensure they continue to do far more good than harm …

But:

The odds are stacked against us in making this a reality.

For a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist like me, the book is a banquet. Has the COVID panic got you worrying about possible leaks from big, expensive labs staffed by credentialed scientists under careful surveillance? Very soon, perhaps already, a hobbyist tinkering with synthetic biology in his garage could kill a billion of us. (Suleyman is actually quoting a biotech expert there, but he seems to believe it.)

Suleyman did have me shaking my head a few times, to the degree my headset would allow it. I suspect he is uncritically Woke. In Chapter 14, for example, we get this:

A few years ago many Large Language Models had a problem. They were, to put it bluntly, racist. Users could quite easily find ways to make them regurgitate racist material, or hold racist opinions they had gleaned while scanning the vast corpus of text on which they had been trained. Toxic bias was, it had seemed, ingrained in human writing and then amplified by AI.

This led many to conclude that the whole setup was ethically broken, morally nonviable. There was no way LLMs could be controlled well enough to be released to the public, given the obvious harms.

But then LLMs, as we’ve heard, took off. In 2023 it’s now clear that, compared with the early systems, it’s extremely difficult to goad something like ChatGPT into racist comments.

Is it a solved problem? Absolutely not; there are still multiple examples of biased, even overtly racist, LLMs, as well as serious problems with everything from inaccurate information to gaslighting. But for those of us who have worked in the field from the beginning, the exponential progress at eliminating bad outputs has been incredible, undeniable.

Suleyman doesn’t give us his definition of ”racist,” but I suspect it is congruent with Ibram X. Kendi’s. Thence to the question: What happens to truth—truth that contradicts social dogma—when AI supplies us with all our knowledge?

I’ll guess that LLM knowledge bases strongly resemble Wikipedia: handy if you want to look up Dirichlet’s Theorem or the Battle of Lepanto but deeply unreliable on anything—or anybody—connected to social dogma on race or sex.

And Western World Wokery is a pale, weak thing by comparison with social dogmas elsewhere. What would a Chinese LLM have to say about Mao Tse-tung’s great famine, or the Tiananmen Square protests? What would a North Korean LLM tell me about the Kim family?

And with North Korea in mind: If one guy fiddling in his garage can kill a billion of us, what might a malevolent nation do?

Mustafa Suleyman does his best to offer hope, scolding what he calls ”techo-pessimists” and urging us to more enlightened regulation, better international cooperation, etc. He sounds worried, though. So he should. ”Nurture political power and wisdom”? Has Mustafa Suleyman ever attended a session of the U.S. Congress?

Twenty years ago I reviewed a book by

Most of the 230,000 illegal aliens encountered at the southwest border in August were released to roam free (and those were just the illegals the Border Patrol caught—hundreds of thousands got away). But we’ve been reading that story for months now. We’ve also been reading about the Illegals who land in Blue Sanctuary Cities such as New York and Chicago, and how those municipalities struggle to pay their bills. But we haven’t read much about the invaders who colonize flyover country with GOP donor assistance. The Daily Wire’s Spencer Lundquist recently reported that a developer and Stupid Party moneyman has built a shanty town in Red State America, which shows just how greedy and unscrupulous donors can be. They’ll do anything to make a buck, even if the buck is made on dispossessing and replacing the Historic American Nation [Inside Colony Ridge: The ‘Fastest Growing Development’ In The U.S. Is A Magnet For Illegal Immigrants, September 16, 2023]. GOP/GAP lawmakers must crack down hard on these developers, big campaign donations regardless.

Attn Texans:

Inside Colony Ridge: The ‘Fastest Growing Development’ In The U.S. Is A Magnet For Illegal Immigrants https://t.co/DpVe8yGa60

— SusanSez (@SezSusan) September 28, 2023

Colony Ridge is a Texas community 400 miles away from the border. Just north of Houston, the unincorporated locale has a population of at least 50,000. It’s larger than mid-sized cities like Asheville, North Carolina, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. Most of those residents are suspected illegals, and the area looks more like a favela—Brazilian Portuguese for slum or ghetto—than a suburb. Video footage shows the Third-World hellhole growing in the heart of Texas.

Colony Ridge sprawls across nearly 60 square miles — about the size of Washington DC — and is 40 miles outside Houston.

Much of CR is a 3rd world shanty town, where foreign flags outnumber American ones.

But how do we know that it's a hotbed for illegal aliens? Let me show you. pic.twitter.com/fKeucLI1FU

— Spencer Lindquist 🇺🇸 (@SpencerLndqst) September 18, 2023

Properties in Colony Ridge are sold by one William “Trey” Harris. Unlike other real estate entrepreneurs, Harris doesn’t require buyers to show the normal qualifications to purchase a property. They don’t need to present a Social Security number, proof of income, or a credit rating. That

See, earlier The Fulford File: Ann Coulter On Willie Horton, Joey Fournier—And What Life Is Really Like and Ann Coulter: Bush's Finest 30 Seconds—The Willie Horton Ad

The sight of the Great Replacement invasion at the southwest border should provoke outrage. It hasn’t, but it could, and in very much the old-fashioned way: with the same type of “Willie Horton ad” that catapulted George H.W. Bush into the White House, despite being behind Democrat Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the polls at the end of July 1988 [The Shadow of Dukakis Looms Over Biden, by David Catron, The American Spectator, August 7, 2020].

Think back to 35 years ago, when William Robert Horton, now 72, a convicted felon, commanded the national spotlight. That was due to an independently produced campaign TV ad aimed at Governor Dukakis for championing a weekend prison furlough program through which Horton committed additional felonies.

Horton had earned a prominent place in the annals of American crime on the night of October 26, 1974, when he and two accomplices robbed a gas station in Lawrence, Mass. One of the perps stabbed Joey Fournier, a 17-year-old attendant, 19 times and then stuffed him in a barrel where he died [35 years after Horton murder, victim’s kin carry on his memory, by Laurel J. Sweet, Boston Herald, October 26, 2009]. In May 1975, all three defendants were convicted of armed robbery and murder. Horton got life without parole. It wasn’t his first stretch in prison. He’d done three years in the slammer in South Carolina for assault with the intent to kill. Unfortunately, this time he had a way out.

In 1972, the Massachusetts legislature had enacted a law, signed by Republican Governor Francis Sargent, authorizing weekend furloughs to prisoners. First-degree murderers were ineligible, but the next year, the state Supreme Court decreed that they were. In 1976, during Michael Dukakis’ first term as governor, the legislature passed a bill overturning the ruling, but Dukakis vetoed it because it would “cut the heart out of efforts at inmate rehabilitation.”

Cut to a decade later. Willie Horton had received nine furloughs. The tenth would be his last. On June 6, 1986, a cop pulled him over for an apparent traffic offense. Rather than comply with the officer’s directive, Horton sped off, crashed the vehicle, escaped to Florida, and resettled in Maryland.

On April 3, 1987, he invaded the Oxon Hill, MD, home of an engaged white couple, Clifford Barnes and Angela Miller. He pistol-whipped and tied up Barnes, raped his fiancée twice, stole her car and drove away. The couple survived. Equally gratifying, Prince George’s County police arrested Horton after a chase and a shootout. He received two consecutive life sentences in addition to his sentence in Massachusetts [Debunking the Willie Horton Ad Controversy, by Carl M. Cannon, Real Clear Politics, December 9, 2018].

Michael Dukakis seemed unconcerned. He not only refused to tighten the requirements of the furlough program, but also declined to meet with, or even apologize to, the traumatized Maryland couple. He even attempted to stonewall a full-scale investigation of the program by the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, which eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts [Horton case linked newspaper and president, by Lisa Kashinsky, Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, December 6, 2018].

The Horton fiasco became common knowledge. In April 1988, during a debate on the eve of the New York Democratic primary, candidate Al Gore raised the

The hashtag #roman empire has reportedly been viewed over a billion times on TikTok, with most videos women asking men the question: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? The surprising answer: a lot. Feminist historian Mary Beard, of course, says it’s because of male chauvinism [How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Expert has thoughts on the new TikTok trend, SkyNews, September 27, 2023]. Well, here’s one reason to think about it: I believe the rise and fall of Rome coincided with the rise and fall of Roman intelligence. Rome fell because its people were becoming less intelligent. And the same thing is happening today.

Indeed it is! My new paper proving that dysgenic breeding and immigration caused the fall of Rome is causing all the right mutants to froth at the mouth with cognitive dissonance. https://t.co/5m8eN5Wipx https://t.co/patkSs61td

— Edward Dutton (@jollyheretic) July 26, 2023

Many theories attempt to explain the Roman Empire’s collapse. It was overstretched, meaning it could no longer efficiently transport the necessary raw materials. Or it came up against problems that its elite could not solve, leading to the populace losing faith in these elites. The problem with these explanations is that they invite obvious questions. Why did Rome gradually become less efficient? Why were its elites decreasingly able to solve the problems of running a large empire?

The essence of intelligence is “solving problems.” Group-level intelligence is associated with all of the markers of civilization: wealth, numeracy, education, democracy, social trust, obedience to the law and just authority, and, importantly good health and public hygiene achieved with plumbing and sanitation. (This is explored in the book Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, by the late Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.)

We would then expect civilization to weaken selection for intelligence because it reduces environmental harshness and leads to improved living conditions: again,

See also: VDARE Video Supercut: Everything That Was Said About Immigration In The GOP Debate

In the interest of saving everyone’s time, we provide a supercut and transcript of what was said about immigration in the second GOP candidates debate, held in California’s Reagan Library on Wednesday night, September 27. It’s only 15 minutes of the one and three-quarter-hour debate.

Perhaps significant of the new globalist Fox News, two of the three moderators were immigrants: Stuart Varney from England (I knew him slightly when we were both financial journalists in lower Manhattan in the early 1980s), and Univision’s heavily accented Ilia Calderon, described as an “Afro-Latina,” from Colombia.

My take after arguably sparking America’s second Thirty Years’s War For Immigration Reform in 1992 (yes, we’re a bit late):

• We have to admit the GOP has come a long way on immigration.

As late as 2016, ¡Jeb! was still calling illegal immigration “an act of love” and clearly planning a massive Amnesty. Now all GOP hopefuls say they favor border control. They’re probably lying, of course, but it’s undeniably different from 2004, when Dubya, having proposed a super-massive Amnesty/ Immigration Surge, was able to pretend to attack John Kerry from the right because no one grasped what he had done, as Steve Sailer documented in this hilarious column.

• But no mention of reducing LEGAL immigration.

Much less an immigration moratorium. This is somewhat disappointing because Ron DeSantis has in the past implied skepticism about legal immigration. But, again, he failed to use the issue to outflank the field, and Trump.

• In fact, Chris Christie lets the mask slip and tells legal immigrants “we want you here in this country.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial Page–type mindless immigration enthusiasm is not dead, it’s  just hiding.

• And Mike Pence conspicuously evaded saying he’d deport DREAMers.

Pence betrayed Tom Tancredo during the Bush Amnesty Wars, and he too has obviously just been hiding during the Trump years (although he has learned to talk a good line on the Border).

• However, an emerging consensus on ending Birthright Citizenship.

The enterprising if slippery Vivek Ramaswamy