The CIA-ran Project MKULTRA and paid Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron for Subproject 68 (1957 – 1964) . Cameron was to conduct experiments involving mind-altering substances. The goal was to probe examination into methods of influencing and controlling the mind and being able to extract information from resisting minds.
Cameron took patients admitted to his Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal and conducted “therapy” on them. The patients were mostly taken in for issues like bipolar depression and anxiety disorders. The treatment they received was life-altering and scarring.
Cameron administered electroconvulsive therapy at 30-40 times the normal power. He would put patients into a drug-induced coma for months on-end and playback tapes of simple statements or repetitive noises over and over again.
The victims forgot how to talk, forgot about their parents, and suffered serious amnesia.
And all of this was performed on Canadian citizens because the CIA wasn’t willing to risk such operations on Americans.
To ensure that the project remained funded, Cameron, in one scheme, took his experiments upon admitted children and in one situation had the child engage in sex with high-ranking government officials and film it.
Mustard Gas Tested on Soldiers via Involuntary Gas Chambers.
As bio-weapon research intensified in the 1940’s, officials also began testing its repercussions and defenses on the Army itself. In order to test the effectiveness of various bio-weapons, officials were known to have sprayed mustard gas and other skin-burning, lung-ruining chemicals, like Lewisite, on soldiers without their consent or knowledge of the experiment happening to them.
They also tested the effectiveness of gas masks and protective clothing by locking soldiers in a gas chamber and exposing them to mustard gas and lewisite, evoking the gas chamber image of Nazi Germany.
EFFECTS OF LEWISITE: Lewisite is a gas that can easily penetrate clothing and even rubber. Upon contact with the skin, the gas immediately causes extreme pain, itching, swelling and even a rash.
Large, fluid-filled blisters develop 12 hours after exposure in the form of intensely severe chemical burns. And that’s just skin contact with the gas.
Inhaling of the gas causes a burning pain in the lungs, sneezing, vomiting, and pulmonary edema.
EFFECTS OF MUSTARD GAS: There are no Symptoms until about 24 hours after exposure. Mustard Gas has mutagenic and carcinogenic properties that have killed many subjected to it. Its primary effects include severe burns that turn into yellow-fluid-leaking boils over a period of time.
Although treatment is available, Mustard Gas burns heal very, very slowly and are extremely painful.
The burns the gas leaves on the skin are sometimes irreparable.
It was also rumored that along with the soldiers, patients at VA hospitals were being used as guinea pigs for medical experiments involving bio-warfare chemicals, but that all experiments were changed to be known as “observations” to ward off suspicions
U.S. Grants Immunity to Involuntary-Surgery Monster.
As head of Japan’s infamous Unit 731 (a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II), Dr. Shiro Ishii (head of medicine) carried out violent human experimentation of tens of thousands during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.
Ishii was responsible for testing vivisection techniques without any anesthesia on human prisoners. For the uninitiated, vivisection is the act of conducting experimental surgery on living creatures (with central nervousness) and examining their insides for scientific purposes.Ishii was giving unnecessary surgery to prisoners by opening them all the way up, keeping them alive and not using any anesthetic.For a disturbing video about vivisection, please go here .
During these experiments he would also force pregnant women to abort their babies.He subjected his prisoners to change in physiological conditions and inducing strokes, heart attacks, frostbite, and hypothermia. Ishii considered these subjects “logs”.
Following imminent defeat in 1945, Japan blew up the Unity 731 complex and Ishii ordered all the remaining “logs” to be executed. Not soon after, Ishii was arrested. And then, the respected General Douglas McArthur allegedly struck a deal with Ishii. If the U.S. granted Ishii immunity from his crimes, he must exchange all germ warfare data based on human experimentation.
So Ishii got away with his crimes because the US became interested in the results of his research.While not directly responsible for these acts, the actions of the American government certainly illustrated it was more than willing to condone human torture for advancements in biological warfare that could kill even more people.Ishii remained alive until 1959, performing research into bio-weaponry and probably thinking up more plans to annihilate people in different ways to his dying day.
Deadly Chemical Sprays on American Cities.
The U.S. tends to test out worse-case scenarios by getting to them first. With the advent of biochemical warfare in the mid 20th century, the Army, CIA and government conducted a series of warfare simulations upon American cities to see how the effects would play out in the event of an actual chemical attack.They conducted the following air strikes/naval attacks:
1. The CIA released a whooping-cough virus on Tampa Bay, using boats, and so caused a whooping-cough epidemic. 12 people died.-
2. The Navy sprayed San Francisco with bacterial pathogens and in consequence many citizens developed pneumonia.3.
Upon Savannah, GA and Avon Park, FL, the army released millions of mosquitoes in the hopes they would spread yellow fever and dengue fever. The swarm left Americans struggling with fevers, typhoid, respiratory problems, and the worst, stillborn children.Even worse was that after the swarm, the Army came in disguised as public health workers. Their secret intention the entire time they were giving aid to the victims was to study and chart-out the long-term effects of all the illnesses they were suffering.
US Infects Guatemalans With syphilis STD
In the 1940’s, with penicillin as an established cure for syphilis, the US decided to test out its effectiveness on Guatemalan citizens.To do this, they used infected prostitutes and let them loose on unknowing prison inmates, insane asylum patients and soldiers.When spreading the disease through prostitution didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, they instead went for the inoculation route.
Researchers poured syphilis bacteria onto mens’ penises and on their forearms and faces. In some cases, they even inoculated the men through spinal punctures.After all the infections were transmitted, researchers then gave most of the subjects treatment, although as many as 1/3 of them could have been left untreated, even if that was the intention of the study in the first place.
On October 1, 2010, Hillary Clinton apologized for the events and new research has gone on to see if anyone affected is still alive and afflicted with syphilis. Since many subjects never got penicillin, its possible and likely that someone spread it to future generations.
6. Harness the power of the atomic bomb.
While testing out and trying to harness the power of the atomic bomb, U.S. scientists also secretly tested the bomb’s effects on humans. During the Manhattan Project, which gave way to the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. scientists resorted to secret human testing via plutonium injection on 18 unsuspecting, non-consenting patients.
This test included injecting soldiers with micrograms of plutonium for Project Oak Ridge along with later injecting three patients at a Chicago hospital. Imagine you’re an admitted patient, helpless in a hospital bed, assuming that nothing is wrong when the government suddenly appears and puts weapons-grade plutonium in your blood.Out of the 18 patients, who were known only by their code-names and numbers at the time, only 5 lived longer than 20 years after injection.
Along with plutonium, researchers also had fun with uranium. At a Massachusetts hospital, between 1946 and 1947, Dr. William Sweet injected 11 patients with uranium. He was funded by the Manhattan Project.And in exchange for the uranium he received from the government, he would keep dead tissue from the body of the people he killed for scientific analysis on the effects of uranium exposure.To the left is a video on the Manhattan Project.
7. Injected Prisoners with Agent Orange
Americans used Agent Orange as a biological warfare during Vietnam. It was used on Americans, VOLUNTARILY injected into people for “testing” purposes… with the help of a very popular American company Dow Chemical Company.
The US Army, and Johnson & Johnson, Dr. Albert Kligman used prisoners as subjects in what was deemed “dermatological research”. The dermatology aspect was testing out product the effects of Agent Orange on the skin.
For the effects Agent Orange had on the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, please click here (WARNING images in this article may be extremely disturbing, as they include extreme human deformation, including that of infants.)Needless to say the injecting of, or exposure to, dioxidin is beyond monstrous to voluntarily do to any human. Kligman, though, injected dioxidin (a main component of Agent Orange) into the prisoners to study its effects.
What did happen was that the prisoners developed an eruption of chloracne (all that stuff from high school combined with blackheads and cysts and pustules that looked like the picture shown to the left) that develop on the cheeks, behind the ears, armpits, and the groin — yes, the groin.Kligman was rumored to have injected 468 times the amount he was authorized to.
Documentation of that effect has, wisely, not been distributed.The Army oversaw while Kligman continued to test out skin-burning chemicals to (in their words) “learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process” and test out many products whose effects were unknown at the time, but with the intent of figuring that out.During these proceedings, Kligman was reported to have said, “All I saw before me were acres of skin … It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.”8. Operation Paperclip While the Nuremberg trials were being conducted and the ethics and rights of humanity were under investigation, the U.S. was secretly taking in Nazi scientists and giving them American identities.
Under Operation Paperclip, named so because of the paperclips used to attach the scientists’ new profiles to their US personnel pages…N***s worked in the infamous human experiments (which included surgically grafting twins to each other and making then conjoined, removing nerves from people’s bodies without anesthetic, and testing explosion-effects on them) in Germany brought over their talents to work on a number of top-secret projects for the US.
Given then-President Truman’s anti-Nazi orders.The project was kept under wraps and the scientists received faked political biographies, allowing these monsters to live on not only American soil, but as free men.So while it was not direct experimentation, it was the U.S. taking some of the worst people in the world and giving them jobs here to do unknown, horrible experiments/research.
9. Infecting Puerto Rico With Cancer
In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads was sponsored by the Rockefeller Institute to conduct experiments in Puerto Rico. He infected Puerto Rica citizens with cancer cells, presumably to study the effects. Thirteen of them died.The accusations stem from a note Cornelius wrote:“The Porto Ricans (sic) are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere… I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more… All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.”
Cornelius became vice-president of the American Cancer Society.
10. Pentagon Treats Black Cancer Patients with Extreme Radiation. In the 60’s, the Department of Defense performed a series of irradiation experiments on non-consenting, poor, African-American cancer patients. They were told they would be receiving treatment, but they weren’t told it would be the “Pentagon” type of treatment: meaning to study the effects of high level radiation on the human body.To avoid litigation, forms were signed only with initials so that the patients would have no way to get back at the government.In a similar case, Dr. Eugene Saenger, funded by the Defense Atomic Support Agency (fancy name), conducted the same procedure on the same type of patients.The poor, black Americans received about the same level of radiation as 7500 x-rays to their chest would, which caused intense pain, vomiting and bleeding from their nose and ears. At least 20 of the subjects died.
11. Operation Midnight Climax
Operation Midnight Climax involved safe houses in New York and San Fransisco, built for the sole purpose to study LSD effects on non-consenting individuals.But in order to lure the individuals there, the CIA made these safe houses out to be, wait for it, Brothels. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll lured “clients” back the houses.Instead of having sex with them, though, they dosed them with a number of substances, most famously LSD. This also involved extensive use of marijuana.
The experiments were monitored behind a two-way mirror, kind of like a sick, twisted peep show. It’s alleged that the officials who ran the experiments described them as…” it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and bidding of the All-highest?”The most horrifying part was the idea of dosing non-consenting adults with drugs they couldn’t possibly know the effects of. Embedded is a video of a soldier talking about Operation Midnight Climax and his experiences with the C.I.A. and the U.S. Government.
12. Fallout Radiation on Unsuspecting Pacific Territories.
After unleashing hell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States embarked on numerous thermonuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in response to increased Soviet bomb activity. They were intended to be a secret affair. However, this secrecy would fail.
Detonated in 1954 over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Castle Bravo was the most powerful nuclear device the US ever set off. What they didn’t expect was for the fallout from the blast to inadvertently be blown up wind onto nearby residents of other islands. The suffering included birth defects and radiation sickness.The effects were greater felt in later years when many children whose parents were exposed to the fallout developed thyroid cancer and neoplasms.
This created Project 4.1, a study to examine the effects of radiation fallout on human beings. Essentially,it was the latest in a long string of studies where humans act as guinea pigs without giving consent and a project remembered by the US as a way to gather data that would otherwise be unobtainable.
The US moral standard that history best remembers is that even though the radiation fallout on the people of the Marshall Islands was an accident, it might as well have been intended.In addition, perhaps as nature’s way of adding insult to injury, a Japanese fishing boat was caught in the fallout. The fishermen all fell ill and one died, making the Japanese livid that the US was still affecting them with nuclear devices.
Tuskegee
The recent uncovering of the US exposing Guatemalans to syphilis brings back to mind this infamous study. In between 1932 and 1972, researchers recruited 400 black sharecroppers in Tuskegee, Alabama to study the natural progression of syphilis. But the scientists never told the men they had syphilis.Instead, they went around believing that they were being treated for “bad blood” disease as researchers used them to find out the extent of syphilis symptoms and effects.I
n 1947, penicillin became the standard cure for syphilis. But along with withholding information about the disease, scientists also “forgot” to tell their subjects that what they were being treated for had a cure.The study continued for nearly 30 years more.
Once it was discovered, the backlash to the study was so fierce that President Bill Clinton made formal apology, stating he was sorry that the government “orchestrated a study that was so racist”. Sadly enough, it would be horrific, but one of the more docile evil human experiments ever conducted by the U.S. Government. Note:
La Terreur sanitaire s’installe en France : prison ferme pour violation des règles sanitaires
By Karine Bechet-Golovko . 28 mars 2021.
Plus que du Covid, les gens doivent avoir peur, désormais, de leur gouvernement.
La justice et la police deviennent le bras armé de ce système déviant, à vocation totalitaire, qui ouvertement lutte contre l’homme et non contre un virus. (Justice and police systems were meant to serve the statu quo of the power to be)
L’incarcération pour violation des règles de confinement n’est pas uniquement théorique : des gens, pour être allé au magasin ou être sorti prendre l’air, doivent passer 3 mois en prison. Ils en sortiront brisés.
Cette Terreur sanitaire remplit in fine deux objectifs : écraser psychiquement les résistants au nouveau dogme mortifère et faire peur au reste de la population.
L’on aurait pu penser que l’inscription d’un étrange délit de violation des règles confinement avec la mise en place d’un régime liberticide sous excuse sanitaire, au pays de Diderot, du libéralisme, des droits de l’homme, que ces excès normatifs sortis d’esprits malades resteraient lettre morte.
Notre culture aurait dû nous sauver de cette barbarie.
Il est triste de constater que la corruption des esprits est encore plus grave que celle des corps à l’heure covidienne, et même les corps de l’État ont sombré, encore une fois, rongés de l’intérieur depuis longtemps, le vernis a craqué, ils se sont effondrés.
Il ne reste plus rien de la culture politique française.
Les procès-verbaux pleuvent sur les « dissidents », ceux qui ont mal rempli leur autorisation de sortie, ceux qui ne sont pas rentrés à l’heure, ceux qui ont le masque trop baissé et risqueraient de respirer alors que les confinements s’enchaînent, pour finalement que le gouvernement ne déclare que prendre l’air est très bon pour la santé.
Mais la justice, elle, si l’on peut encore l’appeler ainsi, suit son chemin, elle condamne les prises d’air non autorisées ramassées dans les rues de notre beau pays par une police, qui semble être focalisée sur le terrorisme sanitaire.
Le 20 novembre 2020, à Dunkerque, la police renforce les contrôles, interpelle ceux qui n’ont pas une autorisation de sortie dans les règles et derrière la justice condamne les dangereux récidivistes. Qui sont-ils ?
L’un, 22 ans, trafiquant de drogue notoire, condamné à deux mois de prison ferme… pour ne pas avoir d’attestation de déplacement valable. (Non issue?)
Les interpellations sanitaires, vont-elles maintenant servir à compenser l’inefficacité de la politique pénale laxiste ? Ce jeune homme avait eu déjà 12 condamnations. Non, il paraît que ce sera une exception, car la dissidence sanitaire est autrement dangereuse que le trafic de drogue pour le nouvel ordre public :
« La condamnation à une peine de prison est une exception qui s’adresse aux cas les plus compliqués et aux casiers les plus lourds », précise au Monde le procureur de Dunkerque, Sébastien Piève.
Le second est en effet un cas également grave :
« Hakim S., un autre Dunkerquois âgé de 29 ans, a été arrêté le 12 novembre après un quatrième contrôle pour violation du confinement en quelques jours. Lui aussi a été placé en détention le lendemain, à l’issue de sa comparution selon la procédure de plaider-coupable. Il avait déjà été condamné à trois mois de prison ferme lors du premier confinement, en avril, pour les mêmes faits. Cette fois il a été condamné à deux mois ferme ».
Lui aussi est récidiviste – il enfreint régulièrement les règles sanitaires. Ça ressemblerait à du terrorisme sanitaire que l’on s’y méprendrait …
Et qu’ont fait les autres plus récemment ?
A 25 ans, Hakim est interpellé par les policiers d’Agde ce 9 mars, on ne traîne plus, comparution immédiate, trois mois de prison ferme pour avoir violé le couvre-feu en étant en voiture après 18 h … et avoir « donné des explications fantaisistes ».
Il avait déjà été verbalisé 3 fois, un dangereux récidiviste, il ne semble pas y avoir de délinquants plus dangereux ces derniers temps. Et le procureur confirme :
« Le parquet de Béziers continuera à faire preuve de fermeté à l’encontre des personnes ayant décidé de violer délibérément et de manière réitérée les règles sanitaires ayant pour objet de lutter contre la pandémie », affirmait le procureur Raphaël Balland.
Le pire, tenez-vous bien, est à venir.
Il est des salauds, des vrais, alors que le pays tremble, que dis-je, que le monde tremble de peur, qui osent vouloir fêter leur anniversaire et qui en plus osent aller au magasin pour cela. Ils mériteraient vraiment un camp de rééducation, mais la France étant une démocratie, ils seront simplement incarcérés :
« L’un des mis en cause est contrôlé par les gendarmes à Lure alors qu’il se rend dans un supermarché. C’est le jour de son anniversaire qu’il entend fêter avec un ami. Problème : l’horaire figurant sur son attestation de déplacement est erroné. Les militaires estiment que le document n’est pas conforme ».
Comme c’est un coutumier du fait, déféré devant la justice, qui sans états d’âme puisqu’elle n’en a pas, le condamne à deux mois de prison ferme.
Le second, c’est encore pire, il ose souffrir de la solitude en restant enfermé chez lui – alors que le bonheur intégral de ne plus avoir à se déplacer, à pouvoir tout faire de son canapé, à ne plus avoir la peine de vivre lui est accordée, il ose en souffrir – c’est indécent.
Un véritable déviant.
Condamné lui aussi ce 25 mars à deux mois de prison ferme. L’ on ne plaisante pas avec l’ordre public et le procureur ni le juge n’ont le temps de l’humanisme, voire simplement du bon sens – de toute manière, ce serait beaucoup trop dangereux en ce moment pour leur carrière et leurs nuits de sommeil :
« Le procureur de la République a pointé une difficulté à respecter le cadre légal pour l’un, une défiance à l’égard des gendarmes et de l’institution judiciaire pour l’autre. Le magistrat a demandé, pour chacun d’eux, des peines de deux mois de prison ferme. Des réquisitions suivies par le tribunal ».
La défiance se paie, elle se paie cher ! Car qui sait jusqu’où l’on pourrait aller sinon …
L’ on appréciera, dans tous ces cas, la parfaite retenue des médias, de ces journalistes qui doivent préserver l’illusion d’informer, sans rien dénoncer, sans jamais oser une critique, voire une réflexion qui pourrait interroger le bien-fondé de ces pratiques. Rien.
Une accumulation de mots sortis d’ encéphalogrammes plats, une légitimation sous couvert de neutralité. Ainsi, les médias, avec la police et la justice, sont devenus un des piliers de ce nouveau régime liberticide. Et comme les corps de l’État, ils ont chus.
Et la prison, pour des personnes qui ne sont pas des délinquants, est un excellent moyen pour littéralement broyer leur personnalité, leur résistance.
Citation du rapport de l’ONU sur l’effet du surpeuplement des prisons :
« La détention sape la dignité humaine, amoindrit la santé physique et mentale des détenus et compromet leurs perspectives de réinsertion ».
Or, les prisons françaises sont surpeuplées et les chiffres de mars 2021 montrent une aggravation de la situation :
« Il y avait 62 673 détenus au 1er janvier. La hausse a été de 1 129 personnes entre janvier et février. Avec 60 783 places opérationnelles dans les 188 prisons de France, la densité carcérale globale s’établit au 1er février à 105%, contre 103,4% le mois précédent.
Cette densité est de 122,7% dans les maisons d’arrêt, où sont incarcérés les prisonniers en attente de jugement et ceux condamnés à de courtes peines ».
Ce qui a valu à la France une condamnation par la CEDH en raison des conditions inhumaines de détention. Et les conditions de vie y sont vraiment déplorables :
« Au 1er février, 740 détenus étaient contraints de dormir sur un matelas par terre. Ce nombre, qui permet de mesurer la surpopulation, est en hausse depuis plusieurs mois (422 matelas posés au sol le 1er juillet, 587 le 1er octobre et 688 le 1er janvier) ».
Donc, l’on condamne à de la prison ferme des « délinquants sanitaires », alors que les consignes avaient été données de favoriser les libérations anticipées de véritables délinquants pour éviter la contamination en prison, dont l’on ne parle plus miraculeusement.
La seule explication logique, car il serait trop facile de toujours tout mettre sur le dos d’une incompétence chronique, est que de cette manière la Terreur sanitaire peut être organisée en écrasant les plus indisciplinés et en faisant peur à ceux qui oseraient la désobéissance.
Aucune dictature ne peut tenir sans terreur, la dictature sanitaire ne fait pas exception.
President Emmanuel Macron’s recent statement that a “memories and truth” commission will be established to look into the history of the French colonisation of Algeria, has led to much public discussion over this bloody legacy.
And in this context, the absence of apologies or offers of reparations by the French state has not gone unnoticed.
One area of particular contention in this process is the ongoing and detrimental effects of France’s nuclear testing in Algeria, (open air testings) conducted throughout the 1960s.
France conducted its first nuclear test known as the “Gerboise Bleue” in February 1960 in the Sahara Desert – an atomic bomb that was 4 times the strength of Hiroshima.
A total of 17 tests were carried out, four of them atmospheric detonations, and 13 underground.
Mustapha Khiati, president of the National Foundation for Health Progress and Research Development (FOREM) in Algeria, states that France had actually conducted 57 nuclear tests. In addition to the 17 tests, which are often mentioned, another 35 took place in Hammoudia in the Reganne region of the Sahara, and five nuclear experiments in In Ecker.
Nuclear testing continued in the region until 1966, four years after the independence of Algeria from French colonial rule, due to a clause in the Evian Accords which were signed by the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA).
The accords established the parameters for Algerian independence. The defeated colonial power demanded to be able to continue to destroy Algeria’s environment and poison its people.
At the time of the tests, around 40,000 people lived in the affected area, and the tests had a horrific effect on these communities. Many were impacted directly, while others were poisoned over time due to the radiation. In fact, 60 years after Gerboise Bleue, babies are still being born with illnesses and malformations.
The destruction caused to the land and animal species in the Sahara is also often overlooked. The radiation has caused a reduction in livestock and biodiversity as well as the vanishing of certain migratory birds and reptiles. The tests even led to the movement of sand dunes.
Algeria is still waiting to be told where the toxic waste was buried
“These nuclear tests need to be seen in the context of a cruel and inhuman colonial experience that was synonymous with expropriation, genocide, racism and pauperisation,” explains Hamza Hamouchene, co-founder of Algeria Solidarity Campaign and Environmental Justice North Africa.
Nuclear waste remains in the region with the French state refusing to take action to – literally – clean up its (radioactive) mess.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) called on the French government to take responsibility for the long-term damage that it has caused.
In a report last year, the Nobel Peace Prize winning group highlighted that, “The majority of the waste is in the open air, without any security, and accessible by the population, creating a high level of sanitary and environmental insecurity”.
In addition to all of this, Algeria is still waiting to be told where the toxic waste was buried, a demand that ICAN also stressed.
Jean-Claude Hervieux, a French electrician who worked on the nuclear testing efforts in Algeria told DW, “When we left Algeria, we dug large holes and we buried everything”.
Furthermore, doubt continues to shroud all the facts related to these and other colonial crimes committed by the French state as they scrambled to maintain power over Algeria, and later refused to even acknowledge the chapter in the country’s history.
Important archives pertaining to the 132 years of occupation are yet to be returned or made public, for example.
The list of colonial horrors linked to these tests includes rounding up Algerians from internment camps and prisons and tying them to pillars to analyse the impact of nuclear explosions on their skin.
The victims of France’s nuclear tests were not limited to Algerians (then and now).
The French government also faced backlash from former soldiers and settlers involved in the nuclear tests that were being conducted in Algeria. Veterans from the French colonisation of Polynesia have similarly since suffered the consequences of participating in these operations with little to no protection.
The French nuclear test veterans’ association Aven, forced the state to recognise the suffering caused to some 150,000 military personnel.
Despite decades of denying that the tests led to their infertility and illnesses, the government introduced a bill that would compensate these victims.
Algerians, however, are yet to even receive a basic recognition for the consequences of these events. Just one Algerian among hundreds has reportedly been compensated so far.
This all adds further clarity as to why Macron decided not to apologise or pay reparations for the colonial crimes committed by his Republic: Not only would the reparations be considerable, but they would involve generations of Algerians who continue to be plagued by the consequences of France’s desperate attempt to be recognised as a leading world power in the second half of the 20th century.
He offers symbolic but broadly irrelevant gestures, and makes sure to avoid anything that could impact France’s economic and political grip
As Hamouchene aptly stated, it’s not enough simply “denouncing these colonial and neo-colonial legacies, and raising awareness for the people whose health, bodies, land and livelihoods have been sacrificed in order to accumulate wealth and concentrate power […] we need to address these issues through a justice lens and through democratic and reparative ways (moral and material reparations)”.
Given Macron has chosen “truth” as a key theme within the commission on French colonisation of Algeria, whether he will completely avoid recognition of this dark chapter – among many others – is yet to be seen.
Nevertheless, let’s not hold our breath. Macron has been tactical in how he has approached the “reconciliation” that he has supposedly committed to with the Algerian state.
Returning the skulls of those Algerians barbarically killed for resisting French colonisation is meaningless in the face of the continued suffering and death of the earth, people and species in the Sahara desert at the hands of the same barbarians.
The French left no trace of their “civilising mission”, despite their claims. Only death and destruction. Without recognition and reparation, that legacy will continue to live on.
Note 1: No matter how loud are the current outcries, the activities of the administration of a “past” colonial power expresses its “pride” of having colonized other people. The administration reflects the “pride” of its people, of “past power” and its urge to rekindle that power in other forms and shapes.
Note 2: There is No logic in “political economics”: this Europe that experienced successive famine periods, still colonized people who had learned to decently survive under their acquired customs and traditions. Political economics is a fancy term for wicked Greed.
Malia Bouattia is an activist, a former president of the National Union of Students, and co-founder of the Students not Suspects/Educators not Informants Network.
Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk
Opinions expressed here are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of her employer, or of The New Arab and its editorial board or staff.
I tried to kill myself 2 years and a few days ago. There is no nice way to say that.
Today, I am where I need to be.
Two years ago, I was where I needed to be.
I was an insecure, close minded, alone and confused mixed girl with no one to relate to and no value for my life.
Today, I’m here now.
Rooted, driven,confident, joyful, black , alive and free.
If you happen to be where I was 2 years ago, remember: great reward often comes from losing everything/everyone you thought you needed and being pushed over a few more times, after you have had enough.
I picked myself back up and I know that it took me 29 years of being phenomenal for me to realize how phenomenal I am.
You will find yourself. Give yourself another chance
How you nurse your wounds after being pushed down determines how those wounds will heal.
My dad always used to say, “We appreciate more when we are required to do some actual work, babygirl, and those logs aren’t gonna haul themselves inside and down the stairs to that wood burner.”
cheers to growth, cheers to hard work and cheers to being alive my friends*
My grandpa to the right passed away at WakeMed due to a failed suicide attempt on grandparent’s Day last year, where me and my dad found him and had to go through a situation I would never wish on anybody.
My grandpa to the left is covid positive with multiple comorbidities, currently fighting for his life at a small hospital. He is not currently intubated, but because of his respiratory status we are leaning more towards having to put him on the vent in order to get him the hell out of that hospital (central harnett).
We are having a hard time trying to get him transferred to another hospital because they will only take him if we intubate and a lot of the beds are supposedly full…
And him being 82 years old and covid positive we wanted intubation to be a last resort.
Due to extreme confusion from the hypoxia, unfamiliar environment, isolation and probably many other factors, they have been giving him MANY sedatives including ones that could affect his respiratory and cardiac status as well as he is still PHYSICALLY restrained now for the second day …
I’ve had to beg for stuff that should’ve been done without me having to ask.
He was off the cardiac monitor in an ICU setting even though he was restrained and on bipap.
The excuse was that “he was pulling it off”…..
I’m sorry, but a PHYSICALLY/MEDICALLY restrained patient cannot pull off a cardiac monitor, so that was completely unacceptable.
Also the fact that he was discharged from my own workplace not once, but twice with how bad he was feeling is absolutely disgusting.
The no visitors policies and inaccurate communication has my mind racing with concerns of being able to ADVOCATE for our elderly population and provide EXCELLENT HOLISTIC care to them!
With all this happening within the last 9 months, I have had a really hard time this week processing things and trying to make decisions.
I love him so much and he has always brought so much joy and happiness to my life. I just want him to feel better
When the United States revealed in January that it is testing a more nimble, more precise version of its B61 atom bomb, some were immediately alarmed.
General James Cartwright, a former strategist for President Obama, warned that “going smaller” could make nuclear weapons “more thinkable” and “more usable.”
However, what is little known is that for the past 25 years, the United States and its allies have routinely used radioactive weapons in battle, in the form of warheads and explosives made with depleted, undepleted, or slightly enriched uranium.
While the Department of Defense (DOD) calls these weapons “conventional” (non-nuclear), they are radioactive and chemically toxic.
In Iraq, where the United States and its partners waged two wars, toxic waste covers the country and poisons the people. U.S. veterans are also sick and dying.
Scott Ritter, a former Marine Corps officer in Iraq and United Nations weapons inspector, told me, “The irony is we invaded Iraq in 2003 to destroy its non-existent WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. To do it, we fired these new weapons, causing radioactive casualties.”
The weapons were first used in 1991 during Desert Storm, when the U.S. military fired guided bombs and missiles containing depleted uranium (DU), a waste product from nuclear reactors. The Department of Defense (DOD) particularly prized them because, with dramatic density, speed, and heat, they blasted through tanks and bunkers.
Within one or two years, grotesque birth defects spiraled—such as babies with two heads. Or missing eyes, hands, and legs. Or stomachs and brains inside out.
Keith Baverstock, who headed the radiological section of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Center of Environment and Health in the 1990s, explained why:
When uranium weapons explode, their massive blasts produce gray or black clouds of uranium oxide dust particles. These float for miles, people breathe them, and the dust lodges in their lungs. From there, they seep into the lymph system and blood, flow throughout the body, and bind to the genes and chromosomes, causing them to mutate.
First, they trigger birth defects. Within five or more years, cancer. Organs, often the kidneys, fail.
At one Basra hospital, leukemia cases in children up to age 14 doubled from 1992 to 1999, says Amy Hagopian, a University of Washington School of Public Health professor. Birth defects also surged, from 37 in 1990 to 254 in 2001, according to a 2005 article in Environmental Health.
Leukemia—cancer of the blood—develops quickly. Chris Busby, a British chemical physicist, explains: “Blood cells are the most easily damaged by radiation and duplicate rapidly. We’ve known this since Hiroshima.”
Dai Williams, an independent weapons researcher in Britain, says the dust emits alpha radiation—20 times more damaging than the gamma radiation from nuclear weapons. The military insists the dust is harmless because it can’t penetrate the skin. They ignore that it can be inhaled.
Fast forward to 2003. When the United States re-invaded Iraq, it launched bunker-busting guided bombs, cruise missiles, and TOW anti-tank missiles. It also fired new thermobaric warheads—much stronger explosives with stunningly large blasts. Many of these, says Ritter, contained some type of uranium, whether depleted, undepleted, or slightly enriched.
Williams says thermobaric weapons explode at extremely high temperatures and “the only material that can do that is uranium.” He adds that while today’s nuclear weapons are nominally subject to international regulations, no existing arms protocol addresses uranium in a non-nuclear context.
While the U.S. government has cleaned up some contaminated sites at home—such as a former uranium munitions plant in Concord, Mass.—it has yet to acknowledge the mess in Iraq.
“Iraq is one large hazardous waste site,” Ritter says. “If it was the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency would declare it a Superfund site and order it be cleaned.”
Left behind in Fallujah
Fallujah (pop. 300,000) is Iraq’s most contaminated city. The U.S. military attacked it twice in 2004, and in the November siege, troops fired thermobaric weapons, including a shoulder-launched missile called the SMAW-NE. (NE means “novel explosive.”)
Ross Caputi was there with the U.S. 1st Battalion 8th Marines. He told me, “We used the SMAW-NE and guys raved about how you could fire just one round and clear a building.” Concrete bunkers and buildings were instantly incinerated and collapsed. The DOD was not disappointed.
Cancers in Fallujah catapulted from 40 cases among 100,000 people in 1991 to at least 1,600 by 2005.
In a 2010 International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health article, Busby and two colleagues, Malak Hamden and Entesar Ariabi, reported a 38-fold increase in leukemia, a 10-fold increase in breast cancer, and infant mortality rates eight times higher than in neighboring Kuwait.
Busby sampled the hair of Fallujah women with deformed babies and found slightly enriched uranium. He found the same thing in the soil. “The only possible source was the weapons,” he states.
These numbers are probably low. “Iraqi women whose children have birth defects feel stigmatized and often don’t report them,” says Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a Michigan-based environmental toxicologist who won the 2015 Rachel Carson Award.
Besides the cancers and birth defects, an Irish pathologist (who asked for anonymity) said an unusually high number of children have cerebral palsy (CP) near the city of Hawija.
“I was skeptical when Iraqi doctors told me, but I examined 30 and saw it was classic CP. I don’t know what caused this, but the increase is almost certainly war-related.”
It is often argued that uranium occurs in nature, so it’s impossible to link soil and other samples to the weapons. But, Ritter told me that when experts examine a site, they take samples, study them in a special lab, and can easily tell the difference between uranium that is natural and that which was chemically processed.
“The idea that you can’t link soil samples to weapons because of the presence of natural uranium is simply ludicrous. It’s done all the time by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency and within the nuclear programs of all major nuclear powers,” Ritter says.
Burn pits and toxic clouds
In addition to the weapons’ lethal dust, Iraqis and coalition troops were exposed to poisonous smoke from huge open burn pits, some stretching 10 acres. From 2003 to 2011, U.S. military bases burned waste in the pits around the clock—spewing toxic clouds for miles.
Two were near Fallujah. Caputi says,“We dumped everything there. Our plastic bottles, tires, human waste, and batteries.”
Rubber, oil, solvents, unexploded weapons, and even medical waste were also tossed into the pits.
As a 2008 Army Times article noted, Balad Air Base burned around 90,000 plastic bottles a day.
When plastic burns, it gives off dioxin—the key ingredient in Agent Orange, which caused malformations and cancer in Vietnam. Burn pits also produce hydrogen cyanide gas, Ritter says, which U.S. prisons used in their execution chambers from the mid-1920s until 2010, and which Nazis used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps. Moreover, pits burning uranium-tinged debris produce uranium oxide dust.
When U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) inspectors visited bases in 2010, they found much to criticize. Contractors running the pits—U.S. companies such as KBR and Halliburton—didn’t collect data on what they burned. (KBR said it wasn’t in their contract.) Few separated out toxic materials. Most burned plastics, although banned by regulations.
The GAO wrote that the fumes could irritate the eyes and lungs, damage the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system, and cause cancer, depending on how much is inhaled and for how long.
Troops breathed them 24/7 during their tours, which were usually one year. Iraqis breathed them for eight years.
The now-closed Balad Air Base burned up to 200 tons of waste a day, and many U.S. troops stationed there now have diseases that mirror the diseases suffered by the Iraqis. Some have already died from brain and lung cancers, or leukemia, says Rosie Torres, who started burnpits360.org, when her husband, an Army captain, returned in 2008 with severe breathing problems.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) x-rayed Captain LeRoy Torres’s lungs and diagnosed a disease of “unknown etiology.” When more veterans presented similar symptoms, the DOD asked Dr. Robert Miller, Vanderbilt’s Chief of Pulmonary Diseases, to study them. Dr. Miller told me,
“We biopsied 200 veterans’ lungs and found they had constrictive bronchiolitis, a very debilitating disease. The DOD didn’t like that we biopsied them and that we found the disease was caused by what they were exposed to—which included the burn pits. After that, it didn’t send us more veterans to evaluate.”
Even as evidence mounts, the DOD and VA steadfastly deny the health effects of the weapons and pits. The Defense Health Agency website states, “No human cancer of any type has been seen as a result of exposure to either natural or depleted uranium.”
Further, in a 2011 DOD report, Exposure to Toxins Produced by Burn Pits, the VA adds: “The effects from burn pits are only temporary and the negative health effects dissipate once a soldier is removed from the source.” In 2014, the VA website assured veterans that “So far, no health problems have been found in veterans exposed to DU.”
While the military admits it used DU in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, it has downplayed the extent. U.S. Marine Corps Captain Dominic Pitrone told The Washington Spectator, “The only weapons with DU in the USMC inventory were 120mm tank rounds.” As for the new SMAW-NE warhead, he said it “does not contain uranium.”
But Ritter says these claims are disingenuous.
Though other DU munitions, such as aerial bombs and 25mm cannon rounds, may not have been in the USMC inventory, they were still “available to and used by USMC units in Iraq.”
And while the USMC may not label the SMAW-NE and thermobaric Hellfire missile as uranium weapons, Ritter says that “this doesn’t resolve whether the shaped-charge warheads [inside them] make use of uranium-enhanced liners.”
U.S. coalition partners—such as Britain, which also used uranium weapons—echo the denials. So too do the WHO and the Iraq Ministry of Health, which concluded in 2012 that Iraq had fewer birth defects and cancers than developed countries.
But Hagopian says the ministry surveyed households instead of using hospital records. Finding this unscientific, a 2013 Lancet article called for a new study. Last November, the American Public Health Association asked the military to ban burn pits and fund research on their health effects. It also asked the WHO to rethink its conclusion.
Researchers tell of attempts by authorities to quash investigations.
In 1991, for example, the United States tried to keep the WHO from “surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers,” Hans von Sponeck, a former U.N. official, told the Guardian.
Karol Sikora, a British oncologist who headed WHO’s cancer program in the 1990s, told me his supervisor (who focuses on non-communicable diseases) warned him that they shouldn’t speak publicly about the cancers and birth defects “because this would offend member states.”
Similarly, Baverstock says, “I was on a WHO editorial committee and I warned about the uranium weapons’ geno-toxicity effect on DNA. My comments were rejected—probably because the WHO monograph didn’t include this.”
Those who persist fare badly.
Horst Gunther, a German physician, went to Iraq to study the spiking diseases. He saw children play with DU shells on Basra’s battlefield, took one to Germany to study, and found it was extremely radioactive. He told German authorities and was arrested for possessing it.
In 2003, Chief Justice Y.K.J. Yeung Sik Yuen of Mauritius, a delegate to the U.N. Sub-Commission on Human Rights, wrote of “the cavalier disregard, if not deception, on the part of the developers and users of these weapons regarding their effects.” After he refused to reverse his position that DU weapons are illegal and violate the Geneva Convention, the U.S. and Britain campaigned against his reelection to the subcommission. He lost.
Hagopian says researchers can’t study the uranium weapons’ effects because “the U.S. won’t fund the work.”
Why can’t the DOD, VA, Iraq government, and WHO come clean?
Ritter says, “The DOD doesn’t want the public to know about the toxic dust, because of the liability. As for Iraq, it will agree with the U.S. as long as it depends on the U.S. for financial and military support. As for the WHO, the U.S. contributes more to U.N. agencies and the WHO than any other country.”
Williams adds that there’s growing international concern about uranium weapons, since they’re radioactive. As early as 1991, Army Lt. Col. Ziehm warned in a memo that because DU weapons “may become politically unacceptable,” after-action reports must “keep this sensitive issue at mind.” In other words, don’t tell.
Media coverage of uranium weapons and the spiraling sickness has been meager. Malak Hamden said when she and colleagues published the 2010 Fallujah study, “CNN said something, but no newspapers touched the story.” A BBC reporter told Williams the public doesn’t want to know about uranium weapons.
In the meantime, the United States continues to build them. Williams notes that U.S. Patent Office records show Lockheed Martin and Raytheon hold patents for enhanced bombs and cruise missile warheads that include uranium options.
Today, with the U.S., Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Russia bombing Syria, and with the Saudis bombing and the U.S. firing drones into Yemen—with some of the same kinds of weapons unleashed in Iraq—it is likely that the people living there, along with fleeing refugees, will suffer just as the Iraqis and veterans have.
As Busby notes, uranium oxide dust is like a bomb that keeps going off. “People’s genes are damaged for generations. Scientists found this in 22 generations of mice, after Chernobyl. The only way mutated genes disappear is when carriers don’t have children.”
Barbara Koeppel is a Washington D.C.-based investigative reporter.
Performance criteria? Are we designing for mankind?
What could be the Human Factors performance criteria?
Note: Re-edit (Human Factors in Engineering, Article #38, written in March 31, 2006)
“Performance” is the magic answer offered by university students to questions like “What is the purpose of this course, of this method, of this technique, or of this design?”
Performance is what summarizes all the conscious learning in the knowledge bag, for lack of meaningful full sentences available in the language to express clear purposes.
It takes a couple of months to wean the students from the catch word “performance” and encourage them to try thinking harder for specificity.
There is a hierarchy for this abstract notion of “performance”.
The next level of abstraction is to answer: “What kind of performance?“.
The third level should answer: “How these various performances criteria correlate? Can we sort them out between basic performances and redundant performance criteria?”.
The fourth level is: “How much for each basic performance criterion? Can we measure them accurately and objectively?”
It seems that every discipline has created for itself a set of performance criteria and they are coined in stone, so that an insertion of another element into that set, is like a paradigm shift in its field of science.
If you prompt a business or engineering university student to expand on the meaning of “performance”, when supported by a specific example, it might dawn on him to spell out another piece of jewels such as: “max profit”, “minimize cost”, “improve quality”, “increase production”, “save time”, or “increase market share”.
In order to reach a finer level of specificity we need to define functionally.
For example, what “max profit” means? A string of monosyllables rains from everywhere such as: “increase price”, “cut expenditure”, “sell more”, and again “improve quality”, “save time”, or “increase market share”.
If we agree that profit is a function of market share, price, expenditure, added values of products, and marketing services then we can understand what could be the basic criteria and which criteria dependent on the basic ones.
How can a business improve performance?
How can it make profit or cut costs?
Should the firm layoff redundant employees, force early retirement, dip in insurance funds, contract out product parts and administrative processes, eliminate training programs, scrap off the library or continuing learning facilities,…
Or streamline the design process, reduce advertising money, abridge break times in duration or frequency, cut overhead expenses such as control lighting and comfort of the working environment, stop investing in new facilities…
Or firing skilled workers, settling consumer plaintiffs out of court, searching for tax loopholes, or engineering financial statements?
How can a business increase its market share? How can it survive competitors and continually flourish?
How can a firm improve products for the quality minded engineers?
Should it invest on the latest technological advancements in equipment, machines, and application software, or should it select the best mind among the graduates…
Or should it establish a continuing education program with adequate learning facilities, or should it encourage its engineers to experiment and submit research papers, or should it invest on market research to know the characteristics of its customers…
Or should it built in safety in the design process, or perform an extensive analysis of the foreseeable misuses of its products or services, the type of errors generated in the functioning and operation of its products and their corresponding risks on health of the users, or manage properly employees’ turnover…
Or care about the safety and health of its skilled and dedicated workers, or ordering management to closely monitor the safety and health standards applied in the company?
At the first session of my course “Human factors in engineering” I ask my class: “What is the purpose of an engineer?”
The unanimous answer is: “performance”.
What are the criteria for an engineer? The loud and emphatic answer is: “performance”!
At the first session of my class I repeat several times that the purpose of the engineering discipline is to design practical products or systems that man needs and wants, that human factors engineers are trained to consider first the health and safety of end users, the customers, the operators, and the workers when designing interfaces for products or systems.
At the first session I tell my class that the body of knowledge of human factors is about finding practical design guidelines based on the capabilities and limitations of end users, body and mind, with the following performance criteria:
To eliminate errors, to foresee unsafe misuses, to foresee near-accidents, to design in safety operations, to consider the health problems in the product and its operation, to study the safety and health conditions in the workplace and the organizational procedures…
And to improve working conditions physically, socially, and psychologically, and to be aware of the latest consumer liability legal doctrines.
A month later, I am confronted with the same cycle of questions and answers, mainly: “What is the purpose of an engineer?” The unanimous answer is: “performance”. What are the criteria for a human factors engineer? The loud and emphatic answer is: “performance”!
A few students remember part of the long list of human factors performance criteria, but the end users are still hard to recognize them in their conscious knowledge.
A few students retained the concept of designing practical interfaces or what an interface could be but the pictures of end users are still blurred.
I have to emphasize frequently that the end users could be their engineering colleagues, their family members, and themselves.
I have to remind them that any product, service, or system design is ultimately designed for people to use, operate, and enjoy the benefit of its utility.
Human factors performance criteria are all the above and the design of products or services should alleviating the repetitive musculo-skeletal disorders by reducing efforts, vibration…
And proper handling of tools and equipment, designing for proper postures, minimizing static positions, and especially to keep in mind that any testing and evaluation study should factor in the condition that a worker or an employee is operating 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and for many years.
I tell them that any profit or cost cutting is ultimately at the expense of workers/employees, their financial stability, safety standards, comfort, and health conditions physically, socially, and psychologically
Whereas any increase in performance should be undertaken as a value added to the safety, comfort, and health of the end users and workers.
Can we Not lose control over Artificial Intelligence?
Scared of super-intelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris — and not just in some theoretical way.
We’re going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, but we haven’t yet grappled with the problems associated with creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants
I’m going to talk about a failure of intuitionthat many of us suffer from.It’s really a failure to detect a certain kind of danger.
I’m going to describe a scenariothat I think is both terrifyingand likely to occur,and that’s not a good combination,as it turns out.And yet rather than be scared, most of you will feelthat what I’m talking about is kind of cool.
0:36 I’m going to describe how the gains we makein artificial intelligencecould ultimately destroy us.And in fact, I think it’s very difficult to see how they won’t destroy usor inspire us to destroy ourselves.
And yet if you’re anything like me,you’ll find that it’s fun to think about these things. That response is part of the problem.OK?
That response should worry you.And if I were to convince you in this talkthat we were likely to suffer a global famine,either because of climate change or some other catastrophe,and that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren,are very likely to live like this,you wouldn’t think,“Interesting.I like this TED Talk.”
Famine isn’t fun.Death by science fiction, on the other hand, is fun,and one of the things that worries me most about the development of AI at this pointis that we seem unable to marshal an appropriate emotional responseto the dangers that lie ahead.
I am unable to marshal this response, and I’m giving this talk.
It’s as though we stand before two doors.Behind door number one,we stop making progress in building intelligent machines.Our computer hardware and software just stops getting better for some reason.
Now take a moment to consider why this might happen.I mean, given how valuable intelligence and automation are,we will continue to improve our technology if we are at all able to.
What could stop us from doing this?A full-scale nuclear war?A global pandemic?An asteroid impact?Justin Bieber becoming president of the United States?
The point is, something would have to destroy civilization as we know it.You have to imagine how bad it would have to beto prevent us from making improvements in our technologypermanently,generation after generation.
Almost by definition, this is the worst thingthat’s ever happened in human history.
the only alternative,and this is what lies behind door number two,is that we continue to improve our intelligent machinesyear after year after year.At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are,and once we have machines that are smarter than we are,they will begin to improve themselves.
And we risk what the mathematician IJ Good calledan “intelligence explosion,”that the process could get away from us.
this is often caricatured, as I have here,as a fear that armies of malicious robotswill attack us.But that isn’t the most likely scenario.
It’s not that our machines will become spontaneously malevolent.The concern is really that we will build machinesthat are so much more competent than we arethat the slightest divergence between their goals and our owncould destroy us.
Just think about how we relate to ants.We don’t hate them.We don’t go out of our way to harm them.In fact, sometimes we take pains not to harm them.We step over them on the sidewalk.
But whenever their presenceseriously conflicts with one of our goals,let’s say when constructing a building like this one,we annihilate them without a qualm.The concern is that we will one day build machinesthat, whether they’re conscious or not,could treat us with similar disregard.
I suspect this seems far-fetched to many of you.I bet there are those of you who doubt that superintelligent AI is possible,much less inevitable.But then you must find something wrong with one of the following assumptions.And there are only three of them.
Intelligence is a matter of information processing in physical systems.Actually, this is a little bit more than an assumption.We have already built narrow intelligence into our machines,and many of these machines performat a level of superhuman intelligence already.
And we know that mere mattercan give rise to what is called “general intelligence,”an ability to think flexibly across multiple domains,because our brains have managed it. Right?
I mean, there’s just atoms in here,and as long as we continue to build systems of atomsthat display more and more intelligent behavior,we will eventually, unless we are interrupted,we will eventually build general intelligenceinto our machines.
It’s crucial to realize that the rate of progress doesn’t matter,because any progress is enough to get us into the end zone.We don’t need Moore’s law to continue. We don’t need exponential progress.We just need to keep going.
The second assumption is that we will keep going.We will continue to improve our intelligent machines.And given the value of intelligence —I mean, intelligence is either the source of everything we valueor we need it to safeguard everything we value.
It is our most valuable resource.So we want to do this.We have problems that we desperately need to solve.We want to cure diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer.
We want to understand economic systems. We want to improve our climate science.
So we will do this, if we can.The train is already out of the station, and there’s no brake to pull.
Finally, we don’t stand on a peak of intelligence,or anywhere near it, likely.And this really is the crucial insight.This is what makes our situation so precarious,and this is what makes our intuitions about risk so unreliable.
just consider the smartest person who has ever lived.On almost everyone’s shortlist here is John von Neumann.
I mean, the impression that von Neumann made on the people around him,and this included the greatest mathematicians and physicists of his time,is fairly well-documented.If only half the stories about him are half true,there’s no questionhe’s one of the smartest people who has ever lived.
So consider the spectrum of intelligence.Here we have John von Neumann.And then we have you and me.And then we have a chicken.
There’s no reason for me to make this talk more depressing than it needs to be.
It seems overwhelmingly likely, however, that the spectrum of intelligenceextends much further than we currently conceive,and if we build machines that are more intelligent than we are,they will very likely explore this spectrumin ways that we can’t imagine,and exceed us in ways that we can’t imagine.
And it’s important to recognize that this is true by virtue of speed alone.Right?
So imagine if we just built a superintelligent AIthat was no smarter than your average team of researchersat Stanford or MIT.
Well, electronic circuits function about a million times fasterthan biochemical ones,so this machine should think about a million times fasterthan the minds that built it.
you set it running for a week,and it will perform 20,000 years of human-level intellectual work,week after week after week.How could we even understand, much less constrain,a mind making this sort of progress?
The other thing that’s worrying, frankly,is that, imagine the best case scenario.So imagine we hit upon a design of superintelligent AIthat has no safety concerns.We have the perfect design the first time around.
It’s as though we’ve been handed an oraclethat behaves exactly as intended.Well, this machine would be the perfect labor-saving device.It can design the machine that can build the machinethat can do any physical work,powered by sunlight,more or less for the cost of raw materials.So we’re talking about the end of human drudgery.We’re also talking about the end of most intellectual work.
what would apes like ourselves do in this circumstance?Well, we’d be free to play Frisbee and give each other massages.Add some LSD and some questionable wardrobe choices,and the whole world could be like Burning Man.
that might sound pretty good,but ask yourself what would happenunder our current economic and political order?
It seems likely that we would witnessa level of wealth inequality and unemploymentthat we have never seen before.Absent a willingness to immediately put this new wealthto the service of all humanity,a few trillionaires could grace the covers of our business magazineswhile the rest of the world would be free to starve.
And what would the Russians or the Chinese doif they heard that some company in Silicon Valleywas about to deploy a superintelligent AI?This machine would be capable of waging war,whether terrestrial or cyber,with unprecedented power.
This is a winner-take-all scenario.To be six months ahead of the competition hereis to be 500,000 years ahead,at a minimum.So it seems that even mere rumors of this kind of breakthroughcould cause our species to go berserk.
one of the most frightening things,in my view, at this moment,are the kinds of things that AI researchers saywhen they want to be reassuring.And the most common reason we’re told not to worry is time.
This is all a long way off, don’t you know.This is probably 50 or 100 years away.One researcher has said,“Worrying about AI safetyis like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”This is the Silicon Valley versionof “don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”
No one seems to noticethat referencing the time horizonis a total non sequitur.If intelligence is just a matter of information processing,and we continue to improve our machines,we will produce some form of superintelligence.
And we have no idea how long it will take usto create the conditions to do that safely.Let me say that again.We have no idea how long it will take usto create the conditions to do that safely.
if you haven’t noticed, 50 years is not what it used to be.This is 50 years in months.This is how long we’ve had the iPhone.This is how long “The Simpsons” has been on television.Fifty years is not that much timeto meet one of the greatest challenges our species will ever face.
Once again, we seem to be failing to have an appropriate emotional responseto what we have every reason to believe is coming.
The computer scientist Stuart Russell has a nice analogy here.He said, imagine that we received a message from an alien civilization,which read:“People of Earth,we will arrive on your planet in 50 years.Get ready.”And now we’re just counting down the months until the mothership lands?We would feel a little more urgency than we do.
Another reason we’re told not to worryis that these machines can’t help but share our valuesbecause they will be literally extensions of ourselves.
They’ll be grafted onto our brains,and we’ll essentially become their limbic systems.Now take a moment to considerthat the safest and only prudent path forward,recommended,is to implant this technology directly into our brains.
this may in fact be the safest and only prudent path forward,but usually one’s safety concerns about a technologyhave to be pretty much worked out before you stick it inside your head.
The deeper problem is that building superintelligent AI on its ownseems likely to be easierthan building superintelligent AIand having the completed neurosciencethat allows us to seamlessly integrate our minds with it.
And given that the companies and governments doing this workare likely to perceive themselves as being in a race against all others,given that to win this race is to win the world,provided you don’t destroy it in the next moment,then it seems likely that whatever is easier to dowill get done first.
I don’t have a solution to this problem,apart from recommending that more of us think about it.I think we need something like a Manhattan Projecton the topic of artificial intelligence.
Not to build it, because I think we’ll inevitably do that,but to understand how to avoid an arms raceand to build it in a way that is aligned with our interests.When you’re talking about superintelligent AIthat can make changes to itself,it seems that we only have one chance to get the initial conditions right,and even then we will need to absorbthe economic and political consequences of getting them right.
13:44 But the moment we admitthat information processing is the source of intelligence,that some appropriate computational system is what the basis of intelligence is,and we admit that we will improve these systems continuously,and we admit that the horizon of cognition very likely far exceedswhat we currently know,then we have to admitthat we are in the process of building some sort of a God.Now would be a good timeto make sure it’s a god we can live with.
State of Emergency declared by Palestinian Red Crescent:
14 ambulances targeted by Israeli force
77 Palestinian youth fell by live bullet in a single day of demonstrations
Scores detained on administrative charges
PRCS Declares a State of Emergency following the escalation of the attacks against Palestinians and its ambulances in the Past 72 hours
(Al-Bireh-4/10/2015): PRCS declared a level 3 state of emergency in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in response to developments on the ground and increased attacks by occupation forces and settlers.
PRCS also activated its central Operations Room at its HQ in Al-Bireh, with all PRCS’ staff, teams and volunteers put on standby.
PRCS announced that fourteen attacks were carried out against its staff and vehicles by occupation forces and settlers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the past 72 hours, in a serious escalation of violations against PRCS, its teams and the humanitarian services they render.
Amid a worrying escalation of violence in the West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has declared a ‘State of Emergency’ following attacks against Palestinians and its ambulances over the past 3 days.
palestinercs.org|By Palestine Red Crescent Society
On Sunday the 4th of October, Israeli occupation soldiers attacked a PRCS’ ambulance in the line of duty in front of Al Quds University in Abou Diss, firing rubber bullets and tear gas grenades at it. (Palestinian university students are shared the uprising, possibly a third Intifada)
On the 2nd of October, occupation soldiers attacked an ambulance in Al Eissawiyeh to the North of Jerusalem.
They then proceeded to arrest an injured Palestinian from inside the ambulance.
In Boureen (Nablus Governorate), settlers prevented a PRCS’ ambulance from discharging its humanitarian duty and smashed its windshield.
The next day, 5 PRCS’ paramedics were beaten up by soldiers in Jerusalem.
That same day, another group of soldiers attacked with their batons another PRCS’ ambulance in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Also on the same day, occupation soldiers severely beat another ambulance crew in Jabal Al Taweel (Al-Bireh), wounding two paramedics.
They then kidnapped an injured Palestinian from inside the ambulance, firing tear gas grenades and rubber bullets at it.
PRCS underlines that these practices constitute a blatant violation of key IHL provisions, mainly the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the protection of civilians in time of war, which legally applies to the oPt.
This Convention affords protection to the personnel engaged in the search for, removal and transporting of and caring for wounded and sick civilians.
It also calls for the respect of human life and dignity in times of military occupation. In particular, such practices constitute a crying violation of article 63 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which states that recognized National Red Cross (Red Crescent, Red Lion and Sun) Societies shall be allowed to pursue their activities.
PRCS urges the International Community, represented by the UN General Assembly and Security Council, to shoulder their responsibilities by taking the necessary steps to make Israeli occupation authorities comply with IHL provisions, and to put an end to the targeting of civilians and their properties.
It calls on these parties to compel Israel to respect IHL provisions regarding the respect of medical and PRCS’ emblems, and recalls that the occupying power is obliged to protect emergency, medical and relief personnel and to facilitate their safe access to the sick and wounded. End.
Note:77 Palestinians injured by live, rubber bullets in 24 hours: Red Crescent
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says nearly 80 Palestinians have been injured from live rounds and rubber bullets in clashes with Israeli forces and illegal settlers in the past 24 hours.
Caution: Artificial Intelligence is a Frankenstein
In the late 1980’s, Artificial Intelligence programs relied on practicing experts in practical fields in order to extract the “How to, and how to go about when a problem hits the system” using a series of questions: “What if“. These programs were designed to foresee going many experts into retirement and the need to train new comers with the least cost and hire the minimum numbers of new employees.
Artificial Intelligence has progress and branched into many fields and this time around it is the professionals in labs who are designing the sophisticated software.
An open letter calling for caution to ensure intelligent machines do not run beyond our control has been signed by a large and growing number of people, including some of the leading figures in artificial intelligence.
“There is now a broad consensus that artificial intelligence (AI) research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase,” the letter said.
“The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable,” it added.
“Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.”
How to handle the prospect of automatic weapons that might kill indiscriminately, the liabilities of automatically driven cars and the prospect of losing control of AI systems so that they no longer align with human wishes, were among the concerns raised in the letter that signees said deserve further research
Roboy, a humanoid robot developed at the University of Zurich,at the 2014 CeBIT technology trade fair on March 9, 2014 in Hanover, Germany
Scientists and Engineers Warn Of The Dangers Of Artificial Intelligence
January 13, 2015 | by Stephen Luntz
Fears of our creations turning on us stretch back at least as far as Frankenstein, and films such as The Terminator gave us a whole new language to discuss what would happen when robots stopped taking orders.
However, as computers beat (most of) us at Jeopardy and self-driving cars appear on our roads, we may be getting closer to the point where we will have to tackle these issues.
In December, Stephen Hawking kicked off a renewed debate on the topic.
As someone whose capacity to communicate depends on advanced computer technology, Hawking can hardly be dismissed as a Luddite, and his thoughts tend to attract attention.
The letter was initiated by the Future of Life Institute, a volunteer organization that describes itself as “working to mitigate existential risks facing humanity.” The letter notes:
“As capabilities in these areas and others cross the threshold from laboratory research to economically valuable technologies, a virtuous cycle takes hold whereby even small improvements in performance are worth large sums of money, prompting greater investments in research.
There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable.
Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.”
The authors add that “our AI systems must do what we want them to do,” and have set out research priorities they believe will help “maximize the societal benefit of AI.”
Anyone can sign, and at the time of this writing well over a thousand people have done so. While many did not indicate an affiliation, names such as Elon Musk and Hawking himself are easily recognized.
Many of the other names on the list are leading researchers in IT or philosophy, including the IBM team behind the Watson supercomputer.
So much intellectual and financial heft may make their prospects good for conducting research in the areas proposed. Musk has said he invests in companies researching AI in order to keep an eye on them.
Musk worries that even if most researchers behave responsibly, in the absence of international regulation, a single rogue nation or corporation could produce self-replicating machines whose priorities might be very different to humanity’s, and once industries become established they become resistant to control.
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