Adonis Diaries

Tidbits and Notes. Part 253

Note: My previous large file titled “Tidbits and notes. Part 211” has vanished after I pressed Leave instead of Cancel. WordPress,com support system was of No help. If you know how I can retrieve the file, I’ll be very appreciative.

Legal Artifial Intelligence AI beat out lawyers in a robot-human face-off. The bots found more flaws in legal documents than the humans, in a fraction of the time.

Archaeologists want us to believe that the Phoenician empires began around 1,300 BC.   I conjecture that any ruins around the Mediterranean basin, England and Scandinavia that were built with megalithic stones, as big as those in Baalbak in Lebanon,  are from a species originating from the eastern shore with the same set of Gods, some 7,000 years ago

The USA: No longer the center of human rights and values. Both political parties obey the requirements of the weapons industrial complexes

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have bought out more than 500 competitors in the last 10 years, and thus benefiting from an outdated definition of monopoly.

I get bored reading the myths in the religious Books. Would prefer hearing the stories from the sources: Those funny verbal story tellers, with great humor, a wink and a twinkle in their eyes

There is no such “Arab civilization”: it is the civilization of the people in the Middle-East (Syria, Iran, Egypt…) within the Islamic Empire. That the commanders of armies were selected from the “elite classes” in Mecca and Medina do Not constitute a civilization

You have these Lebanese who say: “Just show me a single event where Saudi Kingdom was Not good to Lebanon”. As if in the history of Lebanon pseudo-State ever took a position that dissatisfied the the Saudi mind-set

British police are using the “The Long Ranger” to catch phone-using drivers from half a mile away.

Japan’s cybersecurity minister, Yoshitaka Sakurada, 68, admitted as much in parliament that he hadn’t heard of USB sticks.

The IRS tax agency collected $4.7 billion in bags of cash from legal cannabis firms, most of which can’t open bank accounts.

Taste can’t be copyrighted. The EU made this ruling after cheesemaker Levola sued competitor Smilde over a suspiciously similar spreadable cheese.

When someone tells us a certain kind of person is dangerous, we’re too eager to believe our xenophobic instincts. We work ourselves into a frenzy over a small injustice, but stand by when the big scam gets done right in front of our eyes.

And we don’t like being wrong. Hence the paradox, the corner we’ve painted ourselves into: We need to believe, we want to believe, we benefit from believing. We can’t function without news and connection and forward motion. But, we don’t like to be proven wrong.

Non-belief doesn’t help, because we can’t make forward motion without any set of belief system. No society works without trust and optimism. Which leads us to the cost of agency and the cost of freedom: the responsibility of believing in things that work. We received leverage and the price is responsibility.