We explore real-life reformation here in this informed, online community.
If the contest is digital, the A.I. contestants look like whatever the computer artists design on their computers. They design something out of their respective imaginations – their best attempts at the epitome of feminine beauty.
For the 2024 “Miss A.I.” Beauty Pageant, some of the fake contestants look a lot like the photoshopped human fantasy-standard models that appear on beauty magazine covers. Some look like the Instagram fantasy-standard to which so many desperate female content creators are trying to conform. “Look at how beautiful I am on the outside!”
Some look like Bratz dolls. Some look mean. Some look jaded and miserable.
Why has our culture been pursuing a standard of human beauty that simply does not look human, or beautiful, or real? It's not because the airbrush, photoshop or A.I. technology can’t replicate photorealism. But real beauty is not someone’s exhibitionistic fantasy.
Who will decide the A.I. winners and set a new cultural “standard” of beauty? The organizers of the contest will be using some of the same A.I. algorithms which produced the digital images in the first place - as judges. And so we have artificial judges, artificial contestants, and artificial beauty for our artificial and confused culture. Who will be declared the winner? Who will be deemed the most beautiful?
Well, it will be interesting to see. Some of the designers, who don’t live and work on Madison Avenue or in Hollywood, seem to be sending a message. Less exhibitionism. Less of the sultry. Less makeup. Less immodesty. Perhaps this A.I. exercise will turn into a sincere quest for more natural and objective beauty. Below is one of the imaginary contestants from a real human computer programmer.
Putin has been consistent from the before the Military Operation that he simply wants to be left alone by NATO, the EU and the US. His terms for peace have been reasonable and have not changed.
Alastair Crooke:
"There are reports that Macron and Starmer agreed in a conversation that Zelensky must conduct some provocative operation [this week]
"--a false flag operation or a provocative attack into Russia, into the depth of Russia or something else--sufficient to create an absolute pressure on Putin to respond, and thus to destroy the meeting altogether, to stop the meeting taking place.
"The Europeans are terrified of the [Alaska] meeting taking place [on Friday] and they want to stop it. I believe the Russians have probably picked up on it, suggesting that there is going to be an attempt to create some incident, some security catastrophe, that creates the impossibility of following up on this meeting. And the Euros are trying to insert Zelensky into Alaska, whether invited or ...
"For four hundred years, Americans lived in a world wherein your brother, your neighbor, your town and region were your responsibility. And where you yourself, could do anything under the commodious carapace of the King of Kings.
"More than anything, the CIA wanted Christianity destroyed; it bred self-determination and strength. Under MKUltra, and mostly at Stanford’s Research Center, using the flower children and rock scene of L.A. and San Francisco, they figured out how to ruin human potential.
"In fact, they called it the human potential movement, in a typical inversion of reality. What it did was celebrate and encourage your worst impulses, praise your degradation, tell you that weakness is your strength, supplant your heritage with the heritage of foreign faiths and experimental practices."
Elizabeth Nickson
"Donald Trump doesn’t understand what (Russian Defense Official) Medvedev tweeted. Medvedev was telling Trump to knock it off with the dangerous threats, saying that if you do this, America can end up looking like the walking dead because of the Dead Hand.
"The Dead Hand is a reference to the perimeter system, which is a defensive system put in place by the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. So that if they are ever struck preemptively by the United States—a first strike, by the way, the tactic to be used in a first strike is to bring the Ohio-class submarines close to Russia’s shores, fire off their Trident missiles on a flattened trajectory to avoid detection so you can strike the targets quicker, which is what Trump just actually appeared to order the U.S. Navy to do. So, the Dead Hand now becomes a factor, because if Trump is dumb enough to launch an attack against Russia, the Dead Hand (the defensive perimeter system) will ensure that all of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces ...
