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.
Any investment in bioscience research comes with 100% risk because one never knows if a particular strategy will produce beneficial outcomes.
Publicly traded pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and the only sure way to generate profits is through regulatory capture.
So Big Pharma just lies about its products and buys off the regulators (and the politicians and the media) every time.
The biggest profits come from giving a drug to the entire population in the name of preventive care — vaccines and now statins.
By pathologizing natural human emotions, the makers of psychopharmaceuticals also seek to sell treatments to nearly the entire population.
Causing harm increases profits by 100x or more (a single injury can produce a lifetime of profitable treatments).
Said simply, causing harm and disease massively increases the size of the market for pharmaceutical products so that’s Big Pharma’s business model today.
Dr. Toby Rogers
The “Putin apologist” smear is as omnipresent today as the same kind of smear was in 2002 in the US, deployed against anyone who questioned the wisdom of the coming war on Iraq. It’s designed to shut down thought. As usual, Hungary is the one dissenter from the EU consensus.
Rod Dreher
The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:
First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.
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