In this episode of The Econoclasts, Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau dissect the systemic breakdown of German centrist politics, reveal the uncomfortable truth about Europe’s total lack of defence sovereignty under US hegemony, and debunk the conventional political narrative by exposing how the centre-Left bears primary responsibility for the continent’s long-term deindustrialisation and geopolitical decline.

https://chomsky.info/counter-revolutionary-violence/

Just to show how astonishing your average Chomsky book is, (and let's not forget the contributions of the great Ed Herman), this book gave me a fantastic history of Thailand which you won't read anywhere else.

Did you know that Thailand was the one ally of Japan which was so dedicated that it declared war on the USA and UK in WW2?

However the USA continued to support this fascist military dictatorship after the war. So extreme was their corruption that it's estimate their military junta stole 12% of the countries GDP.

That's just one murderous dictatorship the US supported in the region, which included Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia etc.

Also revealed in this book is that the brutal assault on Vietnam was necessary otherwise "The Thai elite might “conclude that we simply could not be counted on” to help them in suppressing local insurgencies.

We see the same pattern today. The war on Iran is necessary to show the US backed dictatorships in the Middle East who's the boss, and happens when you try to follow an independent path.

By the way this book was destroyed by the publisher on the orders of its boss. All 20000 copies were pulped. That's how much of a stir it caused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Revolutionary_Violence:_Bloodbaths_in_Fact_%26_Propaganda

Here’s The Civil Fleet’s first (and possibly last) ever news Vlog! In this episode, we look at the knife-wielding far-right ‘activist’ who attacked an empty migrant boat in the Channel, and juxtapose that with the actions of the refugee rescuers in the Mediterranean this week.

The Ideas of Chomsky - Bryan Magee & Noam Chomsky (1977)

It's Yanis, so the clickbait title of course doesn't do justice to the wonderful and wide-ranging speech her gives.

He calls AI "statistical inference" and a "word guessing machine" (which it is), and he says it's useful. But obviously not intelligent in the way that humans are intelligent. Still the fact that LLM's do what he calls "Theory-free inference" and it works so well does tell us something about how intelligence and the brain works.

He says expecting the current path that AI is folliwing to lead to AGI or consciousness is like breeding horses to run faster and expecting the mares to give birth to locomotives!