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My dear friend, Avi Jorisch, has published another book
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Dear Colleagues and Friends,
I am delighted to announce today the publication of my new book NEXT: A Brief History of the Future (Gefen Publishing House).
“In the coming decades, planet Earth will undergo the unimaginable equivalent of twenty thousand years of progress. NEXT demonstrates brilliantly how we are in a position to fundamentally shape our destiny by leveraging exponential technologies to achieve our most sublime hopes.”
- Meir Brand, CEO Google Middle East
Star Trek–loving inventors who 3D print in space, vegan researchers who replicate the composition and chemical structures of meat in a lab, and mad scientists who save humans from terrible disorders by cutting and pasting genes like letters in a document. These are a few of the remarkable stories featured in Next, an in-depth look at the coming global challenges and the transformative innovations that will help make our world a better place.
Imperiled by hunger, pollution, and global warming, we are more at risk of driving ourselves into extinction than ever before. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Despite this existential crisis, we’re in an era of remarkable wealth and innovation that could allow us to fundamentally change our destiny—to cure the sick, feed the hungry, and help the needy.
Next tells the story of 13 inspiring innovators around the world who are already tackling these challenges and transforming our species. Call it Humanity 2.0. Every individual and venture featured in Next is having an outsized impact on human history. Their stories show what the future might look like. But most of all, they will give readers hope. As the science fiction writer William Gibson once put it: “The future is already here. It is just not very evenly distributed.”
I would be delighted if you considered purchasing the book on Amazon and leaving a review.
I’ll keep you posted on developments and media appearances—I'd be delighted if you’d spread the word about the book through your social media platforms.
With warmest regards,
Avi
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NEW PREAMBLE TO THE CONSTITUTION
"We the sensible people of the United States, in an attempt to help everyone get along, restore some semblance of justice, avoid more riots, keep our nation safe, promote positive behavior, and secure the
blessings of debt-free liberty to ourselves and our great-great-great-grandchildren, hereby try one more time to ordain and establish some common sense guidelines for the terminally whiny, guilt
ridden, delusional, and other liberal bed-wetters.
We hold these truths to be self evident: that a whole lot of people are confused by the Bill of
Rights and are so dim they require a Bill of NON-Rights."
ARTICLE I: You do not have the right to a new car, big screen TV, or any other form of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them,
but no one is guaranteeing anything.
ARTICLE II: You do not have the right to never be offended This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone -- not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc.; but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.
ARTICLE III: You do not have the right to be free from harm. If you stick a screwdriver in your eye, learn to be more careful; do not expect the tool manufacturer to make you and all your relatives independently wealthy.
ARTICLE IV: You do not have the right to free food and housing. Americans are the most charitable people to be found, and will gladly help anyone in need, but we are quickly growing weary of subsidizing generation after generation of professional couch potatoes who achieve nothing more
than the creation of another generation of professional couch potatoes. (This one is my pet peeve...get an education and go to work....don't expect everyone else to take care of you!)
ARTICLE V: You do not have the right to free health care. That would be nice, but from the looks of public housing, we're just not interested in public health care.
ARTICLE VI: You do not have the right to physically harm
other people. If you kidnap, rape, intentionally maim, or kill someone,
don't be surprised if the rest of us want to see you fry in the electric
chair.
ARTICLE VII: You do not have the right to the possessions of
others. If you rob, cheat, or coerce away the goods or services of other
citizens, don't be surprised if the rest of us get together and lock you
away in a place where you still won't have the right to a big screen color
TV or a life of leisure.
ARTICLE VIII: You do not have the right to a job. All of us sure want you to have a job, and will gladly help you along in hard times, but we expect you to take advantage of the opportunities of education and
vocational training laid before you to make yourself useful. (AMEN!)
ARTICLE IX: You do not have the right to happiness. Being an American means that you have the right to PURSUE happiness, which by the way, is a lot easier if you are unencumbered by an over abundance of idiotic laws created by those of you who were confused by the Bill of Rights.
ARTICLE X: This is an English speaking country. We don't care where you are from, English is our language. Learn it or go back to wherever you came from! (Lastly....)
ARTICLE XI: You do not have the right to change our country's history or heritage. This country was founded on the belief in one true God. And yet, you are given the freedom to believe in any religion, any faith, or no faith at all; with no fear of persecution. The phrase IN GOD WE TRUST is part of our heritage and history, and if you are uncomfortable with it, TOUGH!
If you agree, share this with a friend. No, you don't have to, and nothing tragic will befall you if you don't. I just think it's about time common sense is allowed to flourish. Sensible people of the United States speak out because if you do not, who will?
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My more liberal friend writes An insightful New Year op ed:
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NEW YEAR MESSAGE
Finding Hope for the New Year
Future historians may come to regard 2022 as a hinge in history, marking the end of one era and the beginning of another. Major war returned to Europe, with its attendant threats of nuclear strikes, and the door closed firmly shut on the U.S. policy of strategic engagement with China.
Yes, the past twelve months did bring some good news but, overall, 2022 brought more bad news than good news. For example….
Turmoil rocked British politics with three prime ministers in just two months while also losing the world’s longest reigning monarch.
The World’s Humanitarian Crises Deepened with some 32 million people around the world currently classified as refugees forced by circumstances to leave their countries. In addition, when the internally displaced—that is, people who have been forced from their homes but continue to live in their native country—are included, the number balloons to more than 100 million, the highest number in human history.
Inflation returned with price spikes driven by a combination of demand and supply issues.
Climate change Intensified as once rare extreme weather events became commonplace. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in April that the effects of climate change will soon become irreversible.
Israel solidly votes for a right wing government which has already sent up signals that it will flirt with racist laws and policies that could imperil the country’s democratic principles.
Yet there was also some good/hopeful news….
Iranians Protested and mounted the most significant challenge to the rule of the Ayatollahs since they came to power in 1979.
COVID eased as the world appears to have turned the corner on the first global pandemic in a century.
However, perhaps the worst/saddest news was Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine signifying that the post World War II phrase “Never Again” has lost all of its meaning. This was a return to the world’s historical position as a place where any one country can covet the land of another and, if desired, simply invade it, kill its citizens and declare said land as now part of the invading country. And, once again, the world lets it happen and wrings its hands in frustration instead of stopping the madman cold.
Given all of this, how do we approach 2023 with hope and optimism for our future and that of the world?
For an answer I turned to the former Chief Rabbi of England, Rabbi Dr. Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, who wrote
“Optimism and hope are not the same. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope. The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope.”
Notice the insightful distinction between optimism and hope. The charge here is to be active, not passive. The passive act is to be optimistic. But the active act, needing courage, is driven by hope so that attendant to that activity, one can actually change the world for the better.
All of us who share the concern for the future of humanity at this dangerous junction in world history, need to commit ourselves to be courageously active so that our hopes will be realized and we will each become instruments of that realization.
Let us commit ourselves as we close out 2022 and enter 2023 to be agents of hope, to use the talents given to us by our Creator, to make the world a better place so that our optimism will become reality borne on the wings of our combined courage.
May everyone have a year of good health, happiness and fulfillment.
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The FBI not Ray Milland.
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FBI Gaslights America Over Twitter Files
By Ben Weingarten
The FBI is gaslighting the American people over the stunning—if unsurprising—evidence that it engaged in a conspiracy with Big Tech to silence wrong thinkers in violation of the First Amendment, as the Twitter Files have revealed.
Meanwhile, in attacking those who refuse to be gas lit, the bureau is also telegraphing that it would respond to Congress investigating its hyper-politicization and weaponization with relentless information warfare.
The gaslighting comes in the preeminent law enforcement agency's "move along, nothing to see here" response to the Twitter Files. It stated that "correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements." The FBI, it says, "provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers."
Here is the kind of conduct the FBI wants you to believe is completely normal:
Grooming Twitter executives for months in advance of the release of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story to compel them to kill the story.
Referring myriad tweets concerning inherently political matters to Twitter's censorship team for purging—so many tweets, in fact, that during one such bulk censorship request, a Twitter employee described the review of the "possible violative content" as a "monumental undertaking."
Flagging specific Twitter accounts for the platform to take action against—up to and including suspension—apparently for engaging in thoughtcrime of promoting "civic misinformation" by making jokes related to the 2020 election.
Paying Twitter $3.4 million for its time and effort censoring Americans.
When a domestic intelligence agency is making repeated contacts with your executives about "content moderation," lodging specific censorship requests directly and via cutout—amid pressure from federal lawmakers to do the same—those "requests" start to look a lot more like demands.
The flimsy national security pretext used to justify the FBI's censorship requests, often targeting random, unpopular accounts, is equally outrageous.
The FBI used allegations of "foreign interference" as a cover to pursue domestic wrong think, as its 80-agent-strong Foreign Interference Task Force coordinated with Twitter. For their part, Twitter executives seemed to find scant evidence of such interference—a throwback to Russia Gate, and the targeting of the Trump campaign on the accusation advisor Carter Page was a Russian asset.
Authorities also apparently sought to treat "election misinformation" as a dire threat—a pretext perhaps more disturbing than the security apparatus' now-familiar crying wolf over Russian interference.
It's well known by now that the security state has linked skepticism over election integrity to "insurrection," and sought to cast skeptics as domestic violent extremists.
But that is only the beginning. Consider the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) position on this matter—one that the FBI seemed to embrace as it participated alongside CISA in meetings with Twitter and other Big Tech companies in the run-up to the 2020 election.
CISA has stretched its mandate of protecting election infrastructure to include targeting purported "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" regarding elections—that is, to combatting ideas it claims threaten physical equipment.
The agency's director, Jen Easterly, has said that "the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important."
In other words, thought policing is now a national security imperative.
Easterly has pledged that CISA will "work with our partners in the private sector," including social media companies, "to ensure that the American people have the facts that they need to help protect our critical infrastructure."
- After months of controversy, Elon Musk is now at the head of one of the most influential social networks on the planet, whose "tremendous potential" he has promised to unleash.
This is exactly what CISA did in conjunction with the FBI and its putatively private sector "partners" in 2020—before Easterly assumed her position.
This "cognitive infrastructure" paradigm is in keeping with President Joe Biden's National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which prevails today. That document calls for "Enhancing faith in American democracy" by "contend[ing] with an information environment that challenges healthy democratic discourse" rife with "disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media." The president declared in the strategy that he intends "to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence."
Given the security state's meddling with America's digital public square in 2020, imagine what it is up to now.
This brings us to the FBI's telegraphing of a relentless information operation to come. The bureau claimed, in response to the Twitter Files, that its collusion with Twitter was completely above board, and "conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency."
The agency, in other words, isn't in the wrong. You are, for pointing out its discrediting behavior. And what's more, as America faces a "dangerous pandemic of mis-, dis-, and mal-information," you may well be a contributor to domestic violent extremism, if not a terrorist yourself.
This echoes the FBI's messaging in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago raid, when it played the victim, while chiding critics of that unprecedented act and claiming they posed a threat to law enforcement.
Such a response can only have two possible explanations: either the FBI can't defend its behavior, or it genuinely believes that behavior to be legitimate.
Either would be disastrous for this country.
As evidence of FBI corruption continues to emerge, Senator Josh Hawley has said we need to "have a conversation about [its] future," and endorsed a Church-style Commission to investigate its activities.
House conservatives have demanded the next speaker establish such a panel.
Incoming House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) recently called for Congress to withhold all funds from the FBI until it can get to the bottom of the agency's collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans.
As such threats to bring transparency and accountability to the FBI grow, it and other agencies will get more aggressive in their attacks on critics.
Courageous leaders must prepare for an onslaught of information warfare aimed at discrediting them and their effort to bring to justice those in a security apparatus run amok—to seek the truth, unbowed.
A return to law and order in this country depends on it.
Ben Weingarten is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, fellow at the Claremont Institute and senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (Bombardier, 2020). Ben is the founder and CEO of Change Up Media LLC, a media consulting and production company. Subscribe to his newsletter at bit.ly/bhwnews, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
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Coal demand and usage is at an all time high. Biden blew it once again.
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