Friday, March 31, 2023

Trump, Indicted, Blames it All on George Soros, Billionaire

 Nadene Goldfoot                                              


 Moments after former President Donald Trump was indicted Thursday, he appeared to blame George Soros, the Democratic donor and Holocaust survivor. “Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace,” Trump said of the prosecutor who brought the charges in emails to reporters and social media posts. Bragg is among a number of liberal prosecutors backed by Color of Change, a political action committee where Soros is the largest funder. (JTA)  


Color of Change is a progressive nonprofit civil rights advocacy organization in the United States. It was formed in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in order to use online resources to strengthen the political voice of African Americans. Color of Change is a 501(c)(4) advocacy organizing with an affiliated political action committee.


Alvin Leonard Bragg Jr. (born October 21, 1973) is an American politician and lawyer from New York who is serving as the New York County District Attorney. In 2021, he became the first African American elected to that office. Bragg previously served as chief deputy attorney general of New York and as an assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York.

                            Soros's 2018 photo


George Soros  (born György Schwartz, August 12, 1930), now 92 years old in August,  is a Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist. As of March 2021, he had a net worth of US$8.6 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations, of which $15 billion has already been distributed, representing 64% of his original fortune. Forbes called him the "most generous giver" (in terms of percentage of net worth).  


Born in Budapest to a non-observant Jewish family, Soros survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary and moved to the United Kingdom in 1947. He studied at the London School of Economics and was awarded a BSc in philosophy in 1951, and then a Master of Science degree, also in philosophy, in 1954. 

💰  Invoking Soros is a go-to for right-wing politicians and activists that many see as rooted in the antisemitic trope of a moneyed Jewish puppet master. But Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer who was Trump’s counsel during his first impeachment, recently said it’s fine to criticize Soros because “he’s not much of a Jew.” (Forward)  I think many of us are indeed, smiling.  We know that Soros hasn't backed Israel, at least not that the public knows of.  


Resource;

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/who-we-are

DNA of Ancient Nile Area, Goshen Of Egypt

 Nadene Goldfoot                                        

What is of interest is northern Egypt from the Nile Delta area called  Goshen.  That's where Jacob and his family of 70 settled, and later where the Hyksos also lived. They had come from Canaan. 


Amarna, the city, in an isolated desert bay some 10 kilometers from the Nile, was the seat of power of Egypt’s “monotheistic” Pharaoh Akhenaten.  It's south of Goshen, however.  The Amarna Period took place at the end of the 18th Dynasty in Egypt between 1353-1322 BCE and refers to the reigns of pharaoh's Amenophis IV (Akhenaten), Nefernefruaten, Smenkhkare, and Tutankhamun,                          

What and where is Amarna? Amarna (Tell el-Amarna) can be found on the east bank of the river Nile about half way between Egypt's capital city of Cairo in the north and Luxor in the south.

Called a “heretic” by his own people, Akhenaten ruled a mere 17 years until his death in 1332 BC. The discovery of workmen’s burial plots of child slaves of biblical Egypt— built and deserted within 15 years — provide a window into his brief reign and the mores of the time.  Archaeologist Mary Shepperson, who previously dug with the Amarna Project, reported in The Guardian this week on the discovery of “the simple desert graves of the ordinary Egyptians who lived and worked in Akhenaten’s city and never got to leave.”  A further suggestion is that the North Tombs Cemetery may represent a captured or deported population brought to Amarna for labor. This is perfectly possible and would account for the lack of family contact and the apparent disregard shown for young life,” she wrote. “We hope that future DNA analysis of the bones might clarify the geographical origins of the North Tombs Cemetery skeletons.”  Since Akhenaton’s worship of Aton as ‘sole god’ is earlier than the date commonly ascribed to Moses (ca. 1280 BC), historians have puzzled over possible relationships between the monotheism of Akhenaton and the Biblical concept of one God. Sigmund Freud in his ‘Moses and Monotheism’ sought to trace the Hebrew-Christian faith to the Amarna revolt of Akhenaton,” wrote Central Michigan University’s Prof. Charles F. Pfeiffer, in his 1963 “Tell El-Amarna and the Bible.”

Aton worship (the sun) was not fully monotheistic (because the pharaoh himself was considered a god), nor was it a direct precursor of monotheistic religions such as Judaism.

Much of the extant correspondence between Egypt and its Canaanite vassals was found in the form of cuneiform tablets at Amarna. Beginning in 1887, Egyptian tomb raiders began digging up and selling the tablets, which were written primarily in the era’s diplomatic language, Akkadian.  Mentioned on the tablets is a people labeled the “‘Apiru” or “Habiru.” According to Pfeiffer and other scholars, the term, although similar sounding to the word “Hebrew,” was more of a social class descriptor for groups of lawless, landless people who live outside of cities and attempt to raid them.  Throwing a bucket of cold water on any possible Habiru-Hebrew connection, the late Tel Aviv University professor of Semitic linguistics Anson Rainey once said, “The plethora of attempts to relate apiru (Habiru) to the gentilic ibri are all nothing but wishful thinking.”  However, perhaps throwing this reporter a bone, he concluded, “The mention of DNA analysis is a hopeful pointer to what might be possible one day, when suitable facilities can be accessed in Cairo.”

Through DNA, are half brothers with mother's mt haplogroup M1a1, different fathers in Manchester Museum, their oldest mummies.  The study, which is being published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, is the first to successfully use the typing of both mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA in Egyptian mummies. This was in 2015 by Dr Konstantina Drosou, of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester who conducted the DNA sequencing.  

The DNA company that is the best for genealogy is ancestry.com, but they also do DNA studies.  Evidently many people are showing an ancestry to Egypt.  Are there sub-regions for the Egypt DNA region?

While there are not currently sub-regions under the main Egypt DNA region, there are some sub-regions and DNA Communities under the Levant DNA region that correspond to parts of Egypt. For example, if you have a strong genetic connection to the Nile Delta area, including Cairo and parts north, you may have the Levant DNA region with the Nile Delta sub-region.  Immigration directly from Egypt to the United States and Canada began in earnest in the 1970s. There were many factors that encouraged emigration from Egypt, but there was also a change to the Egyptian constitution in 1971 that relaxed rules for those who wanted to permanently leave the country.  This would not show ancient connections, however.  Work on ancient found bones and mummies are used for that.       

Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) has a Levant group of J2a-under L26. Some members are Jewish.    Ancient Egyptian mummies brought to life.   "The mummies came from an ancient Nile community, known as the Abusir el-Meleq. The team noted that their ancestry more closely matched modern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern individuals, rather than Egyptians.  Their complexions were thought to be light brown, with dark hair and eyes and no freckles. A press release from Parabon went into detail, saying: "These results are highly consistent with Schuenemann et al's conclusions that 'ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than present-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times' and that they had an allele for lighter skin.'"  This is thought to be the first time modern techniques have been used on human DNA of this age, with the trio of samples estimated to be between 2,023 and 2,797 years old. " That's not as old as our history, but it helps.  

CNN — 

Ancient Egyptians and their modern counterparts share less in common than you might think. That is, at least genetically, a team of scientists have found.

They discovered that King Tut had a DNA profile that belongs to a group called haplogroup R1b1a2. This group can be found in over 50 percent of European men and shows the researchers that there is a common ancestor.  This is my son's haplogroup, also called R-M269, I believe, who's father's line was from England.  Recent DNA analyses from the mummies of Tut and his kin revealed that the boy king's parents were siblings. Those results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in February 2010, pointed to the "heretic" king Akhenaten and one of his sisters as the mom and dad of Tut. But researcher Marc Gabolde said in a talk at Harvard University last week that he believes King Tut's mom was Akhenaten's cousin Nefertiti, who was Akhenaten's chief wife and the mother of six of his daughters.

There is a group of Levites with R-M269. This was unusual as mostly Levites would be from the tribe of Levi, and be J1.    

Three ancient Egyptian individuals were analysed for Y-DNA, two were assigned to West Asian haplogroup J and one to haplogroup E1b1b1 both are carried by modern Egyptians, and also common among Afroasiatic speakers in Northern Africa and the Middle East. The researchers cautioned that the examined ancient Egyptian specimens may not be representative of those of all ancient Egyptians since they were from a single archaeological site from the northern part of Egypt.  The Nile Delta is as north as you can get.  (J1 and J2 are the Y haplogroups of the Cohens of Judaism and also of many Arabs.  E1 is also common among Jewish males.)

Researchers from the University of Tuebingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, both in Germany, have decoded the genome of ancient Egyptians for the first time, with unexpected results.

Publishing its findings in Nature Communications, the study concluded that preserved remains found in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt, were closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from the Near East (Middle East), Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans.

Only in the last five or six years has it become possible to actually study DNA from ancient humans, because we can now show whether DNA is ancient or not by (its) chemical properties.”

Heat and high humidity in tombs, paired with some of the chemicals involved in mummification, all contribute to DNA degradation, the paper adds, but it describes its findings as “the first reliable data set obtained from ancient Egyptians.”

Analyzing samples spanning over a millennium, researchers looked for genetic differences compared with Egyptians today. They found that the sample set showed a strong connection with a cluster of ancient non-African populations based east of the Mediterranean Sea.  

Archaeologist Judith Marquet-Krause, ca. 1933. Source: Wikimedia Commons.  Her most notable accomplishment came in 1933 when she was appointed to lead the excavation at the ancient city of Ai and determine whether the Book of Joshua’s description of the city—as a royal Canaanite city conquered by the Israelites during the conquests of Joshua—was accurate. An early death cut short her promising career as an archeologist of Biblical cities.

Krause hypothesizes that ancient Northern Egypt would be much the same, if not more, linked to the Near East. Marquet-Krause was a pioneer among archaeologists who were born in Erez Israel and sought to learn the secrets of its past. She was the first archaeologist to manage so large an excavation team and to prepare the first reports in Hebrew.


In 2012, the 20th dynasty mummies of 
Ramesses III and another mummy "Unknown Man E" believed to be Ramesses III's son Pentawer were analyzed by Albert Zink, Yehia Z Gad and a team of researchers    under Zahi Hawass, then Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Egypt. Genetic kinship analyses revealed identical haplotypes in both mummies using the Whit Athey's haplogroup predictor, the Y chromosomal haplogroup E1b1a (E-M2) was predicted.


Two haplogroups, E1b1b and J, that are carried by both ancient and modern Egyptians. The subclade E-M78 of E1b1b is suggested to have originated in Northeast Africa in the area of Egypt and Libya, and is more predominant in Egypt.

The famous Hyksos were one such group that actually controlled lower Egypt from their capital at Avaris (Tell el-Dab‘a) in the eastern Nile Delta for a century during either the later Patriarchal period using conventional Egyptian chronology (ca. 1650–1550 BC) or the post-Exodus period in a revised Egyptian chronology (ca.1490–1340 BC). Non-Egyptian burials, architecture, and Canaanite style pottery from the site of Tell el-Yahudiya farther to the south (Tell el-Yahudiya Site with remains dating from the Second Intermediate to the Roman Period. A palace at the site dates most likely under Ramesses III. There is also a Hellenistic Jewish temple (temple of Onias) described by ancient authors and identified and excavated by Petrie.) also attest to the presence of so-called “Asiatics” (the Egyptian term used for Canaanites and other West Semitic peoples) in Egypt. Therefore, these mummies only confirm influxes of people into Egypt from the Levant and farther north early in its history. The Nile delta region of Egypt was probably a rich mixture of Egyptians and various immigrant groups at least as early as the time of Abraham (e.g., Bietak 1987; Wengrow 2006: 135–50; Bard 2008: 195–99).

(Genesis 45:1-26) Joseph spoke to his brothers in Egypt and told them that this was the 2nd year of the hunger years and there were 5 year in which there would be neither plowing nor harvest so they were to return to Canaan and bring back their father, Jacob.  "You will reside in the land of Goshen. and you will be near to me." Pharaoh said, I will give you the best of the land of Egypt and you will eat the fat of the land.  They had wagons for the small children and wives.  ..the best of all the land of Egypt--it is yours."  The Hyksos were never mentioned in  the Torah, so they must have come after Joseph's time.  

Resource:

 https://www.familytreedna.com/public/jewishr1b/default.aspx?section=yresults  

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/marquet-krause-judith#:~:text=Marquet%2DKrause%20was%20a%20pioneer,the%20first%20reports%20in%20Hebrew.

http://www.amarna3d.com/the-amarna-period/#:~:text=The%20Amarna%20Period%20took%20place,and%20Tutankhamun%2C%20see%20Figure%201.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-ancient-mass-graves-archaeologists-find-child-slaves-of-biblical-egypt/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarna

https://www.amarnaproject.com/

https://www.newsweek.com/ancient-egyptian-mummies-faces-dna-2000-years-old-1629706

Tanakh, Stone Edition, Genesis 45:1-26

https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/health/ancient-egypt-mummy-dna-genome-heritage/index.html

https://whoareyoumadeof.com/blog/what-is-the-egypt-dna-region-on-ancestry/

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/j-2a-4-levant-genetic-match/about/background

Thursday, March 30, 2023

How A Chabad Orthodox Jew Works With Artificial Intelligence (AI)

 Nadene Goldfoot                                              

                     World's largest computer chip:  The Silicon Valley is in a race to produce the best.  This company's idea is to go big.  

Tech leaders in the AI industry are Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak and others.  They are ALL worried about AI getting out of control.  They are calling for a major expansion of government oversight over AI.    What is Artificial Intelligence, anyway?   Artificial intelligence is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence of humans and other animals. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between languages, as well as other mappings of inputs.

AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search), recommendation systems (used by YouTubeAmazon, and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Waymo), generative or creative tools (ChatGPT and AI art), automated decision-making, and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go).

Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions. By the late 1980s and 1990s, AI research had developed methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.

Many of these algorithms proved to be insufficient for solving large reasoning problems because they experienced a "combinatorial explosion": they became exponentially slower as the problems grew larger. Even humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research could model. They solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments.                                        

     Department of Defense Using AI:  The Defense Department just updated DoD Directive 3000.09, Autonomy in Weapon Systems, which governs the development and fielding of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems. The core of the directive remains unchanged. DOD updated the directive due to advances in technology, changes in the structure of the department and changes in the security environment. 

What chances does government have with their own intelligence services to gain a hand over AI, the most profound intelligence of all today?  Elon Musk, etc, want a 6 month pause in the work on the AI systems.  "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity," the letter said."  

Israel is known for its technological innovation and flourishing high-tech ecosystem; however, it is at risk of falling “far, far behind” other countries in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) due to ongoing political instability, industry experts have warned.

Isaac Ben-Israel (Hebrewיצחק בן ישראל, born 26 July 1949) in Tel Aviv,  now almost 74,  is an Israeli military scientistgeneral, politician with Kadima and state official. He currently serves as the chairman of the Israeli Space Agency and the National Council for Research and Development, under the auspices of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Space of Israel. He finished his service in the IDF ranked General, serving as head of the military Administration for the Development of Weapons and the Technological Industry. He misread Covid, thinking it would be over in 70 days.  In 2018, Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, chairman of the AI Week Conference who heads Tel Aviv University’s Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center, was appointed together with his colleague Professor Eviatar Matania to come up with a plan intended to make Israel a global leader in field of AI. Matania is the founder and former head of Israel’s National Cyber Bureau.

Unfortunately, the political instability that has roiled Israel – which has seen five elections in four years – means that that plan has yet to receive funding from the national budget despite being submitted in June 2019.  Ben-Israel told The Media Line that the goal of the program is to make Israel one of the five leading countries in the world in AI and that it is now in the hands of the new government to take appropriate action.

Shaul Solomon  of Los Angeles is an orthodox Jew with Chabad who is involved in AI.  He did his bachelors in Israel, in an orthodox men-only Jerusalem College of Technology, studying computer science, cyber security and Torah. The first time he even heard about AI was a year after he finished his degree from Sam Harris’ podcast discussing panpsychism and decided to take a Coursera class where he learned the fundamental elements of neural networks (gradient descent, back-propagation, etc.) Soon after he left religion and spent a year traveling, ending up in New York with no budget. To save some money for his future trips he began working as program and administrative director at a Chabad Center in New Jersey, where his uncle was the rabbi. Being less of a believer, he continued to think about artificial intelligence, coding and computer science but it was still unclear what to do next.

“We want science to be as objective as possible and religion as subjective as possible; meaningful, contextual and personal. I believe AI can help us with both, but we don’t want to create a new religion, rather a “guru” who helps us get to where we need to be. AI is not a black box in which you give data and get solutions, but it’s more of a tool to make your own discoveries. 

As such, there is a growing trend of ‘spiritual yet non-religious’ individuals who reject the dogmatic elements of their previous faith, yet are still proponents of liberal values, equal rights, and a holistic approach to balanced living. They do, however, still find value in analyzing how Jesus/Moses/Buddha lived, for instance. I can very much relate to this idea, growing up reading all those religious texts. 

I do reject the dogma, but it’s undeniable that all the stories I’ve read have perennial value. I’d like to base my ideas on different aspects of different religions. 

Spirituality is not difficult in the tech world at all; it’s simply not talked about, which is upsetting, but also understandable. You can discuss it but you can’t quantify it. If you can’t optimize it, how do you improve it? Technology is there to help us process things faster, approach things on a bigger scale, but whether we talk about AI or religion, the human is always the one interpreting. 

We therefore need a human-centric view of both AI and spirituality. My idea is to create an AI that is able to take something from any religion or piece of art and put everything together into a new coherent story, and the responsibility is on the person reading it to interpret it however they want to in the end.”

                               Elon will be 52 in June

 Elon Reeve Musk  born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceXangel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.;

Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and briefly attended at the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics.In 1995, he was accepted to a PhD program in materials science at Stanford University. However, Musk decided to join the Internet boom, instead dropping out two days after being accepted and applied for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.

Antisemitic posts on Twitter have dramatically spiked in the weeks since Elon Musk acquired the social media platform, researchers claimed hours after Kanye West was suspended for tweeting an image of a swastika inside a Star of David. Musk was not supportive of Kanye West's comments. 

                          Steve in 2017, age 67, now 71 

Steve Wozniak was born August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California.  He is an American technology entrepreneurelectronics engineercomputer programmerphilanthropist, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with business partner Steve Jobs, which later became the world's largest technology company by revenue and the largest company in the world by market capitalization. Personal computers are his thing.                             

In 2014, Wozniak visited Israel.  Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak made his debut trip to Israel this week to address an education forum, meet Israeli startups, and experience the country he has heard so much about. He even made a special trip to the communities near the Gaza border to ‘get a feel of the surroundings, really see what is happening. This has been one of my best experiences I have ever had. I do not think it is okay that people have to worry about missiles all the time,’ he said.  Wozniak spoke about the importance of computers in the classroom and about allowing children to think beyond the curriculum.                                                            
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955  October 5, 2011) was an American business magnateindustrial designermedia proprietor, and investor. Jobs was born in San Francisco to a Syrian father and German-American mother. He was adopted shortly after his birth. Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1972 before withdrawing that same year.

He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. He is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.  He died at age 56.  In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very poor; Jobs stated that he had a rare, much less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.

                                                                        

     

Strangely, I started writing this article to leave and pick up groceries.  When I came back and turned on the View, it's first topic of the day was Artificial Intelligence.  I about dropped my groceries!  What kind of intelligence is going on, here?  
 




Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Muskttps://medium.com/y-data-stories/judaism-and-ai-a-surreal-story-of-an-orthodox-jew-becoming-a-data-scientist-a88c43b5a75d

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3278065/dod-updates-autonomy-in-weapons-system-directive/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

You tube with Shaul Solomon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__k4rfmz0ow

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2022-12-02/ty-article/.premium/antisemitic-posts-spike-on-twitter-since-musk-takeover/00000184-d34f-dc50-adc4-ffefed220000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs