Carl Branco

Risk & Governance; attested to US, EU, APAC & SA corp boards & regulators on effectiveness of corp governance, operational risk management & internal controls

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton: "If you want to know what it's like NOT being the apex of intelligence, ask a chicken".

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@davelee "Hope springs eternal "

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@EmmetPeppers The first Ford Model T was a joke, a novelty. All anyone ever wanted was a faster horse that sh*t less.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@mpawlo @ylecun @elonmusk Yes, very good point!

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@nerdalert $420 , again?

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@EmmetPeppers @BrendanCarrFCC @SawyerMerritt Yes, as in Plato's Allegory of the Cave

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

My dear American friends, yesterday I showed you an email. Today I want to show you what comes after, because history has already written this chapter many times, and every time in blood.

Every Marxist revolution goes after the same first target. Not the army, and not the rich. It goes after the people who think.

Lenin understood it early. In 1922 he put Russia's leading philosophers, scientists and writers on ships and expelled them. Many of those who stayed were shot or sent to the camps. In 1940, in the forest of Katyn, Stalin's secret police executed around 22,000 Polish prisoners: officers, but also doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and priests. A nation's educated class was killed one by one, each with a bullet in the back of the head.

Mao perfected the method.

In 1956 he launched the Hundred Flowers campaign. "Let a hundred flowers bloom." He invited China's intellectuals to speak freely and to criticize the Party. They believed him, and they spoke. A year later the trap closed. The Anti-Rightist Campaign branded more than half a million people as enemies. Professors, writers, engineers and doctors lost their careers and their families, and many were sent to labor camps they never left.

Mao was proud of it. In 1958 he compared himself to the First Emperor of China, who was infamous for burying 460 scholars alive. Mao boasted that the Communists had buried 46,000.

His masterpiece came in 1966, with the Cultural Revolution. This time he didn't need the police. He used children.

Schools were closed and students became Red Guards. Their teachers were dragged onto stages for "struggle sessions." Their heads were shaved, placards were hung around their necks, and they were forced to kneel while crowds beat and spat on them. In August 1966 Lao She, one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese literature, was beaten by Red Guards. The next day he was found drowned in a lake in Beijing. That same month, at a girls' school in Beijing, students beat their vice principal Bian Zhongyun to death.

Then the revolution entered the home. Children learned a slogan: "Father and mother are dear, but not as dear as Chairman Mao." Sons denounced fathers and daughters denounced mothers. Zhang Hongbing was 16 when he reported his own mother, and she was executed. A child turning on his parents was celebrated as the highest form of virtue.

Once the Red Guards had done the dirty work, Mao discarded them too. From 1968 on, around 17 million young people were sent to the countryside to "learn from the peasants." A whole generation lost its education, its youth and often its sanity. The revolution devours its own children, every single time.

Cambodia, 1975. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities in days. Glasses, soft hands, speaking French: any of these could mark you as an intellectual, and being an intellectual could get you killed. In four years roughly a quarter of the population was dead.

Look at the pattern, because it never changes. First, convince the young that the world is rotten and the old are guilty. Second, silence or destroy the people who could contradict the story. Third, break the family so that the only loyalty left is to the cause. Fourth, give the young power. Fifth, when they've finished the dirty work, throw them away.

I am not telling you America is China in 1966. I'm telling you the first steps look familiar. Careers are destroyed over a single opinion. Professors sign ideological pledges just to get hired. Children are taught to see their parents as bigots and their country's history as nothing but a list of crimes. Political violence is excused online, and sometimes even celebrated. Every year it gets a little more radical, and every year the people who warn about it are called alarmists.

This is not a left versus right debate. Reasonable people can disagree about tax rates, healthcare or trade, and that's politics. What I'm describing is something else. It's an ideology that has killed tens of millions of people in the last century, and it always starts by promising justice to the young. We should call it what it is: evil.

You fight evil by refusing to become it. Teach real history. Defend free speech, especially for the people you disagree with. Protect the teachers and parents who refuse to bow. Above all, give young people something to own, build and defend, so that no one can sell them the fire.

I come from a continent that has already lived this story. Please don't let your children write the next chapter.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@skdh AI will win a noble prize in physics before any of your critics - and that is scary.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@andrewilliamsus Check out the border wall between Gaza and Egypt, where I believe he holds dual citizenship. Some 30' high, with multiple rows of razor wire and armed checkpoints with shoot-to-kill orders. It's been there for over 50 years. I don't see him, or anyone, protesting to open that up.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@RyanMcbeth Yes, I have seen this movie. Spoiler alert...it doesn't end well for humans.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@nerdalert Strong basis for more rate increases

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@EmmetPeppers @grok 👍

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

This should be compulsory viewing on campuses across the United States. Young people growing up today did not live through this & they’re learning about it through the lens of information warfare which is not a true record of history. As a result they have no idea what is really at stake.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@TwoBitDaVinci Breakeven? Does that include all the energy needed to run the facility, or just counting the energy used at the point of fusion?

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@WesleyHuntTX Please consider moving to my state

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@Rainmaker1973 True, but unlike most ,if not all, other countries the US is the destination of choice. Relax it's immigration policies for a brief time and it's demographics are changed for generation.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@laralogan Never underestimate a Momma bear

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@EndWokeness Doing his best to make Chicago the next Detroit.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@Rainmaker1973 I need to see the math.

[Carl Branco @CarlBranco]

@Briankeating So, was @skdh right all along?