Two Google engineers built a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot years ago, but execs reportedly shut it down due to safety concerns

Aaron Mok
Wed, March 8, 2023

Years before ChatGPT, two google engineers developed an advanced AI chatbot.Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress

Ex-Google engineers developed a conversational AI chatbot years ago, per The Wall Street Journal.


But Google execs thwarted their efforts to release it to the public due to safety concerns.


Google is now racing to catch up with Microsoft's AI and plans to release its AI chatbot this year.

Google is expected to release its widely anticipated AI chatbot Bard in the near future. But years ago, two ex-Google engineers pushed their former employer to release a similar chatbot to the public — and they were met with resistance, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

Around 2018, Daniel De Freitas, who was a research engineer at Google, started working on an AI side project with the goal of creating a conversational chatbot that mimicked the ways humans speak, former colleagues familiar with the matter told the Journal. Noam Shazeer, a software engineer for Google's AI research unit, later joined the project.

Per the Journal, De Freitas and Shazeer were able to build a chatbot, which they called Meena, that could argue about philosophy, speak casually about TV shows, and generate puns about horses and cows. They believed that Meena could radically change the way people search online, their former colleagues told the Journal.

But their efforts to launch the bot — which they renamed LaMDA, which would become the language model behind Bard — reached an impasse after Google executives said the chatbot didn't adhere to its AI safety and fairness standards, per the Journal. Executives thwarted multiple attempts made by the engineers to send the bot to external researchers, add the chat feature into Google assistant, and launch a demo to the public, the Journal reported.

Frustrated by the executive response, De Freitas and Shazeer left the company near the end of 2021 to start their own company called Character Technologies Inc. — despite CEO Sundar Pichai personally requesting they stay and continue working on the chatbot, per the Journal. Their company, which now goes by Character.ai, has since released a chatbot that can roleplay as figures like Elon Musk or Nintendo's Mario.

"It caused a bit of a stir inside of Google," Shazeer said in an interview with investors Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan last month. "But eventually we decided we'd probably have more luck launching stuff as a startup."

De Freitas and Shazeer declined an interview request from the Journal, and did not respond to Insider's request for comment. Google did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

Google has been thwarting its AI efforts since 2012

Google's hesitancy to release its AI tools is nothing new.

In 2012, Google hired computer scientist Ray Kurzweil to work on its language processing models, TechCrunch reported. About one year later, Google bought British AI firm DeepMind which aimed to create artificial general intelligence, per TechCrunch.

However, academics and tech experts pushed back on using the tech due to ethical concerns around mass surveillance, the Journal reported, and Google committed to limit how it would use AI. In 2018, Google ended its project to use its AI tech in military weapons in response to employee backlash, per the Journal.

But Google's AI plans may now finally see the light of day, even as discussions around whether its chatbot can be responsibly launched continue. The company's chatbot, Bard, will come after Microsoft — whose stock is on the rise — released its own chatbot through Bing.

After Google's Bard chatbot generated a factual error during its first public demo last month, Google employees were quick to call the announcement "rushed" and "botched." Alphabet chairman John Hennessy agreed that Google's chatbot wasn't "really ready for a product yet."

CEO Pichai has asked all Google employees to spend two to four hours of their time helping test the product so it can be ready for launch.

"I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that's to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential," Pichai wrote to Google employees in a February memo.

"The most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly," he said.

CUT DEFENSE BY 90%
If you want to balance the budget without raising taxes or cutting defense, Social Security, and Medicare, you'd probably have to fire nearly every park ranger and cut 70% of anti-poverty spending


Juliana Kaplan,Ayelet Sheffey
Tue, March 7, 2023



Republicans want to reduce the deficit, and they've suggested a range of areas to cut spending.

An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Budget found balancing the budget would require some massive cuts.

That is, if tax increases, defense spending, Social Security, and Medicare remain off the table.

Right now, all eyes are on what Congress wants to spend on — or decide to chip away at.

Republicans want to pare down the deficit, and it's something that Democrats seem to be open to, as well. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that the upcoming White House budget will have "substantial deficit reduction over the next decade," according to Reuters, and Democrats are willing to discuss cost-cutting measures with Republicans independent of the debt ceiling.


But if the government wants to get serious about its spending, it'll have to make some pretty big cuts, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). According to a CRFB analysis, all government spending would have to be reduced by 27% to get budgets balanced in the next decade — and, if tax increases, defense spending, Social Security, and Medicare are all off the table, 78% of spending would have to be cut.

That "effectively means you're eliminating almost all of government other than the military and programs specifically for middle class seniors," Marc Goldwein, a senior policy director at CRFB, told Insider. "It's just not realistic."

As the New York Times notes in its visualization of CRFB's analysis, to close the gap between now and 2033 would require $16 trillion in spending cuts — the same size as all of Social Security, or all of Medicare plus every anti-poverty program.

"The thing is the government has basically three gigantic programs and it's the US military, Social Security, and Medicare," Goldwein said. As Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman once wrote, the US government is "best thought of as a giant insurance company with an army."

With the military, Social Security, and Medicare off the table for cuts, it means other programs would have to be on the cutting block to balance the books. That means you would have to say goodbye to things like visiting national parks, and accessing food assistance programs, as the New York Times reports.

"The idea we're just going to eliminate all parts of government other than Social Security, Medicare, and defense — it's just not realistic, or desirable," Goldwein said.

Spending cuts are the name of the game in Congress right now. House Republicans have floated a number of areas in which they would support cutting spending in a potential debt ceiling deal to keep the US on top of paying its bills. Rather than agreeing to a clean debt ceiling increase, they are using the opportunity to negotiate with Democrats to achieve their own policy priorities.

For example, Republicans on the House Budget Committee said last month that they are on board with cutting spending for environmental programs and federal student-debt relief plans, and some GOP lawmakers have reportedly been chatting with former President Donald Trump's budget official, who has been pitching his 104-page plan with suggested budget cuts for every federal agency.

The Republican Study Committee also released a blueprint to balance the budget in seven years last year, which included making Trump's tax cuts permanent and ensuring Social Security's solvency by gradually raising the retirement age. An increase in the retirement age would translate into substantial lifetime benefit cuts for future retirees.

While it remains unclear what exactly Republicans are eyeing in a final deal, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has vowed that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are off the table. Still, that hasn't stopped some GOP lawmakers from discussing changes to the programs, like the previously mentioned increase in the retirement age to 70.

Trump, who has frequently urged his party to preserve the two programs, blasted the idea during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, saying that "we're not going back to people that want to destroy our great Social Security system, even some in our own party."

Goldwein thinks measures like putting caps on appropriations spending, reducing healthcare spending, restoring solvency to major funds, and tax reforms could help.

Biden is expected to unveil his federal budget plan on Thursday in Philadelphia, during which he will "deliver remarks on his plans to invest in America, continue to lower costs for families, protect and strengthen Social Security and Medicare, reduce the deficit, and more," the White House said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Democrats await Republicans' plan to move ahead with a deal to raise the debt ceiling before the US defaults.

"The GOP is divided and unable to unite around a plan to raise the debt ceiling. The hard right demands spending cuts," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on Twitter. "Will they cut Medicaid? Pell Grants? Food for kids? Speaker McCarthy: It's March 2nd, where is your plan?"

15-Year-Old NASA Probe Back in Action After Systems Reset

Passant Rabie
Tue, March 7, 2023

An artist’s depiction of the IBEX spacecraft.

Most computer glitches can be resolved with a simple question, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” It seems this simple instruction also applies to computers on board spacecraft orbiting thousands of miles away.

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is finally up and running again after spending three weeks in contingency mode, also known as safe mode, the space agency announced in a blog post on Monday. The team behind the mission performed an external reset of IBEX on March 2 when the spacecraft was at its closest point to Earth.

On February 18, the spacecraft, which is about the size of a bus tire, stopped responding to commands following a flight computer reset. “While fight computer resets have happened before, this time the team lost the ability to command the spacecraft during the subsequent reset recovery,” NASA wrote at the time. “Uplink signals are reaching the spacecraft, commands are not processing.”

The team tried resetting the mission’s hardware and software from the ground, but IBEX remained unresponsive. The spacecraft, working in a high Earth orbit, was scheduled for an autonomous reset and power cycle on March 4, but the team went ahead with a firecode reset, another term for an external reset, two days prior to take advantage of “a favorable communications environment around IBEX’s perigee,” according to NASA.

Following the firecode reset, the spacecraft’s ability to receive commands was fully restored and IBEX now appears to be fully operational.

The mission launched in 2008 with a unique task to map the edge of the Solar System, observing the interaction between the solar wind emitted by the Sun and interplanetary space. Data collected by IBEX has helped scientists measure changes in the heliosphere, the bubble generated by the Sun’s magnetic field, over the star’s 11-year-cycle. Now that IBEX has been reset and all is back to normal, we can keep learning about our host star and how it influences its surrounding environment.

Women take star role in African movies on jihadist bloodshed

Marietou BÂ
Mon, March 6, 2023


Few movies have been made about jihadism in Africa and even fewer have focused on the plight of women at the hands of extremists.

But a slew of films showcased in the continent's biggest movie festival could be a cinematic watershed.

"When people talk about terrorism, they don't talk much about women," said Apolline Traore, a director from the festival's host country, Burkina Faso, which has suffered grievously from jihadism.

Traore's feature-length "Sira," which won the Silver Stallion of Yennenga award in the FESPACO festival that ended on Saturday, describes a 25-year-old woman who is abducted by jihadists and has to draw on courage and smartness to survive.

Traore said she wanted to haul women out of the typical image of victimhood and place them in the "major role... (they play) in the fight against terrorism".

The director said she was inspired by meeting women whose lives had been turned upside-down by jihadists.

One example, she said, was a woman who with a bullet lodged in her shoulder had spent five days looking for shelter for herself and her two children.

Nafissatou Cisse, a Burkinabe actress who plays the lead role of Sira, said she had drawn on "the rage" of women caught in the jihadist nightmare.

More than 10,000 people have lost their lives in Burkina Faso since jihadists swept in from neighbouring Mali in 2015 and more than two million people have fled their homes.

Around 40 percent of the country is controlled by the insurgents.

Making "Sira" was in itself a gruelling challenge.

After a massacre at Solhan in June 2021 that left 132 dead -- the bloodiest single attack in the long-running jihadist campaign -- the authorities declined to renew authorisation for filming "Sira" in Burkina's deeply troubled north.

- 'Terrorists use women' -

Another director whose home country is struggling with jihadism is Amina Mamani.

Her native Nigeria is the cradle of the Boko Haram movement, whose attacks began in 2009 and metastasised to Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

It leapt to global notoriety in 2014, when hundreds of schoolgirls were kidnapped in Chibok, in Borno state.

Mamani's short film, "The Envoy of God," tells the story of a girl aged about 10, who is kidnapped one night by jihadists to use her to carry out a suicide attack on a market -- but she decides otherwise.

"Terrorists use women. Men get killed, but women are kidnapped, forced into marriage and raped, and young girls selected to blow themselves up," said Mamani.

In another feature-length film, "Thorns of the Sahel," Burkinabe director Boubakar Diallo describes a nurse who is sent to a displaced persons' camp.

She said that during the film shoot, some of the displaced people "panicked when they saw armed men" -- actors playing the part of jihadists.

"We had to build up trust with them," she said.

- 'Sensitive' -

Traore said that in all her 20 years in film-making, she had never experienced such fear in showing a film.

She fretted especially about how the public would react to her work.

"(Jihadism) is very sensitive and fresh in the heart of Burkinabe people and people living in the Sahel," she said.

Launched in 1969, the biennial Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) draws thousands of movie fans and professionals from across the continent.

It is also closely followed by the US and European movie industries, which scout the event for new films, talent and ideas.

A total of 170 films competed in this year's event, whose theme was "African cinema and culture of peace".

Tunisian director Youssef Chebbi won the top prize, the coveted Golden Stallion, for murder mystery "Ashkal".

Under festival rules, films chosen for competition have to be made by Africans and predominantly produced in Africa.

bam/pid/stb/ri/ea

The coming EV batteries will sweep away fossil fuel transport, with or without net zero

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

THE TELEGRAPH
Tue, March 7, 2023

New electric car batteries could lengthen ranges to a thousand miles or more - Michaela Handrek-Rehle/Bloomberg

The Argonne National Laboratory in the US has essentially cracked the battery technology for electric vehicles, discovering a way to raise the future driving range of standard EVs to a thousand miles or more. It promises to do so cheaply without exhausting the global supply of critical minerals in the process.

The joint project with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) has achieved a radical jump in the energy density of battery cells. The typical lithium-ion battery used in the car industry today stores about 200 watt-hours per kilo (Wh/kg). Their lab experiment has already reached 675 Wh/kg with a lithium-air variant.

This is a high enough density to power trucks, trains, and arguably mid-haul aircraft, long thought to be beyond the reach of electrification. The team believes it can reach 1,200 Wh/kg. If so, almost all global transport can be decarbonised more easily than we thought, and probably at a negative net cost compared to continuation of the hydrocarbon status quo.

The Argonne Laboratory in Chicago is not alone in pushing the boundaries of energy storage and EV technology. The specialist press reports eye-watering breakthroughs almost every month. America, Europe, China and Japan are all in a feverish global race for battery dominance – or survival – and hedge funds are swarming over the field.

I highlight this paper because US national labs have AAA credibility. The study is peer-reviewed and has just appeared in the research journal Science. Their solid-state battery has achieved the highest energy density yet seen anywhere in the world. And sometimes you have to pick on one to tell a larger story.

The science paper says the process can “theoretically deliver an energy density that is comparable to that of gasoline”, a remarkable thought that slays some stubborn shibboleths. It is not for today, but it is not for the remote future either. It typically takes five or so breakthroughs of this kind in battery technology to reach manufacturing.

Professor Larry Curtiss, the project leader, told me that his battery needs no cobalt. That eliminates reliance on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which accounts for 74pc of the world’s production and has become a Chinese economic colony for the extraction of raw materials.

Beijing has already gained a lockhold on the supply chain through ownership or control over three quarters of the DRC’s major cobalt mines. Russia is the world’s third. It is planning to raise that share by tearing up the marine bed off the Pacific coast.

Reports by the United Nations and activist groups leave no doubt that cobalt mining in the DRC is an ecological and human disaster, with some 40,000 children working for a pittance in toxic conditions for small ‘artisanal’ mines. It has become a byword for North-South exploitation.

Needless to say, the horrors of the cobalt supply chain have been seized on by fossil “realists” (i.e. vested interests) and Putin’s cyber-bots to impugn the moral claims of the green energy transition. The Argonne-IIF technology should make it harder to sustain that line of attack.

Prof Curtiss said the current prototype is based on lithium but does not have to be. “The same type of battery could be developed with sodium. It will take more time, but can be done,” he said. Switching to sodium would halve the driving range but it would still be double today’s generation of batteries.

Sodium is ubiquitous. There are deposits in Dorset, Cheshire, or Ulster. The US and Canada have vast salt lakes. Sodium can be produced cheaply from seawater in hot regions via evaporation. There is no supply constraint.

This knocks out another myth: that the EV revolution is impossible on a planetary scale because there either is not enough lithium, or not enough at viable cost under free market conditions in states aligned with the Western democracies. (The copper shortage is more serious, but there may be solutions for that as well using graphene with aluminium).

The International Energy Agency estimates that demand for lithium will rise 20-fold by 2040 if we rely on existing battery technology. The Australians are the world’s biggest producers today. But the greatest long-term deposits are in the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, which are in talks to create an OPEC-style lithium cartel. China’s Tianqui owns 22pc of the Chilean group SQM, the world’s second-biggest lithium miner.

A lithium recycling industry will mitigate the problem. In the end, lithium can be extracted from seawater. It is highly diluted at 180 parts per billion but research suggests that it could be isolated for as little as $5 a kilo. If so, the lithium scare is just another of a long list of seemingly insurmountable barriers that fall away with time. The march of clean-tech is littered with such false scares.

For readers with a better grip on chemistry than me, the Argonne-IIF uses a solid electrolyte made from a ceramic polymer based on nanoparticles. This does require expensive materials.

It achieves a reaction of four molecules at room temperature instead of the usual one or two. It is able to extract oxygen from the surrounding air to run the reaction, solving a problem that has held back development for a decade. It can operate over a thousand cycles of charging and discharging. It is safer and less likely to catch fire than today's batteries.

What the Argonne-IIF battery and other global breakthroughs show collectively is that energy science is moving so fast that what seemed impossible five years ago is already a discernible reality, and that we will be looking at a very different technological landscape before the end of this decade.

Germany and Italy last week succeeded in blocking EU’s plans for ban on petrol and diesel sales by 2035. They might just as well bark at the moon or command the waves to recede. Moore’s Law and the learning curve of new technology has already sealed the fate of the combustion engine – with or without net zero.

The legacy companies cannot save their sunk investment in fossil motors – unless the EU retreats into fortress protectionism, which would be economic suicide. To try would be to guarantee the total destruction of Europe’s car industry. The only hope of saving it is to go for broke on electrification before global rivals run away with the prize.

The coming battery technology kills the case for hydrogen in cars, vans, buses, or trucks, and perhaps also for trains and aircraft, whether it is “green” from wind and solar via electrolysis or “blue” from natural gas with carbon capture. The energy loss involved makes no sense. It is much cheaper and more efficient to electrify wherever possible.

Clean hydrogen is too valuable to squander. We need it to replace dirty hydrogen used in industry. We need it for fertilisers, green steel, container shipping, and long-term storage in saline aquifers to back up renewables during a windless Dunkelflaute. We do not need it for road transport.

My advice to corporate bosses and ministers: keep up with the world’s scientific literature, or you will be massacred.

Scientists named a fungicide after Keanu Reeves because it's extremely effective at killing — just like his characters


Hannah Getahun
Sat, March 4, 2023


Scientists discovered a compound in pseudomonas bacteria that can effectively kill certain fungi.

The fungus killer was named after actor Keanu Reeves by German researchers.

The study authors say that the fungus could be used to effectively treat both crops and humans.

Like John Wick, new compounds discovered by scientists are effective killers. But instead of killing bad guys, they kill fungi.

Researchers at the Leibniz Institute in Germany found certain bacteria naturally contained compounds effective at killing fungi that affect plants and humans. The scientists named them keanumycins A, B, and C — after actor Keanu Reeves.

The three keanumycins — lipopeptides in bacteria of the Pseudomonas genus, commonly found in soil and water — were isolated by scientists, who tested their deadly properties. They found that the compounds got rid of amoebas and fungi.

"The lipopeptides kill so efficiently that we named them after Keanu Reeves because he, too, is extremely deadly in his roles," the study's main author Sebastian Götze said in a press release. The scientists released their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in January.

The keanumycins were most effective at killing Botrytis cinerea — a fungus that produces gray mold rot. The fungus ruins crops like strawberries and wine grapes, and farmers usually use chemical fungicides to prevent it from growing.

The study authors are currently testing the theory that a fungicide containing keanumycins could kill fungus on crops, and provide a biodegradable option that won't leave chemicals in the soil or on fruit.

The scientists also say it can help with another crisis — human fungal infections that are becoming less resistant to anti-fungal treatments. Keanumycins are effective at treating the human-pathogenic fungus responsible for yeast infections and are not toxic to humans, the study authors note.

"We have a crisis in anti-infectives," Götze said in the release. "Many human-pathogenic fungi are now resistant to antimycotics — partly because they are used in large quantities in agricultural fields."

So far, 2023 has seen multiple significant scientific discoveries named after celebrities.

Recently, biologists in Ecuador found a mystical stream frog and named it after fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien.

Another pair of biologists discovered five new species of snakes in Central and South America. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio named one of them — an orange-eyed, snail-eating snake that produces a "musky and distasteful odor"— after his mother, Irmelin Indenbirken.

How socialism became un-American through the Ad Council’s propaganda campaigns

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, Teaching Professor of American Studies, Miami University

THE CONVERSATION
Sun, March 5, 2023 

Bernie Sanders was asked at a CNN-sponsored town hall about socialism. CNN screenshot

This article was published in 2020 Bernie Sanders has emerged as the Democratic front-runner in the race for the presidential nomination.

Yet even some left-leaning pundits and publications are concerned about what they see as Sanders’ potential lack of electability.

Sanders is a Democratic Socialist. And the label “socialist” is a political liability in American culture. According to a Gallup poll released on Feb. 11, 2020, only 45% of Americans would vote for a socialist.

I am a scholar of American culture with an interest in the relationship between political ideologies and popular culture. In my research, I have found that this antipathy toward socialism may not be an accident: American identity today is strongly tied to an image of capitalism crafted and advertised by the Ad Council and American corporate interests over decades, often with the support of the U.S. government.

A screenshot from one of the corporate Cold War-era cartoons linking the Bill of Rights to free-enterprise ideology. Internet Archive, Prelinger Collection

Business and government solidarity

In 1942, a group of advertising and industry executives created the War Advertising Council, to promote the war effort. The government compensated the companies that created or donated ads by allowing them to deduct some of their costs from their taxable incomes.

Renamed the Ad Council in 1943, the organization applied the same wartime persuasive techniques of advertising and psychological manipulation during the Cold War years, the post-war period when the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S., the USSR and their respective allies raged. One of their goals: promoting the virtues of capitalism and free enterprise in America while simultaneously demonizing the alternative – socialism – which was often conflated with communism.

Government propaganda at home portrayed the communist USSR as godless, tyrannical and antithetical to individual freedoms. As a counterpoint, America became everything the Soviet Union was not.

This link between capitalism and American national identity was advertised through a sophisticated, corporate effort as efficient and ubiquitous as state-driven propaganda behind the Iron Curtain.

The campaigns used the ideological divisions of the Cold War to emphasize the relevance of their message. In a 1948 report, the Ad Council explained its goal to the public: “The world today is engaged in a colossal struggle to determine whether freedom or statism will dominate.”

Extolling capitalism’s virtues

The campaigns started as a public-private partnership. At the end of World War II, the government worried about the spread of communism at home. Business interests worried about government regulations and about the rising popularity of unions. The Cold War provided both parties with a shared enemy.

In 1947, President Truman asked the Ad Council to organize the Freedom Train Campaign, focusing on the history of America’s political freedoms. Paramount Pictures, U.S. Steel, DuPont, General Electric and Standard Oil provided financial support. For two years the train crisscrossed the nation, carrying original documents that included the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

One of the Ad Council’s messages about capitalism in America. 

Outdoor Advertising Association of America Archives, Duke University Libraries

The following year, the Ad Council launched a business-led campaign, called “The Miracle of America,” intended to foster support for the American model of capitalism, as distinct from its Western European version, which was more friendly to government intervention. It urged increased productivity by U.S. workers, linked economic and political freedom and, paradoxically, asserted capitalism’s collaborative nature.

“Sure, America is going ahead if we all pull together,” read a brochure. Another flyer, “Comes the Revolution!,” cast its support of American capitalism in the language of global struggle: “If we continue to make that system work…then other nations will follow us. If we don’t, then they’ll probably go communist or fascist.”

In its first two years, the Miracle of America message reached American audiences via 250 radio and television stations and 7,000 outdoor billboards. Newspapers printed 13 million lines of free advertising. The Ad Council boasted that the campaign made over 1 billion “radio listener impressions.”

American factory workers received about half of the 1.84 million copies of the free pamphlet “The Miracle of America.” One-quarter were distributed free of charge to schools, and 76 universities ordered the booklet.

This pro-business propaganda, expressed in the language of Cold War patriotism, had reached roughly 70% of the American population by the end of the campaign.

Cartoon capitalism

The efforts produced more than just print and billboard messages.

In 1946, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, founded by the former head of General Motors, paid the evangelical Harding College to produce “Fun and Facts about American Business,” a series of educational cartoon videos about capitalism, produced by a former Disney employee.

Between 1949 and 1952, Metro Goldwyn Mayer distributed them in theaters, schools, colleges, churches and workplaces.

The films promoted the same messages as the Ad Council campaigns, although they were not part of the project. They continued a decade-long effort by the Sloan Foundation to start, in the words of its executive director, “a bombardment of the American mind with elementary economic principles through partnering with educational institutions.”

To both Sloan and the movement’s backers, business interests were synonymous with the national interest. The free-enterprise system was a shorthand for freedom, democracy and patriotism. Unlike in Europe, the videos suggested, class struggle – of the kind that required unions – did not exist in the U.S.

In the cartoon “Meet the King,” Joe, the archetypal American worker, realizes he is not an exploited proletarian. Instead, he’s a king, “because he can buy more with his wages than any other worker on the globe.”

Conversely, government regulations of, or interventions in, the economy were described in the cartoons as socialist tendencies, bound to lead to communism and tyranny.

“Make Mine Freedom,” and “It’s Everybody’s Business” presented the state as a perpetual threat. A money-sucking tax monster, the government reduces everyone’s profits, crushes private enterprise and takes away individual freedoms: “No more private property, no more you.”

According to an estimate from Fortune magazine, by 1952, American businesses spent US0 million each year, independent from any Ad Council campaigns, promoting free enterprise.
‘Peanuts’ pushes freedom

In the early 1970s, business responded to rising negativity about corporate power with a new campaign coordinated by the Ad Council.

“The American Economic System … and Your Part in It” was launched alongside the bicentennial national celebrations. It was the largest centralized pro-business public relations project thus far, but only one of many independently run by corporations.

Part of a page from the 1970s booklet that used Charles Schultz’s ‘Peanuts’ comic strips to explain the benefits of America’s economic system. Amazon

The media industry donated million in free space and air time in the first year of the campaign. The Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor contributed about half a million dollars toward the production costs for a 20-page booklet.

That booklet used data provided by the departments of Commerce and Labor and Charles Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’ comic strips to explain the benefits of America’s economic system. The system was again presented as a foundational freedom protected by a Constitution whose goal was to “maintain a climate in which people could work, invest, and prosper.”

By 1979, 13 million copies had been distributed to schools, universities, libraries, civic organizations and workplaces.

Echoes now?

For four decades, the Cold War provided a simple good-vs.-evil axis that consolidated the association between freedom, American-ness and free-enterprise capitalism.

The business community, independently and through the Ad Council, funded massive top-down economic education programs which shaped American perceptions of business and government and of capitalism and socialism.

The Cold War ended 30 years ago, but its cultural structures and divisions endure – perhaps, even, in the responses of some Americans to Bernie Sanders’ socialism.

Editor’s note: The Conversation has received grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

It was written by: Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, Miami University.

Read more:

Americans are drowning in a sea of polls

What 1860 and 1968 can teach America about the 2020 presidential election

Could a woman defeat Donald Trump? What political science research says

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy received funding from the Fulbright Commission and The Library of Congress.

Israel president says judicial compromise 'closer' as protests escalate


Mon, March 6, 2023
By Steven Scheer

JERUSALEM, March 6 (Reuters) - Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday said a compromise in the government's judicial overhaul plan could be imminent even as protests against the reform continued to spread.

Local media circulated a letter by 10 former air force chiefs to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning of the "grave and tangible" threat posed by the judicial overhaul plan, a day after reservists said they would not turn up for training in protest.

In a statement late on Monday, Netanyahu criticised the threats to refuse military service, which he said endangered Israel's existence.

On the battlefield, soldiers have stood united "throughout all of Israel's wars, regardless of the struggles and disagreements among us," he said, speaking from a Border Police base in the occupied West Bank settlement of Beit Horon.

"There is room for protest, there is room for disagreements, for expressing opinions, but there is no room for refusal."

Although the presidency is a ceremonial post, Herzog convened 100 heads of authorities for an emergency meeting designed to come up with a solution to proposals that have split the country and led to mass nationwide protests.

"We are closer than ever to the possibility of an agreed outline. There are agreements behind the scenes on most things," Herzog said in a statement, without giving details.

Herzog's comments sent financial markets sharply higher even though there was no immediate sign of a deal between the government and opposition.

He said it would now depend on leaders of the ruling coalition and opposition to "put the country and the citizens above everything else" and implement it, adding that his plan works to placate both sides.

Heads of the opposition Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz issued a joint statement in response, commending the president's efforts to reach a compromise but demanding that Netanyahu halt the legislation process to allow for "honest and effective dialogue".

"Israel is on the brink of a national emergency - and Netanyahu refuses to stop," they wrote on Twitter.

Netanyahu did not immediately respond to Herzog's efforts.

Herzog last month floated a compromise plan to spare the country what he described as a "constitutional collapse".

The judicial overhaul plan, which has already received initial parliamentary approval, would give the government greater sway on selecting judges and limit the power of the Supreme Court to strike down legislation.

Critics of the planned law changes say Netanyahu - on trial on graft charges that he denies - is pursuing steps that will hurt Israel's democratic checks and balances, enable corruption and bring diplomatic isolation.

Proponents say the changes are needed to curb what they deem an activist judiciary that interferes in politics.

Lapid has called for compromise talks and a freeze of the legislation for 60 days but Netanyahu said he would only agree to negotiations without preconditions.

Optimism over a possible compromise riled financial markets and sent the shekel up 2% on Monday to 3.59 per dollar - its strongest level since Feb. 21. Similarly, Tel Aviv share indexes were up 1.5% and government bond prices were also up close to 1%.

Since the proposals were introduced in late January, the shekel has slumped against the dollar, alarming investors wary that Israel might be joining the growing list of emerging markets taking a more authoritarian stance to decision making.

By last week, the shekel had fallen nearly 10% against the U.S. currency in just one month, and was trading at a three-year low.

 (Reporting by Steven Scheer and Henriette Chacar; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Christina Fincher)

Israeli reserve pilots ditch drill in protest at judicial overhaul

Sun, March 5, 2023 
By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Dozens of Israeli air force reservists said on Sunday they would not turn up for a training day in protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial reforms, a jolt for a country whose melting-pot military is meant to be apolitical.

As Israel's strategic arm, the air force has traditionally relied on reservists in wartime and requires crews who have been discharged to train regularly in order to maintain readiness.

But in a letter circulated in local media, 37 pilots and navigators from an F-15 squadron said they would skip drills scheduled for Wednesday and instead "devote our time to dialogue and reflection for the sake of democracy and national unity".

The religious-nationalist government seeks changes that include curbs on the Supreme Court, which it accuses of over-reach. Critics worry that Netanyahu - who is on trial on graft charges he denies - wants excessive power over the judiciary.

Weekly and increasingly raucous demonstrations have swept the country, with some protest leaders - among them former military chiefs - saying that a non-democratic turn in government would warrant mass-disobedience within the ranks.

The 37 air force reservists said they would suspend their one-day protest if required to carry out actual operations.

A military spokesperson declined to comment on their letter but said top commander Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevy "is aware of the public discourse and division but will not allow any harm to the IDF's (Israel Defence Forces) ability to carry out its most important mission - defend(ing) Israel's security".

Officers had been instructed to speak with subordinates on the issue, said the statement, which also reiterated the "importance of maintaining the IDF’s impartiality".

Israel does not publish military personnel figures, making it hard to judge to impact of the air force reservists' protest, or of similar pledges by some reservists from other branches.

"These irresponsible Israeli media are playing up any reservist who makes some kind of statement," Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Channel 12 TV.

"There are tens and hundreds of thousands who will continue to enlist for the military and serve in the reserves and understand that we are brothers and bear responsibility for the great miracle that is the Zionist enterprise."

Netanyahu, a former officer in Israel's most prestigious commando unit, tweeted a photograph of himself at conscription age with the caption: "When called up for reserve duty, we always turn up. We are one nation."

Meanwhile, Israel's N12 News reported that El Al Israel Airlines was having trouble finding a crew to fly Netanyahu on a state visit to Italy this week, because of a boycott by pilots over the judicial overhaul.

Netanyahu's office did not respond to a request for comment.

El Al said it would not support boycotts "particularly against the prime minister of Israel", and that the flight had been staffed and would depart as planned.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Christina Fincher and Alexander Smith

Poor nations' leaders unleash anger and despair at UN summit

Tim Witcher
Sun, March 5, 2023 


Leaders from the world's poorest nations poured out their disappointment and bitterness at a UN summit on Sunday over the treatment of their countries by richer counterparts.

Many made pointed calls for the developed powers to come good with billions of dollars of promised aid to help them escape poverty and battle climate change.

Central African Republic's president told the UN Least Developed Countries meeting in Doha that his resource-rich but impoverished nation was being "looted" by "Western powers".

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres followed up an attack he made a day earlier on the "predatory" interest rates imposed by international banks on poor states.

He said there could be "no more excuses" for not providing aid.

But the opening day of general debate at the once-in-a-decade summit saw no major announcement of desperately needed cash -- apart from $60 million that host Qatar said it would give to United Nations programmes.

Leaders of the world's major economies have been markedly absent from debate, which will last five days, on the turmoil in poor nations.

At a meeting with LDC leaders on Saturday Guterres called for $500 billion to be mobilised for social and economic transformation.

Leaders also used the first day of public debate to renew demands that industrialised governments hand over a promised $100 billion a year to support their efforts to counter global warming.

Presidents and prime ministers from Africa and the Asia-Pacific region made calls for financial action.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, whose country of 170 million is scheduled to graduate out of LDC status, said poorer nations "deserve" certainty over financing for development and climate.

"The international community must renew its commitment for real structural transformation in LDCs," Hasina said.

"Our nations do not ask for charity. What we seek are our due international commitments."

- 'Epic battle' -

Zambia's President Hakainde Hichilema said providing the finance was "a matter of credibility".

"LDCs cannot afford another lost decade," declared Narayan Kaji Shrestha, deputy prime minister of Nepal, which is also to leave the LDC club for the Middle Income Countries division by 2026.

Shrestha said that in the five decades since LDC status was established to give countries trade privileges and cheaper finance, they had been "fighting an epic battle against poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy."

He highlighted that only six countries had so far escaped the LDC status that some nations consider a stigma.

Central African Republic's President Faustin-Archange Touadera used his speech to lash out at sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council and other institutions against the huge but sparsely populated nation that has seen decades of instability.

Touadera said the country's 5.5 million people could not understand how, with vast reserves of gold, diamonds, cobalt, oil and uranium, it "remains, more than 60 years after independence, one of the poorest in the world".

"Central African Republic has always been wrongly considered by certain Western powers as a reserve for strategic materials," he added.

"It has suffered a systematic looting since its independence, helped by political instability supported by certain Western powers or their allies."

The country has been under a UN arms embargo for a decade, while the EU imposed sanctions against the Russian mercenary group Wagner over its activities in Central African Republic and other neighbouring countries.

One sanctioned Wagner official was a "security adviser" to Touadera, according to the EU.

Gold and diamond companies linked to Wagner in Central African Republic and Sudan were also hit by EU sanctions.

The LDC summit lasts until March 9 while hundreds of business executives are attending a parallel private sector forum.

tw/it

'Truth serum' drugs do exist. Here's how medicines like sodium pentothal and scopolamine can manipulate the brain.


Jessica Orwig
Sun, March 5, 2023 

The Datura stramonium plant contains poisonous seeds that can be used to make scopolamine.Orest Lyzhechka / Getty Images

The term "truth serum" refers to a number of mind-altering drugs.

These drugs make you incapable of lying, or so the theory goes.

Such mind-altering drugs do exist, but their effect isn't enough to stop a person from lying.

Humans have known since the time of the Roman Empire that we're more readily truthful while under the influence. That's where the idea behind the term "truth serum" comes from.

Truth serum refers to a number of mind-altering drugs that are supposed to make you incapable of lying, but the reality is no drug is powerful enough to grip the human mind so tightly as to make it impossible to lie.

Some truth serums, like sodium thiopental, slow the speed at which your body sends messages from your spinal cord to your brain.

As a result, it's more difficult to perform high-functioning tasks, such as concentrating on a single activity like walking a straight line or even lying. It's this concentration you need to think up a lie that truth serum removes. So in that way, lying can be more difficult, but not impossible.

The same thing happens when you're nodding off and reaching that twilight state where you're in between consciousness and sleep. If you're not a compulsive liar, then it's likely more difficult for you to lie than tell the truth.

As the famous American author wrote in "Mark Twain's Notebook" (published posthumously in 1935): "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

That said, there's no way to really know if someone is telling the truth, ever.

Numerous accounts and scientific reports suggest that you're more prone to tell the truth under the effects of truth serum drugs, but the drugs have other side effects. Most concerning among them is that they might make you say something to please someone else, even if it's not true.

Furthermore, not only are truth serum drugs not all that useful, they are illegal under certain circumstances, including interrogation.

Although many of the first drugs that the CIA, police, and Nazi interrogators used throughout the '20s, '30s, and '40s are still around today, they have other uses, including ingredients in medicines that prevent motion sickness and for lethal injection.

Here's a list of the most common mind-altering, manipulating medicines that have used as truth serums.

Sodium Pentothal

Marlyn Monroe died from acute barbiturate poisoning, the same type of drug as sodium pentothal.Baron / Stringer / Getty Images

Sodium pentothal is a type of barbiturate, which is a series of drugs that are central nervous system depressants, colloquially known as "downers." Downers slow your body's process to transmit information to your brain and are common prescription medicines for pain relief, sedation, muscle relaxation, and lowering blood pressure.

An overdose of barbiturates can be lethal and has led to a number of celebrity deaths, including Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and Jimi Hendrix. The drug was also one of the first used in lethal injections in the US and is most often administered intravenously.

Until 2011, it was sometimes used as an anesthetic because patients usually pass out within 30-45 seconds after taking the drug. But the US has stopped using the drug.

In 2011, the Italian company that produced the drug announced it was ceasing production, The Guardian reported at the time. The company was worried that Italian authorities would use it in executions and as a result, the US lost its only viable supplier.

There are still accounts of this drug's use as a truth serum. In 2007, police in New Delhi, India administered sodium pentothal to a wealthy businessman, Moninder Singh Pandher, and his servant, Surinder Koli, who were suspects in the infamous Noida serial murders. While under the influence, they confessed to luring children to their home, raping, and then killing them. The servant, Koli, was given the death sentence and is still in jail, and Pandher received a seven-year sentence.

Scopolamine

The dark seeds from the Datura stramonium plant used to make scopolamine.

Rosendo Serrano Valera / Getty Images

Scopolamine was first promoted by Dr. Robert House as a truth serum in the early 20th century, and was the first drug to adopt the name "truth serum."

Throughout the 1920s and '30s some police departments in the US used scopolamine on suspects, and — in some cases — judges permitted the statements the subjects gave up while under the influence.

Scopolamine was the truth serum drug of choice for many back in the day because it also wiped a subject's memory clean so they didn't know what they said after waking up, Gizmodo reported.

The drug comes from the seeds of a tree, which locals in Colombia where it grows call the "get-you-drunk" tree. While some Nazis used it in interrogation, today it's in many medicines to help prevent motion sickness and tremors of Parkinson's disease. It's also used as a date-rape drug.

Scopolamine can be ingested orally through a pill, or in one bizarre case, as a rub. Reports recount three young women in the Colombian capital, Bogota, who smeared the drug on their breasts luring men to lick it off. Once the men were incapacitated, the women would drain their bank accounts.

Sodium Amytal or Amobarbital

World War II soldiers were known to take sodium amytal for anxiety.

Mirrorpix / Contributor / Getty Images

Sodium Amytal is also a type of barbiturate, or downer. It was widely used during World War II as an anti-anxiety drug for soldiers with the psychological disturbance called shell shock.

But like all truth serum drugs, sodium amytal is a powerful sedative, and that side effect combined with the dis-coordination and cognitive impairment it induces is why soldiers stopped using it.

Moreover, sodium amytal is highly addictive. This drug is sometimes used to treat insomnia and is often administered intravenously, although it can come in powder form for oral ingestion.

Take too much of this drug and it can be lethal. The maximum dose for an adult is one gram.

This drug is no longer used as a truth serum because subjects sometimes develop false memories after the fact.

Ethyl Alcohol

Wine contains ethyl alcohol, which can help relax you and feel more inclined to tell the truth.Getty Images

That's right. Booze!

The Italian phrase "In vino veritas," which is Latin for "In wine there is truth", is attributed to a Roman philosopher known as Pliny the Elder.

So, humans have known for roughly 2,000 years about alcohol's ability to loosen the tongue.

Whether you're drinking it down or taking it intravenously in pure, ethanol form, ethyl alcohol can make you more prone to spilling your secrets.

But as you probably know, it doesn't make you incapable of a little white lie every now and again.

Do truth serums work?

Like lie detector tests, truth serum drugs aren't a full-proof solution either to determining if someone is lying, or not.Jose Luis Magana/AP

As Washington Post reporter David Brown wrote in 2006: "The answer appears to be: No. There is no pharmaceutical compound today whose proven effect is the consistent or predictable enhancement of truth-telling."

Despite the fact that truth serum's magical capabilities seem to be mostly fictional, US courts have in special cases allowed their use.

One example was with with suspect in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, theatre shooting — a judge allowed the use of sodium pentothal to determine if his claims of insanity were real.

Just because no truth-inducing drug exists today, doesn't mean there couldn't be one in the future, according to Mark Wheelis, a professor and expert on the history of biological warfare and biological weapons control at the University of California Davis.

"There is a large number of neural circuits that we are on the verge of being able to manipulate — things that govern states like fear, anxiety, terror and depression," Davis told the Washington Post in 2006. "We don't have recipes yet to control them, but the potential is clearly foreseeable. It would absolutely astonish me if we didn't identify a range of pharmaceuticals that would be of great utility to interrogators."
A truth serum experiment

To find out if truth serum works, TV journalist Michael Mosley experienced it for himself in 2013.

To investigate sodium thiopental, one of the more popular truth serum drugs, Mosley took two different doses of it. After administering the first dose, a doctor asked Mosley what he did for a living and — through fits of giggles — Mosley managed to lie and say he was a world-famous heart surgeon.

In less than a minute after the drug was administered, Mosley was all laughs from the light-headed, tipsy feeling he said he experienced from the drug. He said the feeling was akin to drinking a glass of champagne.

After the second, larger dose of sodium thiopental, Mosley experienced something he was not expecting. When the doctor asked him what he did for a living he immediately responded:

"I'm a television producer. Well, executive producer, well, presenter, some, mix of the three of them."

Mosley explained later that when asked the question, it didn't even occur to him to lie, so he didn't.


But is this evidence that truth serum works? Not exactly.

One of the biggest problems with using truth serum for interrogation, is the warm, friendly feeling it gives the subject toward their interrogator. Combined with a state of severe disorientation, this can lead a subject to tell their interrogator what they think the interrogator wants to hear, which could be true or not.

This is partly why any statement made under the influence of a truth serum drug is inadmissible in US courts and has been for 60 years. In 1963, the US Supreme court ruled that confession statements made under the influence of truth serum drugs were "unconstitutionally coerced" threatening citizens' rights under the Fifth Amendment and were therefore inadmissible.

So, when it comes to drugs that alter your state of mind, disorient you, and loosen your tongue, believe what you will about their abilities to enhance truth telling. The evidence shows that statements revealed under the influence have a chance of being more complacent or outright false than true.

Moreover, truth serums are mostly "useless", Esther Inglis-Arkell wrote for io9, "not because no one could get information, but because everyone could get too much." And sifting through the statements trying to pull out the ones that are true versus complacent is, frankly, impossible.

But researchers continue to look for something more reliable.

The future of truth-telling drugs

There may be a more powerful truth serum drug out there that researchers have yet to discover.Jackyenjoyphotography / Getty Images

As we learn more about the brain and discover new drugs we could be on the verge of a new type of truth-telling and trust-enhancing drug.

One of the more recent drugs examined for its truth-telling affects is oxytocin, known to women in labor as Pitocin.

In 2005, two researchers at the University of Zurich examined the trust-promoting effects of the drug by studying 128 college students, some of whom were given a snort of oxytocin while the others received a placebo.

They were asked to play an investing game in which they had to trust a stranger to give them back a portion of their winnings. The students given oxytocin were more trusting and transferred more money, on average. More importantly, 45% of the students on oxytocin transferred all of their money, showing maximal trust, twice as many as students who took the placebo.

These new drugs that increase trust could be a next-level advancement in truth serums — they would actually encourage truth-telling instead of just making the teller say whatever makes their questioner happy.

Don't worry too much — your secrets are safe for now.

Business Insider