The Permanent Emergency Has Been Revoked

April Fool!

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The latest False Flag Weekly News begins with an April Fool’s prank: Some guy named Kevin Barrett, a Morocco-based American Muslim journalist, tries to hijack my show!

The other Kevin Barrett and I aren’t entirely identical. I’m a recovering left-leaning-anarchist, he’s a long-time conservative. I’m white, he’s black. I’m from Wisconsin, he’s from New York. I’m 64, and as I recall he said he was a year or two short of that.

Still, it’s uncanny to run into someone with the same name and discover you have so much in common. What made it even weirder was that I “discovered” K. Barrett Bilali (the name he uses to avoid being confused with the notorious conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett) while I was in Morocco making preparations to move there. (“Wait a minute…there’s already an American Muslim Substack writer in Morocco with the same name as me?!”)

As it turns out we have pretty similar views, as you’ll find out by watching the show. We begin by noting that the Senate has pretended to revoke the permanent state of emergency. In reality, all it did was revoke the COVID emergency and the emergency authorizations to wage the two wars on Iraq. But 86 senators from both parties united to vote down Rand Paul’s initiative to quash Public Law 107-40, the September 2001 emergency bill that authorizes endless use of force against 9/11-style “terrorists.” And these days, everybody who questions Big Brother is a “terrorist.”

So we are still living in the shadow of the 9/11 self-inflicted emergency. And while I am not opposed to using force against those who used explosives to demolish the World Trade Center, I haven’t seen much progress on that front over the past 21-and-a-half years.

So even if the Iraq and COVID Emergencies are over, we still have plenty left. The big one this week is the Trump Emergency. Tomorrow, Tuesday April 4th, Donald Trump is scheduled to get handcuffed, fingerprinted, and photographed by the NYPD or whoever does that sort of thing in New York. The media is already salivating over his every step as he prepares to board his plane and fly to NYC to turn himself in. It’s like the O. J. circus all over again. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past Trump to drive all over New York and New Jersey for several hours, tailed by hundreds of squad cars and followed by police and media helicopters, just for the hell of it.

So why is Donald Trump a national emergency? Beats me. Somehow the Establishment has convinced Democrats that Trump is a “threat to our democracy” that cannot be defeated by ordinary measures (such as ignoring him or not voting for him). Instead, they’ve had to engage in draconian internet censorship, outrageous propaganda around the prefabricated J6 spectacle, and now a campaign of lawfare starting with prosecution on a relatively trivial charge. Maybe they should just go all the way and suspend the Constitution. Wait a minute—it’s already suspended, and has been since 9/11/2001. So they’ll have to find something else to suspend…like maybe the 2024 election?

Even weirder than the Trump Emergency is the ever-escalating Trans Emergency. There are two ways of looking at this one (just like there are two ways of looking at someone who pretends to the opposite gender). From the liberal perspective, transexuals are suffering an epidemic of hate and harassment, so we need to fix that by inflicting “make up your gender as you go along” ideology on everyone, starting in preschool if not earlier. From the conservative perspective, having an army of woke schoolteachers trying to convince your kid that he’s a she or she’s a he, with a multi-billion-dollar Gender Mutilation Industrial Complex ready to step in with surgical and/or pharmaceutical remedies, is a bona fide national emergency. It’s sort of like a George Romero zombie movie, except instead of zombies, it’s gender-confused people.

The interwoven Trump and Trans Emergencies have so many farcical elements it’s impossible to take them seriously. Suspend the Constitution to prevent a buffoonish real estate shark and talk show host from channeling the pent-up rage of America’s dispossessed working people? Get all worked up over the minuscule minority of people who experience genuine gender confusion?

Enough with the farcical fake emergencies! Let’s move on to our last two emergencies—which is to say, two emergencies competing to see which one becomes the Last Emergency that humanity ever experiences. The first “last emergency” under consideration is the AI Emergency. A summer 2022 survey of machine learning researchers found that half thought there was an over-10% chance that their work would lead to human extinction. Even transhumanist poobah Yuval Harari wonders what’s up with that: “Imagine that as you are boarding an airplane, half the engineers who built it tell you there is a 10 percent chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it. Would you still board?”

The nice thing about the AI Emergency is that we can address it without suspending the Constitution. All we need to do is let Ted Kaczynski out of prison and give him a few tools and let him build a hut in some junkyard next to a mailbox. And then provide him with a lavish supply of postage stamps.

But seriously, folks, aside from the paperclip problem and associated iterations, there are, as I see it, basically two big problems with AI. The first is that it is, by definition, a lie machine. A chatbot’s purpose is to make you think you’re talking to a human. But of course you aren’t. It’s a machine. By pretending to be a human, it’s lying. It’s just like the come-ons we all get from machine voices making robo-calls: a robo-call voice trying to make you think it’s human is lying to you at a very basic level. Constructing ever-more-powerful lie machines is just not an activity that anybody, anywhere, should tolerate.

My second and related criticism of AI is that there is a real possibility that these lie machines will become infested by satanic jinn. “Woo boy,” I hear you saying, “Barrett’s really gone off the deep end now.” But wait! Hear me out! If you don’t already know that disembodied spirits exist, please review the exorcism-related work of Malachi Martin…or better yet, read the Qur’an. A review of the relevant literature of other religious and spiritual traditions will yield the same effect. And the scientific literature on psi will reinforce those conclusions.

A friend of mine who I haven’t talked to in years, but should, tells a true story about what happened when he was in middle school and a group of friends started monkeying around with a Ouija board. The board started spelling out messages to them, as Ouija boards do. Or so I’m told. I’ve never used one, and wouldn’t if you paid me.

One of the messages the Ouija board spelled out was something along the lines of “Jimmy is going to die” (Jimmy being a classmate of theirs). And lo and behold, not long thereafter, Jimmy passed away. The kids were horrified. They wondered whether it would have happened if they hadn’t messed with that *%*# Ouija board.

A Ouija board is not entirely unlike an AI algorithm. In both cases, we have a system working with bits of natural language. In both cases, there is direct human input, but the output is in some sense out of the control of the human inputters.

So if malevolent spirits tend to infest Ouija boards—and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that they do, aside from my friend’s story—I cannot help wondering whether they might not be equally likely to infest AI algorithms. I’m not saying it’s a sure thing. But it doesn’t seem all that unlikely. I can’t help concluding that building ultra-powerful lie machines that might get infested by satanic jinn strikes me as a really, really stupid idea.

And speaking of stupid ideas, how about nuclear war? The Nuclear War Emergency has been omnipresent since before my birth in 1959, and will presumably continue until, like Chekhov’s gun, it goes off in the last act. That act may come sooner rather than later if the incompetent extremist ideologues who are driving the US empire off the cliff don’t get purged sooner rather than later.