The Northcountry Chronicle

Insurrection: Are We Really Surprised?

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by William Ehrhart Let’s review the facts. Our 45th President openly bragged about grabbing women by their genitals and declared that he could murder someone in broad daylight in Manhattan without consequences. He has paid hush money to prostitutes he was “screwing” (please substitute the F-bomb) even as his third wife was nursing their newborn child. Our 45th President has declared that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un “fell in love,” and that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin “is really very much of a leader,” while calling German chancellor Angela Merkel “stupid,” French President Emmanuel Macron “nasty,” and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “two-faced.” Our …

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Covid shows, once more, who’s excluded from the American Dream

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The media and disease experts tell us we must take personal responsibility to avoid Covid-19! Gov. Sununu, to no one’s surprise, has taken the same hands-off approach, choosing to treat the pandemic like we do other social ills, like poverty or homelessness, exemplifying our state motto: “Live Free or Die.” Indeed, some individual behavior is unconscionable, like folks refusing to wear masks and kids flocking to large parties. Yet disease experts stress that responsible leadership is essential because controlling this plague is beyond individual capabilities. That’s why it is so disheartening that after almost a full year, the federal government has yet to provide a …

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Timeless truths for trying times

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What’s wrong with people? Has the savagery, selfishness, and raw, animal hatred within the human species finally come out of the darkness to devour our society?! Fanatics in MAGA caps rabidly cheering a tyrannical, lying, insane president. Gangs of “Proud Boys” strutting around in militia costumes beating protesters whose politics they dislike. Wackadoodle extremists who advocate violence by promoting the group hallucination that Nancy Pelosi is leading a fiendish Democratic cabal of child sex traffickers and cannibals. But is that really who we are? Given the media and political focus on all thing awful about people, you would think so. But consider a couple of …

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Solar Winds Hack – Preventing Future Energy & Security Catastrophe

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by Roy Morrison The Solar Winds hack, attributed to Russian intelligence, exposes the existential vulnerability of the U.S. electrical infrastructure including its nuclear plants. The control and safety of our electric grid is now in the trustworthy hands of Vladimir Putin. What could possibly go wrong? What? We do not want to be at the mercy of malign foreign actors? The transformation to a decentralized solar and energy storage system now underway is crucial, not just to escape from climate catastrophe, but to build a secure and reliable energy system resistant to hack attacks. Solar Winds Hack: Power Grid & Nuke Vulnerability The 2020 Solar …

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Is more technology the answer to too much technology?

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We humans have got to get a whole lot smarter, says Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla automobiles and CEO of SpaceX rockets. Musk is not merely reacting to humanity’s recent tendency to elect lunatics to lead our countries. Rather, he’s trying to warn us about the rapid rise of a radical new technology: Artificial intelligence. In common parlance, he’s referring to robots, but these are not the clunky, somewhat cute machines performing rote tasks. AI essentially has evolved to become an electronic brain—a web of evermore-complex super-computers interacting as one cognitive unit that can program itself, make decisions, and act independently of the …

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Robot farmers—E-I-E-I-O!

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How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen…Angus? Not “Angus,” the breed of cattle, but Angus, the 1,000-pound “farmer of the future.” He is not actually a he, but an it: A robot, toiling away on an indoor hydroponic farm that is soilless, and—yes—soulless. Programmed by a multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley start-up named Iron Ox, Angus’ homestead is an 8,000-square-foot concrete warehouse in a San Francisco suburb. The farm bot is more of a heavy lifter than a heavy thinker, wheeling around the warehouse to lift, move, and hand-off large pallets of produce to another robot that, so far, hasn’t earned a …

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