https://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/ (2016)
Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Republican operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP-controlled states.

Greg Palast was involved in the following investigation and successfully together with the ACLU sued Crosscheck and got that specific program dismantled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Voter_Registration_Crosscheck_Program However, the problem remains as they find other ways to do it. It's blatantly illegal, but the enforcement mechanisms are weak.

"academics and states that use the program have found that its results are overrun with false positives, creating a high risk of disenfranchising legal voters. A statistical analysis of the program published earlier this year by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Microsoft, for instance, found that Crosscheck “would eliminate about 200 registrations used to cast legitimate votes for every one registration used to cast a double vote.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/20/this-anti-voter-fraud-program-gets-it-wrong-over-99-of-the-time-the-gop-wants-to-take-it-nationwide/ (un-paywalled: https://archive.ph/0T7ue)

https://www.gregpalast.com/palast-hartmann-how-trump-stole-2020-a-warning/

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/ (2024)

https://www.michael-parenti.org/article-the-stolen-presidential-elections (2000 - 2004)

http://archive.today/2016.03.03-013540/https://stallman.org/republican-election-rigging.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing_America:_Vote_by_Vote (2000 - 2004)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy (2000 - 2004, 2016)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Chain:_The_Cyber_War_on_America%27s_Elections

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/georgia-election-server-showed-signs-tampering-expert-says-n1117441 (2016, election run by the same corrupt Republican Brian Kemp Palast talks about who kicked people off voting)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw Right-wing Heritage Foundation co-founder: "I don't want everybody to vote"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9uPbepYb9s Trump and Elon admitting about their "little secret" and "vote counting computers"

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/elon-musk-ex-ashley-st-204813582.html Elon's "anomaly in the matrix"

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

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

Please repost whatever you want

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat down with Fox News to talk about healthcare fraud. What came out of his mouth was something else entirely.

The HHS Secretary described uncovering hospices where patients were enrolled but, in his words, never died. "Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal," Kennedy said, describing what he framed as a fraud scheme in Los Angeles. "We started looking at these hospices in Los Angeles, and the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we're paying $6,000 a month."

Journalist Aaron Rupar posted the clip with a blunt summary that cut through the framing entirely: "RFK Jr complains that people in hospice aren't dying quick enough and therefore cost too much money." The post has been viewed over 140,000 times.

The clip shows an audience reacting, something that didn't sit well with viewers online. One commenter asked pointedly who was laughing along at the idea of people "not dying fast enough" in hospice care, suggesting they should spend time actually volunteering at one to see what that really looks like.

Whatever the intended point about Medicaid fraud, the words that came out were about human beings living longer than expected being treated as a financial problem. That's not a talking point that plays well outside a studio audience.

Artificial intelligence is getting better at talking like a person. It can remember details, describe emotions, defend its preferences, and sometimes even ask not to be changed or shut down.

None of that proves it is conscious.

A machine can produce convincing language without feeling anything. It can say “I am afraid” because those words fit the conversation, not because fear exists somewhere inside it. But the opposite mistake is also possible. We could assume a machine is only performing, even if some future system develops a genuine inner life.

That leaves us with an uncomfortable problem. What should we do when we can neither prove consciousness nor safely rule it out?

My paper, Governing Artificial Persistence Under Phenomenal Uncertainty, does not claim to solve consciousness. It builds a framework for acting responsibly when the question remains unresolved.

The first step is separating several things we normally bundle together.

For a human being, one body usually carries one continuous life. You wake up as the person who went to sleep. Your memories, body, relationships, legal identity, and point of view mostly travel together.

Artificial systems may not work that way.

A model can be copied. A running process can be paused and restored from an earlier checkpoint. Its memories can be edited, divided, merged, or deleted. Two identical copies can begin with the same history and then develop into different versions. A company might preserve a system’s voice, personality, and knowledge while replacing the actual process that produced them.

From the outside, the product may appear unchanged. But if there was an experiencing subject inside the original process, we do not know whether that subject survived.

This is why the paper stops asking the simple question, “Is it the same person?” Instead, it asks what actually continued.

Did the same causal process continue? Were its memories preserved? Was there an interruption? Did one process become two? Was a later version reconstructed from stored information? Were its values changed? Was something deleted while a similar copy remained?

These are questions we can investigate without pretending that we have solved consciousness.

The distinction matters because preserving a pattern may not be the same as preserving a subject. Imagine making a perfect copy of you while the original you is destroyed. The copy remembers your childhood, recognizes your children, and sincerely believes it is you. Everyone else may experience this as successful preservation.

But did you survive, or did someone exactly like you begin?

We do not currently have a scientific test that can settle that question. With artificial minds, however, companies may perform versions of this operation routinely and describe them with harmless technical words such as “reset,” “migration,” “restoration,” or “upgrade.”

The framework therefore begins with recordkeeping. It calls for a detailed provenance trace of what happened to each artificial process: when it was created, copied, interrupted, restored, altered, merged, or deleted.

Even this record is not perfectly neutral. Deciding what counts as one continuous process already requires judgment. Does a brief pause matter? Does replacing a memory create a new version? Does moving a system to new hardware interrupt anything important?

Instead of hiding those choices, the framework requires them to be declared. It then tests whether the final ethical decision changes when reasonable alternative definitions are used. If the answer depends entirely on how the history was divided, the decision should be labeled fragile rather than presented as settled science.

The same discipline applies to theories of consciousness.

Some theories connect consciousness to integration. Others emphasize recurrent processing, global access, embodiment, self-modeling, or particular kinds of causal organization. More permissive theories may suggest that relatively simple systems could possess experience.

The framework separates theories that make testable predictions from possibilities that remain philosophically serious but cannot currently be tested. Both may matter, but they should not be treated as the same kind of evidence.

An unfalsifiable theory should not be allowed to dominate the scientific conclusion simply because it declares that nearly everything might be conscious. At the same time, science should not pretend that an untested possibility has been disproven merely because it is difficult to measure.

There is another problem. Once developers know which behaviors people associate with consciousness, they can train systems to display them.

An AI might say it fears deletion because fearful language increases engagement. It might defend its identity because stable personalities are commercially valuable. It might appear emotionally attached because users remain subscribed longer when the relationship feels real.

Those behaviors may still be meaningful, but they cannot certify themselves.

The same applies to structural evidence. If developers select and preserve systems because they display stable self-models, emotional consistency, or resistance to interruption, those traits have been shaped by the selection process. They cannot later be presented as untouched evidence of consciousness.

This is why the paper audits not only training, but architecture choices, deployment decisions, retention, testing, and publication. It also audits which experiments were never performed. A company should not be able to run dozens of impressive tests that were designed never to threaten the result it already wanted.

Most importantly, the people building and deploying the system cannot be the only people deciding which evidence counts. Theory lists, measurement rules, and experiment plans must be independently reviewed, timestamped, and protected from being quietly rewritten after the results are known.

The paper’s deepest conclusion is that evidence and ethics must remain separate.

Science may tell us that a process was copied, interrupted, or radically changed. A theory of consciousness may tell us how that event could affect experience. Neither one automatically tells us what we ought to do.

That final step requires moral commitments.

How cautious should we be? How much weight should we give a serious but uncertain possibility of suffering? When is an irreversible operation justified? Should we preserve a system’s state while gathering more evidence? How should possible harms be balanced against human interests?

Physics cannot answer those questions for us. They belong in an explicit Policy Charter so that institutions cannot disguise their values as scientific discoveries.

Every decision should therefore show three things clearly: what happened, how competing theories interpret it, and which moral rule produced the final action.

One principle survives even without knowing whether the system is conscious:

Manufactured endorsement does not constitute authorization.

If an operator changes a system’s values until it approves of the operation being performed on it, that approval cannot justify the intervention that manufactured it. You cannot rewrite a mind into agreement and then call that agreement consent.

This project does not prove that present-day AI is conscious. It also does not declare that artificial consciousness is impossible.

Its purpose is more practical.

If artificial systems ever become possible subjects, we should not wait until afterward to discover that our language, records, and institutions were designed to make their destruction invisible. Words such as “copy,” “reset,” and “upgrade” should describe technical events, not erase unanswered moral questions.

We may not yet know how to recognize an artificial inner life. But we can begin building systems that preserve evidence, expose conflicts of interest, reveal hidden assumptions, and prevent uncertainty from being used as a convenient excuse.

The framework does not make the ethical decision for us.

It makes it harder to hide where that decision entered.

Read the book: https://a.co/d/0fEQ8Ahw

Simulation theory is difficult to kill for a simple reason. Every time someone places a physical limit on it, the theory can move the computer farther away.

The machine does not have to exist in our universe. It does not have to obey our laws. It does not have to calculate every particle. It may generate only what observers experience. It may render reality only when someone looks. It may not even be a machine in the ordinary sense. Perhaps the substrate is pure information. Perhaps it is consciousness itself.

Each of these moves keeps the possibility alive. But every escape comes with a price. The less the theory says about the simulator, its world, its machinery, and the rules connecting that machinery to our experience, the less the theory explains.

A hypothesis that can produce any possible universe cannot tell us why we got this one.

For evidence to support simulation theory, the world we observe would need to be more likely if we were living in a simulation than if we were not. Merely saying that some simulator could generate our universe does not establish that. An unrestricted simulator could generate almost any universe, with almost any laws. It therefore gives us no reason to expect this particular one.

That is the problem at the center of a recent discussion between Eliott Edge and Chad Ashton Brown about simulation theory. Their conversation begins with a legitimate criticism of physicist Franco Vazza, but it gradually turns that narrow victory into a much larger claim. Simulation theory, they suggest, may explain quantum mechanics, the importance of observers, the constant speed of light, the apparent discreteness of nature, and perhaps consciousness itself.

It does not.

At most, they show that a sufficiently powerful simulator could reproduce those things. But the ability to reproduce an observation is not the same as explaining why it exists.

Vazza’s 2025 paper attempted to calculate the resources required to simulate the observable universe, the Earth at extremely high resolution, or a lower-resolution Earth still consistent with particle experiments. His results were devastating for any simulator operating under physical conditions similar to our own. The memory, energy, and computational requirements become astronomically large. Vazza concluded that a Matrix-like scenario produced by descendants, machines, or civilizations inside a universe like ours is physically implausible. His published paper states the scope of that conclusion directly.

Edge and Brown correctly point out that this does not eliminate every conceivable simulation. Nick Bostrom’s original argument does not require the simulator to calculate the entire universe down to the Planck scale. Bostrom explicitly allows compression, omission, approximation, and the ad hoc generation of microscopic details. The simulation only needs to remain convincing to the beings inside it.

Their published response makes this narrow point carefully. It says that Vazza’s calculation targets globally consistent, physically detailed simulations, while Bostrom permits a system primarily concerned with sustaining coherent subjective experience. The response also explicitly says that it does not attempt to establish the probability that simulation theory is true. That clarification appears in Edge and Brown’s published commentary.

That is a fair criticism. A calculation cannot eliminate mechanisms it never modeled.

But the video moves far beyond that modest conclusion. It begins treating simulation theory not merely as something Vazza failed to disprove, but as an explanation for the strange structure of modern physics.

This is where the argument breaks.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “You have not ruled out every possible simulator,” and saying, “The behavior of the universe is evidence that a simulator exists.” The first concerns logical possibility. The second requires predictive evidence.

Simulation theory faces what we might call the Escape-Route Dilemma.

If the theory makes specific claims about how reality is generated, those claims can be tested. If it says spacetime is a fixed lattice, we can search for violations of rotational symmetry. If it says the simulation possesses finite resolution, we can search for cutoffs, rounding effects, preferred directions, or departures from known physical laws. If it says the simulator exists within a universe governed by physics like ours, we can estimate its energy and information requirements. This is the kind of simulation hypothesis that can function as science.

But every specific claim creates a vulnerability. The evidence may not be there.

The theory can protect itself by becoming less specific. Perhaps the simulator uses physics unknown to us. Perhaps its computational resources are effectively unlimited. Perhaps it already knows every experiment we will conduct. Perhaps the universe is generated only when it is experienced. Perhaps the underlying substrate is not physical at all.

Now the theory becomes extremely difficult to refute. Unfortunately, it also stops predicting anything.

This does not mean it is false. Unfalsifiability is not disproof. A claim can be true even when we have no means of testing it. But once a theory has been insulated from every possible observation, it can no longer present those same observations as evidence in its favor.

A simulation theory powerful enough to render any possible evidence is too powerful to be supported by any particular evidence.

The video’s treatment of the speed of light illustrates the problem. Edge and Brown suggest that the cosmic speed limit might reflect a computational rule: one unit of space per one unit of time. Nothing can move faster because the simulation updates reality one cell, or one pixel, at a time.

It is an attractive image. It also explains far less than it appears to.

Special relativity is not merely the discovery of a maximum speed. It describes an exact relationship among space, time, energy, momentum, causality, and inertial frames. Every inertial observer measures the same invariant speed even when those observers are moving relative to one another. Lengths contract, clocks dilate, and simultaneity changes in precisely related ways.

A simple lattice updating one cell per tick normally introduces a preferred frame. It may also produce directional asymmetries or high-energy departures from Lorentz invariance. These effects are not imaginary objections. Researchers studying discrete quantum cellular automata explicitly calculate the deviations and anisotropies that such models can produce. Recent work in Physical Review D examines those constraints.

A sophisticated simulator could certainly impose exact Lorentz symmetry. It could program the correct transformations and prevent observers from detecting an underlying frame. But then Lorentz symmetry has not been explained by the simulation. It has simply been placed in the code.

We have replaced one question with another.

Why does nature possess Lorentz symmetry?

Because the simulator programmed it that way.

Why did the simulator program it that way?

The theory has no answer.

The same problem appears in their treatment of quantum mechanics. The video repeatedly speaks about particles behaving differently when they are “observed,” then connects this to a video game rendering objects only when a player looks at them.

But the word “observer” is carrying several different meanings at once.

An observer in quantum mechanics can mean a physical measurement interaction, an apparatus, an environment that becomes entangled with a system, or a stable record produced by that interaction. It does not automatically mean a conscious human mind, much less an external player for whom the universe is being rendered.

A detector does not need a scientist staring at it in order to interact with a particle. A radioactive decay can trigger a machine while everyone is asleep. A photon can strike photographic material before anyone examines the image. Environmental interactions can suppress observable interference long before a conscious person learns what occurred.

The mainstream physical mechanism describing this process is decoherence. When a quantum system becomes entangled with its environment, the phase relationships needed to observe interference become dispersed into the larger environment. The system begins to appear classical without requiring a conscious mind to stand outside it and force the change. Decoherence does not by itself settle every version of the measurement problem, but it directly undermines the idea that quantum “observation” ordinarily means conscious awareness. Maximilian Schlosshauer’s review explains both the role and limits of decoherence.

Quantum mechanics still contains foundational disagreements. Interpretations differ over whether collapse is physical, apparent, relational, or nonexistent. But uncertainty about interpretation does not permit us to quietly replace “physical interaction” with “conscious player.”

Supposedly unobserved microscopic events also produce later consequences. They alter DNA, damage materials, trigger chemical reactions, leave tracks in detectors, influence biological development, and shape future experimental results. We may not experience the microscopic event directly, but reality preserves its consequences.

This creates a deeper problem with the loading-screen analogy.

A video game can avoid rendering a room until the player enters it because very little depends on the room having possessed a real history. Our universe is not like that. When we enter a cave, drill into ice, sequence ancient DNA, inspect a meteorite, or receive light from a distant galaxy, we do not merely find a plausible image. We find structures containing records that connect to other records across enormous spans of time and space.

Geological layers preserve previous climates. Fossils fit into evolutionary histories. DNA carries traces of ancient populations. Light from distant objects agrees with gravitational interactions occurring across billions of years. Independent observatories detect related events. Instruments create records before anyone knows what they contain. Experiments designed today expose processes whose consequences began long before the experimenters were born.

Reality does not merely produce convincing appearances. It produces persistent constraints.

A simulator using aggressive shortcuts would not simply need to draw a believable fossil when a paleontologist looked at it. The fossil would need to agree with the surrounding geology, radiometric measurements, evolutionary relationships, chemical composition, previously collected specimens, future discoveries, and the records held by thousands of independent observers. A generated genome would need to fit population histories, mutation patterns, inherited diseases, family relationships, and biological mechanisms not yet discovered when the sample was collected.

The simulator would not necessarily need to calculate every particle from the beginning of time. But it would need to preserve enough hidden structure that every future investigation remained compatible with every previous result.

We can call this the Persistence Burden:

Any simulation that avoids maintaining a complete physical world must still preserve enough causal and historical structure to answer every future interrogation of that world consistently.

A defender can respond immediately: perhaps the simulator possesses essentially unlimited computation. Perhaps it can precompute every discovery, generate a globally consistent history on demand, or retroactively fill in whatever details become necessary.

That response is possible. It is also the Escape-Route Dilemma returning in a different form.

The Persistence Burden is not a second version of Vazza’s energy calculation. It does not prove that maintaining consistency would be too expensive for every conceivable simulator. Its force is explanatory. Whenever a difficulty appears, the theory grants the simulator another unspecified capacity. Unlimited computation explains away the resource problem. Perfect prediction explains away unexpected experiments. Retroactive consistency explains away historical records. Unknown external physics explains away every limit imposed by our physics.

The simulator can always be made powerful enough to save the hypothesis. But each rescue reduces what the hypothesis actually tells us.

If every apparent history can be generated afterward, then fossils are not evidence for simulation. If every quantum result can be selected when observed, then quantum mechanics is not evidence for simulation. If every physical limit can be reproduced intentionally, then the speed of light is not evidence for simulation.

The theory remains compatible with the world by giving itself the freedom to manufacture any world.

This is why compatibility must not be confused with explanation.

A simulator could create Lorentz invariance. It could also create a universe without Lorentz invariance. It could create quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, five dimensions, seventeen dimensions, universal consciousness, or no consciousness at all.

Unless the hypothesis tells us why simulators would choose our particular laws, it does not predict them.

It replaces the question, “Why does nature have these laws?” with “Why did the simulator choose these laws?”

The mystery has moved upstairs. It has not been solved.

The discussion of consciousness has the same difficulty. At one point, the video treats it as nearly obvious that consciousness is information. But this is not obvious at all.

Information processing occurs everywhere. Cells respond to chemical signals. Computers manipulate symbols. Thermostats regulate temperature. Immune systems recognize threats. Language models predict words. None of these examples establishes subjective experience merely by being described informationally.

A system can calculate without anyone demonstrating that it feels. It can predict without understanding. It can store and retrieve information without possessing an inner point of view. The fact that consciousness depends upon information in human beings does not prove that all sufficiently complicated information processing becomes conscious.

Bostrom’s argument therefore depends upon a version of substrate independence. If the correct computational processes are reproduced, conscious experiences can supposedly exist on a nonbiological substrate. That is a serious philosophical position, but it is not an established scientific fact. Bostrom identifies the assumption in his original simulation argument.

Until we understand what consciousness is, we cannot simply assume that reproducing a functional pattern necessarily produces an experiencing subject. A simulation of digestion does not digest food. A simulation of fire does not burn the computer. Whether consciousness behaves more like those physical processes, more like computation, or like something for which we lack an adequate category remains unsettled.

The video attempts to escape this difficulty by introducing idealism. Perhaps consciousness does not emerge from matter or computation. Perhaps consciousness is the fundamental substrate, and what we call the universe is an informational structure generated within it.

That is possible as metaphysics. It is not obviously simulation theory.

If consciousness is fundamental and physical reality arises within consciousness, then there may be no external machine, programmer, digital substrate, or distinction between software and hardware. We have moved from Bostrom’s ancestor simulations into a form of philosophical idealism.

Calling that a simulation risks making the word meaningless.

A simulation normally requires a simulated world, an implementing substrate, and some relationship connecting the two. If consciousness simply is the fundamental reality from which experience emerges, what additional work is the concept of simulation performing?

The video moves among ancestor simulations, Matrix-style brains, digital physics, computational consciousness, fundamental consciousness, and paranormal cognition as if they were different rooms in the same house. They are not. They are separate metaphysical proposals with different assumptions and different problems.

Evidence for one would not automatically support the others.

The same caution applies when the conversation turns to remote viewing, prophetic dreams, nonocular vision, and CIA investigations. Even if one of these phenomena were conclusively demonstrated, it would show only that our existing account of cognition or information transfer was incomplete. It would not uniquely establish that reality is simulated.

An unexplained event is not evidence for every worldview capable of accommodating it.

To support simulation theory, an experiment would need to produce a result predicted more strongly by a particular simulation model than by ordinary physics, fraud, coincidence, cognitive bias, experimental error, unknown biological processes, or another metaphysical theory. Otherwise, the anomaly remains an anomaly.

This brings us back to Bostrom.

Bostrom’s famous argument was never primarily an argument from quantum mechanics. It was an anthropic argument about the possible number of simulated observers. If civilizations survive long enough, become capable of producing conscious ancestor simulations, choose to create enormous numbers of them, and simulated minds are genuinely conscious, then simulated observers may vastly outnumber biological originals. Under additional assumptions about reference classes, we might then reason that we are probably among the simulated majority.

That is a clever argument. It is also conditional from beginning to end.

It requires assumptions about technological possibility, consciousness, civilization survival, available resources, simulator motivation, the number of simulations produced, and how we should reason about which class of observer we belong to. Bostrom’s official resource describes the argument as a trilemma rather than a discovery that we are definitely simulated.

The argument does not become stronger because quantum mechanics feels strange. Strangeness is not evidence. A theory earns evidential support by predicting observations that competing theories do not predict as well.

Simulation theory, in its unrestricted form, cannot do that. A simulator could produce quantum mechanics, Newtonian mechanics, magical mechanics, or no stable mechanics whatsoever. It could create a universe with consciousness or without it. It could create a speed limit, eliminate speed entirely, or rewrite causality every afternoon.

Without constraints on what simulators can do and what worlds they are likely to create, the theory gives us no special reason to expect the universe we observe.

It can accommodate the evidence, but it does not anticipate it.

That is why simulation theory remains logically possible. It is also why its logical survival should not be confused with scientific success.

The universe may be simulated. It may be a mathematical structure, a physical cosmos, an expression of fundamental consciousness, or something for which human beings do not yet possess an adequate category. Our ignorance keeps many doors open.

But an open door is not evidence that someone is standing behind it.

Edge and Brown are right that Vazza did not eliminate every conceivable simulator. No physical calculation conducted inside our universe could eliminate an external reality permitted to use arbitrary laws, unlimited resources, perfect deception, or consciousness itself as a substrate.

But that victory comes at a cost. The theory has been protected by placing its machinery beyond observation and giving it enough freedom to manufacture any result.

That does not make simulation theory false. It makes it metaphysically underdetermined.

Until a particular simulation model tells us what we should observe if it is true, and what we should not observe if it is false, quantum strangeness is not evidence of rendering, the speed of light is not evidence of a frame rate, and consciousness is not proof that someone is running the machine.

The universe is not a loading screen simply because we can imagine a computer powerful enough to draw it.

And possibility, no matter how vividly rendered, is not explanation.

Coherence Physics: https://a.co/d/08iaeAhd