A Chinese court has sentenced five top members of an infamous Myanmar mafia to death as Beijing continues its crackdown on scam operations in South East Asia.
In all 21 Bai family members and associates were convicted of fraud, homicide, injury and other crimes, said a state media report published on the court website.
The family is among a handful of mafias that rose to power in the 2000s and transformed the impoverished backwater town of Laukkaing into a lucrative hub of casinos and red-light districts.
In recent years they pivoted to scams in which thousands of trafficked workers, many of them Chinese, are trapped, abused and forced to defraud others in criminal operations worth billions.
Mafia boss Bai Suocheng and his son Bai Yingcang were among the five men sentenced to death by the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court. Yang Liqiang, Hu Xiaojiang and Chen Guangyi were the other three.
Two members of the Bai family mafia were handed suspended death sentences. Five were sentenced to life imprisonment, while nine others were handed jail sentences ranging from three to 20 years.
The Bais, who controlled their own militia, established 41 compounds to house their cyberscam activities and casinos, authorities said.
(The video should have sound but works without it.)
I would add — yes, bikes are dangerous but the danger is overemphasized. I believe it is overemphasized because all healthy men would love to ride but are afraid; and the exaggeration of danger justifies staying away; following that is the echo chamber of uninformed agreement and circular reasoning.
Modern motorcycles are definitely safer than bikes from just two decades ago. They are equipped with many traction and braking safety features. Also, airbag jackets and vests for motorcycles are available and moderately priced.
My very consistent attitude toward motorcycles is I never try to convince anyone to ride and am not doing that now. Right now, I am just setting the record straight, as I see it.
Motorcycling is a very free sport. Most riders are very pleasant, polite men; and they are that way because riding uses and exhausts primal animal hormones, thought and sensory processes, and instincts as they were evolved to be used.
Yes, some women ride and I love them for it, but the sport is mostly men. ABN
I approve of this video and agree with it and also… while she has the basic idea, the actual reality has been far more savage and violent than endocrine disruption alone.
It is difficult to prove a decades long covert assault on an entire civilization, which is why it’s done covertly.
But it is fairly easy for intelligent observers to recognize the patterns of past and ongoing covert operations being conducted against their societies.
Many people can see the soft stuff — mind-control, censorship, propaganda, bribery and blackmail.
The hard stuff—poison, lobotomy, sensory disablement, endocrine disruption and more—is but a step or two beyond that.
You need to think and reason like a ruthless military strategist who is a member of a ruthless ancient cult which has been striving for world domination for thousands of years.
Funding an army of covert operatives dedicated to disabling an entire civilization is not expensive or even difficult to do.
If you infiltrate the target civilization, you can trick them into paying for their demise. ABN
The recognizable ancestor of the IDF is not the Marquis De Sade, a mere sexual deviant, but your common serial killer with added pathological paraphilia, and the ability to industrialize the scale of his crimes.
As I had remarked before, patterns of arousal—the commingling of serial killing and sex—are tied to psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.
Honed in rendition torture camps, sexual violence has become the coin of the Greater Israel realm. A glimpse into Sde Teiman, a torture rendition camp in Israel proper, revealed to the world that Israel has de facto systemized the practice of anally rapturing the bowels of Palestinian prisoners, most detained without charge.
Marquis de Sade, whose name is used to denote things sexually bent, was no murderer. The recognizable ancestor of the IDF is not the Marquis De Sade, a mere sexual deviant, but your common serial killer with added pathological paraphilia, and the ability to industrialize the scale of his crimes.
Paraphiliacs are said to enjoy exhibitionism or masochism or sadism, “in which sexual gratification is derived from activities or fantasies that are generally regarded as atypical or deviant. A paraphilic disorder is present when it causes … “actual or potential harm to others.”
The habitual infliction of rectal rape on Palestinian men has joined the crimes of genocide, the making and mass-marketing of online snuff films featuring murdered Palestinians, and the commission of extra-judicial assassination the globe over. These practices are de facto legal in what passes for law in the Israeli thugocracy.
Sensory damage, maiming, lobotomy, and poison are also techniques used in disabling and humiliating perceived enemies, a term which means everyone else but us in their psychopathological group imagination.
Covert groups, clandestine groups of military operatives, have worked secretly throughout the West for decades disabling, especially, boys and young men.
The strategy is and has been to cripple or kill them while they are still young, thus debilitating their communities and nations.
The results of that strategy are manifestly visible wherever the psychopaths live. ABN
In this post, I want to avoid words like psychology, personality, instinct, normal, abnormal, etc. to describe human beings. I want to throw out all of those usual ways of thinking about people and replace them with just three terms–semiosis, symbiosis, and optimization.
In this context, semiosis means all symbols, meaning, language, philosophy, belief, value, etc. An easy way to grasp semiosis is to equate it with the way an individual’s culture, or subculture, works within their mind. Symbiosis denotes relations to other people. An easy way to grasp symbiosis is to equate it with an individual’s social group(s)–their marriage partner, family, friends, clubs, religious groups, job, etc.
All humans are a combination of some sort of semiosis and symbiosis as defined above. What we want to aim for in our lives is optimization of our semioses and symbioses. The only way I know how to do this is with FIML practice because only FIML practice gives partners the tools to grasp and manipulate—to understand and improve—their semioses.
The main area where this optimization occurs in FIML practice is in the symbiosis of partners’ semioses. Semioses are shared. Partners share in a symbiotic relationship the semioses they both carry around in their heads. FIML partners must become conscious of this level of human interaction because it happens whether you are conscious of it or not. If partners are not conscious of it and/or can’t deal with it, they will not be able to optimize their relationship (or their own lives). Rather, they will be forced to cling to public semiotics, private neuroses, or most commonly both.
If partners are optimizing the symbiosis of their shared semioses, their core behaviors will spring from dynamic principles rather than static codes, vows, or agreements. FIML is nearly contentless in that it does not tell partners what to think but rather how to observe and analyze their shared semioses.
Now, as an example, let’s say you experience a mix-up with your partner. Something didn’t go right; one of you misspoke or did something bothersome; then you had an argument or at least difficult emotions arose. So what should you do? At times like these, many people will separate for a while to cool down and then gloss over whatever it was when they get back together later on. At that point they will rely on some sort of static notion of their relationship and on that basis try to recapture good feelings. This technique works to a point, but it is not the best because it does nothing to optimize the relationship. It just covers up the problem. When you avoid a problem, you underscore your inability to deal with it while allowing it to grow.
A much better way for partners to deal with a problem like the one above is recognize that it is definitely going to affect your shared semiosis. Once you both accept this fact, you will probably find it easier to stick with the issue. Rather than separating for a while, face the issue and start a FIML discussion by analyzing what has happened and why. Even if it takes you an hour or more to reach a resolution, it will be well worth it because you will be optimizing your relationship. By doing a FIML discussion, you will avoid hiding from a problem while profoundly increasing your mutual understanding.
This is how mutual transformation often works in the real world. If you do small things like this enough, both you and your partner will become convinced that you can really live and interact on a higher level than what you probably had thought possible before.
Teaching AI to see faces like humans reveals what makes expert eyes so effective, new research shows.
What is it that makes a super recogniser – someone with extraordinary face recognition abilities – better at remembering faces than the rest of us?
According to new research carried out by cognitive scientists at UNSW Sydney, it’s not how much of a face they can take in – it comes down to the quality of the information their eyes focus on.
“Super-recognisers don’t just look harder, they look smarter. They choose the most useful parts of a face to take in,” says Dr James Dunn, lead author on the research that published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
“They’re not actually seeing more, instead, their eyes naturally look at the parts of a face that carry the best clues for telling one person from another.”
This article is interesting but leaves out the fact that facial recognition takes place in a small part of the brain which works wholistically with faces; that is, it is able to grasp an entire face as a whole.
People who are good at face recognition have good brains in this area. People who are bad at it have not-so-good brains in this area.
Interestingly, this area of the brain is close to our orthographic area, the area where written words and graphic signs are identified or produced.
And the two areas can borrow real estate from each other.
One result of this is some people when learning how to read and write can lose some of their face-recognition abilities, to make room for the orthography.
Facial recognition is interesting and plays a major role in our social and subjective sense of how we function.
Everybody is somewhere on the spectrum of good-to-bad facial recognition skills.
As the article above states, correctly, you cannot train yourself to be better at face-recognition (because it is a wholistic skill ensconced in the architecture of the brain).
Many people with poor facial recognition skills are not aware of their deficit.
It’s a good idea to take one or two of the free online tests for prosopagnosia, the clinical word for face-blindness.
If you are good at it, you are probably pretty good socially.
If not, you may have a social deficit whose origin you were not aware of.
I took a couple of those tests some years ago and thought they were ridiculous because there is no way, I thought, anyone could do it.
Even after that it took me a few more years to recognize I really suck at recognizing faces.
Parents and teachers should be aware that some of the children they are dealing with may be very intelligent but also very bad a face-recognition.
Oliver Sacks and Brad Pitt both have prosopagnosia, so the company is not so bad. ABN
A group of Lithuanian lawmakers has proposed banning family reunification for immigrant workers legally employed in the country, arguing that the policy change is necessary to prevent a large influx of nonworking migrants.
Ten members of the Seimas registered amendments on Wednesday to the Law on the Legal Status of Foreigners that would remove provisions allowing residence permits for family members of foreigners already living and working in Lithuania.
One of the bill’s authors, Vytautas Sinica of the far-right National Alliance party, said that without this change, Lithuania could see around 60,000 additional immigrants arrive starting next year through family reunification, placing a financial burden on taxpayers.
“By 2026, three years after the start of mass immigration, around 60,000 additional foreigners could come to Lithuania through family reunification. These would no longer be labour migrants but mostly nonworking persons,” Sinica said in a statement.
American Buddhist Net 