[There has been much talk in recent days of slowing U.S. artificial intelligence research. China immediately announced that it would have no part of the “fearmongering” and would not slow down at all. But they are far from the only active enemy employing AI against us. — Rod Martin]

In 1999, two psychologists conducted a study in which test subjects counted how many times a basketball was passed among individuals wearing white shirts. The passing was not tricky to see. The action was not particularly fast. On its surface, it was a simple task.

Yet half of the participants missed the gorilla.

Midway through the video, a student in a full gorilla costume walked into the center of the court, turned to face the camera, thumped its chest, and strolled off-screen.

The viewers’ eyes swept over the primate. Still, their brains, entirely consumed by the mental arithmetic of pass-counting, filtered out the visual data.

They missed the obvious because they were preprogrammed to a particular task.

A decade later, researchers ran a similar experiment with board-certified radiologists. These were not novices, but bona fide experts, examining chest CT scans.

These doctors were asked to look for suspicious lung lesions, called nodules, often indicative of cancer. Special software tracked their eye movements so researchers would know exactly where they were looking.

But then, just as in 1999, there was a gorilla.

Embedded in the lung tissue of the final scan was a graphic of a gorilla, 48 times the size of the average cancerous nodule. Of the 24 radiologists in the study, 20, or 83 percent if you are so inclined, failed to see it, despite the eye-tracking software proving they had stared right at it for half a second.

How could they have missed a gorilla in a chest CT scan? When they stared directly at it?

This cognitive glitch, inattentional blindness, is not merely an academic curiosity. It is the ultimate cloak for asymmetric warfare.

A village fightback against migrant camps is set to spread across the country.

Piddington in Oxfordshire will on Tuesday hold a symbolic referendum on leaving the UK in protest against plans to move up to 1,250 male asylum seekers into a former army barracks close to the village of 350 people.

The parish has been approached by hundreds of other villages and towns nationwide for advice on replicating the campaign, which has won the backing of the Conservatives and Reform.

As well as the vote, Piddington’s villagers have drawn up plans to install a network of wireless CCTV cameras, an emergency alert system and security patrol teams over fears of being outnumbered by a ratio of nearly four to one.

Speaking to The Telegraph on the eve of the vote, which is expected to pass unanimously, women who live in the village said they planned to take up self-defence classes because of fears about the influx of migrants.

Tim McNally, the chairman of Piddington parish council, said that hundreds of other areas wanted to follow his blueprint to fight back against migrant camps.

He said: “We have been working in the background with other areas who feel the same as us, who feel they have not been represented and been run over roughshod. What has happened to our politics to allow this to happen?

“When I first published the blueprint, I had over 500 inquiries from across the UK, from parish and town councillors. The aim of our referendum is for them to go and do it themselves.”

Nigel Farage’s party has pledged to support any other areas that want to hold votes.

The “AI Apocalypse” scare campaign looks suspiciously like the climate hoax.

How convenient that it’s come to a head right as the midterm election season kicks off this week.

The campaign launch was when Jacob Coxon, a low-level 27-year-old AI researcher, trumpeted his resignation from AI company Anthropic in a Wall Street Journal exclusive last week followed by a viral X thread warning AI will “kill us all.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade . . . They are gambling with our lives,” he claimed.

His boss, the Democrat-aligned Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei, amplified Coxon’s apocalyptic message with a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, followed by a giddy interview CBS aired Sunday in which he essentially called for a one-world government to regulate AI.

He wants “the right combination of governments” to provide “some kind of joint governance [to] control the technology.

“I’m uncomfortable government didn’t build this technology.”

Soon it will a long, hot Labor Day weekend, and police in many cities are bracing for multiple teen takeovers.

These takeovers, usually of crowded downtown areas, are organized on social media and escalate rapidly into large-scale brawls involving the use of fists, knives, and guns.

Bystanders and police are hurt, and businesses are damaged and have their hours curtailed.

Footage from a large teen takeover from the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee has aired on national media, with commentators noting that “these kinds of takeovers have become all too common.”  What was not said is that “these kinds of takeovers” are largely, though not entirely, black teen takeovers.

Although white teens are certainly guilty of committing crimes, teen takeovers are mostly relegated to blacks.  The question is, why?

Over the weekend, a German political party called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won a major victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote, improving on its 2021 result by 23 percentage points.

Three other parties, all various shades of far left, took 22.3 percent between them.

Germany’s governing and center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, saw its share decline from 37.1 percent in 2021 to 17.2 percent.

Voter turnout was a record 77.8 percent.

AfD’s platform and ideology have dominated coverage, but don’t miss the forest for the trees.

This election was not a vote for anything. It was a protest vote against an incumbent presiding over a status quo unacceptable to a large and growing swath of the electorate.

Over-indexing on the notion that a far-right populist party doing well in a state election means it’s 1933 again misses the political earthquake that has already happened in Germany.

AfD’s victory is important — just not for the reasons Western media and mainstream German parties are focused on.