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Gunmen shot and killed at least 26 tourists on Tuesday at a resort in Indian-controlled Kashmir
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Human judgment "imposes "an impenetrable ceiling on the AI agent's performance: the agent cannot discover better strategies underappreciated by the human rater, DeepMind scholars David Silver and Richard Sutton write in the paper, Welcome to the Era of Experience. Most studies do not allow a context for a problem, a history. That is to say, human thinking is holding the technology back.
Uh oh.
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Who ever imagined there would be a Waste, Fraud, and Abuse lobby?
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Shen Yun
The Shen Yun dance is coming to Pittsburgh this month. As with all things China, it is not without controversy over its admitted religious-political content.
That criticism is state-based. China has been using its economic and diplomatic influence to pressure theaters and ministries around the world and disrupt Shen Yun performances. In 2016, the Chinese Embassy in South Korea threatened financial retribution against a hosting theater in Seoul, effectively forcing cancellation of a performance just days before it was scheduled.
The Shen Yun interpretation of traditional Chinese culture differs sharply from the official version sanctioned by the Communist Party. Its narrative episodes are inspired by Chinese history and literature, claiming a “true Chinese tradition” defined by Confucian morality as well as Buddhist and Daoist spiritual thoughts — ideas that developed over millennia, ideas denounced and suppressed after the 1949 Communist takeover and all but eradicated during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976.
Against this historical background, the Chinese communists’ ongoing persecution of Falun Gong may be seen as part of a larger campaign against religious faiths and traditional cultural values. The regime’s overbearing effort to censor the dance show may imply its deep-seated insecurity about its own professed legitimacy to embody Chinese civilization. Or it may be evidence of an overwhelming force trying to finish an annoying opponent off.
Shen Yun artists have bypassed communist intervention and take seriously the Chinese intellectual and cosmological foundations in their understanding of dance. The spiritual teachings of Falun Gong, to which the show’s creators adhere, include an essential unity between the material and the spiritual, which human beings should strive to embody. For the dancer, it is important to refine one’s moral character while improving one’s physical skills, so that virtuous thought may extend from the heart to the body in performing tales of heroism, kindness, and devotion.
This spiritual interpretation of Chinese culture has had a compelling global impact, and this inspiring vision of what China was and could be without the Communist Party must be deeply unsettling to the authoritarian state. The artificially conjoined ideas of “China” and the party are decoupled, undermining the regime’s insistent claim to be the sole legitimate guardian and spokesperson of Chinese civilization and culture. Like a lover, the state must be "the only one."
Art, from the vision of eternal punishment in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment to the Von Trapp family’s perilous escape from Nazi persecution in The Sound of Music, has never existed in a social vacuum; it has always aspired to greater universality than the politics of the moment. However, politics is increasingly claiming this universality. To view politics and religion as the sole ends of Shen Yun’s art rather than its context is to deny the vital human experience of hope and kindness, which many of its audiences, regardless of their political and religious orientations, already derive from it.
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