Showing posts with label column. Show all posts
Showing posts with label column. Show all posts

Monday, January 20, 2025

Leopaul's Column: The "True" Empire of Death

 Leopaul's Column

Welcome to "Leopaul's Column," where I will transform my daily stress into engaging editorials, just like the Opinion section of your regular newspaper. Today's column is called "The TRUE Empire of Death", where authoritarianism equals communism in today's unstable world now that Donald Trump has returned to the White House, bracing us for the TRUE empire of death.

Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 marked the end of Russia's monarchy and gave rise to communism as we know it. Led by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), this revolution transformed Russia into the original Empire of Death, embodied in the USSR. This fearsome ideology spread beyond the Silk Road, leading to the establishment of single-party states, such as the People's Republic of China, and North Korea under three generations of the Kim Il Sung bloodline. Additionally, the world witnessed the complete communist takeover in Vietnam, the devastating regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia, and Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba, among others.

Although the Cold War ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, communism is still a relevant ideology. Notably, countries like China, Cuba, and North Korea continue to embody its principles. Furthermore, elements of communist tactics can be observed in various countries, as authoritarian leaders often draw inspiration from past communist leaders.

Any Filipino people who lived through the Martial Law years will tell you just how terrifying their lives have been since the time Ferdinand Marcos Sr. transformed the Philippines into his Empire of Death because of Martial Law, but there's more than just the time the Philippines became an Empire of Death.

There was the Rodrigo Duterte regime that unleashed a wave of extrajudicial killings even children weren't spared by it, triggering international condemnation, as well as the Martial Rule in Marawi because of clashes against an ISIS-affiliated Maute terror group. He even let ABS-CBN rot in the first half of 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic because the TV network heavily criticized him. Although no longer the president, Rodrigo Duterte is still plotting more to escape the wrath of the International Criminal Court. He even tried separating the Mindanao regions away from the Philippine archipelago as well, don't you know? 

The situation mirrors that of his daughter, Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, who seems to be attempting to undermine the Bongbong Marcos administration. The government has claimed that her video messages have incited "death threats" against the administration. People are drawing comparisons between the two, suggesting that they are alike in their approaches.

Moving away from the Philippines, we can observe some of the deadliest examples of what occurs when authoritarian leaders embrace communist policies or when nations that have always been communist pursue such agendas. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, China’s Xi Jinping, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are undoubtedly the top three worst offenders. Everybody knows who they are from Kim Jong Un's nuke-testing and missile-launchings, Putin's relentless attack on Ukraine, and the usual Xi Jinping shenanigans that pleases the economic world but irritates the US into paranoia.

As any Red in the US will tell you, Cuba is Latin America's worst offender since the Fidel Castro regime, but there's more than just Communist Cuba because there are some other worst offenders in Latin America that made the world worrying. You have Venezuela which is still under the socialist rule of Nicolas Maduro who still can't give up on his rule even though he was defeated by Edmundo Gonzales Urrutia in the elections, and then there's Brazil's equivalent of Donald Trump; Jair Bolsonaro. Like Trump, Bolsonaro has no regard for the environment and let the Amazon rainforest go down in flames. Thankfully, he's no longer in power...yet.

Would you like to know which is the most "communist" of the so-called captive nations and rogue nations? No, it's not Communist China. It's the US Republicans, of course. Since Donald Trump's first term, the US Republicans, in my mind, are the real communists. The stuff you saw in one of the Red Scare propaganda called "Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism" is getting real. 

In a typical communist nation, the government stripped human rights away from voting (as demonstrated by their so-called voter integrity laws and Voter ID laws), the right to choose, the right to live, and so on, and so forth. Long story short but that's the true nature of US Republicans these days. They bear the same color and behavior as communists and what "common sense" these Republicans are aiming for feels like it all came from their so-called US Republican equivalent of The Communist Manifesto.

Go ahead, keep comparing The Bill of Rights to The Communist Manifesto a million times. Here's to warn you that US Republicans mixed both of these different ideologies into one deadly manifesto that made the United States a rogue nation that prefers to be "a friend of none, an enemy to all". To clarify, the United States under Republican rule loves to pick fights with any nation or global organization that doesn't align with its wants such as its energy independence, its support to Israel, strong military power, paranoia over China, and whatever the heck the Republican-controlled USA is boasting.

The United Nations, NATO, World Trade Organization, and other global organizations should have condemned Donald Trump from the start. Trump's wanton policies, labeled by the Republicans as "common sense" sent the world towards Hell, and with him back, his ultimate mission to turn the USA into his "Empire of Death" began with the help of his ultra-wealthy backers and the Republican majority of the US Congress who got his back. By repealing every single move his Democrat predecessors worked hard, he lets oil barons, rapists, raiders, White Supremacists, religious cults, and other legions of doom rallying with him have the upper hand. 

Can you hardly imagine what will the US look like under Trump's second term? Beating China as the world's largest polluter thanks to slashing environmental regulations, becoming the country with the highest number of adolescent pregnancies because of slashing down abortion rights, boasting the record number of "baby factories" with abortion out of the table, the list goes on and on. A never-ending nightmare.

As the so-called Doomsday Clock continues to accelerate to the point that we're now less than thirty seconds to midnight or ten for that matter, it's modern-day totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and communism that have sped up the end of the world. Is this what "common sense" feels like to you? Getting plunged into a world where your life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are taken away by leaders who prefer putting their countries first? Where are the global organizations such as the United Nations when the so-called "Empires of Death" continue to expand?

It's true what the world says. Nothing is safe. The men who sold the world are responsible for it.

America under Republican rule... No, the world under the rule of the Reds... IS THIS TOMORROW?

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Leopaul's Column: Don't ask me, ask the AI

The segment that I made "Heaven and Hell" is all about me talking about the world's most interesting topics from my perspective. I made this so I can have a little mindfulness, turning my everyday stress into interesting columns every internet user should put on his or her water supply. Sadly, that segment name wasn't my type anymore so I decided to rename this segment as...

Leopaul's Column

Welcome to my newly titled segment, "Leopaul's Column," where I will transform my daily stress into engaging editorials, just like the Opinion section of your regular newspaper. For my first post in this newly renamed segment, let's talk more about the use of AI in your everyday life.

*This is an AI-generated illustration
*This is an AI-generated illustration

Since the so-called twilight of the COVID pandemic, artificial intelligence has become a booming trend. While popular AI assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa became the early adopters of the AI craze, it was the big ones such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion that saw a spike in popularity. Call it beneficial, controversial, or horrifying (probably because the AI art you've requested looks more distorted than you wanted it to be), but in the end, artificial intelligence has the upper hand but not always.

People like us starting to rely on AI because we're starting to feel either lazy or we're running out of time. We used AI to create video mashups in half the time (results not typical), create stunning artwork, generate important materials for your next office meeting, find answers to our homework problems, and so on. It has become part of our daily lives since AI became an exploding trend of this decade.

Although AI is proven to be beneficial for normal people, some bad actors abuse AI for malicious purposes. Most people blame AI for spreading malicious deepfake videos and the ever-spreading trend of "fake news" that separates people like us from the real truth. It's so intense, that even fact-checking experts are having a hard time clarifying things. The use of AI in spreading fake news is proven to be deadly for everyone who falls victim to it.

Let's be real, while most use AI for good and bad, others think they're better than AI or they're better off without AI. For instance, translators. AI-generated translators like Google Translate can translate different languages, eliminating the need for a human translator, but human translators think they're better than AI translators because, to them, AI translators are not as native as native speakers. I've seen a lot of videos proving that human native speakers are better than AI translators. They're like the resistance from the Terminator movies. Sadly, in today's reality, as the human translators are fighting, the AI translators are fighting back because of self-adaptability. It never stops evolving.

Another example is the use of AI artwork. Sure, everybody who is running out of time to do artworks rely on AI to create stunning artwork but, like human native speakers, some oppose the use of AI to generate artwork because it sometimes scoops up artwork belonging to someone else. It's like stealing but in an AI kind of way. That's why some don't rely on AI artworks to share with the world because of plagiarism concerns.

Whether it's an ultra-handy instrument for everyday life or a powerful weapon of mass destruction like Skynet from the world of Terminator if fell into the wrong hands, the use of Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. Will it help us or will it hurt us? That is an extremely divisive question when you talk about the use of AI daily.

Hey you. I've seen a lot of "questions" flooding the search query records from my Google Search Console. Haven't I told you already? "The search engine is made for searching keywords. Never put a question such as what, where, will there be, when, how, why, or any form of questions." You still turned a humble search engine like Google into a chatbox. Next time, post a comment on my blog for questions, or better yet, ChatGPT your silly questions. I don't care but I've warned you a million times; Please, don't use questions as search queries. I am asking for your cooperation because I don't want to see another "silly question" bombing my Google Search Console review.

THANK YOU.