2024-06-16
etc
Horseshit
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If you always use these 6 phrases, you're mentally stronger than most
- ‘I’m enough’
- ‘What possibilities does this setback present?’
- ‘Am I letting myself dream big?’
- ‘What’s the cost of indecision?’
- ‘Am I controlling the controllables?’
- ‘I don’t have to do this; I get to do this’
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After Baillie Gifford, who is ‘clean’ enough to fund the arts?
Many people involved with the arts have viewed the affair with despair. Activists managed to target an asset manager that invests much less in fossil fuels than most of its peers. They succeeded in reducing funding for literary festivals (not fossil fuels or arms companies). The whole arts sector is already struggling from years of public funding cuts, lacklustre philanthropy, cost inflation and Covid. If Baillie Gifford isn’t clean enough to fill the gap, who exactly is?
- Historically speaking, has any quest for religious purity throughout society ended well? Seems to me the more vigorous such movements are, the bigger the dent the leave in the societies that host them. America still feels the scars of Prohibition, for example.
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
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Nvidia CEO: One of the most 'profound learnings in my life' came from a gardener
Their interaction was brief, but the gardener’s words became one of the “most profound learnings in my life,” Huang said. “It really taught me something. This gardener has dedicated himself to his craft and doing his life’s work. And when you do that, you have plenty of time.”
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Stanford Internet Observatory wilts under legal pressure during election year
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It’s important to note that journalists, even in the 40 states that recognize the reporter’s privilege, do not have unlimited, blanket protection from having to turn over sensitive materials. But in those states — and we hope in Mississippi very soon — there is an appropriately high threshold that a plaintiff in a defamation suit must first reach before journalists are compelled to turn over their documents and notes. Under the reporter’s privilege, a plaintiff in a defamation suit should first prove that what a journalist reported was false, defamatory and based upon unreliable sources before documents are turned over to anyone. Those standards have not been met in the 13 months since Bryant first threatened this lawsuit against Mississippi Today. There has been no evidence presented to demonstrate our reporting was false because it wasn’t. There has been no evidence presented that our reporting was defamatory because it wasn’t. There has been no evidence presented that we relied on an unreliable source because we didn’t. For those reasons, we should not be compelled to turn over privileged information.
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Data-Fueled Neurotargeting Could Kill Democracy
Neurotargeting, in its simplest form, is the strategic use of large datasets to craft and deliver a message intended to sideline the recipient’s focus on logos and ethos and appeal directly to the pathos at their emotional core. Neurotargeting is prized by political campaigns, marketers, and others in the business of persuasion because they understand, from centuries of experience, that provoking strong emotional responses is one of the most reliable ways to get people to change their behavior. As Briant explained, modern neurotargeting techniques can be traced back to experiments undertaken by U.S. intelligence agencies in the early years of the 21st century that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to examine the brains of subjects as they watched both terrorist propaganda and American counterpropaganda. One of the commercial contractors working on these government experiments was Strategic Communication Laboratories, or the SCL Group, the parent company of CA.
A decade later, building on these insights, CA was the leader in a burgeoning field of political campaign consultancies that used neurotargeting to identify emotionally vulnerable voters in democracies around the globe and influence their political participation through specially crafted messaging. While the company was specifically aligned with right-wing political movements in the United States and the United Kingdom, it had a more mercenary approach elsewhere, selling its services to the highest bidder seeking to win an election. Its efforts to help Trump win the 2016 U.S. presidential election offer an illuminating glimpse into how this process worked.
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The Ford Foundation has spent decades tearing the country apart, tax-free
America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress.” Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.
The Ford Foundation may today use the trendy language of the “woke” progressive revolution and back all the latest causes in the name of social justice, but its nature hasn’t much changed from the 1960s. Its decades spent shredding the American way of life merely show what happens when a gang of self-regarding “experts” are handed an almost unlimited pile of other people’s money to spend, an indefinite mission to change the world, and no accountability whatsoever.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Jeffrey Katzenberg Is Biden’s Secret Weapon Against Trump - The New York Times
Few have dived headfirst into the president’s re-election campaign more thoroughly than Mr. Katzenberg. The longtime Hollywood mogul known for “The Lion King” and “Shrek,” among many others, Mr. Katzenberg has been one of the most prolific cash generators for Democratic presidents for a generation. On Saturday night, he will bring Mr. Biden together with former President Barack Obama, George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Jimmy Kimmel for a star-studded fund-raiser in Los Angeles, following the $26 million fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in March he arranged with Mr. Obama and former President Bill Clinton. While Mr. Katzenberg has not solved Mr. Biden’s age problem by any means and Biden aides noted that some of those he brought to the White House did not need convincing, his efforts to validate the president with the well-heeled set have helped build a war chest that has been outpacing the Trump campaign. But he has gone far beyond his past political work, joining Mr. Biden’s campaign as a co-chairman and investing himself fully in the effort to defeat former President Donald J. Trump.
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We Are Starting to Enjoy Hatred - WSJ
But what I’m seeing is that we don’t mind disliking each other now. We like it. That’s the new thing, that we’re enjoying the estrangement. Nobody’s trying to win anybody over. The biggest recent example of this is the story about the Supreme Court justice’s wife who didn’t understand that flying the American flag upside down outside her home during a crisis might be experienced by others as unhappily weird and possibly alarming, and her neighbor who didn’t understand that when engaged in a political dispute it’s not really nice to spew lewd and ugly epithets unbidden, or put them on lawn signs.
That was a local and particular expression of a larger trend we’re all witnessing. Bill Maher wrote of it in an essay last month: “Would anyone ride the New York City subway wearing a MAGA hat, or go to a NASCAR race in a Biden T-shirt? That’s where we are now: Other parts of the country are seen as no-go zones.” It’s shocking that that’s true, but it is.
The left leans toward condemnation. It is going from “Trump is a criminal” to “Trump supporters are criminal.” They understand things the other dopes don’t. Class is involved. I have quoted the friend who said recently, with no bitterness, that Democrats see Trump voters as toothless, smelly Walmart shoppers. The left does look down, sometimes from a privileged economic position, which makes it the more shameful.
Trump supporters lean toward manipulation. They charge the other side are bad human beings—selfish elites who have no feeling for, no affiliation with, the common man. They’re coastal elites who look down on flyover states as they sip martinis in first class. Some Trump voters say his foes oppose him to go to “Georgetown cocktail parties” or similar gatherings in New York and Los Angeles.
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What Have Progressives Done to the West Coast? - The New York Times
liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. I’m an Oregonian who bores people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West, but the truth is that too often we offer a version of progressivism that doesn’t result in progress. We are more likely to believe that “housing is a human right” than conservatives in Florida or Texas, but less likely to actually get people housed. We accept a yawning gulf between our values and our outcomes.
Democratic states enjoy a life expectancy two years longer than Republican states. Per capita G.D.P. in Democratic states is 29 percent higher than in G.O.P. states, and child poverty is lower. Education is generally better in blue states, with more kids graduating from high school and college. The gulf in well-being between blue states and red states is growing wider, not narrower. So my rejoinder to Republican critiques is: Yes, governance is flawed in some blue parts of America, but overall, liberal places have enjoyed faster economic growth and higher living standards than conservative places. That doesn’t look like failure. So the problem isn’t with liberalism. It’s with West Coast liberalism.
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'Cheapfake' Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead (Archive)
On June 13, at about 1 p.m., the RNC posted a clip it captioned, “What is Biden doing?” The post has been viewed more than 3 million times. Biden is seen with other Group of Seven leaders watching skydivers in Italy, carrying the flags of the nations. Biden turns and walks a few steps to chat with one of the parachutists, the only leader to do so. Then Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni turns him back to the other leaders. In one feed distributed by news services — the one used by the RNC — it’s not entirely clear who Biden is talking to, but an alternative feed, also distributed by news services, makes it clear that Biden is having a conversation. The New York Post jumped on the RNC clip, posting a story less than two hours later and embedding the RNC post. When the White House cried foul, saying the video had been taken out of context, the newspaper buried that comment in the bottom of the story, while noting that the video feed had been distributed by news services. (None characterized it as the RNC did. C-SPAN, for instance, titled its video: “President Biden & G-7 Leaders Watch Skydiving Demonstration.”)
An X community note was added to the video clip, saying: “Biden didn’t ‘wander off’. After viewing a skydiving demo with the other G-7 leaders, Biden stepped aside to speak with one of the other skydivers who is kneeling on the ground packing away his chute. The video in the above post has been digitally altered to remove the skydiver.”
- Let's see this kind of nuance applied to their understanding of some of the famous Trump stories, then? no? It's only dishonest when the other guys do it?
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North Dakota voters just approved an age limit for congressional candidates
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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House passes defense bill automatically registering men ages 18-26 for draft
- As opposed tot he current requirement to sign up for selective service individually.
World
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Europe's far-right gains raise migrant fears for future – DW – 06/11/2024
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Samyang: Denmark recalls Korean ramen for being too spicy
"We understand that the Danish food authority recalled the products, not because of a problem in their quality but because they were too spicy," the firm said in a statement to the BBC. "The products are being exported globally. But this is the first time they have been recalled for the above reason." The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration said it had assessed the levels of capsaicin in a single packet to be "so high that they pose a risk of the consumer developing acute poisoning".
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Why cheap US gas costs a fortune in Europe
"In today's geopolitical context, among countries that support Ukraine there are two categories being created in the gas market: those who are paying dearly and those who are selling at very high prices," French President Emmanuel Macron told a group of industrial players last week. "The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling us at a high price ... I don't think that's friendly." Macron's dig conveniently ignored that the largest European holder of long-term U.S. gas contracts is none other than France's own TotalEnergies.
At the company's latest earnings call last month, TotalEnergies CFO Jean-Pierre Sbraire trumpeted the fact that the firm's access to more than 10 million tons of U.S. LNG annually "is a huge advantage for our traders, who can arbitrage between the U.S. and Europe." "And now, given the price of LNG, each cargo represents something like $80 million, even $100 million. So, when we are able reroute or to arbitrage between the different markets, of course, it's a very efficient way to maximize the value coming from that business," Sbaire added. "Cash flow generation of this order of magnitude marks the start of a new era for the company."
Unlike some producers — for example in the Middle East — which restrict the final destination of the LNG to consumers in Asia and prevent it being sold onward at a higher price, American gas changes ownership the minute it's loaded onto a ship and comes with no strings attached.