2024-06-17
etc
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I later learned that a term exists for this phenomenon—the March of Dimes syndrome—and that the tendency affects many other movements, too. Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?
These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.
For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.
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$2.4M Texas home listing boasts built-in 5,786 sq ft data center
Horseshit
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A United States president sought to remain in office after his term ended, maintains a worshipful following and has declared he will operate as a dictator only on “day one” if reelected. His cunning and manipulation of American politics and its legal system have, so far, blocked efforts to hold him accountable.
That sort of activity has been called “Machiavellian,” after Renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli, who lived from 1469 to 1527. He wrote a notorious little treatise called “The Prince,” in which he advises sole rulers – his phrase for authoritarians or dictators – as well as those who aspire to sole rule to use force and fraud to gain and maintain power.
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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How I Became ‘CIA Renee’ - The Atlantic
Each morning, Google Alerts arrive in my inbox detailing the adventures of a fictional character bearing my name. Last month she starred in an article about “A Global Censorship Prison Built by the Women of the CIA.” In a Substack article headlined “Media Ruled by Robust PsyOp Alliance,” later posted on Infowars, an anti-vaccine propagandist implicated my alter ego in a plot to bring about a “One World Government.” A blog post titled “When Military Rule Supplants Democracy” quoted commentators who lumped her in with the “color revolution blob”—a reference to popular revolts against Russian-backed governments—and the perpetrators of “dirty tricks” overseas. You get the idea. Somewhat flatteringly, the commentators who make up these stories portray me as highly competent; one post on X credited the imaginary me with “brainwashing all of the local elections officials” to facilitate the theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
The plotlines in this cinematic universe go back to the so-called Twitter Files—internal documents released to a group of writers after Elon Musk bought the social-media platform. Some of those writers have posited the existence of a staggering “Censorship Industrial Complex,” of which I am supposedly a leader. In written testimony for a March 2023 hearing of Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the Substack writer Michael Shellenberger claimed that my cohorts and I “censored 22 million tweets” during the 2020 election. It also insinuated that I have CIA ties that I’ve kept “hidden from public view.” The crank theory that I am some kind of secret agent caught on. X users with follower counts in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands started referring to me as “CIA Renee.” The mere mention of the character’s name—as with Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Lex Luthor in the DC Extended Universe—became enough to establish villainy.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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(May 2024) The History of DR DOS
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Written by Douglas McIlroy and James Hunt and released with the 5th Edition of Unix, on this month in 1974 the world was given diff. Merge wouldn’t come along for another few years; patch, despite its physical history dating back to punchcards and paper tape, would not appear for another decade, 1984.
My friend Greg Wilson has argued, and I absolutely believe, that you can divide the entire computational universe into who has diff and patch, and who doesn’t. It’s the seed crystal of all workable open collaboration, and people living without it don’t even have the language to recognize how bad they’ve got it.
The ongoing failing and ML-distilled containerization of search don’t just keep you from finding the answers to problems you care about; it keeps you from finding the people who share your problems or care about the same things you do. In a world of forums, whether it’s reddit or discourse or phpbb or anything, search is a soft path to social discovery; view-source, diff and patch if you have them, are likewise a soft path to collaboration and community. And I don’t think either of these things are going away by accident. I think they’re being taken from us, for the unforgivable sin of not driving this quarter’s top line growth. Mutual discovery, collaboration, assistance and support, the path to that goes through the technology that enables it to happen, and ideally as easily as possible. I’m ready to elevate that to a general principle: you can know that a technology serves the people, that a developers’ first constituency is humans, when diff and patch works for two strangers needing nobody’s consent but theirs. These are the tools of the people, and anything else is control that turns extractive eventually.
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What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 Days | Hacker News
Something that came out of analysis of the blocked IP addresses was that I discovered a few untrustworthy /24 networks belonging to a bunch of "internet security companies" whose core business seems to depend on flooding the entire IPv4 space with daily scans. Blocking these Internet scanner networks significantly reduced the uninvited activity on my open service ports. And by significantly I mean easily over 50% of unwanted traffic is blocked.
- Be the problem you want to get paid to solve.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
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Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5M back
because of alleged financial ties between the non-profit that owns the building – Lightcone Infrastructure (Lightcone) – and jailed crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, the administrators of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange, are demanding the return of almost $5m that new court filings allege were used to bankroll the purchase of the property. During the last year, Lightcone and its director, Oliver Habryka, have made the $20m Lighthaven Campus available for conferences and workshops associated with the “longtermism”, “rationalism” and “effective altruism” (EA) communities, all of which often see empowering the tech sector, its elites and its beliefs as crucial to human survival in the far future.
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
World
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Post Office scandal victims in Scotland have convictions quashed
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Erith: 'I want to know why all the shops have gone'
Aside from the issue of the high street, people in Erith and Woolwich tell me that they are worried about the increase in crime. At a barber shop inside a London bus, I speak to some locals who say they are concerned with the amount of shoplifting that's going on. "People are really struggling and I've noticed a rise in petty crimes, homelessness and the use of drugs," 39-year-old Derek Vaughan says.
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Poo in the Water: How Financial Engineering Sullied Britain's Most Famous River
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Japan to allow building new reactors if others are dismantled