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2024-06-19

etc

Horseshit

Electric / Self Driving cars

celebrity gossip

Obit

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

  • Judicial Watch: New Records Detail Federal-State Censorship Coordination in 2020 Election | Judicial Watch

    “The records provide more disturbing evidence of a conspiracy by federal, state, and ‘private’ actors to censor Americans on social media during a presidential campaign,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Judicial Watch will continue to expose the government’s involvement in what is an ongoing and unprecedented attack on Americans’ First Amendment rights.”

  • Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI - Schneier on Security

    What does representation look like in a world without either filtering or geographical dispersal? Or, how do we avoid polluting 21st century democracy with prejudice, misinformation and bias. Things that impair both the problem solving and feedback mechanisms. That’s the real issue. It’s not about misinformation, it’s about the incentive structure that makes misinformation a viable strategy.

    Our catastrophic technological risks are planetary-scale: climate change, AI, internet, bio-tech. And we have all the local problems inherent in human societies. We have very few problems anymore that are the size of France or Virginia. Some systems of governance work well on a local level but don’t scale to larger groups. But now that we have more technology, we can make other systems of democracy scale. This runs headlong into historical norms about sovereignty. But that’s already becoming increasingly irrelevant. The modern concept of a nation arose around the same time as the modern concept of democracy. But constituent boundaries are now larger and more fluid, and depend a lot on context. It makes no sense that the decisions about the “drug war”—or climate migration—are delineated by nation. The issues are much larger than that. Right now there is no governance body with the right footprint to regulate Internet platforms like Facebook. Which has more users world-wide than Christianity.

    We also need to rethink growth. Growth only equates to progress when the resources necessary to grow are cheap and abundant. Growth is often extractive. And at the expense of something else. Growth is how we fuel our zero-sum systems. If the pie gets bigger, it’s OK that we waste some of the pie in order for it to grow. That doesn’t make sense when resources are scarce and expensive. Growing the pie can end up costing more than the increase in pie size. Sustainability makes more sense. And a metric more suited to the environment we’re in right now.

  • Leading chatbots are spreading Russian propaganda

    The leading AI chatbots are regurgitating Russian misinformation, according to a NewsGuard report shared first with Axios. The chatbots presented as fact false reports, originating on those sites, about a supposed wiretap discovered at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence and a nonexistent Ukrainian troll factory interfering with U.S. elections.

Musk

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

  • The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started - The New York Times

    Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication. A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy itself. “Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. “What we’re staring down is extremely dark.”

  • Trump, Musk, Supreme Court justices exploit post-shame America

    America is reaching the pinnacle of a post-shame society forged by Donald Trump and reinforced by powerful patrons. Why it matters: Nearly 50 years after Richard Nixon resigned before ever being charged with a crime, the GOP is a month away from nominating a convicted felon to be president. Polls suggest the race is extremely close.

    • We saw Hunter getting a footjob from an underage relative and hundreds of people stepped up to explain how that wasn't relevant to the last election, but a nonexistent "pee tape" was. ... But its the Right's shameless behavior they want us to worry about.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

  • Cologne prosecutors charge Twitter user for the crime of assembling a list of Covid-era insults that politicians and celebrities directed against the unvaccinated.

    You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.

    Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them.” On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism.” The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence.” MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation.”

    We must take a moment to ponder this truly amazing argumentation, which would seem to criminalise such things as participating in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembling one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources. In each of these cases, of course, it is the prosecutors and the judges eager to apply Paragraph 126a to their political opponents who get to decide what is “wrong.”

    I’m happy to say MicLiberal was acquitted two days ago at the Cologne district court,

  • Should We Be Worried About News of New Viruses? Here’s What to Consider.

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

  • Understanding the Misunderstood Kessler Syndrome

    even the definition of “Kessler Syndrome” is open to debate. As Kessler, who retired decades ago, pointed out in a 2010 paper, it is “an orbital debris term that has become popular outside the professional orbital debris community without ever having a strict definition.”

    At around 400 kilometers and into the 500-km realm — home to ISS and the SpaceX Starlink satellites among others — atmospheric drag plays a major role. Dead satellites and debris usually slow and burn up in the atmosphere in just a few years. This natural cleansing process accelerates when the sun becomes more active and solar coronal mass ejections strike Earth and cause the atmosphere to swell. “In those altitudes, we can probably do a lot and we will be forgiven,” Linares says.

    But this atmospheric drag drops off quickly as one goes higher. By the time you get around 600 km, the altitude of the Hubble Space Telescope, “now you’re talking about decades for things to drag down,” Matney says. “When you get up to 800 or 900 km, we’re now talking about centuries for things to drag down,” he adds. “When we get up to 1,000 km, you’re talking about millennia.”

  • SpaceX retrieves space junk from farmer

  • NASA delays Starliner return a few more days to study data

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

  • Trials reveal depths of Bidens' family tragedy

  • Gavin Newsom wants to take smartphones out of schools

  • (PDF) CISA Publishes "Enhancing Election Security Through Public Communications"

  • We’re All Soviets Now | The Free Press

    The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase deaths of despair for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. While male life expectancy improved in all Western countries in the late twentieth century, in the Soviet Union it began to decline after 1965, rallied briefly in the mid-1980s, and then fell off a cliff in the early 1990s, slumping again after the 1998 financial crisis. The death rate among Russian men aged 35 to 44, for example, more than doubled between 1989 and 1994.

    The explanation is as clear as Stolichnaya. In July 1994, two Russian scholars, Alexander Nemtsov and Vladimir Shkolnikov, published an article in the national daily newspaper Izvestia with the memorable title “To Live or to Drink?” Nemtsov and Shkolnikov demonstrated (in the words of a recent review article) “an almost perfect negative linear relationship between these two indicators.” All they were missing was a sequel—“To Live or to Smoke?”—as lung cancer was the other big reason Soviet men died young. A culture of binge drinking and chain-smoking was facilitated by the dirt-cheap prices of cigarettes under the Soviet regime and the dirt-cheap prices of alcohol after the collapse of communism.

  • Your Lyin' Eyes: Corporate Media Panics With 'Fact Checks' Over Biden's Obvious Decline | ZeroHedge

  • CNN's Enten: We're Watching Historic Numbers Of Black Voters Under 50 Giving Up On Democratic Party | Video | RealClearPolitics

    Look at Black voters under the age of 50. Holy cow, folks," he said. "Joe Biden was up by 80 points among this group back at this point in 2020. Look at where that margin has careened down towards. It's just -- get this -- 37 points. That lead has dropped by more than half. I've just never seen anything like this. I'm, like, speechless... We are looking at a historic moment right now where Black voters under the age of 50, who have historically been such a big part of the Democratic coalition, are leaving it in droves."

  • Biden offers citizenship path to spouses of US citizens

  • The New Cynicism Isn't Like the Old Cynicism - The Atlantic

    it seems wrong to see the crisis as beginning and ending with Trump and assume that his departure from the national stage will allow the corner to be decisively turned. Election denialism feeds a form of anti-politics that rejects the tenets of the free exercise of democratic politics. A democratic politics is defined by the give and take of debate and disagreement, an acceptance of the diversity of opinion and interests, a shared understanding that elections go one way and then the other, and a respect for the institutions that make a free politics possible. In anti-politics, political activity as a means of reconciling diverse opinions and interests is seen as an abject surrender of principle. It is replaced instead by a bullying disregard for the views of the opposition, which are not just to be defeated at the polls but utterly vanquished. Partisans should control elections, all the better to ensure the desired results, and the rule of law, disdained as a political tool, is ready at hand for use against adversaries, to punish and weaken them.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Iran / Houthi

Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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