oftwominds |Class wars are the inevitable result of an economic system in which 'anything goes if you're rich enough and winners take most'.
The
traditional class war has been waged between wage-earners (who sell
their labor) and their employers (owners of capital and the means of production). These
classes have been assigned various names (proletariat, bourgeoisie,
capitalists, etc.) but these broad class definitions don't describe all
the class conflicts emerging in the modern U.S. economy.
Before we dig deeper, let's stipulate that ownership of various forms of capital still defines class: the wealthy live off unearned income skimmed from capital and everyone else lives off earned income from selling their labor. (Those without either source of income become dependents of the State).
What you own or don't own defines your class interests, but these have been fragmented into a multitude of sub-classes. Six years ago I took a stab at defining America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014), to which I would now add a tenth class, gig economy precariat, who paradoxically may own one of the means of production such as the car needed to become an Uber driver, but the precariat doesn't own the controlling means of production, which is the Uber platform.
Cell phone video
shows Kenosha Wisconsin police officers in an military vehicle telling
armed White militia members they "appreciate them being
there" and giving them bottled water; while in the background
cops can be heard ordering protestors to disperse. pic.twitter.com/73SsfCUYWj
As a consequence, all the profits flow to the owners of the platform. Since the gig economy is not traditional hourly employment, there is no employer-provided security at all.
To which we add a new category of the working poor who lack even the
minimal security of the conventional Working Poor (such as Amazon
fulfillment center workers):
10. Gig economy precariat.
For the purposes of today's discussion, let's focus on the conflicts between four classes:
1. The Central State, which includes the elected government, the
permanent Deep State, the Federal Reserve and and the
managers/technocrats who run the State Nomenklatura.
2. The owners of Capital and political influence (The Oligarchs and New Nobility).
3. The Upper Caste, the top 10% of the private sector.
4. The lower classes of wage-earners and state dependents.
technologyreview | The first family to quit Pastor Clark Frailey’s church during the
pandemic did it by text message. It felt to Frailey like a heartbreaking
and incomplete way to end a years-long relationship. When a second
young couple said they were doubting his leadership a week later,
Frailey decided to risk seeing them in person, despite the threat of
covid-19.
It was late May, and things were starting to reopen
in Oklahoma, so Frailey and the couple met in a near-empty fast food
restaurant to talk it over.
The congregants were worried about
Frailey’s intentions. At Coffee Creek, his evangelical church outside
Oklahoma City, he had preached on racial justice for the past three
weeks. He says the couple didn’t appreciate his most recent sermon,
which urged Christians to call out and challenge racism anywhere they
saw it, including in their own church. Though Frailey tries to keep
Coffee Creek from feeling too traditional—he wears jeans, and the church
has a modern band and uses chairs instead of pews—he considers himself a
theologically conservative Southern Baptist pastor. But at one point,
the couple Frailey spoke to said they believed that he was becoming a
“social justice warrior.”
Pastors and congregants disagree all
the time, and Frailey doesn’t want to be the sort of Christian leader
whom people feel afraid to challenge. But in that restaurant, it felt to
him as if he and they had read two different sacred texts. It was as if
the couple were “believing internet memes over someone they’d had a
relationship with for over five years,” Frailey says.
At one
point he brought up QAnon, the conspiracy theory holding that Donald
Trump is fighting a secret Satanic pedophile ring run by liberal elites.
When he asked what they thought about it, the response was worryingly
ambiguous. “It wasn’t like, ‘I fully believe this,’” he says. “It was
like, ‘I find it interesting.’ These people are dear to me and I love
them. It’s just—it felt like there was someone else in the conversation
that I didn’t know who they were.”
Frailey told me about another young person who used to regularly
attend his church. She was sharing conspiracy-laden misinformation on
Facebook “like it’s the gospel truth,” he said, including a quote
falsely attributed to Senator Kamala Harris. He saw another post from
this woman promoting the wild claim that Tom Hanks and other Hollywood
celebrities are eating babies.
Before the pandemic, Frailey
knew a little bit about QAnon, but he hadn’t given such an easily
debunked fringe theory much of his time. The posts he started seeing
felt familiar, though: they reminded him of the “Satanic panic” of the
1980s and 1990s, when rumors of secret occult rituals tormenting
children in day-care centers spread quickly among conservative religious
believers who were already anxious about changes in family structures. “The pedophile stuff, the Satanic stuff, the eating babies—that’s all from the 1980s,” he says.
That conspiracy-fueled frenzy was propelled in part by credulous mainstream news coverage, and by false accusations and even convictions
of day-care owners. But evangelicals, in particular, embraced the
claims, tuning in to a wave of televangelists who promised to help
viewers spot secret satanic symbols and rituals in the secular world.
If
the panic was back with fresh branding as QAnon, it had a new ally in
Facebook. And Frailey wasn’t sure where to turn for help. He posted in a
private Facebook group for Oklahoma Baptist pastors, asking if anyone
else was seeing what he was. The answer, repeatedly, was yes.
The pastors traded links. Frailey read everything he could about QAnon. He listened to every episode of the New York Times podcast series Rabbit Hole, on “what happens when our lives move online,” and devoured a story in the Atlantic that framed QAnon as a new religion infused with the language of Christianity. To Frailey, it felt more like a cult.
He
began to look further back into the Facebook history of the young
former member who had posted the fake Harris quote. In the past, he
remembered, she had posted about her kids every day. In June and July,
he saw, that had shifted. Instead of talking about her family, she was
now promoting QAnon—and one member of the couple that had met with him
in May was there in the comments, posting in solidarity.
Suddenly
he understood that his efforts to protect his congregation from
covid-19 had contributed to a different sort of infection. Like
thousands of other church leaders across the United States, Frailey had
shut down in-person services in March to help prevent the spread of the
virus. Without these gatherings, some of his churchgoers had turned
instead to Facebook, podcasts, and viral memes for guidance. And QAnon, a
movement with its own equivalents of scripture, prophecies, and clergy,
was there waiting for them.
pulpitandpen | The gist is this: Prior to the return of Christ, his followers are
going to become increasingly unpopular and the world will grow
increasingly wicked. It will be characterized by unruly children,
self-centered vanity (food selfie, much?), homosexuality, and general
ungodliness. Although all ages have had these sins to varying degrees,
the generation before Christ returns will actually take pride in them.
This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.6 For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. 2 Timothy 3:1-7
This will be accomplished by incredible technology that allows the
comings-and-goings of people to be micromanaged and they will be
excluded from buying or selling things in the marketplace. This is to
accomplish a “soft extermination,” basically starving out believers or
forcing them to assimilate.
16 And he causeth all,
both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in
their right hand, or in their foreheads:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Revelation 13:16-17
After it’s clear from muscling non-conformists into a corner by
restricting their access to the market, a global, powerful government
will then begin a “hard extermination,” rounding up believers and
murdering them like dogs in a persecution worse than anything the world
has ever seen (including the Holocaust).
Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake…21 For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.Matthew 24:9,21
This will, in part, be possible by some kind of contraption – whether
natural or supernatural – that will detect believing non-conformists
who have refused to identify with the global grand poobah (known as the
anti-christ) and it will sound an alarm, alerting people that an
‘unauthorized person’ is nearby.
15 And he had power to
give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast
should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image
of the beast should be killed. Revelation 13:15
You can figure out how that will be done, because it doesn’t leave
much to the imagination in a period in which we’re talking about “health passports” scanning temperatures of passing crowds of people, putting everyone into a facial recognition database (even liberals in America’s cities are scared over this one and have started to ban the tech),
and are micro-chipping Lassie. I’m not a prophet or the son of one, but
I surmise it will be one of these things, a combination thereof, or
something eerily similar. In one way or another, those little images are
going to scream out and snitch, something that John was seeing in his
revelation and trying to convey to us with his 1st Century vocabulary.
And when all this fails to round up believers for the gas chamber,
people will snitch on each other. Even family members will turn one
another in for not conforming to the government regulations.
theverge | Elon Musk has said
that his secretive neurotech firm Neuralink will demonstrate a working
“device,” presumably a brain-machine interface, at 6PM ET on Friday.
Musk has spoken repeatedly about his belief that BMI devices are needed
to help humans keep up with AI by supplementing our brainpower, but
right now, his goal is much simpler: to create an implantable device
that lets people control phones or computers with their mind.
Musk initially announced the August 28th “progress update” back in July, and has now offered more details on what will be shown. He says the update will include the unveiling of a second-generation robot designed to attach the company’s technology to the brain, and a demo of neurons “firing in real-time,” though it’s not clear exactly what is meant by this.
Even compared to Musk’s other ventures like Tesla and SpaceX, Neuralink is ambitious.
The company wants to connect to the brain using flexible electrodes
thinner than a human hair that it calls “threads.” Current BMI devices
use stiff electrodes for this job, which can cause damage. But inserting
flexible electrodes is a much more delicate and challenging task, hence
the company’s focus on building a “sewing machine” like robot to do the
job.
techcrunch | Pleasanton-based green energy startup NDB, Inc. has reached a key milestone today with the completion of two proof of concept tests of its nano diamond battery (NDB) .
One of these tests took place at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, and the other at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge
University, and both saw NDB’s battery tech manage a 40% charge, which
is a big improvement over the 15% charge collection efficiency
(effectively energy lossiness relative to maximum total possible charge)
of standard commercial diamond.
NDB’s innovation is in creating a
new, proprietary nano diamond treatment that allows for more efficient
extraction of electric charge from the diamond used in the creation of
the battery. Their goal is to ultimately commercialize a version of
their battery that can self-charge for up to a maximum lifespan of
28,000 years, created from artificial diamond-encased carbon-14 nuclear
waste.
This battery doesn’t generate any carbon emissions in
operation, and only requires access to open air to work. And while
they’re technically batteries, because they contain a charge which will
eventually be expended, they provide their own charge for much longer
than the lifetime of any specific device or individual user, making them
effectively a charge-free solution.
NDB
ultimately hopes to turn their battery into a viable source of power
for just about anything that consumes it — including aircraft, EVs,
trains and more, all the way down to smartphones, wearables and tiny
industrial sensors. The company is currently now at work creating a
prototype of its first commercial battery in order to make that
available sometime later this year.
It has also just signed its
first beta customers, who will actually be receiving and making use of
those first prototypes. While it hasn’t named them specifically, it did
say that one is “a leader in nuclear fuel cycle products and services,”
and the other is “a leading global aerospace, defense and security
manufacturing company.” Obviously, this kind of tech has appeal in just
about every sector, but defense and power concerns are likely among the
deepest-pocketed.
The
lava tubes beneath the surface of the moon have also remained largely
intact due to low gravity. Any collapsed lava tubes on the moon are
likely due to asteroid impacts, the researchers said. And those
skylights could actually provide access to the tubes.
These lava tubes could help shelter astronauts, as well as provide new information about the moon and Mars.
"The
existence of stable huge voids below the Moon subsurface, potentially
accessible through skylights, could change the paradigm on how we
approach planetary exploration in terms of mission design, planetary
human outposts and scientific research," said Pozzobon and Franceso
Sauro, study author and professor in the department of biological,
geological and environmental sciences at the University of Bologna.
"Accessing
these caves and (analyzing) this type of subsurface environment will
present new technological challenges but also could provide unexpected
scientific discoveries."
For astronauts exploring the harsh environments and fluctuating
temperatures of the moon and Mars, the lava tubes could provide natural
shelter from radiation, impacts by micrometeorites and unstable
temperatures.
Micrometeorites pose a danger not only
to astronauts, but the habitats and life support equipment they'll need
on the moon and Mars. The caves could be used to live in and store
equipment.
It's even possible that the tubes could provide access to water ice reservoirs, the researchers said.
"But the challenges in order to access these caves and sustain human activity are nonetheless massive," the researchers said.
Forbes | Lava tubes on the moon and Mars may be large enough to fit city
center-sized groups of astronauts living on these other worlds, a new
study finds.
Lava tubes are an underground tunnel that happens due to the flow of
molten rock during a volcanic explosion. We get lava tubes on Earth as
well, but the ones on the moon and Mars are likely much larger —
allowing huge communities of people to work, live and explore on other
worlds.
A typical tube on Earth will be roughly 30 feet to 100 feet (10 to 30
meters) in diameter. But one on Mars could be the height of the Empire
State Building, with a diameter 10 times that of Earth. If that sounds
big, consider the moon, where its even lower gravity produces a tube up
to 1000 times larger than Earth’s — much taller than the massive Burj
Khalifa tower in Dubai.
It’s an exciting find because these small, cramped spaces on Earth
would instead open up into vast caverns of space on other worlds. Rather
than imagining future astronauts working shoulder to shoulder all the
time, these space explorers could easily stroll through otherworldly
boulevards, all sheltered from deadly outside radiation (and in the case
of Mars, fierce dust storms).
"These [lava tubes] represent ideal gateways or windows for subsurface
exploration,” said study lead author Francesco Sauro in a statement.
While we’ve known about these lava tubes for a while, the new study
shows just how large they are — able to contain the same space as the
city center of Padua, Italy in at least one case, Sauro said.
scientificamerican | Most scientists would readily tell you that their discipline is—and
always has been—a collaborative, communal process. Nobody can
revolutionize a scientific field without first getting the critical
appraisal and eventual validation of their peers. Today this requirement
is performed through peer review—a process Wolfram’s critics say he has
circumvented with his announcement. “Certainly there’s no reason that
Wolfram and his colleagues should be able to bypass formal peer review,”
Mack says. “And they definitely have a much better chance of getting
useful feedback from the physics community if they publish their results
in a format we actually have the tools to deal with.”
Mack is not alone in her concerns. “It’s hard to expect physicists to
comb through hundreds of pages of a new theory out of the blue, with no
buildup in the form of papers, seminars and conference presentations,”
says Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech. “Personally, I feel it would
be more effective to write short papers addressing specific problems
with this kind of approach rather than proclaiming a breakthrough
without much vetting.”
So why did Wolfram announce his ideas this way? Why not go the
traditional route? “I don't really believe in anonymous peer review,” he
says. “I think it’s corrupt. It’s all a giant story of somewhat corrupt
gaming, I would say. I think it’s sort of inevitable that happens with
these very large systems. It’s a pity.”
So what are Wolfram’s goals? He says he wants the attention and
feedback of the physics community. But his unconventional
approach—soliciting public comments on an exceedingly long paper—almost
ensures it shall remain obscure. Wolfram says he wants physicists’
respect. The ones consulted for this story said gaining it would require
him to recognize and engage with the prior work of others in the
scientific community.
And when provided with some of the responses from other physicists
regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed
by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles.
“I deserve better.”
edge |We're now in this situation where people just assume that science
can compute everything, that if we have all the right input data and we
have the right models, science will figure it out. If we learn that our
universe is fundamentally computational, that throws us right into the
idea that computation is a paradigm you have to care about. The big
transition was from using equations to describe how everything works to
using programs and computation to describe how things work. And that's a
transition that has happened after 300 years of equations. The
transition time to using programs has been remarkably quick, a decade or
two. One area that was a holdout, despite the transition of many fields
of science into the computational models direction, was fundamental
physics.
If we can firmly establish this fundamental theory of physics, we
know it's computation all the way down. Once we know it's computation
all the way down, we're forced to think about it computationally. One of
the consequences of thinking about things computationally is this
phenomenon of computational irreducibility. You can't get around it.
That means we have always had the point of view that science will
eventually figure out everything, but computational irreducibility says
that can't work. It says that even if we know the rules for the system,
it may be the case that we can't work out what that system will do any
more efficiently than basically just running the system and seeing what
happens, just doing the experiment so to speak. We can't have a
predictive theoretical science of what's going to happen.
The question that I'm asking myself is how does the universe work?
What is the lowest level machine code for how our universe works? The
big surprise to me is that over the last six months or so, I think we've
figured out a path to be able to answer that question.
There's a lot of detail about how what we figured out about the path
to that question relates to what's already known in physics. Once we
know this is the low-level machine code for the universe, what can we
then ask ourselves about why we have this universe and not another? Can
we ask questions like why does this universe exist? Why does any
universe exist? Some of those are questions that people asked a couple
thousand years ago.
Lots of Greek philosophers had their theories for how the universe
fundamentally works. We've gotten many layers of physics and mathematics
sophistication since then, but what I'm doing goes back to these core
questions of how things fundamentally work underneath. For us, it's this
simple structure that involves elements and relations that build into
hypergraphs that evolve in certain ways, and then these hypergraphs
build into multiway graphs and multiway causal graphs. From pieces of
the way those work, we see what relativity is, what quantum mechanics
is, and so on.
One of the questions that comes about when you imagine that you might
hold in your hand a rule that will generate our whole universe, how do
you then think about that? What's the way of understanding what's going
on? One of the most obvious questions is why did we get this universe
and not another? In particular, if the rule that we find is a
comparatively simple rule, how did we get this simple-rule universe?
Counterpunch | the former constitutional law professor Obama knows damn well that
the President of the United States is NOT “elected by all the people.”
Thanks to the openly undemocratic Electoral College system, the winner
of the national presidential popular vote has failed to win five U.S.
presidential elections so far, including the last one.
And to what “democracy” is Obama referring? The United States is a corporate and financial oligarchy. This is an open secret understood very
well (in private) by the onetime record corporate fundraiser Obama.
Even some conservative elites like the veteran federal jurist and
economist Richard Posner concede this basic reality. As the
distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern)
and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched book Democracy in America? (written and researched during the highly instructive years of Obama’s Citigroup presidency):
“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had
little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.
Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business
corporations – have had much more political clout. When they are taken
into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless…The
will of majorities is often thwarted by the affluent and the
well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special
favors for themselves…Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help
provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal
medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such
programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut
‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural
gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs] (emphasis
added).”
By Gilens and Pages’ findings, based on exhaustive inquiry into
hundreds of bills and policies enacted and blocked since the 1980s, the
basic same rule – concentrated wealth wins, the populace loses – holds
regardless of which major party or party configuration holds or
distributes nominal power in in Washington.
The “hope” and “change” Obama administration, loaded with agents of
high finance, was a case in point. It gave Americans a blunt object
lesson on who really owns and runs the country, helping thereby to spark
the Occupy Wall Street rebellion, which Obama’s Department of Homeland
Security helped crush (along with hundreds of Democratic city
governments from coast to coast).
Seven in the ten Americans currently support Medicare for All – a
desperately needed policy that the current pretend-progressive
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden suggests he would veto if it
came to his desk as president!
thelist | Barack and Michelle Obama's beautiful Martha's Vineyard estate seems to be ripped from the pages of a storybook.
Martha's Vineyard, a picturesque Massachusetts island, has been a vacation favorite for many Presidents and first families, from the Kennedys to the Clintons. Lately, however, the Obamas have been amongst the island's most regular presidential visitors — spending time than ever on the island since President Obama's time in office. And while visiting the island may be thoroughly enjoyable, the former first family decided to plant roots and buy a stunning mansion on the island.
As reported by People, in December 2019, the Obamas spent a cool $11.75 million to buy their 6,892-square-foot home dream home, which sits on a stunning 29 private acres. While almost $12 million may sound like a high price to pay for a vacation home, this luxurious Martha's Vineyard estate is well worth the hefty price tag. Here's a look inside Barack and Michelle Obama's beautiful Martha's Vineyard estate.
Barack and Michelle Obama's Martha's Vineyard estate is certainly dreamy.
Martha's Vineyard is known for beautiful homes and stunning beaches. So, it's no wonder why the Obamas wanted to spring for a home-away-from-home on the island — and they didn't skimp, either. The mansion they chose, located on Edgartown Great Pond, is enormous. The home boasts almost 7,000 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, a private pool, and multiple living rooms, according to the estate's real estate listing. And with 29 private acres of manicured lawns, greenery, and beach, this estate has a little bit of everything.
peoplespolicyproject | The People’s Policy Project is proud to release its first formal
paper. Co-authored by Ryan Cooper and Matt Bruenig and designed by Jon
White, it uses data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to track the
evolution of African-American wealth during the Obama presidency, and
how that wealth was affected by housing policy choices made by the
administration.
The paper finds that while President Obama had wide discretion and
appropriated funds to relieve homeowners caught in the economic crisis,
the policy design his administration chose for his housing program was a
disaster. Instead of helping homeowners, at every turn the
administration was obsessed with protecting the financial system — and
so homeowners were left to drown.
As a result, the percentage of black homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage exploded 20-fold from 2007 to 2013.
Most middle-class wealth is housing wealth. Obama’s failure meant that
while the top 10 percent of white households saw large increases in
wealth due to the bank bailout restoring stock market values, almost
everyone else in the country suffered serious losses.
Interviewer: Doctor, you
know the situation very well. You’ve worked since the beginning of the
pandemic with patients affected by the coronavirus. You are actually at
the Escorial Hospital, here in Madrid. Tell us, what is the situation
like, exactly? It’s worrying, is it not? Can you tell us about the
total saturation level? Are there hospitals that are beginning to
increase the number of beds? Can you confirm any of this?
Doctor: Ah, no, I don’t
believe so. I don’t know which hospitals you are talking about. It’s
true we are seeing an increase in the number of admissions. But until
last week there were none. Yesterday we had three. Three people, and
over one hundred beds, you understand? So no, I don’t believe we are
close to saturation levels. What’s more, the most crowded hospital, The
12th of October…
Interviewer: So The 12th
of October is the hospital that cancelled all surgical interventions
from its planning schedule and postponed less-urgent external
consultations.
Doctor: Okay, yes.
Yesterday, independent authorities published that there were 75
admissions – seventy five admitted in a hospital with 1,300 beds.
Interviewer: That’s right. And 540 infected!
Doctor: Are those sick or
just positive cases? Because the data can deceive and confuse us. In
the health centres, we administer only PCR tests, so we will find many
positives. Furthermore, we are now hospitalizing people tested in their
vehicles. We classify these positive PCR tests as Covid-19, even though
they are only people that have been tested in their cars. So we are
creating confusion by announcing, “Covid-19 cases are increasing!” when
in fact, it is not true. There is an increase, but not for patients who
have a pathology of Covid-19. A pathology of Covid-19 is what we saw
in the spring when our hospitals were indeed crowded. But at present, we
see an increase in cases that are the simple result of an increase in
PCR testing. And having a positive PCR test does not necessarily mean
that we are sick.
Interviewer: Tell
us, in your hospital, for example, what are you doing? Are you
preparing for September or October? Have the health staff returned?
Doctor: Why would they
return? they are on vacation like all our elected officials and
government personnel. There is no emergency. We are on alert, yes, but
not in an emergency.
Interviewer: Are there replacements? Replacement doctors or nurses?
Doctor: I have no idea
what was planned. As for the rest, the decision to suspend consultations
or surgeries affects the supply in the blood banks and personnel.
However, we haven’t yet seen the number of sick patients that we
received in the spring.
theautomaticearth | No, no matter how much I read and watch, I can’t shake the idea (less
so as I go along, actually) that the Democrats don’t really, honestly,
want to win the 2020 presidential election. Obviously, there are many in
the party who do, and voters too, but not the ones pushing the levers
and pulling the strings. Those, whoever they may be, that are picking
candidates, setting policy, maintaining media contacts, doctoring spins.
Because is there anyone among you who has ever seen a worse candidate
than Joe Biden? I’m not just talking about his dementia and gaffes, but
you’d be very hard-pressed to find anyone who can use Biden and
enthusiasm -let alone inspiration, or even better: exhilaration- in one
sentence that doesn’t include the word “no”. And isn’t that the #1
requirement for a candidate?
They ostensibly went with Kamala Harris to provide some of that, if
we may believe the press. She’ll whip up the voters into wild bouts of
inspiring enthusiasm! Only, Kamala bowed out of the primaries even
before 2020 started, after spending $40 million -part of which is still
not paid off- because she was stuck at 2% support and couldn’t generate …
any enthusiasm.
What you got is a really old man who couldn’t get a toddler excited
about ice cream, and a token black woman who nobody even in her own
party likes. Mix those ingredients into a convention that attracts just
half the viewers of the 2016 one and generates the excitement level of
an infomercial for kitchen appliances, and is it any wonder I doubt that
the “behind the curtain party” is in this to win?
As for the political program, the agenda, there is really only one
item on it: Donald Trump. And no matter how many millions of times it
may be repeated in speeches and news articles, NOT being something is in
the end NOT a positive message. You’re supposed to win on your own
merit, not someone else’s perceived lack of merit. Newsflash: “MOST
BIDEN SUPPORTERS SAY THEIR VOTE IS AGAINST TRUMP RATHER THAN FOR BIDEN –
WSJ/NBC News poll”.
This bit from the Guardian on Monday sums it up nicely, and it veers
into late night comedy territory while doing it (what more can one ask
for?):
The Democratic national convention begins on Monday with a star-studded lineup and heavy
emphasis on unity aimed at presenting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as
the US’s best hope for healing a deeply divided nation[..]
The Dems have a hard enough time uniting their own party, let alone
the nation. And there’s not a Trump supporter who would move into their
camp – other than the odd washed up GOP politician.
Even supposing the positive test is real, the vast majority of
“cases” are asymptomatic. Between false positives, unreliable tests and
asymptomatic infection, a “case” count for sars-cov-2 is borderline
meaningless.
Let’s say there are symptoms AND a positive test, and assume they’re
not just a false positive who has a cold or the flu. Well, even the vast
majority of the “symptomatic cases” will only ever be mildly ill. In
fact of the 6 million active cases in the world, only 1% are considered
severely ill. The majority of them will survive.
The CDC estimates the infection fatality ratio of Sars-Cov-2 to be
about 0.26%. A number perfectly in line with severe flu seasons.
Virtually every country in Europe is now reporting average, or even below average, mortality.
Broadly speaking, the vast majority of the world is, and will likely remain, absolutely fine.
But things aren’t going back to normal, are they? In fact, they are
getting worse. The governments have got their foot in the door, and they
have no intention of moving it.
Masks are now mandatory in the UK, and Australia, and New Zealand, and Germany and France. And many others. The Democrat’s nominee for President, Joe Biden, has said they should be mandatory in the US as well.
Every day there are more and more articles discussing the need for mandatory vaccination, or something even worse.
And everywhere the language is changing. “The New Normal” was about beating Covid19, but now it’s about “covid19 and future pandemics”, or the “other colossal challenges facing humanity”….which can mean literally anything they want it to mean.
All this is based on the ever-increasing number of cases, without any reference to the fact deaths are falling.
theinsideview | We can define civilizational collapse as a process wherein most
recognizable large-scale institutions of a society vanish, coupled with a
drop in material wealth, a drop in the complexity of material artifacts
and social forms, a reduction in travel distance and physical safety of
the inhabitants, and a mass reduction in knowledge.
Loss of knowledge is especially damaging, since it accelerates the
other aspects of collapse and ensures that they will be long-lasting.
Nearly all of the written evidence we have of societal decline comes
from elites. Historically, literacy was restricted to the traditional
elite class of a society, as they were the only ones with any use for
reading and writing. This accounts for the total disappearance of
writing after the Late Bronze Age collapse, since Bronze Age societies
had a very small literate class.
The result was a wholesale loss of
civilizational knowledge. When writing reappeared in the eastern
Mediterranean centuries later, it was based on the new Phoenician
alphabet, rather than the old hieroglyphic system that gave birth to the
cuneiform of the Assyrians or the Linear B of the Minoans. Such losses
of knowledge are a constant throughout human history: as with FOGBANK,
or as with the state of New Jersey recently scrambling to find a COBOL programmer with the ability to overhaul their legacy information systems.
Despite how difficult it can be to gather historical data, it’s still
a far better way to understand societal collapse than purely
theoretical models. Rather than picking and choosing our preferred
explanations of collapse beforehand, we should first recognize that
there are simply too many causal variables to control for. The best we
can hope for is rigorous cross-comparison with the historical record,
using sets of natural experiments between past societies. A broad
historical literature of collapse does exist, especially on the Late
Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire. But the scholars
that pose these questions often have particular—and popular—answers in
mind as to what causes collapse: environmental fragility, moral decline,
an overloading of systemic complexity, and so on.
The morality play is
written first, the facts are found second, and this often results in a
shoddy final product of a theory. Thus, the relevance of history for
investigating our own society’s potential collapse is also obvious:
without comparing the present to other civilizations, we can’t say much
of anything useful about it.
It is hard to come to a consensus on historical cause and effect. In
geology, we didn’t build another planet to discover the Earth’s plate
tectonics, but rather dug among the rocks on which we found ourselves.
In our macro-study of history and civilizations, we too must rely on
in-depth exploration of historical examples.
That exploration is still itself theory-driven. Good historians and
theoreticians explicitly acknowledge the theses they work with, so I
will do the same. My theory of history is great founder theory:
I propose that social technologies do not evolve out of mass action,
but rather are devised by a tiny subset of institutional designers.
Looking at history, we see that new organizations and social forms often
arise within a single generation, showing jumps in social complexity
far too rapid to be explained away by collective action or evolution.
This would be the equivalent of expecting a tornado tearing through a
junkyard to assemble a Boeing 747 or a Tesla Cybertruck.
Designing complex objects through collective action, or perhaps
through an intermittent individual strategy similar to the open software
approach, is tempting. However, unowned commons tend to be raided, and
individual visions tend to differ massively. It often takes an
exceptional individual with exceptional vision to create a new social or
material technology. It’s hard to remember nowadays that the smartphone
once had to be devised as a combination of the cell phone, the tablet,
and the camera, and did not merely emerge out of mass market sentiments.
It took a single individual, Steve Jobs, to see that while a
combination of the car, the airplane, and the submarine would produce an
inferior version of all three, the opposite case would be true in the
creation of the smartphone. And then that individual had to implement
the vision.
Very curious...look where Ghislaine Maxwell’s nephew & one of two Clinton political appointees to the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Alexander Djerassi was workinghttps://t.co/B9CtK9fVqYhttps://t.co/eB70wDYIW1
thedailybeast | Now the celebrity tabloid OK! Magazine
is reporting that ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “gifted”
Maxwell’s nephew, Alexander Djerassi, a position within her department
when he was just out of college and gave him “special treatment.”
The
Daily Beast could not confirm details of Djerassi’s appointment with
the State Department nor if the role was in fact "gifted" by Clinton.
The
reports come as Maxwell, 58, awaits trial in a Brooklyn federal lockup
for allegedly grooming and trafficking girls for Epstein.
The
report also appears to reference Djerassi’s LinkedIn profile, which
lists his role as chief of staff for the “Office of the Assistant
Secretary of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs” from May 2011 to
June 2012. Djerassi served as special assistant to the office from May
2009 to May 2011, his online profile says.
Djerassi’s name also popped up in a collection of Clinton’s emails
hacked via WikiLeaks. In a November 2011 message, Assistant Secretary
Jeffrey Feltman referred to his “special assistant, Alex Djerassi.”
Feltman mentioned Djerassi again in a January 2012 email, according to
WikiLeaks.
Djerassi was also a nonresident associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A biography on the
endowment’s website states Djerassi’s research “focused on Tunisia and
U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East and North Africa.” The bio
adds, “From 2009 to 2012, Djerassi was chief of staff and special
assistant in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern
Affairs, covering U.S. relations with Arab states, Israel, and Iran. He
worked on matters relating to democratization and civil society in the
Arab world, the Arab uprisings, and Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
“Djerassi
has served as a U.S. representative to the Friends of
Libya conferences, Friends of the Syrian People conferences, U.S.-GCC
Strategic Coordination Forum, and several UN General Assemblies,” the
profile concludes.
The role at the State Department wasn’t the nephew’s only Clinton-related gig.
From
September 2007 to June 2008, Djerassi was a policy associate for
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He listed his job duties as
such: “Researched and drafted memos, briefings, and policy papers for
candidate, senior staff, and news media on wide range of domestic and
foreign policy issues. Prepared for more than 20 debates.” (In late
2007, Epstein was under investigation for trafficking girls in Palm
Beach and working on a secret plea deal with federal prosecutors.
Maxwell is believed to be one accomplice who was protected under the
controversial agreement.)
The Yale and Princeton alum—the son of Maxwell’s sister Isabel—apparently returned for Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.
Djerassi lists a job as “national security policy planner” for the “Clinton-Kaine Presidential Transition Team” in 2016.
counterpunch | Just how much erosion has support for Israel suffered among Western
Jews under the age of 40? The polls are not much help, because they tell
contradictory stories. However, in anecdotal terms, there is a strong
sense that the gap is growing between an increasingly rightwing and
racist Israeli society and younger, liberal/progressive Western Jews.
The well-publicized recent interview with Seth Rogen, a comedian and
filmmaker with an “ability to capture the Jewish cultural conversation,”
and a fan base among Jewish millennials (i.e., those born between 1981
and 1996), may be a case in point.
On 27 July 2020 Rogen was interviewed on fellow Jewish comedian Marc Maron’s “insanely popular podcast” WTF.
While on Maron’s program, Rogen questioned why those with “a secular
Jewish identity” should feel “any cultural identification with the state
of Israel.” Indeed, he admitted that the notion of a Jewish state made
little sense to him. He said “Jewish statehood was the result of an
“antiquated thought process” and was in truth, counterproductive.
“Encouraging all Jews to live in one Jewish state is a nonsensical
strategy for the preservation of Jewish peoplehood.”
How did Rogen come to these conclusions? He credited his outlook to
overcoming an incomplete and deceitful Jewish educational process. He
explained that he had been “fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my
entire life. You know, they never tell you, that oh by the way, there
were people there.” In other words, the history of Israel he was taught
never mentioned the Nakba, Occupied Territories, and collective
imprisonment of the residents of the Gaza Strip and the like. It was
just the story of “only democracy in the Middle East” and the “most
moral army in the world.” As Marc Maron would say,
“WTF”!
Asked why a famous guy like himself had not previously spoken
publicly about Israel, he noted that “I’m afraid of Jews. I’m 100
percent afraid of Jews.” Presumably not all Jews, just those allied to
the State of Israel. Who can blame him? Most of the U.S. Congress feels
the same way.
Reaction from the Right: Standard Tropes
A few days after Rogen’s interview appeared, a quick retort appearedin the Jewish publication the Forward. Weirdly
entitled “Dear American Jewish boys, Please, please, take your Oedipal
rage and find another outlet for it.” It was written by Dr. Shany Mor, a
researcher at, among other places, the Israel Democracy Institute.
Mor’s objections to Rogen’s positions are reflections of standard
Zionist tropes.
Standard Trope One: As Mor’s title implies, his initial reaction to
Rogen’s statements is that they must reflect some form of self-hatred.
The “self-hating Jew” is an established, if rather despicable, Zionist
trope. Mor now uses it against Rogen, accusing him of being motivated by
“Oedipal rage” that is hatred of his parents because they did not tell
him about Israel’s bellicose origins. This is a ridiculous ad hominem
attack. It should be noted that it is probably the case that a majority
of Jewish children in the West, post 1948, were either lied to or left
in ignorance about the Palestinians and their fate. That some of them
should now express resentment is not evidence of some personality flaw
on their part. It is rather an expression their dismay of Zionists’
inability to admit to their own criminal behavior.
tabletmag | A few weeks ago, Americans learned, from a letter
sent by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to former National Security
Adviser Susan Rice, that Rice had sent herself an unusual “email for the
record” on Barack Obama’s last day in office. In the email, Rice
claimed to be memorializing a high-level meeting of Obama officials in
January 2017, at which they discussed whether to limit the information
they were sharing with President-Elect Donald Trump on the investigation
of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, writing at National Review Online,
concluded that the purpose of this meeting was to keep Trump in the
dark about the extent to which he himself was under investigation. He
concludes from the fact of the email’s existence and its odd timing that
the device of briefing Trump on limited portions of the documentation
was a tactic —one intended to obscure the fact that Trump was a target
of the investigation, even if he was not technically the subject of it. In fact, McCarthy wrote, given the type of investigation, Trump was effectively the main target.
In
establishing this, McCarthy alluded to an aspect of counterintelligence
investigations and surveillance that Americans tend to know little
about. This is McCarthy’s key passage (emphasis in original):
Whether
eavesdropping is done for national-security purposes under FISA [the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] or for law-enforcement purposes
under criminal statutes, the objective is always the same: to uncover
the full scope of a conspiratorial enterprise.
The point is to identify
all of the conspirators, and especially to establish the complicity of
the most insulated leaders. Carter Page may have been the surveillancetarget named
in the FISA warrant, but he was of low rank in the alleged conspiracy.
The point of monitoring Page was to determine exactly what he was doing
and, just as crucial, who was directing him.
McCarthy’s
point here means that the surveillance authorized by the FISA warrant
wasn’t limited to the personal communications of Carter Page; it only
began there. To understand the “conspiratorial enterprise,”
investigators and analysts have to follow up on all the entities Carter
Page is in contact with.
And
they don’t stop there. A conspiratorial enterprise is bound to involve
communications beyond Carter Page’s first circle of direct contact, so
investigators need to look at the next circle as well. They may need to
look further, depending on the communications patterns they find in the
first two circles radiating from their named target. But under current
rules, it’s the first two that government investigators can routinely
gain access to in order to “uncover the full scope of a conspiratorial
enterprise,” without needing to apply for further warrants.
This convention is referred to as the “two-hop” rule, and, like many provisions of surveillance law, has come in for criticism by civil libertarians. The original FISA was passed in 1978, before the internet age. After 9/11, information technology enabled surveillance operators under the Patriot Act, which complemented and in some ways overlapped FISA surveillance, to inaugurate a “three-hop”
rule exploiting computer-networked communications to look well beyond
the first-order contacts of a central subject (under Patriot Act
surveillance, a terror suspect). This was done via presidential order
and came as an unwelcome surprise to the public when the practice was revealed, and initially dubbed “warrantless wiretapping,” in 2005.
realclearpolitics | News reports have downplayed the significance of former FBI lawyer
Kevin Clinesmith’s guilty plea, acknowledging he altered an official
document in the government’s Trump-Russia collusion probe. There has
been some coverage, mainly because it is so rare to see FBI agents
charged with a felony and because it is the first tangible result of
U.S. Attorney John Durham’s sprawling investigation of the
investigators. But mainstream news outlets have minimized its
importance. It’s only one count, they say, and it deals with a
relatively minor crime by a mid-level figure.
That’s spin, and it’s wrong. This plea is like finding water seeping
from the base of a dam. The problem is not one muddy puddle. The problem
is that it foreshadows the dam’s failure, releasing a torrent. That’s
what the Clinesmith plea portends.
What Did Clinesmith Admit?
Clinesmith acknowledges he altered an email from the CIA to the FBI,
answering a question about Carter Page. Page is an American citizen and a
Naval Academy graduate who spent considerable time in Russia. His time
abroad raised a question for the FBI’s counter-intelligence division.
Was Page a Russian agent? Or was he on our side, helping the U.S. gather
intelligence about the Kremlin? The CIA would know.
The answer mattered because the FBI and Department of Justice were
preparing warrants to spy on Page as a hostile foreign agent. The CIA gave them a clear answer in August 2016, before the first warrant was issued: Page was working for us.
That answer was given to a still-unnamed FBI case agent, and we don’t
know what he did with it. Did he show it to those preparing the warrant
applications? Why else would he even ask the CIA for the information?
In 2017, after Clinesmith was tasked to the Mueller investigation, their
team asked him to clarify Page’s relationship with U.S. intelligence.
That’s when he took the CIA document and added a single word, “not.” The
altered document said Carter Page was not a CIA asset. It was a deliberate lie.
Quickie
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Hi folks,
At this stage my blogger entries feel like I'm talking on a barbwire
network over a party line, like on Green Acres. I haven't put out a signal
...
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directly with i...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...