CNN | Susan
Rice, President Barack Obama's former national security adviser, on
Wednesday declined Sen. Lindsey Graham's request to participate in a
judiciary subcommittee hearing next week on Russian interference in the
US election, CNN has learned.
A letter obtained
exclusively by CNN from Rice's lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, outlines the
grounds for her decision not to appear. It was addressed to Graham, the
Republican chairman of the judiciary subcommittee on crime and
terrorism, which is holding the hearing, and senior Democrat Sheldon
Whitehouse.
"Senator Whitehouse has
informed us by letter that he did not agree to Chairman Graham's
invitation to Ambassador Rice, a significant departure from the
bipartisan invitations extended to other witnesses," Ruemmler wrote.
"Under these circumstances, Ambassador Rice respectfully declines
Senator Graham's invitation to testify."
A
source familiar with Rice's discussions told CNN that when Graham
invited her, Rice believed it was a bipartisan overture and was prepared
to accept. However, Whitehouse indicated to her that the invitation was
made without his agreement, as he believed her presence was not
relevant to the topic of the hearing, according to the source.
Rice
considered the invitation a "diversionary play" to distract attention
from the investigation into Russian election interference, including
contacts between Trump allies and Russians during the campaign, the
source said.
Whitehouse
told CNN that "with the exception of that invitation, Senator Graham
and I have agreed on all witnesses that have been invited to this
hearing."
consortiumnews | Since the Times is a member of the Google-funded First Draft Coalition
– along with other mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post and
the pro-NATO propaganda site Bellingcat – this idea of eliminating
information that counters what the group asserts is true may seem quite
appealing to the Times and the other insiders. After all, it might seem
cool to have some high-tech tool that silences your critics
automatically?
But you don’t need a huge amount of imagination to see how this
combination of mainstream groupthink and artificial intelligence could
create an Orwellian future in which only one side of a story gets told
and the other side simply disappears from view.
As much as the Times, the Post, Bellingcat and the others see
themselves as the fount of all wisdom, the reality is that they have all
made significant journalistic errors, sometimes contributing to
horrific international crises.
For instance, in 2002, the Times reported that Iraq’s purchase of
aluminum tubes revealed a secret nuclear weapons program (when the tubes
were really for artillery); the Post wrote as flat-fact that Saddam
Hussein was hiding stockpiles of WMD (which in reality didn’t exist);
Bellingcat misrepresented the range of a Syrian rocket that delivered
sarin on a neighborhood near Damascus in 2013 (creating the impression
that the Syrian government was at fault when the rocket apparently came
from rebel-controlled territory).
These false accounts – and many others from the mainstream media –
were countered in real time by experts who published contrary
information on the Internet. But if the First Draft Coalition and these
algorithms were in control, the information scrubbers might have purged
the dissident assessments as “fake news” or “misinformation.”
technologyreview |“The single most prevalent Russian response is to
attack the critic,” he says. “They use a ‘vilify and amplify’
technique.” Critics are besmirched, sometimes in an official
announcement, sometimes through proxies, sometimes through anonymous
sources quoted in state media; then paid trolls and highly automated
networks of bots add scale. In response, an ad hoc blend of civilians,
private companies, and NGOs has evolved to cast a bright, shining light
on MH17 and Russian aggression in Ukraine, Syria, and the Atlantic
partnership. Exemplifying the values Italo Calvino outlined in Six Memos for the Next Millennium—lightness,
quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency—their
methods are in sharp contrast to the West’s generally sclerotic response
to a revanchist Russia.
Nowhere is this weakness more
brutally apparent than in Russia’s use of digital technology to
reinforce its greatest tool of statecraft: maskirovka. The
literal translation—“little masquerade”—disguises the density and
importance of this elusive concept. “Military deception” misses its deep
cultural roots: maskirovka involves camouflage, denial, and a deep finesse. As James Jesus Angleton, the founding counterintelligence chief of the CIA, put it,
“The myriad stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other
devices of disinformation … confuse and split the West [with] an
ever-fluid landscape, where fact and illusion merge, a kind of
wilderness of mirrors.”
The most powerful weapon in the maskirovka armory is disinformation, a word acquired in the 1950s from the Russian dezinformatsiya. A generation after the Cold War, the acknowledged masters of “deza”
are deploying disinformation technology against the compromised immune
system of liberal democracy. “And at this point,” says Andrew Andersen, a
Russian-born security analyst at the University of Calgary’s Centre for
Military and Strategic Studies, “the West is losing.”
“The first thing you need to understand is that this is
a war,” says Andersen. “This is not a joke and not a game of any kind.
It’s not ‘socializing with your friends on social networks’—it’s a real
war. Even those who don’t want to take part have to behave in accordance
with the laws of war,” he says, alluding to Trotsky’s notorious epigram,
recalled by several of the interviewees for this story, that translates
loosely as: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in
you.”
bellingcat | Since the April 4th 2017 chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun a number
of individuals and organisations have attempted to promote narratives
that promote the idea that the attack was a false flag. One prominent
voice stands out among these individuals and organisations, that
of Professor Theodore A. Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT).
Professor Postol was previously known for his work with the late
Richard Lloyd on the August 21st 2013 sarin attacks in Damascus,
claiming the White House version of events was false, with Postol in
particular attempting to point the finger of blame at rebel groups. His
status at MIT has made him particularly popular with conspiracy
theorists who cite his work and credentials when promoting their false
flag theories around the attack.
With the latest attack in Khan Sheikhoun Professor Postol has
returned to the fray, publishing a series of reports claiming to show
the version of events as described by the White House is false. This has
yet again drawn much positive attention from conspiracy theorists, and
even a small amount of mainstream attention.
His latest report, generously titled “The
French Intelligence Report of April 26, 2017 Contradicts the
Allegations in the White House Intelligence Report of April 11, 2017” (mirror)
attempts to further attack the White House version of events using the
recently released French report on the Khan Sheikhoun attack. Professor
Postol states in this report that a “reading of the report
instantaneously indicates that the French Intelligence Report of April
26, 2017 directly contradicts the White House Intelligence Report of
April 11, 2017” and that “the discrepancies between these two reports
essentially result in two completely different narratives alleging nerve
agent attacks in Syria on April 11, 2017.” He concludes his
introduction to the report by stating “it raises very serious questions
that need to be investigated and reported to the American public.”
Professor Postol claims the following for his dramatic conclusion:
The French Government has released a report that totally contradicts the already dubious allegations in the WHR.
The French Report instead claims that there were at least three
munitions dropped from helicopters in the town of Saraqib, more than 30
miles north of the alleged sarin release crater identified by the WHR.
The WHR claims that a fixed wing aircraft was the originator of the
airdropped munition at the alleged dispersal site. The French
Intelligence Report alleges that a helicopter was used to drop sarin
loaded grenades at three different locations in Saraqib.
wikipedia |Bellingcat (also spelled bell¿ngcat) is an investigative search network founded by the British network activist Eliot Higgins.
It uses open source and social media investigation to investigate a
variety of subjects ranging from Mexican drug lords to conflicts fought
around the world. Bellingcat brings together contributors who specialise
in open source and social media investigation, and it creates guides
and case studies so others can learn to do the same.[1] Bellingcat began as an investigation of the use of weapons in the Syrian civil war. It first received international attention with its analysis of forged data on satellite images of the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 during the still ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.
theintercept |When civil liberties advocates discuss the dangers of new
policing technologies, they often point to sci-fi films like “RoboCop”
and “Minority Report” as cautionary tales. In “RoboCop,”
a massive corporation purchases Detroit’s entire police department.
After one of its officers gets fatally shot on duty, the company sees an
opportunity to save on labor costs by reanimating the officer’s body
with sleek weapons, predictive analytics, facial recognition, and the
ability to record and transmit live video.
Although intended as a grim allegory of the pitfalls of relying on
untested, proprietary algorithms to make lethal force decisions,
“RoboCop” has long been taken by corporations as a roadmap. And no
company has been better poised than Taser International, the world’s
largest police body camera vendor, to turn the film’s ironic vision into
an earnest reality.
In 2010, Taser’s longtime vice president Steve Tuttle “proudly predicted” to GQ that
once police can search a crowd for outstanding warrants using real-time
face recognition, “every cop will be RoboCop.” Now Taser has announced that
it will provide any police department in the nation with free body
cameras, along with a year of free “data storage, training, and
support.” The company’s goal is not just to corner the camera market,
but to dramatically increase the video streaming into its servers.
With an estimated one-third of departments using body cameras, police
officers have been generating millions of hours of video footage. Taser
stores terabytes of such video on Evidence.com,
in private servers, operated by Microsoft, to which police agencies
must continuously subscribe for a monthly fee. Data from these
recordings is rarely analyzed for investigative purposes, though, and
Taser — which recently rebranded itself as a technology company and renamed itself “Axon” — is hoping to change that.
Taser has started to get into the business of making sense of its
enormous archive of video footage by building an in-house “AI team.” In
February, the company acquired a
computer vision startup called Dextro and a computer vision team from
Fossil Group Inc. Taser says the companies will allow agencies to
automatically redact faces to protect privacy, extract important
information, and detect emotions and objects — all without human
intervention. This will free officers from the grunt work of manually
writing reports and tagging videos, a Taser spokesperson wrote in an
email. “Our prediction for the next few years is that the process of
doing paperwork by hand will begin to disappear from the world of law
enforcement, along with many other tedious manual tasks.”
Analytics will
also allow departments to observe historical patterns in behavior for
officer training, the spokesperson added. “Police departments are now
sitting on a vast trove of body-worn footage that gives them insight for
the first time into which interactions with the public have been
positive versus negative, and how individuals’ actions led to it.”
But looking to the past is just the beginning: Taser is betting that
its artificial intelligence tools might be useful not just to determine
what happened, but to anticipate what might happen in the future.
“We’ve got all of this law enforcement information with these videos,
which is one of the richest treasure troves you could imagine for
machine learning,” Taser CEO Rick Smith told PoliceOne
in an interview about the company’s AI acquisitions. “Imagine having
one person in your agency who would watch every single one of your
videos — and remember everything they saw — and then be able to process
that and give you the insight into what crimes you could solve, what
problems you could deal with. Now, that’s obviously a little further
out, but based on what we’re seeing in the artificial intelligence
space, that could be within five to seven years.”
As video analytics and machine vision have made rapid gains in recent
years, the future long dreaded by privacy experts and celebrated by
technology companies is quickly approaching. No longer is the question
whether artificial intelligence will transform the legal and lethal
limits of policing, but how and for whose profits.
NYTimes | When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last month, he was asked a startling question, one with overtones of science fiction.
“Can you foresee a day,” asked Shirley Ann Jackson,
president of the college in upstate New York, “when smart machines,
driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom
fact-finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision-making?”
The
chief justice’s answer was more surprising than the question. “It’s a
day that’s here,” he said, “and it’s putting a significant strain on how
the judiciary goes about doing things.”
He may have been thinking about the case of a Wisconsin man, Eric L. Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison
based in part on a private company’s proprietary software. Mr. Loomis
says his right to due process was violated by a judge’s consideration of
a report generated by the software’s secret algorithm, one Mr. Loomis
was unable to inspect or challenge.
In March, in a signal that the justices were intrigued by Mr. Loomis’s case, they asked the federal government to file a friend-of-the-court brief offering its views on whether the court should hear his appeal.
The
report in Mr. Loomis’s case was produced by a product called Compas,
sold by Northpointe Inc. It included a series of bar charts that
assessed the risk that Mr. Loomis would commit more crimes.
The
Compas report, a prosecutor told the trial judge, showed “a high risk
of violence, high risk of recidivism, high pretrial risk.” The judge
agreed, telling Mr. Loomis that “you’re identified, through the Compas
assessment, as an individual who is a high risk to the community.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Loomis.
The report added valuable information, it said, and Mr. Loomis would
have gotten the same sentence based solely on the usual factors,
including his crime — fleeing the police in a car — and his criminal
history.
At the same time, the court seemed uneasy with using a secret algorithm to send a man to prison. Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, writing for the court, discussed, for instance, a report from ProPublica about Compas that concluded
that black defendants in Broward County, Fla., “were far more likely
than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher rate of
recidivism.”
50% are woefully unprepared for a financial emergency.
Nearly 1 in 5 (19%) Americans have nothing set aside to cover an unexpected emergency.
Nearly 1 in 3 (31%) Americans don’t have at least $500 set aside to
cover an unexpected emergency expense, according to a survey released
Tuesday by HomeServe USA, a home repair service.
A separate survey released Monday by insurance company MetLife found
that 49% of employees are “concerned, anxious or fearful about their
current financial well-being.”
The Federal Reserve announced Friday that the U.S. has $1
trillion in credit-card debt. Consumers hit that number in the fourth
quarter of 2016, but eased on revolving credit during January 2017. The
Fed announcement showed revolving consumer credit hit more than $1 trillion once again in February 2017.
“Credit card debt is rising quickly, but delinquencies are still really low,” said Matt Schulz, a senior industry analyst at the credit cards site CreditCards.com. “Many Americans are doing a good job of controlling their debts, but eventually with big debts and rising interest rates, it’s likely that something will have to give.”
Paycheck to Paycheck “Good Job”
Excuse me for asking but if half the nation lives paycheck to
paycheck, is that really indicative of doing a good job at managing
debt.
In 1951, a woman died in Baltimore, America. She was called Henrietta
Lacks. These are cells from her body. They were taken from her just
before she died. They have been growing and multiplying ever since.
There
are now billions of these cells in laboratories around the world. If
massed together, they would weigh 400 times her original weight. These
cells have transformed modern medicine, but they also became caught up
in the politics of our age. They shape the policies of countries and of
presidents. They even became involved in the cold war because scientists
were convinced that in her cells lay the secret to how to conquer
death.
"It was not like an ordinary cancer. This was different,
this didn’t look like cancer. It was purple and it bled very easily on
touching. I’ve never seen anything that looked like it and I don’t think
I’ve ever seen anything that looked like it since, so it was a very
special different kind of, well, it turned out to be a tumor." –Dr.
Howard Jones, Gynecologist.
nbcnews | Over the past six decades, huge medical advances have sprung from
the cells of Henrietta Lacks, a poor, African-American mother of five
who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. But Lacks never agreed that the
cells from a biopsy before her death taken could be used for research.
For years, her own family had no idea that her cells were still alive in
petri dishes in scientists' labs. They eventually learned they had
fueled a line called HeLa cells, which have generated billions of
dollars, but they didn't realize until this spring that her genome had
been sequenced and made public for anyone to see.
On Tuesday, the National Institute of Health
announced it was, at long last, making good with Lacks' family. Under a
new agreement, Lack's genome data will be accessible only to those who
apply for and are granted permission. And two representatives of the
Lacks family will serve on the NIH group responsible for reviewing
biomedical researchers’ applications for controlled access to HeLa
cells. Additionally, any researcher who uses that data will be asked to
include an acknowledgement to the Lacks family in their publications.
The new understanding between the NIH and the
Lacks family does not include any financial compensation for the family.
The Lacks family hasn’t, and won’t, see a dime of the profits that came
from the findings generated by HeLa cells. But this is a moral and
ethical victory for a family long excluded from any acknowledgment and
involvement in genetic research their matriarch made possible.
It took more than 60 years, but ethics has
finally caught up to a particularly fast-moving area of science: taking
tissue samples for genetic research. Thanks to the efforts of a dogged
journalist, some very thoughtful science leaders in Europe and the U.S.,
and an ordinary family willing to learn about a complex subject and
then to do the right thing to help you and me and our descendants, a
long-standing wrong has now been fixed.
The news of the day is that the analysis of
the genetic makeup of HeLa cells, the most useful cells used in all of
biomedical research, has been completed. But the real news here is that
medicine and science have finally done right by the person from whom
those cells were taken—Henrietta Lacks.
counterpunch | How do you sell elite rule to a 99% electorate? Well, don’t run
somebody like Hillary Clinton, a lackluster campaigner with more 1%
baggage than the Louis Vuitton stockroom.
There aren’t many politicians who can look you in the eye and say “I
work for the bankers…but I care about you” and get away with it.
Obama could. Clinton couldn’t. Now that Obama’s termed out, the
search is on for the telegenic candidate who checks the intersectional
boxes but knows on what side the world’s bread is buttered.
My bets are on Kamala Harris as the intersectional box-checking,
globalist friendly, appealing candidate now being groomed for a
presidential run. Sooner rather than later, I’d think.
Judging by Emmanuel Macron, a handsome youngster can be transformed
into a president even with a slim resume. Best thing is to get ‘em out
in front of the voters while they’re young and fresh, and before they’ve
had to accumulate too much of a track record of 1% accommodation.
That’s the Obama lesson. He came from nowhere and became President. Hillary came from somewhere and went nowhere.
It’s an interesting data point in the evolution of American politics
that the Democrats doing what the Republicans used to do: find a
charismatic front person who is also a tabula rasa to generate electoral
mass appeal for elitist policies.
The key task, and one I’m guessing Democratic strategists have
devoted a lot of effort to cracking, is how to convert the perceptual
framing from “99% v. 1%” to “degraded lumpen v. the quintessence of
America”.
Democratic Party liberalism pretty relies on meritocratic
technocratic model to make the elite rule pill easier to swallow: the
best and the brightest are recognized by an enlightened electorate and
handed the keys to the America-mobile.
The people who don’t vote for Team Demlib are *ahem* unenlightened:
low information voters, bigots, oh, what’s a good word? How
about…Deplorables!
So what should we call Demlibs? The wise? The The woke? How about…the Adorables?
glamour | If 1994 was the Year of O.J.'s White Bronco, 2013 was the Year of the Very Visible Vagina.
Let
me say up front: I am not a prude. I love sex; I am comfortable with my
sexuality. Hell, I've even posed in my underwear. I also grew up on a
healthy balance of sexuality in pop stars. Yes, we had Madonna testing
the boundaries of appropriateness, but then we also had Janet Jackson,
Whitney Houston, and Cyndi Lauper, women who played with sexuality but
didn't make it their calling card.
And for every 2 Live Crew "Me So
Horny" video girl, there was Susanna Hoffs singing tenderly about her
eternal flame.Twenty
years later, all the images seem homogenous. Every star interprets
"sexy" the same way: lots of skin, lots of licking of teeth, lots of
bending over. I find this oddly...boring. Can't I just like a song
without having to take an ultrasound tour of some pop star's privates?
I'm not gonna lie. The fact
that I was accused of "slut-shaming," being anti-woman, and judging
women's sex lives crushed me. I consider myself a feminist. I would
never point a finger at a woman for her actual sexual behavior,
and I think all women have the right to express their desires. But I
will look at women with influence—millionaire women who use their
"sexiness" to make money—and ask some questions. There is a difference, a
key one, between "shaming" and "holding someone accountable."
theatlantic | A lot of factors have contributed to
American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the
power of lobbying, globalization, and so on. In their wake, what’s
left?
That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,
by Peter Temin, an economist from MIT. Temin argues that, following
decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or
less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that
wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political
influence and a much larger, minority-heavy (but still mostly white)
lower class that is all too frequently subject to the first group’s
whims.
Temin identifies two types of workers in what he calls “the
dual economy.” The first are skilled, tech-savvy workers and managers
with college degrees and high salaries who are concentrated heavily in
fields such as finance, technology, and electronics—hence his labeling
it the “FTE sector.” They make up about 20 percent of the roughly 320
million people who live in America. The other group is the low-skilled
workers, which he simply calls the “low-wage sector.” Temin
then divides workers into groups that can trace their family line in
the U.S. back to before 1970 (when productivity growth began to outpace
wage growth) and groups that immigrated later, and notes that race plays
a pretty big role in how both groups fare in the American economy. “In
the group that has been here longer, white Americans dominate both the
FTE sector and the low-wage sector, while African Americans are located
almost entirely in the low-wage sector,” he writes. “In the group of
recent immigrants, Asians predominantly entered the FTE sector, while
Latino immigrants joined African Americans in the low-wage sector.”
After
divvying up workers like this (and perhaps he does so with too broad of
strokes), Temin explains why there are such stark divisions between
them. He focuses on how the construction of class and race, and racial
prejudice, have created a system that keeps members of the lower classes
precisely where they are. He writes that the upper class of FTE
workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically
pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and
business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some
groups and not others, largely along racial lines. “The choices made in
the United States include keeping the low-wage sector quiet by mass
incarceration, housing segregation and disenfranchisement,” Temin
writes.
vulture | In
his youth, Paul Mooney was a dancer. And you can see it, too, in
vintage clips from the ’80s, in the lithe, graceful way he carried
himself onstage during his comedy sets. Even as he entered middle age
and beyond, and even after he took to performing while seated, Mooney
had a dignified, almost regal bearing — no matter that he was, as
always, laying waste to any notions of political correctness or
politesse. “Kill every white person on this planet,” he said bluntly in
his 2012 special, The Godfather of Comedy. “To end racism, that’s the only way.”
Today,
that dancer’s elegance is almost entirely gone, replaced by a slumped
and diminished figure with a rambling, uncertain delivery. The
74-year-old is still touring, though whether he should be is an open
question. It’s a troubling state in which to witness one of the most
important and underappreciated comics of the past half-century. And
that’s exactly what Paul Mooney is. He was Richard Pryor’s writing
partner and best friend. He’s worked with Redd Foxx, Eddie Murphy, and
Dave Chappelle. A comedian’s comedian, he was known to command the stage
at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood for hours, riffing acidly on show
business, politics, and, especially, the ugly state of America’s race
relations. Slavery, lynchings, riots — these weren’t isolated sins, they
were the country’s foundation, and somehow Mooney made it funny.
Filmmaker Robert Townsend, who cast Mooney in his satirical 1987 film, Hollywood Shuffle, says, “Paul didn’t care to be loved. He wanted to speak his mind. He taught a generation of comedians to be fearless.”
Now,
though, Mooney’s legacy is in danger of being sullied by an
increasingly disheartening series of appearances. Last May, he delivered
a rambling performance on Arsenio Hall’s since-canceled talk show. A
week after it aired, news outlets reported that Mooney had cancer,
citing his cousin and sometime manager Rudy Ealy as the source of the
info. I asked Ealy, who I’d been told lives with Mooney in Oakland, if
Mooney was ill; he said Mooney was “fine.” (Despite agreeing to let me
interview Mooney and inviting me to Oakland to do so, Ealy stopped
returning my calls once I arrived in the Bay Area.)
Helene
Shaw, who was Mooney’s manager for more than 30 years, has a different
view. “Those people around him right now,” she says incredulously, “are
going to put this man onstage?” She says Mooney was living in Los
Angeles until about two years ago, when he fell ill during a trip to
Oakland. “Rudy’s just been around because Paul happened to get sick up
in Oakland. He just grabbed him. When he was in his right mind, Paul
hated Rudy.”
All
this uncertainty is especially jarring given the man it surrounds. Paul
Mooney has built, and occasionally undermined, a career by boldly
delivering his version of the truth. “They said, ‘Paul, why don’t you
sugarcoat?’ ” he snapped at imaginary critics during one of his
routines. “I ain’t sugarcoating shit … because white folks didn’t
sugarcoat shit to me.”
Many of Mooney’s bits don’t read like jokes. His comedy is more like a challenge: Can you take me seriously? Can you not? Laugh, or you’ll cry.
As Mooney’s daughter Spring puts it, “There is no lukewarm.” And that
applies to his relationships, too. Comedy Store veteran and Roseanne
executive producer Allan Stephan says, “Paul is a very gentle, sweet
man. I have nothing bad to say about him.” Jennifer Pryor, Richard’s
widow, who has known Mooney since 1977, sees him differently: “I don’t
have anything nice to say about the asshole.”
charleshughsmith | If we don't challenge these poisonous polarizing binaries, they may well trigger the accidental suicide of our polity.
If there is any statement about politics in America that qualifies as as a
truism accepted by virtually everyone, left, right or independent, it's
that America is a deeply divided nation. But is this really true?
Like everyone else, I too accepted that the line between Hillary
supporters and detractors, and Trump supporters and detractors, was
about as "either/or" as real life gets.
But are we really that divided? A fascinating 55-minute lecture by historian Michael Kulikowski entitled The Accidental Suicide of the Roman Empire has made me question this consensus certitude.
Maybe
the real driver of this division is divisive language--more
specifically, language that is designed to drive a wedge between us. In other words, maybe the divisions are an intentional consequence of the language we're using.
Kulikowski makes a number of nuanced arguments in his talk, but his
primary point is that the late-stage Roman Empire collapsed partly as an
unintended consequence of rhetorical binaries, polarizing rhetoric that lumped an extremely diverse Imperial populace into false binaries: Roman or Barbarian, Christian or heretic, and so on.
The actual lived reality was completely different from these artificial either-or binary classifications. As
Kulikowski explains (and anyone who has read a modern history of
late-stage Rome will know this from other accounts), many "Roman
generals" were "Barbarian" by birth, and the boundary between "Roman
citizen" and "Barbarian" was porous on purpose.
automaticearth | In the US it’s not east versus west, it’s coast versus interior
(flyover land). But the difference is equally clear and sharp. In fact,
probably what we’re looking at is that France has only one coastline,
while the US has two, and in both countries people living close to the
ocean are on average richer than those who live more inland.
And in both cases there is no doubt that wealth is a deciding factor
in dividing the nations to the extent that they are. We see that in an
‘urban versus rural area’ comparison as well. Cities like New York, LA
and Paris are strongholds for the incumbent and establishment, the
parties that represent the rich.
There can be no doubt that we’ll see more of that going forward. It
won’t be there in smaller countries, Holland for instance is not nearly
large enough for such dynamics. But Italy very well might. It’s always
had a strong north-south-divide, and its present crisis has undoubtedly
deepened that chasm.
Looking at things that way, it’s also glaringly obvious that Macron
is Obama (and is Renzi is Cameron etc.). A well-trained good looking
mediagenic puppet with a gift of teleprompter gab, fabricated and
cultivated by the ruling financial and industrial world to do their
bidding. Macron, to me, looks the most artificial of the crop so far,
the Obama, Rutte, Cameron, Renzi crop. There will be more, and they will
get more artificial. Edward Bernays is just getting started.
Of course there is also a strong move away from established parties.
It is more pronounced in France -where they were eradicated at least in
the presidential elections- than in the US or UK, but that may be more
of a superficial thing. Trump and Bernie Sanders are simply America’s
version of France’s ‘ultra’ right wing Le Pen and ‘ultra’ left wing
Melenchon. And Trump is running into problems with the remnants of the
established parties as much as Macron will if he’s elected president.
Anglo countries seem to take longer diversifying away from tradition
than others, but they too will get there. The various deteriorating
economies will make sure of that.
NYPost | The solar system that humanity calls home may have once been
inhabited by an extinct species of spacefaring aliens, a top scientist
has suggested.
A space scientist has suggested ancient extraterrestrials could have
lived on Mars, Venus or even Earth before disappearing without a trace.
“I think cultures are kinds of virtual realities where whole populations of people become imprisoned inside a structure which is linguistic and value-based.”
“Now, if we’re gonna become a planetary being, we can’t have the luxury of an unconscious mind, that’s something that goes along with the monkey-stage of human culture. And so comes then the prosthesis of technology, that all our memories and all our sciences and our projective planning abilities can be downloaded into a technological artifact which is almost our child or our friend or our companion in the historical adventure.”
counterpunch | US authorities are reported to have prepared
charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This
overreach of US government toward a publisher, whose principle is aligned with
the U.S. Constitution, is another sign of a crumbling façade of
democracy. The Justice Department in the Obama administration could not
prosecute WikiLeaks for publishing documents pertaining to the US
government, because they struggled to determine
whether the First Amendment protection applied in this case. Now, the
torch of Obama’s war on whistleblowers seems to have been passed on to
Trump, who had shown disdain toward free speech and even called the U.S. media as “enemies of the people”.
Earlier this month, CIA Director Mike Pompeo vowed
to end WikiLeaks, accusing the whistleblowing site as being a
“non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors
like Russia”. He also once called
Edward Snowden a traitor and claimed that he should be executed. This
declaration of war against WikiLeaks may bring a reminiscence of George
W. Bush’s speech in the aftermath of 9-11, where he said,
‘either you are with us or against us’, and urged the nation to side
with the government in his call to fight global ‘war on terror’.
In a recent interview on DemocracyNow!, journalist at The Intercept,
Glenn Greenwald put this persecution of WikiLeaks in the context of a
government assault on basic freedom. He spelled out
their tactics, noting how the government first chooses a target group
that is hated and lacks popular support, for they know attacking an idea
or a group that is popular would meet resistance. He explained:
“…. they pick somebody who they know is hated in society
or who expresses an idea that most people find repellent, and they try
and abridge freedom of speech in that case, so that most people will let
their hatred for the person being targeted override the principle
involved, and they will sanction or at least acquiesce to the attack on
freedom because they hate the person being attacked”.
Demonizing and scapegoating of a particular group or organization is
an alarming tendency toward an authoritarian state. At a news conference
last Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions also chimed in
to emphasize how Assange’s arrest is a priority. This targeting of
WikiLeaks is a threat to press freedom and could be seen a slippery
slope toward fascism.
downwithtyrrany | [Update: It's been suggested in comments (initially here)
that Clinton's "we" in her answer to Blankfein's question was a
reference to China's policy, not our own. I'm doubtful that's true, but
it's an interpretation worth considering. Even so, the U.S. and Chinese
policies toward the two Koreas are certainly aligned, and, as Clinton
says, "for the obvious economic and political reasons." (That argument
was also expressed in comments here.) I therefore think the thrust of the piece below is valid under either interpretation of Clinton's use of "we." –GP]
"We don't want a unified Korean peninsula ... We [also] don't want
the North Koreans to cause more trouble than the system can absorb."
Our policy toward North Korea is not what most people think it is. We
don't want the North Koreans to go away. In fact, we like them doing
what they're doing; we just want less of it than they've been doing
lately. If this sounds confusing, it's because this policy is unlike
what the public has been led to assume. Thanks to something uncovered by
WikiLeaks, the American public has a chance to be unconfused about
what's really going on with respect to our policies in Korea.
This piece isn't intended to criticize that policy; it may be an excellent one. I just want to help us understand it better.
Our source for the U.S. government's actual Korean policy — going back
decades really — is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She
resigned that position in February 2013,
and on June 4, 2013 she gave a speech at Goldman Sachs with Lloyd
Blankfein present (perhaps on stage with her) in which she discussed in
what sounds like a very frank manner, among many other things, the U.S.
policy toward the two Korea and the relationship of that policy to
China.
That speech and two others were sent by Tony Carrk
of the Clinton campaign to a number of others in the campaign,
including John Podesta. WikiLeaks subsequently released that email as
part of its release of other Podesta emails (source email with
attachments here).
In that speech, Clinton spoke confidentially and, I believe, honestly.
What she said in that speech, I take her as meaning truthfully. There's
certainly no reason for her to lie to her peers, and in some cases her
betters, at Goldman Sachs. The entire speech reads like elites talking
with elites in a space reserved just for them.
Citizenship, Criticism, and Communism
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In the 1940s and ’50s, Americans engaged in an intense debate over the
content of school textbooks, particularly social studies texts. Fears of
communism a...
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
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 ...
