consentfactory | There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know
this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people.
We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their
loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to
do so. We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020
science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,”
“Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.
They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we
feel superior to them. They believe we are conspiring against them, that
we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat them, pervert their
culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids,
and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.
So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us,
when to segregate us, in order to protect society from us. In their
eyes, we are no more than criminals, or, worse, a plague,
an infestation. In the words of someone (I can’t quite recall who),
“getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question of ideology. It is a
question of cleanliness,” or something like that. (I’ll have to hunt
down and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)
tomluongo | It doesn’t matter what issue we’re discussing: masks, vaccines,
election fraud, racism, Joe Biden’s health, climate change, the
sovereign bond markets, lockdowns.
No matter the issue or the question Biden’s Press Secretary, the
uniquely incompetent Jenn Psaki, will be happy to ‘circle back to that
later’ but never doing so hoping to just get through the next news cycle
without a revolt.
Everyone’s doing the ‘believe me’ look that body language experts
talk about all the time. It’s all so tiresome and exhausting. And you
can feel the level of frustration building like John Cleese’s anger in
the sketch.
It even looks to me like the people in the media are getting fed up
with having to disseminate the lies. But, since their access to power
and livelihoods depend on playing along with the charade even the best
ones act out on the stage prepared for them.
We all know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. We know they know that we know they are lying.
And yet the lying continues.
Worse than that, the dying continues.
Because that is the net outcome of all this lying, the wasted time
and energy billions of people who eventually are asked to fight wars on
behalf of these venal liars desperate to retain power and privilege.
The endless lying comes from the need to sell us on a future we don’t
want for a price we can’t afford to pay. That the pols in D.C. think
they can bribe us with a couple thousand bucks of stimmy money after
they’ve destroyed our quality of life is the clearest sign ever that
they are completely out of touch.
But what is clear as well is that they do not care. They don’t have
to care because our government has openly morphed into the phone company
from the old Lily Tomlin sketch of a few years after the Pythons’
heyday.
This absurd level of lying betrays the elites’ utter contempt for
us. They’re obsessed with squashing all traces of the only truly
four-letter word in Brussels and D.C. “populism.’
Populism is the bane of tyrants and comedy like the Dead Parrot
sketch can no longer be tolerated in the coming brave new world where
you’ll own nothing and like it… or else.
I can’t stress enough that this obsession with narrative control is equal parts terrifying and hilarious at the same time.
Terrifying because the real world consequences are destroyed
businesses, suicidal children, bombed cities, starved local populations,
sanctions, threats, embargoes and migrations.
Hilarious because these people are patently absurd. And we all know that comedy is, unfortunately, tragedy plus time.
Because if we don’t laugh at this just a little bit the only recourse is insanity and violence.
and these workers don't have to stop and pee in a bottle....,
bostondynamics | Robotic navigation of complex subterranean settings is important for
a wide variety of applications ranging from mining and planetary cave
exploration to search and rescue and first response. In many cases,
these domains are too high-risk for personnel to enter, but they
introduce a lot of challenges and hazards for robotic systems, testing
the limits of their mobility, autonomy, perception, and communications.
The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge seeks novel approaches to
rapidly map, navigate, and search fully unknown underground environments
during time-constrained operations and/or disaster response scenarios.
In the most recent competition, called the Urban Circuit,
teams raced against one another in an unfinished power plant in Elma,
Washington. Each team's robots searched for a set of
spatially-distributed objects, earning a point for finding and precisely
localizing each object.
Whether robots are exploring caves on other planets or disaster areas
here on Earth, autonomy enables them to navigate extreme environments
without human guidance or access to GPS.
The Solution
TEAM CoSTAR,
which stands for Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots, relies
on a team of heterogeneous autonomous robots that can roll, walk or fly,
depending on what they encounter. Robots autonomously explore and
create a 3D map of the subsurface environment. CoSTAR is a collaboration
between NASA’s JPL, MIT, Caltech, KAIST, LTU, and industry partners.
“CoSTAR develops a holistic autonomy, perception, and communication
framework called NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy),
enabling various rolling and flying robots to autonomously explore
unknown environments. In the second year of the project, we aimed at
extending our autonomy framework to explore underground structures
including multiple levels and mobility stressing-features. We were
looking into expanding the locomotion capabilities of our robotic team
to support this level of autonomy. Spot was the perfect choice for us
due to its size, agility, and capabilities.
We got the Spot robot only about 2 months before the competition.
Thanks to the modularity of the NeBula and great support from Boston
Dynamics, the team was able to integrate our autonomy framework NeBula
on Spot in several weeks. It was a risky and aggressive change in our
plans very close to the competition, but it paid off and the integrated
NeBula-on-Spot framework demonstrated an amazing performance in the
competition.” said CoSTAR's team lead Ali Agha of JPL. "The
NeBula-powered Spots were able to explore 100s of meters autonomously in
less than 60 minutes, negotiate mobility-stressing terrains and
obstacles, and go up and down stairs, exploring multiple levels."
The Results
Performance of the NeBula-enabled Spots alongside CoSTARs roving and
flying robots led to the first place in the urban round of competition
for team CoSTAR. For more information about Team CoSTAR's win, see:
trust | I drove for
Amazon from December 2019 until March of 2021, and I want to shed light
on the work environment and the way the world's largest online retailer
treats its employees. I want to show support for all the people I worked
with and drove with, and
with those who wear the blue vest across the nation. I support the
driver walk-out on Easter Sunday. It's time to show Amazon that drivers
are people who deserve better, and not machines who don't need a
bathroom break!
When Vic started delivering packages
for Amazon in 2019, he enjoyed it - the work was physical, he liked the
autonomy, and it let him explore new neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado.
But Vic, who asked to be referred to by his first name for fear of
retaliation, did not like the sensation that he was constantly under
surveillance.
At first, it was Amazon’s “Mentor” app that constantly monitored his
driving, phone use and location, generating a score for bosses to
evaluate his performance on the road.
“If we went over a bump, the phone would rattle, the Mentor app would
log that I used the phone while driving, and boom, I’d get docked,” he
said.
Then, Amazon started asking him to post “selfies” before each shift on Amazon Flex, another app he had to install.
“I had already logged in with my keycard at the beginning of the shift, and now they want a photo? It was too much," he said.
The final indignity, he said, was Amazon's decision to install a
four-lens, AI-powered camera in delivery vehicles that would record and
analyse his face and body the entire shift.
This month, Vic put in his two-week notice and quit, ahead of a March
23 deadline for all workers at his Denver dispatch location to sign
release forms authorising Amazon to film them and collect and store
their biometric information.
“It was both a privacy violation, and a breach of trust,” he said. “And I was not going to stand for it.”
The camera systems, made by U.S.-based firm Netradyne, are part of a
nationwide effort by Amazon to address concerns over accidents involving
its increasingly ubiquitous delivery vans.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously
told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that access to the footage was
limited, and video would only be uploaded after an unsafe driving
incident was detected.
Albert Fox Cahn, who runs the Surveillance Technology Oversight
Project - a privacy organisation - said the Amazon cameras were part of a
worrying, new trend.
"As cameras get cheaper and artificial intelligence becomes more
powerful, these invasive tracking systems are increasingly the norm," he
said.
twitter | This
is the absolute end of the line for human liberty in the West and if
you don’t understand why, ask a techie. Once you agree to this platform
any functionality can be loaded into it turning off and on access to
society, goods, information, movement, based on your behavior.
WaPo’s phrasing is insidious:“vaccine passports – that would allow Americans to prove that they
have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to
reopen." First, “allow Americans to prove” is bizarre language. I can try to
prove anything. I do not need the federal government’s help to prove
anything, necessarily. And to what extent does a government app prove
anything? Are fake ID’s held by teenagers not
a thing? Second, “as businesses try to reopen.” Try? Business closures were by government edict.
WaPo | The
Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a
standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine
passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been
vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.
The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy
this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines
to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before
opening their doors again.
The
administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the
Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to
health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month
took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the
work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of
announcing updates in coming days, said one official.
The
White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative,
instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials
made this month.
“Our
role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be
simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on
paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients
said at a March 12 briefing.
The
initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration,
with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a
variety of experts, including military officials helping administer
vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.
The
passports are expected to be free and available through applications
for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an
airline boarding pass. Americans without smartphone access should be
able to print out the passports, developers have said.
Other countries are racing ahead with their own passport plans, with the European Union pledging to release digital certificates that would allow for summer travel.
U.S.
officials say they are grappling with an array of challenges, including
data privacy and health-care equity. They want to make sure all
Americans will be able to get credentials that prove they have been
vaccinated, but also want to set up systems that are not easily hacked
or passports that cannot be counterfeited, given that forgeries are
already starting to appear.
Guardian |God,
I miss the pub. I miss pushing through the door and diving into a pool
of sound, all chatter and laughter and sport on the telly. I miss the
sight of people’s faces, friendly and relaxed and a bit flushed. I miss
finding friends gathered around a table, bantering and gossiping,
pausing only to place their order when I ask if anyone needs a drink. I
miss weaving through the crowd, taking care not to spill pints or drop
crisp packets, catching a flirty glance from a stranger out of the
corner of my eye.
What I would give to
go to the pub this evening and talk with my friends about everything and
nothing. Since many of us work in technology, at some point the
government’s “vaccine passports for the pub” plan would come up.
I’d say it is dumb. They would tell me that, no, I
am the one who is dumb. We’d hash it out, order another round and set
the world to rights. Sadly, it’s a conversation we won’t be having.
We’re in lockdown. None of us has tasted a proper pint in months. We’ve
had to debate what the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has called “papers
for pints” over WhatsApp and FaceTime while sitting at home and walking
in the park.
The good news is that pubs open
for outdoor service from 12 April and for indoor service from 17 May.
The bad news is that Johnson’s “papers for pints” plan is essentially a
national ID card by stealth, one that would link our identity to our
Covid status – whether we’ve been vaccinated, had a recent negative test
or have antibodies.
The UK has already toyed with national ID cards. It rejected them
in 2010. As Theresa May, then home secretary, explained in 2010: “This
isn’t just about cost savings, it’s actually about the principle, it’s
about getting the balance right between national security and civil
liberties, and that’s what the new coalition government is doing.”
That was before coronavirus, of course, but just
because we’re in a pandemic doesn’t mean that we stop caring about that
balance.
Already, the Conservatives have
announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023
for all UK-wide and English elections. There’s no obvious need for it:
there was only one conviction for “personation” fraud in the UK in 2019.
Ten days ago, I vigorously and explicitly waived in this direction - The Unrivaled Power of Google's Coalition of the Connected - I'm going to try again today. Once you accept that corporations are people under law, and that they wield exponentially greater power and thus rights under law - the nature of our current predicament becomes very straightfoward, simple, and plain.
crushlimbraw |The government has outsourced
tyranny. Let’s see how this black magic is performed.
Expression of
Viewpoints is Guaranteed to be Free from Government Abridgement, Even if the
Viewpoints are Hateful…
The First Amendment to the United States
Constitution is a remarkable provision that has, for centuries, protected
Americans from the abridgment of their freedom of speech by their government.
Even so-called “hate speech” is protected.
The relevant provision states that
“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” As written, the
guarantee of free speech originally applied only to the federal government.
However, the Supreme Court ruled in Gitlow v. New York that the guarantee
had been “incorporated” in the Fourteenth Amendment and the guarantee is now
applied to all state and local governments as well.
Now, in practice, there are laws
regulating speech (you cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theater, and so on),
but such regulations are generally “time, place, and manner” restrictions. Our
Courts have universally frowned on what is called viewpoint discrimination:
Viewpoint discrimination is a form of
content discrimination particularly disfavored by the courts. When the
government engages in content discrimination, it is restricting speech on a
given subject matter. When it engages in viewpoint discrimination, it is
singling out a particular opinion or perspective on that subject matter for
treatment unlike that given to other viewpoints.
And, yes, viewpoint discrimination
explicitly includes hateful, hostile, and offensive viewpoints. This position
was unanimously upheld by the United States Supreme Court
in Matal vs. Tam. Justice Samuel Alito
wrote:
Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas
that offend.
The disparagement clause denies registration to any mark that is
offensive to a substantial percentage of the members of any group… That is
viewpoint discrimination in the sense relevant here: Giving offense is a
viewpoint.
Speech that demeans on the basis of
race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground
is hateful, but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we
protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’
A more explicit statement could not be
made. Speech may not be banned for being offensive or hateful. Giving offense
is a viewpoint. There is no “hate speech” exception to the First
Amendment.
But Expression of
Viewpoints is Not Guaranteed Against Private Abridgement
Government cannot regulate your
expression of your viewpoint - but corporations can.
Most people understand that the First
Amendment does not apply to private actors on their private
property. A person or corporation can choose to allow free speech in their home
or business, or can choose to regulate free speech, even viewpoints, as they
deem. This “exception” to the First Amendment has been the case since the
foundation of Anglo-American law, and it is absolutely necessary to protect the
rights of property owners.
For instance, if I am running a bicycle
shop, I am absolutely permitted to prevent my employees from putting up posters
that say “bicycles suck” or telling my customers to “buy a scooter.” Likewise,
if I am running a video game news site, I am absolutely permitted to tell my
journalists not to write about the beauties of Sistine Chapel instead. And if I
invite you to my home to binge-watch Babylon 5, and you express the offensive
viewpoint that Star Trek is better, I am altogether within my rights to make
you leave.
Admittedly, there have been occasional
exceptions to this rule under the so-called state actor doctrine. Most notably, the
US Supreme Court ruled in Marsh v Alabama (1946)that the First
Amendment fully applied to expressive activities on the company-owned sidewalks
and streets of a company-owned town. The precedent of Marsh v
Alabama was expanded in Amalgamated Food Employees Union v Logan Valley Plaza
(1968) then overturned in Hudgens v NLRB (1976). Since Hudgens,
the state actor doctrine has waned in importance, despite numerous conservative
efforts to sue online platforms.
We will put aside the so-far toothless
Section 230 for a discussion another day. In general, private corporations can
regulate the expression of viewpoints, even though government cannot, and
that’s the law.
There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There
are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is
only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven,
interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.
Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles,
pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which
determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural
order of things today.” Arthur Jensen
nautil | The hero of Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, a supremely
self-confident inventor. He has figured out a way to turn static
electricity into an inexhaustible source of clean energy. But Galt and
his kind are living in an America veering toward the kind of ham-fisted
socialism that Rand escaped when she immigrated from the Soviet Union in
1926. Galt brings about a rebellion of the “producers” of the world,
like the mythical Atlas shrugging the earth from his shoulders, so that
the “looters” and “moochers” can be brought to their senses. The
centerpiece of the novel is a speech that Galt delivers to the world by
taking over the airwaves with his technical prowess.
Whether
conveyed through philosophy or fiction, Rand’s worldview couldn’t
function as a moral system if the pursuit of self-interest didn’t end up
benefiting the common good. That’s where the invisible hand of the
market comes in, a metaphor that was used only three times by Adam Smith
in his voluminous writing, but was elevated to the status of a
fundamental theorem by economists such as Milton Friedman and put into
practice by Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, who served as Chair of the
United States Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.
Here’s how
it’s supposed to work: Everything of value can be represented as a
dollar value and therefore can be compared to anything else of value by
their relative prices. Making money is the surest way to provide value
to people because the best way to make money is to provide what people
are most willing to pay for. The system works so well that no other form
of care toward others is required. No empathy. No loyalty. No
forgiveness. Thanks to the market, the old-fashioned virtues have been
rendered obsolete. That’s why Milton Friedman could make his famous
claim in 1970 that the only social responsibility of a business is to
maximize profits for its shareholders. In Ayn Rand’s fictional
rendering, the word “give” is banned from the vocabulary of the Utopian
community founded by John Galt, whose members must recite the oath: “I
swear by my life and love of it that I will never live for the sake of
another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”
My sequel to Atlas Shrugged is titled Atlas Hugged
and its protagonist is John Galt’s grandson. Ayn Rand was not a
character in her novel, but since anything goes in fiction, I could
transport her into mine as Ayn Rant, John I’s lover and John III’s
grandmother. Rant’s son, John II, parlays her Objectivist philosophy
into a world-destroying libertarian media empire. John III rebels
against the evil empire by challenging his father to a duel of speeches.
In the process, he brings about a worldwide transformation based on
giving. Atlas Hugged is so anti-Rand that it isn’t even being
sold. Instead, it is gifted for whatever the reader wishes to give in
return. Eat your heart out, Amazon!
wired | Over the last five years, a growing community of
quantum physicists has been implementing the quantum switch in tabletop
experiments and exploring the advantages that indefinite causal order
offers for quantum computing and communication. It’s “really something
that could be useful in everyday life,” said Giulia Rubino, a researcher
at the University of Bristol who led the first experimental demonstration of the quantum switch in 2017.
But the practical uses of the phenomenon only make the deep implications more acute.
Physicists
have long sensed that the usual picture of events unfolding as a
sequence of causes and effects doesn’t capture the fundamental nature of
things. They say this causal perspective probably has to go if we’re
ever to figure out the quantum origin of gravity, space and time. But
until recently, there weren’t many ideas about how post-causal physics
might work. “Many people think that causality is so basic in our
understanding of the world that if we weaken this notion we would not be
able to make coherent, meaningful theories,” said Brukner, who is one
of the leaders in the study of indefinite causality.
That’s
changing as physicists contemplate the new quantum switch experiments,
as well as related thought experiments in which Alice and Bob face
causal indefiniteness created by the quantum nature of gravity.
Accounting for these scenarios has forced researchers to develop new
mathematical formalisms and ways of thinking. With the emerging
frameworks, “we can make predictions without having well-defined
causality,” Brukner said.
Progress has grown swifter recently, but many
practitioners trace the origin of this line of attack on the quantum
gravity problem to work 16 years ago by Lucien Hardy, a British-Canadian
theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical
Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “In my case,” said Brukner, “everything
started with Lucien Hardy’s paper.”
Hardy was best
known at the time for taking a conceptual approach made famous by
Albert Einstein and applying it to quantum mechanics.
Einstein
revolutionized physics not by thinking about what exists in the world,
but by considering what individuals can possibly measure. In particular,
he imagined people on moving trains making measurements with rulers and
clocks. By using this “operational” approach, he was able to conclude
that space and time must be relative.
In 2001, Hardy applied this same approach to quantum mechanics. He reconstructed all of quantum theory starting from five operational axioms.
He
then set out to apply it to an even bigger problem: the 80-year-old
problem of how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity,
Einstein’s epic theory of gravity. “I’m driven by this idea that perhaps
the operational way of thinking about quantum theory may be applied to
quantum gravity,” Hardy told me over Zoom this winter.
theconversation | The tense test of strength began when Biden was asked about Putin in an interview
with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and agreed he was “a killer” and
didn’t have a soul. He also said Putin will “pay a price” for his
actions.
Putin then took the unusual step of going on the state broadcaster VGTRK with a prepared five-minute statement in response to Biden.
In an unusually pointed manner, Putin recalled the US history of
genocide of its Indigenous people, the cruel experience of slavery, the
continuing repression of Black Americans today and the unprovoked US
nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war.
He suggested states should not judge others by their own standards:
Whatever you say about others is what you are yourself.
Some American journalists and observers have reacted to this as “trolling”. It was not.
It was the preamble to Putin’s most important message in years to
what he called the American “establishment, the ruling class”. He said
the US leadership is determined to have relations with Russia, but only
“on its own terms”.
Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are
different people. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code.
But we know how to defend our own interests.
And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves
are interested, and on those conditions that we consider beneficial for
ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it. They will have to
reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development. Despite
the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.
This is new for Putin. He has for years made the point, always
politely, that Western powers need to deal with Russia on a basis of
correct diplomatic protocols and mutual respect for national
sovereignty, if they want to ease tensions.
But never before has he been as blunt as this, saying in effect: do
not dare try to judge us or punish us for not meeting what you say are
universal standards, because we are different from you. Those days are
now over.
theburningplatform | What appears to be happening is the last dying gasps of an empire of debt
as it thrashes about using un-Constitutional means to control its
subjects, while injecting trillions of fiat dollars as an adrenaline
treatment for a terminal cancer diagnosis.
As a last resort, initiating a global war with Russia and China would
certainly distract the masses and keep them from realizing the true
enemy within. Turning Washington DC into an armed encampment is not to
protect the government from white supremacists. It is to protect the
traitorous creatures in Congress and the White House from the citizens
when this diabolical plan blows up in our faces.
Inflation is already raging, but the government and Fed tell you it is
1.5%. There are 261 million working age Americans and only 127 million
are employed full-time, but the government tells you the unemployment
rate is 6.2%, when more than 50% of those capable of working are not.
The government will tell you GDP soared in the first
quarter at 6%, when we are in the midst of a government created
Depression, and the GDP calculation is nothing more than the government
borrowing trillions from future generations and giving a minuscule
portion to current generations, with the vast majority going into the
pockets of billionaire oligarchs, Wall Street, and mega-corporations.
The “economic recovery” narrative is entirely false, but the jar shakers
know the plebs do not understand math.
The plumbing of our astonishingly crooked financial system began to
fail in September 2019, with overnight Repo rates soaring to 10%. The
Fed immediately leapt into action by restarting QE (aka No Banker Left
Behind) to keep the depth of our debt predicament hidden from the
public. A flu released from a Chinese bio-lab, which is highly
non-lethal to anyone under 80 years old, has been utilized by the jar
shakers to unleash a tsunami of digital fiat (aka debt) to prop up a system being smothered by too much debt.
Since March of 2020, our beloved legislators have added $4.5 trillion to the national debt,
a 20% increase in one year. The Fed has done their part by jolting
their balance sheet up by $3.5 trillion, an 85% increase in one year.
The current administration is saying hold my beer, as they are busy
adding another $4 trillion in the next year and the Fed will add another
$2 trillion or so to their balance sheet. Meanwhile, hundreds of
thousands of small businesses
have been permanently destroyed, while Bezos and the rest of his
billionaire buddies have increased their net worth by tens of billions.
At least your grandma is earning .015% in her savings account, while her
living expenses rise by 10%. Do you get it yet?
theburningplatform |“If you catch 100 red fire ants as
well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing
will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back
on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other.
The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice
versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.
This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs.
Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax.
Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. The real question we
need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?”Shera Starr
A few weeks ago, I saw the above quote in Jeff Thomas’ articleLearning from Ants,
and it has been reverberating in my mind ever since. It is a perfect
analogy for what has been happening in this country for years, with the
jar lately being shaken at a rate faster than a Biden vote count
increase at 3:00 am in a swing state. Everyone in this country, and the
world, is at each other’s throats. Who is shaking the jar? Why are they
shaking the jar? Why do they want us fighting each other?
If they keep us focused on fighting each other, they believe we will
not notice their reprehensible criminality, as they manipulate the
masses through psychological engineering
and the employment of propaganda techniques to push their desired
narrative. If you ask someone – who is shaking the jar? – they will
likely answer based on the standard left vs right, liberal vs
conservative, white vs black paradigm which has been created by those
benefiting from conflict. It is always a safe bet to follow the money
when trying to identify the culprits.
The elevated intensity of manipulation by those pulling the strings
of societal discontent reveals much about their level of desperation in
creating more chaos, because the awakening of more to the truth,
endangers their wealth, power, and control. They have turned the shaking
power up to eleven in the last year, as an implosion of the Ponzi
financial system was looming as we entered 2020, and the Deep State
oligarchs needed cover to implement a massive injection of liquidity
into the veins of Wall Street bankers, the medical industrial complex,
and mega-corporations like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target.
The weaponization of a contagious, but highly non-lethal to anyone
under 80 years old, flu became the perfect camouflage of fear to bailout
the teetering financial system and creating turmoil, chaos, and
distrust among the populace. The non-stop fear mongering was purposely
ramped to keep the public distracted while the national wealth pillaging
operation proceeded at a breakneck pace behind the scenes. $600 for you
and $10 trillion for them.
The monstrous effort to polarize the country by the psychopaths in
suits pulling the strings of societal disgruntlement has the ultimate
purpose of subjugation and dominion over every aspect of our lives. They
no longer feel the need to conceal their treachery, as they openly
proclaim their Great Reset, where you will own nothing and be happy –
living in a 200 sq ft shipping container, eating synthetic meat,
drinking Gates endorsed reprocessed piss, snacking on bugs, and praying
their windmill and solar power works on calm cloudy days as a frigid
winter storm front arrives.
LATimes | In late January, when protesters shut down the vaccine site at Dodger
Stadium, his research team tracked a surge in online new world order
activity, including posts tagged with #greatreset, #scamdemic and
#agenda21, a theory based on a 1990s United Nations resolution that some
consider proof of a plot to depopulate the Earth.
The reasons why
some Southern Californians have latched onto new world order rhetoric
are complex. Finkelstein’s organization found a correlation between
places with high incidence of both Black Lives Matter activity and what
he terms as pushback against it in the form of anti-mask, anti-lockdown
rallies — a mix that fed new world order activity online. Los Angeles
County had the greatest abundance of both types of protests, followed by
San Diego and Orange counties.
“Where
the Black Lives Matter protesters showed up, the quarantine became sort
of a counter-cause,” he said. “This idea that ‘we are the ones being
victimized.’”
Mia Bloom, professor of Communication at Georgia State University and
an expert on QAnon, also pointed out that Southern California is a
hotbed of wellness culture, where anti-vaccine sentiment has found a
foothold. Last summer, conspiracy theories jumped to Instagram, she
said, where women previously more interested in lifestyle content were
drawn in, creating an unlikely bridge between liberal and conservative
movements.
Levin, Blazakis and others said regardless of why they
took hold, new world order theories will likely play a role if the state
holds a recall election for Gov. Gavin Newsom this fall. Newsom is
already being featured in recall-related memes that portray him as
“puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party and complicit in the global
takeover. At rallies, he has been portrayed as Hitler and called a
tyrant.
Recall supporters have posted on Twitter with hashtags
such as #nwo, #trumpsarmy and #Agenda21 among others. Another recall
meme posted online showed Newsom with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San
Francisco) with “Nuclear Powered Satan,” written below them. A commenter
on an official recall Facebook page called Newsom an “idiot communist,”
and a recall founder recently posted about “Beijing Biden.”
A recent analysis of articles by the Network Contagion Research
Institute about the California recall for a six-month period from
September through March found about 800 articles from just more than 300
sources. Of those sources, 177, or 57%, were classified as
disinformation sites or uncategorized. That designation, said researcher
Lea Marchl, usually means they cannot be trusted. Similar numbers held
true when it came to videos about the recall.
“What’s driving the
recall is not merely an honest difference on policy but something that
is framed in a deeper and more dark matter,” Levin said. “I’m concerned
that people with legitimate, fact-based reasons for wanting to recall
the governor are now mixed into those whose currency also is aggression
and conspiracy and that is a problem because each feed on each other.”
teenvogue | Last Tuesday, a suspect entered three different massage parlors in
the Atlanta area, killing 8 people. The next day, 21-year-old Robert
Aaron Long was charged with eight counts of murder. Most of the victims
were Asian or Asian American women. Although the suspect’s motives are
still under investigation, he claimed to have had a “sex addiction” that
prompted the rampage, according to the New York Times. In a recent report by Stop AAPI Hate,
there have been about 3,800 reports of hate incidents across the
country since March 2020, with women reporting hate incidents 2.3 times
more than men.
It’s
no coincidence that Asian women are the most vulnerable when it comes
to these attacks. This historic wave of anti-Asian racism is frightening
and tragic, but its connection to Asian representation, especially
Asian women, in America is disturbing.
Let’s start with the fact that there’s clearly a lack of Asian representation in Hollywood. According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
about 5.7 percent of people identify as Asian or Asian American.
However, in 2016, they only made up 3.1 percent of film roles according
to UCLA’s 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report. Because of this lack of representation, oftentimes portrayals of Asian women in Hollywood have been harmful.
The oversimplified depiction of Asian identity has a deep-rooted history
of racism and violence. Often pop culture (films, musicals, TV, operas,
etc) has portrayed Asian women as incompetent and fragile foreigners,
exotic femme fatales, and subservient “mail-order” wives.
"Consider the heartbroken Cio-Cio San of Madame Butterfly (1904),
a Japanese woman who commits suicide after she is abandoned by her
white lover,” says Dr. Stephanie Young, an Associate Professor of
Communication Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. “Madame Butterfly
epitomizes the Lotus Blossom (sometimes called the China Doll) trope —
feminine, shy, fragile, subservient, and sexually submissive. We see the
Lotus Blossom trope in Miss Saigon (1989) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005).
Another popular trope is the Dragon Lady who is cunning and deceitful.
She uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation, but often is
emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity. A contemporary
example of the Dragon Lady is with the Japanese Yakuza leader O-Ren
Ishii (played by Lucy Liu) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003).
realclearpolitics | Before the next of kin were even notified in the horrific shootings
last week at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, the narrative was
established: The fact that six of the eight victims were Asian women
provides the proof that a “surge in hate crimes”
against Asian Americans has bubbled up in the U.S. in response to the
coronavirus pandemic. That fits neatly with the view of some Americans
that our society, at its heart, is racist.
For contrast, consider the mass shooting this week in Boulder, Colo.,
in which the suspect is Syrian American. Even though all the victims
were of the same race, no one assumes without proof that he was acting
out of racial animosity because, of course, they were white. In Atlanta,
the shooter killed two white people and injured a Latino. But the
killings must still be motivated by anti-Asian hatred, right?
“Racially motivated violence must be called out for exactly what it
is -- and we must stop making excuses or rebranding it as economic
anxiety or sexual addiction,” Rep. Marilyn Strickland (pictured) told
members of the House a day after the Atlanta shootings. In a CNN
interview, Strickland, whose heritage is both African American and
Korean American, called the incident a racially motivated hate crime.
None of the evidence to emerge thus far supports that speculation.
Like Strickland, I am Korean American, and the idea that someone
might randomly attack me at the gym or hurl racist invectives at me in
the grocery checkout line makes me uneasy. So I looked into the numbers
being used to support the so-called “surge” in attacks. They turn out to
be thin, with data points cherry-picked to invoke fear and bolster the
wobbly claim that the Atlanta shooter was driven by racism.
A report
by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism drew national media
attention for identifying a 149% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in
2020 compared to 2019 in 16 of our largest cities. A startling number --
until you learn the actual number of hate crimes in those cities rose
from 49 to 122 – in a country of 330 million people.
In my hometown, Houston, there were three last year. The year before, there were none.
And what about the 3,795 incidents of harassment
and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
documented by Stop AAPI Hate? The group’s data point is even more
useless than the 149% increase figure. Stop AAPI (shorthand for Asian
American and Pacific Islander) Hate was formed as the coronavirus
pandemic took hold in the U.S. and its data has no baseline for
comparison.
But it may be sufficiently frightening to open a line of federal
spending directly to Stop AAPI Hate’s member organizations. The group
was on Capitol Hill last week to urge lawmakers to address the kind of incidents it tracks and to fund programs supporting the victims.
CJR |Meanwhile,coverage
of the shooting by national media outlets remained vague; reporters
seemed reluctant (or were unable) to find details about the victims or
pick up reports from the Korean press. Instead, the mainstream press
published profiles of the shooter. And when the Atlanta Sheriff’s Office
held a press conference on Wednesday morning, the press raced to take
down the official statement, whichuncritically
echoed the suspect’s claims that he suffered from sexual addiction, and
which minimized the role of racial animus in his motivation for the
killing spree.
Lee, who had worked the police beat
in Korea earlier in his career, was in disbelief. “I’ve never before
seen a case where the police suggest: ‘The suspect said it wasn’t the
case, therefore it’s not the case,’ ” he says. Worse, the press
replicated the official statement in headlines and presented it as breaking news.
In most news pieces, the spokesperson’s words were treated as
self-explanatory, without additional context or questions. “It was
almost as though the press believed what was said to be correct, like
they wanted it to be the case,” Lee says.
To Lee, the official statement was
“clearly too absurd to repeat.” He felt no obligation to cover the press
conference or to recite the spokesperson’s words. Instead, Atlanta K ran a story that recounted the community response to the official statement, titled: “ ‘Does a bad day mean you can kill someone?’: white police officers’ protection of a white murderer.”
The press corrected course a day
later, but already, public perception of the suspect’s racist and
anti-Asian motives had been muddied. The shooter’s explanation for the
murders—sex addiction—had been widely circulated, giving weight to
long-standing associations between Asian-owned massage shops and illicit
sex work. Investigations into the spas in the past week cited
suggestive customer reviews and a history of police raids (some of
which had been undertaken wrongfully, Lee says), in effect imputing
criminality to the women. The media should ask if it is meaningful to
determine whether the victims had been offering sexual services, and
whether such questions are worth stigmatizing the deceased women and
risking harm to family members and other spa workers. This also means
that survivors, who have long lived under the radar—fearful
of losing their livelihoods and immigration statuses—feel discouraged
from talking publicly. “Unless they have immense courage, it’s
improbable for these women to want to put themselves out there,” Lee
says.
From the beginning, Lee had feared
this sort of scrutiny. Reporters for national media outlets had asked
him about criminal activity at the spas, to which he declined to
respond. Why speculate on a question that lacks clear relevance to the
story at hand? Already, the women have been unfairly immortalized in
association with their place of work. The spas could never be a full
reflection of who the women were; they were survival jobs—jobs the women
might have worked tirelessly to retire from, had they been allowed to
live out their lives.
NYTimes | Sue-ling Wang prided himself on being a self-made businessman.
The
son of a farmer in Taiwan, he attended a vocational school that trained
students at a factory producing zippers and ballpoint pens. But he made
his ascent after arriving in America on a scholarship and obtaining a
Ph.D., then starting his own company in the Atlanta area three decades
ago.
He appeared at civic events,
donated to Republican candidates and ensconced himself in an exclusive
country club community northeast of Atlanta where he bought two stately
homes, each valued at about $1 million.
Later
this year, he will assume the role of head of the World Taiwanese
Chambers of Commerce. It is a prestigious post: Taiwan’s government
recently produced a 14-minute video of him discussing his life that included a photo of him with the island democracy’s president, Tsai Ing-wen.
“When
we go abroad, we are not afraid of hardship, because we must raise our
children, we want to glorify our ancestors,” Mr. Wang, himself a father,
said in the video.
In telling his immigrant success story, Mr. Wang, 68, did not mention
his tie to a business whose employees had little opportunity to follow
his path: Gold Spa, one of the three Atlanta-area massage parlors where a
gunman last week killed eight people and wounded another.
Six victims were of Korean or Chinese descent, fueling outrage and
despair about the surge of anti-Asian violence, particularly against
women, in the United States.
But as details about the employees emerged, so too did another narrative: the story of the wealth divideamong
people of Asian descent in America — a community often viewed by
outsiders as monolithic and whose economic disparities have long been
misunderstood.
The income gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is, in fact, greatest among Asians, who are considered the most economically divided group in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.
fearlessj1111 | Sociologist Tamara K. Nopper argued against depicting these Black-Asian conflicts as “mutual misunderstanding” in a 2015 article.
“The use of ‘mutual’ misunderstanding suggests shared status or power,
with each group contributing to each other’s vulnerability and
suffering,” Nopper wrote. “The employment of the mutual misunderstanding
framework suggests Asian store owners desire identification with and
from Black customers across class and race lines. Yet many studies of
Asian immigrant storeowners show they hold racist views of Black people
and associate them with negative qualities purportedy absent among
Asians.”
Asian Americans must admit and rectify the
ways we uphold white supremacy, namely our anti-Blackness. Much like
the U.S., Asian countries suffer from colorism and caste systems within
their own societies. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to the creation of
America,” said Diane Wong, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at
NYU Gallatin, whose research has focused on the gentrification of
Chinatowns and Afro-Asian solidarities. “It’s no secret then that
anti-Blackness is reflected in Asian immigrant families, businesses,
institutions and interpersonal relationships on a frequent basis.”
As a society, we have “progressed” from
lynchings to viral videos of violence against Black people, from
police killings and brutality to baseless accusations of criminality. In retail spaces, Black people continue to experience racism and antagonization.
When Asians internalize and perpetuate anti-Black racism and violence,
we are reifying our complicity and driving a deeper wedge between the
minority groups.
It’s important to note that two groups are
not equally positioned in larger structures of power, especially when
one racial group is profiting off the other, which is oftentimes the
case in these violent clashes between Black people and Asians.
“Race is certainly a factor, but it is not
the only factor,” Kang, an associate professor at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, said in an interview. Kang’s research has
focused on Asian-owned nail salons and their racially diverse customers.
“Many nail salon workers are under pressure to work quickly and keep
costs down, which does not create the best environment for building
customer relations.
The potential for tensions is heightened
by the intimacy of the service, which involves direct physical contact,
and the fact that many of the workers and owners are immigrants who do
not speak the language or understand the culture of their customers.” In
these scenarios, the tension is stoked by economic stress: the salon
workers who often work for low wages under poor conditions, and the mostly working class clientele who cannot afford to waste money on subpar service.
Kang stressed the importance of putting
these largely publicized conflicts in context. “I have observed hundreds
of interactions in salons in this neighborhood that were very cordial
and where workers and customers were very respectful and appreciative of
each other,” she said.
Our perspectives are largely shaped by the
way Black-Asian conflict is covered in media. “There is a lot of
misinformation when it comes to reporting on salient issues that affect
both Black and Asian communities,” Wong said. However, when videos of
Asian business owners and workers inflicting violence on Black customers
go viral, when Asian American activists protest in support for Peter Liang,
an NYPD officer who shot an unarmed Black man in a stairwell, the
message received by the public is that Asians do not care about Black
lives.
These acts of violence are only a
microcosm of the conflict between the minority groups, moments when the
tension bubbles up to the surface and pops. There have been many ways
statistics about Asian American achievement and the “model minority”
myth have been used as a wedge between Asians and other minority groups, most notably through Ed Blum’s anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard.
Many Asian Americans have thrown their support behind ending affirmative action and in support of standardized testing in
school admission, placing their own concerns ahead of the communities
marginalized by these systems, namely Black, Brown, and indigenous
peoples.
KRON4 | San Francisco school board members will move forward to remove Vice
President Alison Collins from the board and other committee positions in
a special meeting later this week.
This comes after derogatory tweets Collins made in 2016 recently resurfaced.
On Tuesday night, the school board held a regular meeting where we heard an apology from Collins for the first time.
Despite this apology, Collins still made no suggestion of plans to step down from her position.
That’s why two other school board members plan to introduce a
resolution at Thursday’s special meeting, calling for Collins to be
stripped of her titles.
The San Francisco School Board met on Tuesday for the first time
since derogatory tweets resurfaced from the board’s vice president,
Alison Collins.
While Collins gave no indication of plans to resign, she made a public apology.
“I’d like to reemphasize my sincere and heartfelt apologies and I’m
currently engaging with my colleagues and working with the community for
the good of all children in our district,” Collins said.
Fellow school board member Jenny Lam called for Collins to make this
apology several days ago and stands behind demands for Collins to
resign.
“I am not alone when I say I don’t have confidence in Commissioner
Collins’s ability to fairly govern a school district that is almost half
API with no bias. Restorative justice begins by acknowledging the harm
and making the intentional effort to connect with those in the community
that has been harmed,” Lam said.
Lam and board member Moliga will introduce a resolution at a special
meeting on Thursday, calling for Collins to be stripped of her VP
position and committee assignments.
tomdispatch | For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the
Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest
covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for
vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a
series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early
1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia
of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive,
multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in
the 1980s.
During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were
similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the
expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953,
almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in
Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese
forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975,
some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and
Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of
communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South
Vietnam.
By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was
turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military
had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent
with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters,
more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships,
including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a
global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and
espionage.
Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually
fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from
the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within
a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60
bases for its growing arsenal
of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the
Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the
island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending
conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and
dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved,
in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez
disaster.
By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass —
home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental
infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing
has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships
redundant, even irrelevant.
greenwald |A report declassified last Wednesday by the
Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the
possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S.
domestic political affairs.
Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report
from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared
“in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland
Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC),
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”
Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence community] assesses
that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of
ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the
United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” While
asserting that “the most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially
or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent
extremists (MVEs),” it makes clear that its target encompasses a wide
range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental
activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: “those who oppose
capitalism and all forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign
citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by
racial or ethnic hatreds).
The U.S. security state apparatus
regards the agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived from
anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” which includes “opposition
to perceived economic, racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the
Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is anyone who opposes
the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power.
Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or
coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a “domestic violent
extremist,” subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and
other forms of legal restrictions:
Department of Homeland Security report, Mar.1, 2021
It
goes without saying that violence of any kind — including that which is
politically motivated — is a serious crime under U.S. law, and it is
the proper role of the U.S. Government to investigate and prevent it.
But there are real and important legal and institutional limits on the
authority of the intelligence community to involve itself in domestic
law enforcement, or other forms of domestic political activity, that
seem threatened here, if not outright violated.
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