Why Has The NYTimes Broken Its Pre-election Embargo On Huntergate?

americanthinker |  Suddenly, though, the media is releasing information about the criminal investigations into not both Hunter Biden and Joe’s brother, James Biden. As the above tweet notes, these investigations have been ongoing for years. We also know that a sizable number of voters would have passed over Biden for Trump had they known about Biden family corruption. So, what gives? Why are Hunter and, by extension, Joe himself, suddenly fair game?

It could be that bad things are about to come down from the FBI. After all, Trump did promise that “a lot of big things” will happen soon. The sudden flurry of reports about the Bidens could just be the Democrats’ way of getting ahead of the story so that, if Hunter is shown doing the perp walk, they can say that it’s “old news.”

However, it’s equally likely that the Democrats are making plans to get Biden out of office as quickly as possible – or perhaps, sideline him before he’s even sworn in (assuming, of course, that Biden hangs onto that president-elect title). As Monica Showalter pointed out on Thursday, Biden is not making leftists happy. He’s filling his possible administration with corporate insiders, he wants a former military officer to head the defense department, and he’s continuing to show a very rapid cognitive decline. He's offering Clinton-era politics with a side of dementia and that is not what the hard left side of the party wants.

In any event, the goal, always, was to get Kamala into the White House. It didn’t and doesn’t matter that the voters don’t like her -- as demonstrated by the fact that even her home state of California didn’t like her and her early retreat from the primaries. What matters is that she, unlike both Hillary and Joe, is Barack Obama’s true third term.

Harris is as hard left as they come and willing to do whatever it takes to maintain power. While Joe Biden, despite his corruption and his shift to the hard left, still cherishes some residual notions about the Constitution, Kamala is not hindered by such old-fashioned ideas:

With Americans at large finally learning that Hunter Biden and James Biden are crooked and that Joe is the big, corrupt tree from which these rotten apples fell, there’s going to be lots of pressure on Joe to retire as quickly as is politely possible. It’s The New York Times that gives the game away. On Thursday, it published a positively wistful article entitled “Investigation of His Son Is Likely to Hang Over Biden as He Takes Office: Unless the Trump Justice Department clears Hunter Biden, the new president will confront the prospect of his own administration handling an inquiry that could expose his son to criminal prosecution.” The opening paragraph, speaks of Biden in a “no-win situation” that could be “politically and legally perilous,” and the report continues in that vein. The subtext is clear: Leave. Leave now.

Joe served his purpose by being the bland front person for a full leftist assault on the White House. Now it’s time for him to go. And while his handlers may reward him for a job well done with the pleasure of the inauguration, you can be sure that they’ll pressure him to do what he promised to do, which is to invent a respectable disease and quit ASAP.

Melinda Gates: Uh, We Were So Focused On Vaccinations We Really Didn't Think Through The Lockdowns...,

aier  |  In a wide-ranging interview in the New York Times, Melinda Gates made the following remarkable statement: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” A cynic might observe that one is disinclined to think much about matters than do not affect one personally. 

It’s a maddening statement, to be sure, as if “economics” is somehow a peripheral concern to the rest of human life and public health. The larger context of the interview reveals the statement to be even more confused. She is somehow under the impression that it is the pandemic and not the lockdowns that are the cause of the economic devastation that includes perhaps 30% of restaurants going under, among many other terrible effects. 

She doesn’t say that outright but, like many articles in the mainstream press over this year, she very carefully crafts her words to avoid the crucial subject of lockdowns as the primary cause of economic disaster. It’s possible that she actually believes this virus is what tanked the world economy on its own but that is a completely unsustainable proposition. 

Further, her comments provide a perfect illustration of the core problem all along: most of the people who have been advocating lockdowns in fact have no actual experience in managing pandemics. To many of these, Covid-19 became their new playground to try out an unprecedented experiment in social and economic management: shutting down travel, businesses, schools, churches, and issuing stay-at-home orders that smack of totalitarian impositions. 

Here is what she says: 

You can project out and think about what a pandemic might be like or look like, but until you live through it, it’s pretty hard to know what the reality will be like. So I think we predicted quite well that, depending on what the disease was, it could spread very, very, very quickly. The spread did not surprise us.

What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts. What happens when you have a pandemic that’s running rampant in populations all over the world? The fact that we would all be home, and working from home if we were lucky enough to do that. That was a piece that I think we hadn’t really prepared for.

There are plenty of specialists who have lived through pandemics in the past and managed them by maintaining essential social and economic functioning. A major case in point is Donald A. Henderson, who as head of the World Health Organization is given primary credit for the eradication of smallpox. He wrote as follows in 2006:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Melinda together with her husband Bill have been the major funding source for pro-lockdown efforts around the world, giving $500M since the pandemic began, but also funding a huge range of academic departments, labs, and media venues for many years, during which time they have both sounded the alarm in every possible interview about the coming pathogen. Their favored policy has been lockdown, as if to confuse a biological virus with a computer virus that merely needs to be blocked from hitting the hard drive.

Jennifer Zeng's Video Of Prof. Di Dongsheng Got Taken Down By Youtube….,

greenwald  |  Documents relating to Hunter Biden’s exploitation of his father’s name to enrich himself and other relatives through deals with China were among the cache published in the week before the election by The New York Post — revelations censored by Twitter and Facebook and steadfastly ignored by most mainstream news outlets. That concerted repression effort by media outlets and Silicon Valley left it to right-wing outlet such as Fox News and The Daily Caller to report, which in turn meant that millions of Americans were kept in the dark before voting.

But the just-revealed federal criminal investigation in Delaware is focused on exactly the questions which corporate media outlets refused to examine for fear that doing so would help Trump: namely, whether Hunter Biden engaged in illicit behavior in China and what impact that might have on his father’s presidency.

The allegations at the heart of this investigation compel an examination of a fascinating and at-times disturbing speech at a major financial event held last week in Shanghai. In that speech, a Chinese scholar of political science and international finance, Di Donghseng, insisted that Beijing will have far more influence in Washington under a Biden administration than it did with the Trump administration.

The reason, Di said, is that China’s ability to get its way in Washington has long depended upon its numerous powerful Wall Street allies. But those allies, he said, had difficulty controlling Trump, but will exert virtually unfettered power over Biden. That China cultivated extensive financial ties to Hunter Biden, Di explained, will be crucial for bolstering Beijing’s influence even further.

Di, who in addition to his teaching positions is also Vice Dean of Beijing’s Renmin University’s School of International Relations, delivered his remarks alongside three other Chinese banking and development experts. Di’s speech at the event, entitled “Will China's Opening up of its Financial Sector Attract Wall Street?,” was translated and posted by Jennifer Zeng, a Chinese Communist Party critic who left China years ago, citing religious persecution, and now lives in the U.S. A source fluent in Mandarin confirmed the accuracy of the translation.

The centerpiece of Di’s speech was the history he set forth of how Beijing has long successfully managed to protect its interests in the halls of American power: namely, by relying on “friends” in Wall Street and other U.S. ruling class sectors — which worked efficiently until the Trump presidency.

Referring to the Trump-era trade war between the two countries, Di posed this question: “Why did China and the U.S. use to be able to settle all kinds of issues between 1992 [when Clinton became President] and 2016 [when Obama’s left office]?” He then provided this answer:

 

Supporting The 2020 U.S. Election Bishes....,

youtube |  Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come. As always, news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific or artistic context.

Connecting people to authoritative information

While only a small portion of watch time is election-related content, YouTube continues to be an important source of election news. On average 88% of the videos in top 10 search results related to elections came from authoritative news sources (amongst the rest are things like newsy late-night shows, creator videos and commentary). And the most viewed channels and videos are from news channels like NBC and CBS.

We also showed information panels linking both to Google’s election results feature, which sources election results from The Associated Press, and to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) “Rumor Control” page for debunking election integrity misinformation, alongside these and over 200,000 other election-related videos. Collectively, these information panels have been shown over 4.5 billion times. Starting today, we will update this information panel, linking to the “2020 Electoral College Results” page from the Office of the Federal Register, noting that as of December 8, states have certified Presidential election results, with Joe Biden as the President-elect. It will also continue to include a link to CISA, explaining that states certify results after ensuring ballots are properly counted and correcting irregularities and errors.

Additionally, since Election Day, relevant fact check information panels, from third party fact checkers, were triggered over 200,000 times above relevant election-related search results, including for voter fraud narratives such as “Dominion voting machines” and “Michigan recount.”

A Contemporary Longitudinal Breakdown Of The Hard Problem Of Martial Arts Dance Informatics

wikipedia |  Eshkol-Wachman movement notation is a system to record movement on paper or computer screen, developed by choreographer Noa Eshkol (daughter of Levi Eshkol) and architect Abraham Wachman.^[2] It was originally developed for dance to enable choreographers to write a dance down on paper that dancers could later reconstruct in its entirety, much as composers write a musical score that musicians can later play.

In comparison to most dance notation systems, Eshkol-Wachman movement notation was intended to notate any manner of movement, not only dance. As such, it is not limited to particular dance styles or even to the human form. It has been used to analyze animal behaviour as well as dance (Golani 1976). 

Eshkol-Wachman movement notation treats the body as a sort of stick figure. The body is divided at its skeletal joints, and each pair of joints defines a line segment (a "limb"). For example, the foot is a limb bounded by the ankle and the end of the toe.

The relationship of those segments in three-dimensional space is described using a spherical coordinate system. If one end of a line segment is held in a fixed position, that point is the center of a sphere whose radius is the length of the line segment. Positions of the free end of the segment can be defined by two coordinate values on the surface of that sphere, analogous to latitude and longitude on a globe.

Limb positions are written somewhat like fractions, with the vertical number written over the horizontal number. The horizontal component (the lower) is read first. These two numbers are enclosed in brackets or parentheses to indicate whether the position in being described relative to an adjacent limb or to external reference points, such as a stage.

Eshkol-Wachman scores are written on grids, where each horizontal row represents the position and movement of a single limb, and each vertical column represents a unit of time. Movements are shown as transitions between initial and end coordinates. 

groundai |  Dance is an art and when technology meets this kind of art, it’s a novel attempt in itself. Several researchers have attempted to automate several aspects of dance, right from dance notation to choreography. Furthermore, we have encountered several applications of dance automation like e-learning, heritage preservation, etc. Despite several attempts by researchers for more than two decades in various styles of dance all round the world, we found a review paper that portrays the research status in this area dating to 1990 [1]. Hence, we decide to come up with a comprehensive review article that showcases several aspects of dance automation.

This paper is an attempt to review research work reported in the literature, categorize and group all research work completed so far in the field of automating dance. We have explicitly identified six major categories corresponding to the use of computers in dance automation namely dance representation, dance capturing, dance semantics, dance generation, dance processing approaches and applications of dance automation systems. We classified several research papers under these categories according to their research approach and functionality. With the help of proposed categories and subcategories one can easily determine the state of research and the new avenues left for exploration in the field of dance automation.

Hard Problem: Have You Ever Seen A Good Dance Martial Arts Text Book?

researchgate |  There is a need to develop tools to automatically read and translate dance scores. Dance has been one of the last artforms to develop objective records. Scores for dance, analogous to scores for music, have existed for more than half a century, but the notation systems are known only to a relatively few trained notators (also, there are a number of competing notation systems). In North America the Labanotation system is most widely used and LabanWriter, a computer based editor for this notation has been developed. Updating a report at WCGSÕ01, this paper describes progress with the project to develop a translator between LabanWriter and Life Forms™, a human animation system for the choreography and animation of human movement. The prototype translator will be demonstrated.

diegomaranan |  I am a transdisciplinary artist and researcher who investigates how technology can help us reimagine our relationship with the environment, with other people, and with ourselves. My work is eclectic, ranging from exploring how digital technologies are changing the way we move as well as perceive human movement, to co-creating socially-engaged art installations that build symbiotic relationships between plants, computers and people. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD fellow in the CogNovo training program for Cognitive Innovation at Plymouth University, I adapted methods and insights from user experience and technology design, perceptual psychology and neuroscience, dance and somatic practices, and pragmatist philosophy to design a low-cost wearable technology that uses vibrotactile stimulation to create unusual, pleasurable, structured sensory experiences that demonstrably increase body awareness. 

benesh |  What is the Benesh Notation Editor?
The Benesh Notation Editor is a PC Windows software program for writing Benesh Movement Notation Scores. It acts as a ‘word processor’ for the notation enabling the production of publication quality multi-stave printed scores that can be edited, copied and stored digitally like other computer documents.

The Benesh Notation Editor was developed to meet the needs of professional notators but is also useful for notation teachers and students, all of whom will find that they can produce publication quality scores more easily and quickly than writing them by hand. Scores written using the Benesh Notation Editor are easy to edit, copy, store, print and transmit by email.

What are the benefits of using the Benesh Notation Editor?
Using the Benesh Notation Editor, writing scores by hand will soon become as obsolete as using a typewriter for text documents. Unlike hand-written scores, BNE scores need never become annotated beyond readability. Alterations can be entered easily and quickly into the BNE score without affecting the original document.

The information in a BNE score can be adjusted and the layout rearranged simply and easily. This means that, unlike hand-written scores, it is not necessary to pre-plan the layout of each page before any information can be entered. Individual ‘parts’ can be extracted from a full multi-person score creating separate, more manageable, role specific scores for use in the rehearsal room or as study resources.

A True Secret Is Still A Secret Even When It Is Revealed To All

feldenkrais-ip |  He based this work on a behavioral study of human beings that gave rise to the concept of using unconscious or instinctive responses for self-preservation. In other words, he wanted to design a self-defense system for the Haganah, based on “a movement someone would do without thinking.”⁷ 

Feldenkrais mentioned this concept in the introduction to his translation of Emile Coué’s book,  Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion. Feldenkrais’ background as a survivor gave him a unique perspective on the practical use of judo in an emergency situation, outside the dojo. At the time, it was a rare judoka who thought about the use of judo for self-defense.⁸  We see Moshe’s interest in survival throughout his development of the Feldenkrais Method. As he said years later, “The most drastic test of a movement is self-preservation.”⁹ 

From  a close reading of Better Judo we will also get a preview of Feldenkrais’ intellectualism. “In those days judo/jujutsu was an art of self-defense. Thanks to Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais it gained a scientific and more sophisticated facet. The Japanese art was increasingly seen as a science of combat practiced by intellectuals, university students, scholars…Moshe played a pivotal role in this evolution [of judo] from a utilitarian practice to a scientific one.”¹⁰  [Fig 1] Feldenkrais became involved with judo when he met its founder Professor Jigoro Kano in Paris in September of 1933. This was not merely a meeting between two giants; it was an event that would lead to a dramatic change in the direction and trajectory of Feldenkrais’ thinking. In his famous 1977 interview about martial arts, Moshe recalled that Kano had said to him that judo is “the efficient use of the mind over the body.”¹¹  

At the time, Moshe had thought that this was a funny way to describe a martial art. During their initial meeting, Moshe was introduced to the concept of seiryoku zenyo (minimum efort, maximum eficiency). Kano challenged Moshe with a judo choking technique. Moshe attempted to free himself using the technique that had always worked for him, but this time it did not help him. As Kano described in his diary: “I grabbed him in a tight reverse cross with both hands and said, ‘Try to get out of this!’ He pushed my throat with his fist with all his might. He was quite strong, so my throat was in some pain, but I pressed on his carotid arteries on both sides with both hands so the blood could not get to his head, and he gave up.

Imagine a small Japanese man, at the age of 75, subduing a strong, young man of 29. This incident impressed Feldenkrais and changed his approach to the use of his own body.  [Fig 2] 

Feldenkrais began to study judo and in a relatively short time was promoted to black belt. More than a skillful practitioner of the art, he proved to be a unique judo teacher of the highest quality. Kano had a great deal of faith in Moshe.¹³  Supported by Kano’s authority, and through his own considerable abilities, Moshe became the leading judo teacher in France. Moshe’s influence on the development of the martial art in France was extraordinary, earning him the title “Pionnier du Judo en France.”¹⁴ As Moshe became more expert at judo, he learned from and cooperated with the judo master Mikinosuke Kawaishi. This partnership gave Feldenkrais the background to later write two judo books. He wrote in the forward of Higher Judo: “I wish to express my gratitude to my friend and teacher of many years, Mr. Mikinosuke Kawaishi, 7th Dan. The figures in the illustrations in this book represent him and myself.”¹⁵ 

Seiryoku-Zenyo: Maximum Efficient Use Of Energy

kodokanjudoinstitute |  "This concept of the best use of energy is the fundamental teaching of Judo. In other words, it is most effectively using one's energy for a good purpose. So, what is 'good'? Assisting in the continued development of one's community can be classified as good, but counteracting such advancement is bad... Ongoing advancement of community and society is achieved through the concepts of 'Sojo-Sojo' (help one another; yield to one another) or 'Jita-Kyoei' (mutual benefit). In this sense, Sojo-Sojo and Jita-Kyoei are also part of the greater good. This is the fundamental wisdom of Judo.

Kata and Randori are possible when this fundamental wisdom is applied to techniques of attack and defence. If directed at improving the body, it becomes a form of physical education; if applied to gaining knowledge, it will become a method of self-improvement; and, if applied to many things in society such as the necessities of life, social interaction, one's duties, and administration, it becomes a way of life...

In this way, Judo today is not simply the practice of fighting in a dojo, but rather it is appropriately recognised as a guiding principle in the myriad facets of human society. The practice of Kata and Randori in the dojo, is no more than the application of Judo principles to combat and physical training... From the study of traditional Jujutsu Kata and Randori, I came to the realisation of this greater meaning. Accordingly, the process of teaching also follows the same path. Furthermore, I recognised the value of teaching Kata and Randori to many people as a fighting art and as a form of physical training. This not only serves the aims of the individual, but by mastery of the fundamental wisdom of Judo, and in turn applying it to many pursuits in life, all people will be able to live their lives in a judicious manner.

This is how one should undertake the study of Judo that I founded. However, in actuality there are many people throughout the world living their lives on the basis of Judo principles without knowing that this is the real essence of Judo. If the Judo that I espouse is propagated to society at large, the actions people undertake will become Judo without even thinking about it. I believe that if more people gain an understanding of the guiding principles of Judo, this philosophy will also help guide their lives. Thus, I implore you all to make great efforts, and initiate this trend in society." *2

The World Economic Forum Is Where BLM's "Trained Marxist" National Leadership Goes

This is where BLM’s national leadership , including its “trained Marxists”, go. 

 

To global neoliberalism’s headquarters, to the World Economic forum, wherein is planned the 4iR and 4th Globalization. 

Bill Clinton crossed a picket line and Angela Davis has been promoting the WEF. Warren Buffet and other billionaire backers have been getting quite a return on their investment. Maybe BLM leadership is not as leftist as they claim. If they’re planning a WEF-backed revolution, what’s their “trained Marxist” plan? Using Marxist analysis to promote and excuse mass layoffs, gig economy work, and increasing monopoly power?

 

If the political/economic current system is good at nothing else, it is good at identifying who to co-opt, who to buy off, and who to marginalize. It’s the same way original black revolutionaries were co-opted into the afrodemic complex, and how civil rights negroes became reliable cogs in the DNC political machine. It’s how some Sixties firebrands were neutered into mild-mannered academics and DNC aparatchiks, while others were shuffled off into obscurity.

 

Much like the first conspirator to snitch on his comrades gets the best deal, the same holds true for aspiring sell-outs.

 

Question: is there even “a national BLM leadership”, with lines of authority and meetings and a board of directors and everything? 

usatoday |  “I’m really proud of the work we’ve been able to do in the last seven years,” Patrisse Cullors, co-founder and chairwoman of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, said in a statement. “What is clear is that Black Lives Matter shares a name with a much larger movement and there are literally hundreds of organizations that do impactful racial and gender justice work who make up the fabric of this broader movement.”

 

 The foundation has already identified several movement organizations that it would like to support, said Cullors, who declined to name the groups. The foundation says it will “prioritize mutual aid organizations, direct service and organizations focused on creating sustainable improvements in the material conditions for all black people.” It also looks to support black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender-led groups.

Over its nearly six years of existence, the BLM Global Network had received contributions from high-profile donors, including A-list entertainers such as Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Prince, who contributed to BLM mere weeks before his death in 2016. But unanswered questions of transparency and access to those gifts left some organizers in network affiliate chapters frustrated.

Adolph Reed: Elite Ratification Of Managerial "Authoriteh" Over The American Negroe Problem

thebaffler  |  The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own tactical alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by committed black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual black heroism and helps drive the intense—and myopic—opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on economic inequality and working-class concerns.

The striking hostility to such a politics within the higher reaches of antiracist activism illustrates the extent to which what bills itself as black politics today is in fact a class politics: it is not interested in the concerns of working people of whatever race or gender. Indeed, a spate of recent media reports have retailed evidence that upper-class black Americans may be experiencing stagnant-to-declining social mobility—which is taken as prima facie evidence of the stubbornly racist cast of the American social order: Even rich professionals like us, elite commentators suggest, are denied the right to secure our own class standing. It is also telling that the study that provoked the media reports – Raj Chetty, et al., “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” – rehearses the hoary recommendation that “reducing the intergenerational persistence of the black-white income gap will require policies whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.” These include “mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given area.” That’s pretty thin gruel, warmed over bromides and all too familiar paternalism and no actually redistributive policies at all.

In this context the pronounced animus trained on the figure of the “white savior” emerges as litmus test for the critical role of racial gatekeeper in respectable political discourse. The gatekeeping question has, for more than a century, focused on who speaks for black Americans and determines the “black agenda.” And the status of black leader, spokesperson, or “voice” has always been a direct function of contested class prerogative, dating back a century and more to Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. Specifically, the gatekeeping function is the obsession of the professional-managerial strata who pursue what Warren has described as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem.” How do “black leaders” become recognized? The answer is the same now as for Washington in the 1890s; recognition as a legitimate black leader, or “voice,” requires ratification by elite opinion-shaping institutions and individuals.

Gatekeeping hasn’t been the exclusive preoccupation of Bookerite conservatives or liberals like Du Bois. Even militant black nationalists and racial separatists like Marcus Garvey and the leaders of the Nation of Islam have pursued validation as black leaders from dominant white elites to support programs of racial “self-help” or uplift. From Black Power to Black Lives Matter, claimants to speak on behalf of the race have courted recognition from the Ford Foundation and other white-dominated nonprofit philanthropies and NGOs. And the emergence of cable news networks and the blogosphere have exponentially expanded the number and types of entities that can anoint race leaders and representative voices.

This new welter of platforms and voices seeking to promulgate and validate the acceptable terms of black leadership has made the category seem all the more beyond question, as black racial voices pop up all over the place all the time. So, for example, the self-proclaimed black voice Tia Oso was brought front and center in the 2015 Netroots Presidential Town Hall featuring Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, where she proclaimed that “black leadership must be foregrounded and central to progressive strategies.” Likewise, the presumed moral authority of race leadership enabled Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford to prevent Sanders from speaking at a Social Security rally in Seattle—as though the long-term viability of Social Security were not a black issue. The instant recourse to a posture of leadership is how random Black Lives Matter activists and a vast corps of pundits and bloggers are able to issue ex cathedra declarations about which issues are and are not pertinent to black Americans.

 

 

The Distributed Revolution Suppression Complex

wedothework |  Well known political commentator and activist Ralph Nader was recently featured in a Truthdig article titled, “Why Aren’t the 99% Revolting?”. The points made in the article sharply illustrate the scale of growing crisis and conflict across the US and globally. It covered issues as wide ranging as medical care, climate change, and the titanic disparity of global wealth distribution. It concluded with the following, hollow statement. “I could go on and on. Pick up the pace, readers. Senator Elizabeth Warren has correctly called for “big structural changes.” 

Of course, we are all asking ourselves the same thing. How bad does it have to get before widespread rebellion? How many unarmed people of color will be gunned down by police? How many civil rights are going to be stripped? How rich can the elites get off of our labor? How much pain do we all need to feel before we rise up? It’s a natural question to ask by anyone suffering the nature of US capitalism. Unfortunately, Nader’s article rings tone-deaf. Like so many liberal arguments, it places the burden of rebellion on working class people while ignoring the mechanisms that kill revolt wherever and whenever it threatens to spark into life.

Although the elements that prevent substantial rebellion are many, they really boil down to just three. They are the not for profit industry, the antiquated strategies of what is currently mislabeled as, “The union movement”, and the Democratic Party. These three elements, all loyal to each other and working in unison, act as the front-line protective mechanism for US capitalism and the political class that serves it.

Many of you will be tempted to flail at this stage of the discussion. Aren’t the Republicans so much worse? Why would anyone attack the forces that are on our side after all they have done, even if they have some traits we may disagree with? The answer is quite simple. These forces are not allied with the types of changes our world desperately needs. They are not there to build, nor even prepare the ground for those types of changes. They act, instead, as the professional brokers of negotiated surrender for communities, work forces, and the environment. They are not building movements; they are preventing them.

Fin D'Siecle American Male Identity?

patrickwyman |  The assumed subject of this culture is a straight, young-ish (18-40) dude who’s kind of into fitness of some kind, whether that’s lifting weights, a little jiu-jitsu, or what have you. He probably played sports and currently enjoys watching them. He’s familiar with but not super dedicated to video games and likes beer and maybe some weed from time to time. He may or may not have a college degree, but either way has a solid but not extremely high-paying job. He probably lives in the suburbs, exurbs, or a rural area, rather than a dense metro. He’s probably but not necessarily white. He’s disproportionately likely to have served in the military, and if he hasn’t, he knows people - family or friends - who do or did.

These various demographic, and therefore cultural and social affiliations, don’t exist in isolation from one another. Put together, they form a relatively stable melange, an ecosystem with its own influencers and heroes, values and principles, and connections to other social, cultural, and political phenomena.

It’s rooted in physicality and the body, self-ownership through activity. While it doesn’t necessarily eschew the life of the mind - Jocko Willink, for example, constantly discusses and advocates the reading of books on his podcast - that’s simply not the main focus for self-actualization or identity. If you want to talk about intellectual pursuits, you can do it while pulling 500 pounds or beating the hell out of a heavy bag.

Some aspects of this are obviously new, like social media and the role of influencers. But others aren’t. Fitness culture, one of Bro Culture’s constituent pieces, has been around in various guises for a long time; weightlifting came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s, Crossfit in the 2000s, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in the last decade, but other manifestations - like respectable men’s Muscular Christianity around the beginning of the 20th century - have been around for much longer. Bare-knuckle boxing was a manifestation of rough-and-tumble, working-class manhood in later 19th century America. That working-class manhood revolved around taverns and drinking, gambling on fights and races, a combination of activities familiar to any self-respecting Bro today whether he participates in them or not.

One parallel that’s particularly striking to me, though I wouldn’t take the comparison too far, is with medieval chivalry.

Hear me out.

The popular conception of chivalry, as a moral code guiding the behavior of honorable knights, is flat-out, laughably wrong. That’s a creation of 19th-century authors like Walter Scott, and the popular fantasy authors (basically up until George R.R. Martin) who built on their worldview in the 20th.

In reality, chivalry was all about one particular version of Guys Being Dudes. Chivalry could refer to a few different things, but the most common meaning was simply battlefield deeds, executed with some style. This, what knights referred to as “prowess,” was at the core of the broader ideology of chivalry: raw, bloody, physical performance, violence done effectively and to an agreed-upon aesthetic standard. The second major concern of chivalry, honor, grew directly out of the first. Honor wasn’t an abstract concept to medieval knights; it was a possession, a recognition of their particular status and place in the social hierarchy, which they were well within their rights to violently defend and assert through their prowess. Piety was the icing on the cake, but no knight really doubted that God approved of their actions.

 

Via Fantasy - Oxford Sought To Capture And Control Young Minds

aeon  |  Tolkien articulated his anxieties about the cultural changes sweeping across Britain in terms of ‘American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass-production’, calling ‘this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying’ and suggesting in a 1943 letter to his son Christopher that, if this was to be the outcome of an Allied Second World War win, he wasn’t sure that victory would be better for the ‘mind and spirit’ – and for England – than a loss to Nazi forces.

Lewis shared this abhorrence for ‘modern’ technologisation, secularisation and the swiftly dismantling hierarchies of race, gender and class. He and Tolkien saw such broader shifts reflected in changing (and in their estimation dangerously faddish) literary norms. Writing in the 1930s, Tolkien skewered ‘the critics’ for disregarding the fantastical dragon and ogres in Beowulf as ‘unfashionable creatures’ in a widely read essay about that Old English poem. Lewis disparaged modernist literati in his Experiment in Criticism (1961), mocking devotees of contemporary darlings such as T S Eliot and claiming that ‘while this goes on downstairs, the only real literary experience in such a family may be occurring in a back bedroom where a small boy is reading Treasure Island under the bed-clothes by the light of an electric torch.’ If the new literary culture was accelerating the slide to moral decay, Tolkien and Lewis identified salvation in the authentic, childlike enjoyment of adventure and fairy stories, especially ones set in medieval lands. And so, armed with the unlikely weapons of medievalism and childhood, they waged a campaign that hinged on spreading the fantastic in both popular and scholarly spheres. Improbably, they were extraordinarily successful in leaving far-reaching marks on the global imagination by launching an alternative strand of writing that first circulated amongst child readers.

These readers devoured The Hobbit and, later, The Lord of the Rings, as well as The Chronicles of Narnia series. But they also read fantasy by later authors who began to write in this vein – including several major British children’s writers who studied the English curriculum that Tolkien and Lewis established at Oxford as undergraduates. This curriculum flew in the face of the directions that other universities were taking in the early years of the field. As modernism became canon and critical theory was on the rise, Oxford instead required undergraduates to read and comment on fantastical early English works such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Le Morte d’Arthur and John Mandeville’s Travels in their original medieval languages.

Oxford for nearly 40 years officially sanctioned magic-filled medieval works as exemplars of English literature

Students had to analyse these texts as literature rather than only as linguistic extracts, a notable difference from the more common approach to medieval literature at the time. Tolkien and Lewis identified concrete moral lessons and ‘patriotic’ insights into the national character in these magical tales of long ago. The past they depicted was not, of course, England as it actually was in the Middle Ages, but England as poets had imagined it to be: the enchanted realm of heroism, righteousness and romance where 19th-century nationalists had identified the moral and racial heart of the nation. (The Oxford curriculum was, in this sense, a throwback to English studies’ roots in colonial education, which – as the literary scholar Gauri Viswanathan has shown in Masks of Conquest (2014) – often looked to prove English right to rule through the glory of its national literature.

The unique educational programme that dominated English at Oxford for nearly 40 years officially sanctioned magic-filled medieval works as exemplars of English literature for generations of students that passed through the university’s power-filled halls. And a number of these students went on to write their own popular children’s fantasy, some to great acclaim. Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland and Philip Pullman in particular, who each received their English degrees between 1956 and 1968, draw on medieval and early modern literary sources, many directly taken from the Oxford syllabus, to create new, self-reflectively serious fantasy for young readers. Together with Tolkien and Lewis, this group forms the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature. Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising quintet (1965-77) and Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy (2000-03) give King Arthur’s story fresh context and resonance for understanding contemporary Britain in their times; meanwhile, the works of Jones and Pullman delight in subverting fantasy expectations while introducing early English literature to new generations of readers. They all celebrate the purported wisdom of old stories, and follow the central tenet that Tolkien set out for fairy-stories: ‘one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in the story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.’

The Oxford School’s reimagining of medieval tales for modern audiences injected these fantastical narratives into the public consciousness, largely eluding elite and scholarly notice because their works were branded as children’s literature. At the same time, taking ancient, canonical texts as the foundations for new stories helped to give their fantasy the historical depth and cultural weight to resist derisive laughter and make claims about the present. For instance, the dragon episode at the end of The Hobbit is full of parallels to the one in Beowulf, from the cup-theft that wakes the worm to its destructive expressions of rage. But The Hobbit uses this narrative to pit a traditionalist and noble-born hero (Bard, whose name means ‘poet’, ‘storyteller’) against an untrustworthy elected official, hammering home the significance of conservative traditions over the whims of easily swayed masses. Tolkien’s novel ends with the protagonist Bilbo’s delighted discovery of this barely veiled moral: ‘the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!’

Hacker Or Slave? CHOOSE!!!

islamtimes  |  The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.

In 1994, PFF held a ground-breaking conference in Atlanta that eventually led to a seminal Magna Carta: literally, Cyberspace and the American Dream: a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Era, published in 1996, during the first Clinton term.

Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.

Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.

Those Randian heroes

Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.

When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.

 That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.

Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.

On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.

The Rise of Data Capital, a 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.

So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.

Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable,  online real estate empire is built.

Timnit Gebru: Google Definitely Has A "Type" When It Comes To Diversity And Inclusion...,

technologyreview |  The paper, which builds off the work of other researchers, presents the history of natural-language processing, an overview of four main risks of large language models, and suggestions for further research. Since the conflict with Google seems to be over the risks, we’ve focused on summarizing those here.

Environmental and financial costs

Training large AI models consumes a lot of computer processing power, and hence a lot of electricity. Gebru and her coauthors refer to a 2019 paper from Emma Strubell and her collaborators on the carbon emissions and financial costs of large language models. It found that their energy consumption and carbon footprint have been exploding since 2017, as models have been fed more and more data.

Strubell’s study found that one language model with a particular type of “neural architecture search” (NAS) method would have produced the equivalent of 626,155 pounds (284 metric tons) of carbon dioxide—about the lifetime output of five average American cars. A version of Google’s language model, BERT, which underpins the company’s search engine, produced 1,438 pounds of CO2 equivalent in Strubell’s estimate—nearly the same as a roundtrip flight between New York City and San Francisco.

Gebru’s draft paper points out that the sheer resources required to build and sustain such large AI models means they tend to benefit wealthy organizations, while climate change hits marginalized communities hardest. “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental impact and inequitable access to resources,” they write.

Massive data, inscrutable models

Large language models are also trained on exponentially increasing amounts of text. This means researchers have sought to collect all the data they can from the internet, so there's a risk that racist, sexist, and otherwise abusive language ends up in the training data.

An AI model taught to view racist language as normal is obviously bad. The researchers, though, point out a couple of more subtle problems. One is that shifts in language play an important role in social change; the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have tried to establish a new anti-sexist and anti-racist vocabulary. An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms.

It will also fail to capture the language and the norms of countries and peoples that have less access to the internet and thus a smaller linguistic footprint online. The result is that AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities.

Moreover, because the training datasets are so large, it’s hard to audit them to check for these embedded biases. “A methodology that relies on datasets too large to document is therefore inherently risky,” the researchers conclude. “While documentation allows for potential accountability, [...] undocumented training data perpetuates harm without recourse.”

Research opportunity costs

The researchers summarize the third challenge as the risk of “misdirected research effort.” Though most AI researchers acknowledge that large language models don’t actually understand language and are merely excellent at manipulating it, Big Tech can make money from models that manipulate language more accurately, so it keeps investing in them. “This research effort brings with it an opportunity cost,” Gebru and her colleagues write. Not as much effort goes into working on AI models that might achieve understanding, or that achieve good results with smaller, more carefully curated datasets (and thus also use less energy).

Illusions of meaning

The final problem with large language models, the researchers say, is that because they’re so good at mimicking real human language, it’s easy to use them to fool people. There have been a few high-profile cases, such as the college student who churned out AI-generated self-help and productivity advice on a blog, which went viral.

The dangers are obvious: AI models could be used to generate misinformation about an election or the covid-19 pandemic, for instance. They can also go wrong inadvertently when used for machine translation. The researchers bring up an example: In 2017, Facebook mistranslated a Palestinian man’s post, which said “good morning” in Arabic, as “attack them” in Hebrew, leading to his arrest.

The Incredible Difficulty Of Writing Chinese Characters On A Computer

happyscribe |  Listener supported WNYC Studios. Wait, you're OK? You're listening to Radiolab Radio from WNYC. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad

[00:29]
This is Radiolab to start things off today.

[00:32]
A couple months ago, we also got to a small community in America in that magical, forgotten time before the coronavirus, our reporter Simon Adler somewhat mysteriously walked me a few blocks from our office making hand to a coffee shop.

[00:49]
OK, with our coffee purchased. Let's go stand in the corner where it's maybe a little less loud. Sort of a fancy one. Exposed brick bear Eddison bulbs.

[00:57]
So let let's gaze out upon the hipsters of Lower Manhattan in the survey and count the number of laptops. Yeah. So how many laptops do you think are here. I get a kick starting from the left. We're going to circle around. We got one, two, three, four, five, six, two more on the four more on the bar.

[01:16]
And they're all typing the same way. Right. Or they're all using a quirky keyboard.

[01:21]
Yeah. Yes.

[01:22]
And the reason he dragged me there as I now know it now let's imagine we're in Shenzhen in a Chinese Starbucks was to point out a massive cultural difference hidden in plain sight and to propose a bit of a reporting trip.

[01:36]
Are you going to send somebody to to Starbucks in Shenzhen?

[01:39]
Well, that's my hope, that I will be the one sent to a Starbucks in Shenzhen, Wellfleet, Adler.

[01:46]
Now, you did not bite on that reporting trip. No. Plus, pretty soon thereafter, traveling to China became a lot more difficult.

No Super Soldiers, Just Drug-Moderated Virally-Delivered Epigenetic Cellular Regeneration...,

nature |   In Sinclair’s lab, geneticist Yuancheng Lu looked for a safer way to rejuvenate cells. He dropped one of the four genes used by Belmonte’s team — one that is associated with cancer — and crammed the remaining three genes into a virus that could shuttle them into cells. He also included a switch that would allow him to turn the genes on by giving mice water spiked with a drug. Withholding the drug would switch the genes back off again.

Because mammals lose the ability to regenerate components of the central nervous system early in development, Lu and his colleagues decided to test their approach there. They picked the eye’s retinal nerves. They first injected the virus into the eye to see if expression of the three genes would allow mice to regenerate injured nerves — something that no treatment had yet been shown to do.

Lu remembers the first time that he saw a nerve regenerating from injured eye cells. “It was like a jellyfish growing out through the injury site,” he says. “It was breathtaking.”

The team went on to show that its system improved visual acuity in mice with age-related vision loss, or with increased pressure inside the eye — a hallmark of the disease glaucoma. The approach also reset epigenetic patterns to a more youthful state in mice and in human cells grown in the laboratory.

It is still unclear how cells preserve a memory of a more youthful epigenetic state, says Sinclair, but he and his colleagues are trying to find out.

In the meantime, Harvard has licensed the technology to Boston company Life Biosciences, which, Sinclair says, is carrying out preclinical safety assessments with a view to developing it for use in people. It would be an innovative approach to treating vision loss, says Botond Roska, director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel, Switzerland, but will probably need considerable refinement before it can be deployed safely in humans, he adds.

The history of ageing research is littered with unfulfilled promises of potential fountains of youth that failed to make the leap to humans. More than a decade ago, Sinclair caused a stir by suggesting that compounds — including one found in red wine — that activate proteins called sirtuins could boost longevity. Although he and others continue to study the links between sirtuins and ageing that were originally observed in yeast, the notion that such compounds can be used to lengthen human lifespan has not yet been borne out, and has become controversial.

Ultimately, the test will be when other labs try to reproduce the reprogramming work, and try the approach in other organs affected by ageing, such as the heart, lungs and kidneys, says Judith Campisi, a cell biologist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California.

Those data should emerge swiftly, she predicts. “There are many labs now who are working on this whole concept of reprogramming,” says Campisi. “We should be hopeful but, like everything else, it needs to be repeated and it needs to be extended.”

 

Why So Hard To Believe Super-Soldiers In The Age Of Disposable Robot Assassins?

lawfareblog |   Someone—almost certainly Israel—recently assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the leading scientist behind the Iranian nuclear program. The latest reporting from Iran suggests that the assassins employed a remotely controlled machine gun mounted on a pickup truck. If this reporting proves correct, the death of Fakhrizadeh will not be the first instance of successful or attempted assassination-by-robot: In 2018, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro survived a possible attempt on his life carried out by small drones armed with explosives. And the U.S., in targeting Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani with a drone strike, has made clear that it is not above the use of such tools in modern statecraft.

So how hard is it to build such a tool? How expensive? Unfortunately, the answer is “hard but doable” and “not much money”—with the further complication that in a few years, it will probably be possible to pick up the necessary equipment online from vendors like Banggood. I know, because this field is something of a hobby for me. For three years, I’ve been trying to build an autonomous computing package for drone-hunting drones, and this work has familiarized me with the relevant technology.

It doesn’t take much for a robot to kill an exposed person. 200 grams (seven ounces)—not that much more than a baseball—is enough explosive to kill anyone within five meters (15 feet). A small ground or air vehicle can easily carry that payload, creating a robotic assassin.

Currently, the remote control needed to maneuver such an assassin is easily defeated with broad-spectrum jamming, which interferes with the radio signals necessary for communication. This played out in 2017, when the Islamic State developed and deployed effective small drones until the U.S. and others employed jammers to disrupt the remote link. There is also reporting suggesting this is why the Maduro assassination attempt failed. In order to avoid this problem, successful robotic assassins will need to be autonomous, capable of identifying targets and attacking without any human intervention.

Likewise, a drone-hunting drone needs to be autonomous because it needs to deal with autonomous—and therefore fast-thinking—adversary drones. It also needs to be fast in order to engage its target while protecting a larger area from attack. And it needs to be cheap, because there are so many potential targets that need defending.

Basically, to fight autonomous robot assassins, I need to build autonomous robot assassins to assassinate the autonomous robot assassins.

Captain China? Do You Find The Bourne Movies Completely Far-Fetched?

caitlinjohnstone |  “What we know is that the nation’s top intelligence official says that the US has evidence that China is conducting biological experiments on its soldiers to enhance their capabilities,” said CIA asset and reporter Ken Dilanian on a recent MSNBC segment designed to keep you nice and terrified of the west’s current Official Bad Guy.

“I was somewhat skeptical about this claim, but when I started poking around I found that private American military experts in the think tank world have actually studied this issue and written about it and they have found that there is ample evidence that Chinese scientists are very interested in applying bio-technology to the battlefield,” Dilanian continued. “Picture super strong commandos who can operate on three hours’ sleep, or a sniper who can see twice as far as a normal person. This is the kind of thing that the Chinese aspire to doing, and you know, it’s problematic because in the west we consider that to be unethical, to tamper with the genes of healthy people.”

Dilanian was referring to a claim made in a freakish screed of cold war smut recently published in the Wall Street Journal by US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe titled “China Is National Security Threat No. 1“. The piece includes an illustration of a red serpent shaped like the Great Wall squeezing the world in its coils, much like the globe-strangling tentacled beasts traditionally used in propaganda to drum up fears of communists and Jews taking over the world.

Ratcliffe claims that “China poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II,” asserting that there are “no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power” and its “efforts to drag the world back into the dark”.

 

An Analysis Of TheAnalysis On Democrats And Their Money Masters

nakedcapitalism |  I hate to have to make a couple of qualifying remarks about an otherwise excellent discussion of how the Democrats have made promises to too many constituencies, particularly Big Finance and top professionals, and will soon go through elaborate exercises to try to pretend that they aren’t betraying some interests to deliver to others.

I’ve mentioned before that Paul Jay has developed a misguided obsession with BlackRock, when it is far from the most powerful financial firm. Goldman, with its astonishing alumni penetration of top level government positions in the US and abroad (Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, William Dudley and Neel Kashkari as as central bankers; Bob Rubin, Hank Paulson, and Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretaries; Gary Gensler, admittedly a bit of a turncoat, as head of the CFTC; John Corzine and Phil Muphy as New Jersey governors; I’m sure I missed plenty). The idea that a former BlackRock official Brian Deese becoming head of the National Economic Council confers some sort of outsized influence is quite a stretch…particularly since former Goldman President and Chief Operating Officer Gary Cheld the same post in Trump’s administration.

Similarly, any of the top private equity firms has vastly more power than BlackRock. Even though BlackRock manages more money, it has an arms-length, virtually nil influence relationship with the companies whose shares are in its funds.

By contrast KKR stated in one of its annual reports in the mid-2000 that it would be the fifth biggest employer in the US through its portfolio companies. Given that private equity has only grown as a share of global equity since then, it’s extremely likely that Blackstone, Carlyle and KKR each through their portfolio companies are among the top ten employers in the US.

All of these private equity firms hire and fire the executives of their portfolio companies and dictate which law and accounting firms they use; they could reach in and fire any employee if they chose to (say they found offensive remarks on Facebook or Twitter). Private equity collectively is the biggest source of fees to Wall Street (their rich merger and acquisition and financing fees dwarf the skimpy stock and bond trading fees a BlackRock pays¹), the biggest source of fees to white shoe law firms, and I am told, since the early 2000s, also pay more than half the fees of top consultants McKinsey, Bain, and BCG

By contrast, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, has extremely little direct influence over any of the public or late-stage VC companies in which BlackRock invests. Nearly all shares are held in index funds, which means BlackRock’s overriding concern is index replication at the lowest possible cost. It can’t buy or sell shares to make a point. BlackRock does not hold large enough stakes to appoint directors, let alone hire and fire executives or employees.

And BlackRock’s promotion of ESG, as in environmental, social and governance investing? BlackRock is very late to that party. CalPERS and CalSTRS were true believers long ago; CalPERS famously dumped tobacco stocks at the worst possible time, right before the Federal-state settlement. CalSTRS pressured Cerberus to dump its holdings in gun maker Remington in 2015. A party with inside knowledge of BlackRock told me that the big reason BlackRock suddenly became a vocal advocate was that it hoped to win the mandate to take over CalPERS private equity portfolio. Recall that Bloomberg publicized in late 2017 that that was CalPERS’ plan, despite BlackRock’s lack of meaningful private equity experience. BlackRock was indeed on a short list of firms invited to propose over that Christmas/New Years holiday. BlackRock staring making a full throated defense of ESG investing, which is near and dear to the board’s heart, in early 2018, with CalPERS Chief Investment Officer Ted Eliopoulos at Larry Fink’s side during the press conference. The effort to hand off CalPERS’ portfolio to an outside party and have less control and pay even more fees fell apart under press scrutiny, led by this website.

Another smaller sour note was Mark Blyth depicting Republicans as representing extractive, old economy industries. Top expert on political money in America, Tom Ferguson, says that’s simplistic. While oil and fracking company donations are strongly Republican, of the four biggest private equity firms, the heads of three (KKR, Blackstone, and Carlyle) are established heavyweight Republican donors. Industry insiders report that private equity firms press portfolio company executives to donate in line with parent company preferences. Apollo, as more of a real estate firm, gives to both parties, as do most developers, since they always need friends in office. The arms industry skews Republican. The health care industry gives heavily to both parties.

Do You Know How Much Damage One Corrupt Bill Clinton Can Cause?

vanityfair |  Band’s ultimate goal was to transform Clinton from a beleaguered politician, remembered for sex scandals and debating what the meaning of the word is is, into the world’s philanthropist in chief. Band came up with the concept at the 2003 World Economic Forum as he watched attendees flock to Clinton like groupies. In 2005, Band convinced Clinton to host his own version of Davos. Celebrities, billionaires, and CEOs descended on New York to mix and mingle while making “pledges” to donate to charity. The Clinton Global Initiative quickly established itself as one of the hottest tickets on the conference circuit. In 2007, Gallup ranked Clinton’s favorability at 63 percent. “Clinton was happy because CGI gave him what he wanted--redemption and being in the spotlight,” Band said.

As the impresario of CGI, Band became a central node in a network of the most powerful people on the planet. Because Clinton didn’t carry a cell phone or use email, anyone who wanted to speak to Clinton had to go through Band. (At his peak, Band carried three BlackBerries at all times.) Most petitioners didn’t get through the door. Not surprisingly, this pissed off a lot of people. “You make so many enemies when you’re the right-hand guy to a powerful person. You just can’t make everyone happy,” Ruddy said. Band didn’t help himself by coming across to many as self-important and blunt. “You had to kiss Doug’s ass to get anywhere. It was like Doug began to think he was Bill Clinton,” said a Clinton adviser who dealt frequently with Band. Clinton ignored Band’s critics because Band was getting results.

Band’s relationship with Clinton rocketed Band into the stratosphere of Manhattan’s social scene. He frequented Bungalow 8 and Buddakan, and briefly dated Naomi Campbell. Band’s bachelor years ended when he met Lily Rafii, a Morgan Stanley banker turned handbag designer, at a Bergdorf’s trunk show. In 2007, they wed at the 17th-century Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, near Paris, at a ceremony attended by no fewer than three billionaires. Clinton delivered a moving toast. “If there is one person I want in a foxhole with me, it’s Doug,” Band recalled Clinton saying.

His problem was that someone else was already in the foxhole.

Politics is the Clinton family business, and it was inevitable that Band would get squeezed between Bill’s and Hillary’s competing ambitions and conflicting priorities. It’s hard to overstate how parallel Bill’s and Hillary’s lives had become by the 2000s. “It was separate worlds that had very little overlap,” Band said. Band was Bill’s guy, which meant he saw Hillary’s career as a threat. “I wanted him to stay out of politics and do great big things,” Band said.

As Hillary’s 2008 run approached, the tensions played out, and the campaign brought on unwelcome scrutiny of Bill’s postpresidency. How exactly had Bill, with Band’s help, earned that $109 million after leaving office? The Wall Street Journal uncovered Band’s role in brokering a $100 million real estate deal between Italian con artist Raffaello Follieri, Ron Burkle, and a Clinton Foundation donor named Michael Cooper. (Follieri wired Band a $200,000 finder’s fee, which Band later returned.) A New York Times investigation exposed how Canadian mining mogul Frank Giustra won a lucrative uranium mining concession in Kazakhstan two days after Giustra and Bill dined with Kazakhstan’s strongman president. (Months later, Giustra donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation and pledged $100 million more.)