Week 48
Time for a little break.. C ya bitchez
Paper: "[2021] The Military-Industrial-Media Complex: The Decline of the “Alert and Knowledgeable Citizenry.. William D. Hartung’s Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex provides a meticulously researched and shocking exposé of the colossal company and the enormous breadth of its reach and influence. Hartung notes that in 2008 alone, Lockheed Martin had $36 billion in total federal contracts, 29 billion of which came from Pentagon contracts, making it not only the nation’s leading weapons contractor but the top overall government contractor as well. The astronomical amounts spent on contracts with Lockheed Martin came out to approximately 260 dollar per taxpaying household, appropriately called 'the Lockheed Martin tax.'"
"If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you"
The Guardian: "‘It’s not drought - it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water.. [A]cross the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water"
"@jonny@neuromatch.social
The dream of a p2p web is not just a technical one, or a political one, but an ecological and aesthetic dream where the thicket of digital reality can grow deep and live long and mutate and create and break without eternal catastrophe of capture by financial tyrants. Where there can truly be a digital reality where people and objects can tangle together and degrade and be renewed"
"@garbados@friend.camp
So long as competitors can destroy each other with, in theory, better products, better prices, etc., then capitalists will serve demand in pursuit of profit. They do this wantonly, exuding toxic externalities; nevertheless the taps run and the grocer holds inventory. But profit dwindles over time, such is its destiny. Capitalists eventually turn on each other not as competitors, but as existential threats. Through acquisition and capture, all sectors tend toward monopoly as even the state becomes a servant of profit alone. The competition necessary to hold capitalists accountable to the governance of production ceases, leaving a corporatist coven of a few unaccountable owners. Why would they need price corrections?
So, maybe the obvious AI bubble doesn't burst. Maybe crypto grifts remain eternal. Maybe property speculation fuels homelessness for the rest of our lives. Maybe the cost of groceries mysteriously outpaces inflation by an order of magnitude, and all we ever hear is that the good line went up.
This only becomes possible because the few remaining capitalists have lost all accountability to the governance of production. Not merely that they are immune to prosecution for abuses, but that they have become totally divorced from the realities of administration. It does not matter what conditions are really like, how production or consumption really behave, because all that these corporatists see is their own propaganda: that the good line went up. Their machinations prove inept, aloof. They fizzle, like the Metaverse, a meaningless waste..
Does this abstention of governance feel like a void, or a hell-hail? Repression rains from the federal while blue team sends fundraising emails. So, we must distinguish what we call our governments — pageantries for settlers in a theology of illusory consent — from the actual work of governance.
It may seem obvious. Governance concerns the marshaling of sufficiency, by organizing (or mediating the organization of) the means of production. The goal of governance is providence, for the governed but more broadly for life itself. Why else are we alive if not to celebrate and perpetuate the cycle of mortality? Why should I not abolish hunger? Why would you expect any less of a compassionate order? Why should not all justice be restorative, all plenitude enduring?
It thus grows clear that despite a system of entities calling themselves governments, virtually no governance occurs in our lives, and it is all done by corporatists. Famine is only stayed in the food desert by the supply chain of McDonald's. The hospital seeks profit; if you're lucky, they'll extend credit. The university takes dividends from genocidaires and the extinctionists of oil. In many places, it is even illegal to perform the work of governance, as feeding those unhoused and hungry comes to risk arrest. Resisting the eviction notice is, so to say, an easy way to arrange a confrontation with the overwhelming force of militarized police"
"@pushcx@ruby.social
Google claims they are injecting ads live now, so I'd like to quickly turnaround a js snippet that sites can use to detect the tampering.
I'm strongly reminded of how a motivation for the big lift to HTTPS was slimy ISPs injecting ads into pages"
"@pushcx@ruby.social
Google has started injecting unlabeled ads into pages that look like an author created them. Can anyone get a reusable example so we can detect the tampering?"
Marv truly screwed the pooch with that one. They have a Red Hulk in the movie who is also the president, fighting "diversity"? Bad timing. I guess they were hoping for a Dem win and the movie would be celebratory. Instead it will look out of touch, whiny.
The new Cap Am movie gets a bad test screening and does reshoots, AGAIN?
TASS: "Georgescu leading first round of presidential election in Romania.. Georgescu is reserved about Romania's NATO membership and he has been cautiously pushing for normalization with Russia"
"@DrALJONES@mastodon.social
Report: At least six Israeli soldiers have taken their own lives in recent months, but the actual number of suicides may be far higher.
1000s of soldiers have sought help from military mental health clinics, with around one-third showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Are the symptoms related to guilt & shame - up from the depths of the mind paralysed by decades of training in dehumanising Palestinians?"
Mark Curtis: "I think for many people the penny has dropped over #Gaza. They're seeing this total support for a genocide on the part of their governments, and people are shocked."
Hartung: "[W]ell before the peak of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, the Air Force decided that it needed a larger aircraft—something much larger. The rationale was to get troops quickly to any part of the world, within days rather than weeks or months... This impulse was the genesis of the C-5A Galaxy, the largest military aircraft ever built.. One of the more controversial aspects of the proposed plane was its projected ability to get war matériel to any spot in the world on extremely short notice — 'like having a military base in nearly every strategic spot on the globe,' as a Lockheed marketing brochure put it. But this military strong point was viewed as a political liability by Senator William Fulbright (D-AR), then the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman. He argued in 1969, when the first C-5As were nearing production, that 'if we have big planes which will, on a moment’s notice, take two or three divisions to every outbreak that may occur, we will be tempted to do it'"
😂 😂 😂
Barandes: "The Multiverse is Unscientific Nonsense"
Jacob Barandes: "[T]his paper.. uses the stochastic-quantum correspondence to show that physical models based on configuration spaces combined with stochastic dynamics can replicate all the empirical predictions of textbook quantum theory — including interference, decoherence, entanglement, noncommutative observables, and wave-function collapse — without relying on the austere and metaphysically opaque Dirac-von Neumann axioms.. In this alternative approach, a given system moves stochastically along a physical trajectory in a classical-looking configuration space"
Barandes' model starts with stochastic laws of which current quantum mech is a projection, an instantiation of... The funkiness of QM is the result of giving something up whilst that transition, from stochastic to deterministic.
He referenced Edward Nelson who was one of the founders of stochastic theory of quantum mechanics, worked on zero-point field view of matter, Cetta, and Luis de la Pena mention him in their work. Barandes succeeded almost by mistake according to his telling of his story, his model went further than Nelson's because he used non-Markovian (non-divisible) stochastic process which bridged the divide between what is known today and a reasonable explainable physical law.
"There’s No Wave Function? | Jacob Barandes" #TOE
"As Israeli filmmaker Hadar Morag said of her grandmother, late of Auschwitz, whose entire family had been exterminated by the Holocaust, and who was allotted a nice beach-house in Jaffa: 'She saw that on the table there were still the plates of the Palestinians who had lived there, and who had been driven away. She returned to the agency and said, "Take me back to my tent, I’ll never do to someone else that which has been done to me"'"
Matthew Hass, UCCS: "Somewhere between the end of 2000 and mid 2001.. Goldman Sachs (GS), facilitated several intricate transactions with Greece. These transactions employed trading methods utilizing elaborate financial derivatives (particularly security swaps) with the purpose of concealing Greek national debt. The Hellenic Republic of Greece was the newest member of the Eurozone at the time.
In order to remain in the European Union (EU), a nation must meet and uphold financial policies per the Maastricht Treaty. The two limits imposed on government finances were the following: '3% for the ratio of the planned or actual government deficit to gross domestic product [GDP] at market prices,' and '60% for the ratio of [total] government debt to gross domestic product [GDP] at market prices'.. In an effort to hide Greece’s swelling public debt from EU regulators (in 2009 debt to GDP ratio was 130%), Goldman Sachs implemented over-the-counter (OTC) trades—private trades occurring outside any regulated securities exchange. These trades involved exchanges of derivative contracts (swaps) between GS and Greece. In short, Goldman Sachs succeeded in avoiding EU scrutiny by giving Greece an off-the-books loan.
Greece’s publicly reported deficit/debt ratios were artificially reduced in 2001 by effectively issuing the country an upfront ‘cash-advance,’ through the use of cleverly crafted swaps by Goldman Sachs, at a time when such a ‘loan’ was not required by Eurostat to be reported as a liability. Therefore, the unconventional pseudo-loan was not only kept off the public books, it was also explicitly used to write-down the existing sovereign debt load as though the funds were in fact surplus government revenue..
Since these swaps and loans were kept off the books, no higher entity could crosscheck the methods or numbers used by Goldman Sachs. The swaps implemented were cross-currency swaps (CCSs) which GS specifically engineered with fictitious exchange rates. This gave the deal a lure of profitability and a guise of stability to the Hellenic Republic.
These tactics may have given Greece the appearance of an improving financial position (required by the Maastricht Treaty for membership in the Eurozone), but they essentially created a house of cards that could only stand for so long"
Brent Welder: "This morning’s email from Bernie Sanders is not just some run-of-the-mill campaign email"
The key lesson here is if a party bases its votes on a numerous group, it increases their staying power. DJT lost in 2020 but did not lose badly. His connection to the working class helped avert a bigger loss which he subsequently used for his 2024 win.
Ruffini, Party of the People, 2023: "It needs to be repeated that Trump lost the 2020 election. Neither his gains in key groups nor his false narratives about a stolen election change this fact. But Trump’s performance was testament to the resiliency of a Republican coalition built around the working-class voter, which in 2020 had grown to include more nonwhite voters. The rise of multiracial working-class conservatism, once on track to merit but a small footnote in the story of a landslide Trump defeat, instead became a crucial reason why the election was so close. For Republicans, this proved to be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it sketched out a future road map to winning over diverse nonwhite voters on the same terms that it had won over white working-class voters. On the other hand, the closeness of the result gave Trump little reason to leave the stage, his presence clouding Republican prospects in the 2022 midterms—and the 2024 presidential race"
#RSF #SAF 11/05 11/24 Very little change in nearly three weeks.. Why are these guys fighting again?