How America Tortures - Report by Mark Denbeaux et.al (Seton Hall Uni, School of Law)
How America Tortures - Report by Mark Denbeaux et.al (Seton Hall Uni, School of Law)
"Aldous Huxley suggested that bureaucracies behave stupidly because, unlike its individual members, a bureaucracy nevers sleeps and therefore never benefits from a fresh start in the morning of the mind. Sleep deprivation in most mammals promotes aggression as well as stupidity. The cosmopolitical headline here: International Sleep Disorder Causing Epidemic Dumbness and Hostility." (via, via)
Cosmopolitanism "is the ideology that all human beings belong to a single community, based on a shared morality" (Wikipedia)
“One Half A Manifesto” - written by Jaron Lanier in the year 2000:
“There is a real chance that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore’s Law fetishizing, and the rest of the package, will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives. If that happens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified from novelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people.”
Inauguration of a new US$55 billion gas pipeline "Power of Siberia" helps cement increasingly close Beijing-Moscow ties that are moving beyond economics into security.
Nordstream 2 is nearing completion but controversy remains (DW)
"The Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline being built by Russia's Gazprom is nearing completion. Critics of the project, including the US and Poland, fear that the EU will become too dependent on Russian gas."
Power of connection: why the Russia–Europe gas trade is strangely untouched by politics (nature)
"Thane Gustafson argues that fuel pipelines foster stability."
Texas Oil Explorers Say Predictions of Growth Contradict Dire Reality (bloomberg)
"Then there’s the rapid decline of shale-well production. In the top five shale basins, wells that came on in 2018 are declining at their fastest rates yet, according to David Ramsden-Wood, the former COO of Permian producer Franklin Mountain Energy."
Fracking Blows Up Investors Again: Phase 2 of the Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (wolfstreet)
"In 2019 through third quarter, 32 oil and gas drillers have filed for bankruptcy, according to Haynes and Boone."
Will the China of tomorrow run on the technology behind bitcoin? (scmp)
"I worry that people have oversold blockchain to Xi as a magic cure-all" - James Andrew Lewis, Centre for Strategic and International Studies
China's blockchain tech adoption inflated? New expose reveals truth behind tall claims (ibtimes, via "China: Marketing Blockchain")
“According to the Global Times, which is a Chinese state-run media house, numerous companies in China seem to find it simpler to claim that they are utilizing blockchain technology than to truly practice its application. Various Chinese firms across a variety of industries reportedly state that they are employing the use of blockchain tech in some form or another, but lack real evidence to prove that they are doing so. Global Times in their expose report that out of over 3,000 registered businesses, about 500 firms claim to be incorporating blockchain tech in their day-to-day operations, but only about 40 of these have been able to demonstrate that they are actively doing so.”
Impossible Knowledge. Conspiracy Theories, Power, and Truth - By Todor Hristov
"Conspiracy theorists claim impossible knowledge, such as knowledge of the doings of a secret world government. Yet they accept this impossible knowledge as truth. In effect, conspiracy theories detach truth from knowledge.
Knowledge without power is powerless. And the impossible knowledge claimed by conspiracy theorists is rigorously excluded from the regimes of truth and power – that is not even wrong. Yet conspiratorial knowledge is potent enough to be studied by researchers and recognized as a risk by experts and authorities.
Therefore, in order to understand conspiracy theories, we need to think of truth beyond knowledge and power. That is impossible for any scientific discipline because it takes for granted that truth comes from knowledge and that truth is powerful enough to destroy the legitimacy of any authority that would dare to conceal or manipulate it. Since science is unable to make sense of conspiracy theories, it treats conspiracy theorists as individuals who fail to make sense, and it explains their persistent nonsense by some cognitive, behavioral, or social dysfunction.
Fortunately, critical theory has developed tools able to conceive of truth beyond knowledge and power, and hence to make sense of conspiracy theories. This book organizes them into a toolbox which will enable students and researchers to analyze conspiracy theories as practices of the self geared at self-empowerment, a sort of political self-help."
Jim Simons, Bob Mercer Even Better At Printing Money Than We Thought
"From 1988 to 2018, Medallion returned 66.1% annually before fees. Net of fees, the gains were 39.1%. Est. trading profits during those 30y amounted to $104.5 billion."
How Jim Simons built the world's most lucrative black box"Robert Mercer is a preternaturally calm and measured scientist, brilliantly rigorous and evidence-based in all things market-related. Yet outside of mathematics, he believes the wildest unfounded conspiracy theories."
Will America's Billionaires Start a Second Civil War?"The aftermath of Mercer's political activities resulted in an uprising within the firm from David Magerman, one of the creators of the hedge fund's trading system."
"Each time, forces of massive accumulated or inherited wealth have nearly succeeded in taking full control of our nation, replacing a democracy, where the will of the people is accomplished through their elected representatives, with a form of government where most government functions reinforce the power, wealth and control of the morbidly rich. Because the oligarch’s campaign is now international, a third world war is not impossible, particularly as China allies itself with the oligarch-controlled nations against those that are still nearly functioning democracies."
The Undying Octopus: FBI and the PROMIS affair: Part1 (Part 2)
"The PROMIS scandal lives on according to a recent FBI FOIA response. The affair centered around the government’s theft of the PROMIS software, a forerunner to the infamous PRISM, and the far-reaching fallout which allegedly included everything from fraud, to covert operations and surveillance, to Danny Casolaro’s mysterious death, and remains the subject of an investigation decades after the Department of Justice declared the matter officially closed."
Military Defeat as a Financial Collapse Trigger
"The function of the US military is to intimidate other countries into letting the US buy whatever it wants by printing US dollars as needed, essentially robbing the rest of the world at gunpoint. Once their ability to intimidate the world into submission is gone so will be their ability to endlessly fleece the planet. And once that ability is gone all that will remain of the “richest country in the world” is a pile of worthless paper."
Book: Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil - by Michael C. Ruppert (2004)
And some loosely related fun high weirdness:
"Understanding “the Octopus” is like the old story of the blind men trying to comprehend their first encounter with an elephant: the parts you touch can appear to be completely different and totally unrelated."
Book: The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy - by Peter Dale Scott (201)
"This provocative book makes a compelling case for a hidden “deep state” that influences and often opposes official U.S. policies. Prominent political analyst Peter Dale Scott begins by tracing America’s increasing militarization, restrictions on constitutional rights, and income disparity since World War II."
Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, son of notorious Medellín cartel drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, now says his father "worked for the CIA", selling cocaine to finance the fight against Communism in Central America. At one point, Escobar smuggled 15 tons a day into the US, making $420 million per week". Dirty business as usual - things change only very slowly.
Russia bans sale of gadgets without Russian-made software 👏
"One of the bill's co-authors, Oleg Nikolayev, has explained how it could help Russian users: "When we buy complex electronic devices, they already have individual apps, mostly Western ones, pre-installed. Naturally, when a person sees them they might think there are no domestic alternatives available. And if, alongside pre-installed apps, we will also offer the Russian ones to users, then they will have a right to choose."
#Comment: The same old highly non-diverse ("inbred") group of techno-capital fundamentalists celebrating them-self once again - while the US forth reich roman empire collapses in real-time. A truly fantastic #Technology #Politics #Comedy show!
The Lies About World War II - by Paul Craig Roberts. << While i do not agree with many things in this post, it is still thought provoking & the following quote is spot-on:
"In the aftermath of a war, history cannot be written. The losing side has no one to speak for it. Historians on the winning side are constrained by years of war propaganda that demonized the enemy while obscuring the crimes of the righteous victors. People want to enjoy and feel good about their victory, not learn that their side was responsible for the war or that the war could have been avoided except for the hidden agendas of their own leaders. Historians are also constrained by the unavailability of information. To hide mistakes, corruption, and crimes, governments lock up documents for decades. Memoirs of participants are not yet written. Diaries are lost or withheld from fear of retribution. It is expensive and time consuming to locate witnesses, especially those on the losing side, and to convince them to answer questions. Any account that challenges the “happy account” requires a great deal of confirmation from official documents, interviews, letters, diaries, and memoirs, and even that won’t be enough. A historian on the track of the truth faces long years of strenuous investigation and development of the acumen to judge and assimilate the evidence he uncovers into a truthful picture of what transpired. The truth is always immensely different from the victor’s war propaganda.
"
Follow up post: The Truth About World War II Is Beginning to Emerge 74 Years Later
"The phrase 'may you live in interesting times' is the lowest in a trilogy of Chinese curses that continue 'may you come to the attention of those in authority' and finish with 'may the gods give you everything you ask for.' I have no idea about its authenticity." - Terry Pratchett - #China #Philosophy #Comedy #Politics #Magic
“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” - Lao Tzu
Governing Through the Dao: A Non-Anarchistic Interpretation of the Laozi:
https://sci-hub.tw/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11712-010-9176-z
"Given the origins of anarchism, it is important to recognize that claiming the political philosophy of the Laozias a form of anarchism requires placing a Chinese world-view into a Western framework that postdates it by over two thousand years and is understood vis-à-vis a particular Western concept (i.e., the modern state). This alone should raise initial skepticism about the anarchist conclusion regarding the Laozi. Beyond Daoism’s historical past, there are three theoretical reasons for skepticism: (1) the fact that the Laozi is clearly a political treatise addressed to the ruler and providing him with a philosophy of governance; (2) the Chinese conception of personhood, which creates aproblem for traditional anarchist arguments that utilize a notion of the atomistic individual;and, (3) the fact that the skepticism of the Laozi is aimed at a different target than that of anarchism."
"Common to both individualist and social anarchists alike, however, is a perceived tension between individual liberty and the collective will. In Daoism and in Chinese political thought generally, this tension does not exist”(Ames 1983: 32). This lack of tension results from the Daoist, and more generally Chinese, conception of the person. Rather than conceiving the self as autonomous and discrete, Daoists understand the self as interdependent and contextualized."
The Journal of Daoist Studies: https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/711
The rise of the Tao: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/magazine/07religion-t.html
China's Apolitical Political School of Thought: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-apolitical-political-school-thought-12823
The Vectoralist Class - by McKenzie Wark. p1: http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-vectoralist-class/ p2: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60567/the-vectoralist-class-part-ii/
#Comment: At the top row, instead of saying "property, wealth and power", we can have "ecology, health and wisdom". An achievable goal.
#Comment: The Nazi elites, which by and large continued to govern the German economy in the decades after 1945, often had peculiar biographies and beliefs - Hermann Josef Abs illustrate this nicely. Similar patterns can be observed in Italy and across Europe. One can only wonder, why ultra-rich sociopaths are so drawn to far-right politics, which dominated the 20st century in the west.
Cost of War: Estimated economic impact of the US war on terrorism 2001-2020: $6.4 trillion. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/budgetary-costs-post-911-wars-through-fy2020-64-trillion Enough money to end poverty, stop environmental destruction, and launch humanity into space. #Military #Economics #Politics
Related: Swiss ETH study from 2011 which showed that 737 people control 80% of the world’s transnational corporations: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.5728.pdf