cdarwin

cdarwin, 2 months ago to politics

If you have never heard of the "Society for American Civic Renewal" (the acronym is pronounced “#sacker” by its members), it’s because they’ve been trying to stay under the radar.

Now that they are getting uncovered, they are attempting to manage the news coming out about them.
They are working to fundamentally reshape America to their vision. It sounds like a classic conspiracy theory — a bunch of rich white men on a mission from God? Really?
The thing is, there’s something about people who have managed to accumulate wealth, whether in business or by other means (like inheritance) that practically breeds hubris.
The prosperity gospel preaches that wealth is a sign that God has especially favored you, and you are privileged to rule over others by virtue of that wealth.
Kovensky has been able to unearth some details on what #SACR is about.
What is it? Among other things…
...The men TPM has identified as behind this group — and they are all men — have a few things in common. They’re all a certain kind of devout #Christian #traditionalist. They are #white. They have means, #financial and social, and are engaged in #politics.
...The members identified by TPM don’t necessarily fit the profile of the disaffected, disgruntled loner or the amped-up, testosterone-fueled militia types often found on the paranoid right-wing fringe. TPM’s reporting has identified as SACR members the president of the influential, Trump-aligned #Claremont #Institute, #Harvard #Law grads, and leading businessmen in communities scattered across America.
...Group members hold a distinct vision of America as a latter-day ancient Rome: a crumbling, decadent empire that could soon be replaced by a Christian #theocracy.
To join, the group demands faithfulness, virtue, and “#alignment,” which it describes as “#deference to and acceptance of the wisdom of our American and European Christian forebears in the political realm, a traditional understanding of #patriarchal #leadership in the household, and acceptance of traditional #Natural #Law in ethics more broadly.”
More practically, members must be able to contribute either influence, capability, or wealth in helping SACR further its goals.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/inside-a-secret-society-of-prominent-right-wing-christian-men-prepping-for-a-national-divorce

cdarwin, 1 month ago to random

For years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put #democracy before #party whenever they were finally 🔹confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. 🔹

There were promising signs:
They had, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020.

They had, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records
(with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote).

We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end.

We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions.

This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear
—brutally so.

These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution.

To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election
—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act.

These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy,
requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort.

They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power.

They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/supreme-court-immunity-arguments-which-way-now.html

cdarwin, 8 months ago to random

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions.

If the Tennessee-born economist James McGill Buchanan were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly).

If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness.
Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest.
Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.
The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993).
Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else).
His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america

cdarwin, 2 months ago to mastodon

In recent weeks, a few posts had appeared on the #asstodon tag that were of butts, not donkeys, and controversy ensued.

Here it is worth describing some key features of #Mastodon in additional detail.
First, #federation, and #feeds:
As noted, each user is hosted on a specific #server; and this #network of servers comprises Mastodon.
Each user has a personal feed; a “home/neighborhood” feed; and a “federated” feed.

Because of how federation stitches together a user’s experience from the vantage point of their home server, views looking outward to the network vary.
While one can follow individual users across other servers,
👉whether one sees the posts of users one does not follow in one’s personal and “federated” feeds is dictated by interactions and follows across servers.
A user on a very small instance
— and some are as small as a dozen users, or even a single user
— would not see posts from other servers in their “federated” feed unless their instance-mates were following users across each of those servers.

Some servers also choose to, at the server level, silence other servers, often because of lax or poor moderation that home moderators fear will affect their own home users.
Depending on whether this is a silencing or a full block, a user can personally follow another individual user on another instance;
but unless they have a pre-existing reason to know about that user, they might be unlikely to ever encounter them.

By contrast, very large servers, some with over 50,000 users, have quite a lot of activity right at home, before even federating outward.
Those users will see a very lively feed on the “home/neighborhood” feed; and a much bigger pool of posts can be seen on the “federated” feed, as it will be populated by people across many remote servers with whom “home” server-mates interact.

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13367/11436

cdarwin, 5 months ago to random

The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in.

A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony.
Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
@pluralistic
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/

cdarwin, 2 months ago to Gold

Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo #Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.

The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren #Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.

After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold #medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored #guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal #Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.

Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G #technology now being rolled out all over the world.

Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.

As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.

Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.

https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/

cdarwin, 4 months ago to random

In January 2024, at long last, someone has figured out a formula of sorts for how snow reacts to climate change,

and the answer is:
It reacts nonlinearly.

Which is to say, if we think snow is getting scarce now, we ought to buckle up.

Nonlinear relationships indicate accelerated change;

shifts are small for a while but then, past a certain threshold, escalate quickly.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, two Dartmouth researchers report finding a distinctly nonlinear relationship between increasing winter temperatures and declining snowpacks.

And they identify a “snow loss cliff”—an average winter-temperature threshold below which snowpack is largely unaffected, but above which things begin to change fast.

That threshold is 17 degrees Fahrenheit.

Remarkably, 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpack exists in far-northern, high-altitude places that, for now, on average, stay colder than that.

There, the snowpack seems to be healthy and stable, or even increasing.

But as a general rule, when the average winter temperature exceeds 17 degrees (–8 degrees Celsius), snowpack loss begins, and accelerates dramatically with each additional degree of warming.

Already, millions of people who rely on the snowpack for water live in places that have crossed that threshold and will only get hotter.

“A degree beyond that might take away 5 to 10 percent of the snowpack, then the next degree might cut away 10 to 15 percent, then 15 to 20 percent,” Alexander Gottlieb, the first author on the paper, told me over the phone as I looked out my window in New York City, where it has rained several times over the past few days.

“Once you get around the freezing point”—32 degrees Fahrenheit—“you can lose almost half of your snow from just an additional degree of warming,” he said.

New York City, which was recently reclassified as a “humid subtropical” climate, has clocked nearly 700 consecutive days with less than an inch of snowfall.

It’s definitely over the snow-loss cliff, and as global temperatures increase, more places will follow.

#17F #SnowLossCliff #NonlinearClimateChange

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/winter-snow-loss-climate-change/677078/?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZ2wLG_A_3r2KLJ1madGqE6s

cdarwin, 4 months ago to random

The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the European ambassador mused.

“I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day.”

As voters cast ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday, many in the United States see this year’s presidential election as a test of American democracy.
But, in a series of conversations with a dozen current and former diplomats, I sensed that to many of our friends abroad, the U.S. is already failing that test.

The diplomats are aghast that so many U.S. leaders let their zeal for partisan politics prevent the basic functions of government.
It’s a major topic of conversations at their private dinners and gatherings.
Many of those I talked to were granted anonymity to be as candid with me as they are with each other.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/15/what-foreign-diplomats-say-about-u-s-politics-behind-closed-doors-00135326

cdarwin, 7 months ago to random

At the heart of Christian Zionism is not a love for Israel but rather Christian nationalism.

Particularly for popular evangelists with significant clout within the Republican Party, their support for Israel is rooted in its role in the supposed end times:
Jesus’ return to Earth, a bloody final battle at Armageddon, and Jesus ruling the world from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
In this scenario, war is not something to be avoided, but something inevitable, desired by God, and celebratory.
What happens to the Jews and Palestinians is, to put it very mildly, collateral damage.
Christian Zionists are anticipating, and hoping for a war to end all wars, and a resulting Christian world
#Christofascism
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/truth-many-evangelical-christians-support-israel-rcna121481

cdarwin, 1 year ago to random

China Gears Up for Cognitive Warfare

China’s military is increasingly at work on wearable technology and a dedicated #psychological #support #system to win at what it views as the crucial space of #cognitive #warfare—manipulating enemy troops’ state of mind to shape their behavior and hardening its own forces against such efforts.

“In future cognitive domain operations, the influence of rational factors such as science and logic on individual cognition is likely to be weakened, and cognitive confrontation may become a #contest of #emotions,” says one recent article in PLA Daily.

Cognitive domain operations seek to capture the mind of one’s foes, changing the thoughts and perceptions of an adversary to shape their decisions and actions. As another People’s Liberation Army outlet describes, a cognitive attack aims to “use an “invisible hand” to control the opponent’s will, making the opponent feel “I can’t” and “I dare not,” and then achieve the effect of “I don't want to.”

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2023/04/china-gears-cognitive-warfare/384876/

cdarwin, 1 month ago to random

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to #Balaji #Srinivasan.

Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come:
A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings,
but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius

https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

cdarwin, 2 months ago to random

How many times does Biden have to prove them wrong before we all see the truth? It is this: Biden is a formidable opponent, a skillful and experienced negotiator, and as a campaigner he is quick on his feet, affable and eminently re-electable.
Still, given the prevailing media narrative, Biden went into last night with low expectations from voters. They have been told repeatedly that he’s too old, that he’s feeble and weak, and that he doesn’t have the stamina and determination to lead us for four more years.
But none of that was evident last night. Right out of the gate, he put Republicans on the defensive over Putin and Ukraine, election denialism and reproductive rights—issues I’ve previously argued will wedge and fracture the Republicans. He even called out the Supreme Court to its face over the Dobbs decision.
Biden importantly set down bright lines and drew sharp contrasts with Republicans, especially over the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/joe-biden-came-to-play

cdarwin, 6 months ago to random

California vs. Florida: The surprising answer to which state handled COVID better

Significantly more Floridians died on a per capita basis during the COVID-19 emergency than Californians.

Of the four most-populous states, California had the lowest cumulative COVID death rate: 2,560 for every 1 million residents.

Florida’s rate was 60% worse, with 4,044 COVID fatalities for every 1 million residents, according to a Times analysis of Johns Hopkins University data through early March, when the university ended its data tracking.

In other words, Florida’s raw death tally — 86,850 in early March — came close to California’s total, 101,159, despite California having roughly 18 million more residents.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-27/california-vs-florida-which-state-handled-covid-pandemic-better

cdarwin, 5 months ago to random

Brittany Watts, a Black woman in Ohio, is facing felony charges for “abuse of a corpse” after miscarrying 22 weeks into her pregnancy in September—and her case is now heading to trial.

Watts, 33, is specifically accused of miscarrying her pregnancy while using the restroom and then flushing the fetal remains down her toilet.

The remains were uncovered by local law enforcement on Sept. 22, per the Warren Police Department.

Watts faces this felony charge even as a forensic pathologist testified last month that her fetus was not born alive and died before passing through the birth canal;
further, he said the fetus was “nonviable because [Watts] had premature ruptured membranes—her water had broken early—and the fetus was too young to be delivered.”

Watts’ defense attorney, Tracy Timko, told local media last month that her client “learned days before” her miscarriage that this outcome “was inevitable and that the fetus could not survive outside the womb due to gestational age.”

Warren assistant prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri has previously responded to Timko and the forensic pathologist by arguing that “the issue isn’t how the child died, when the child died, it’s the fact that the baby was put into a toilet, large enough to clog up a toilet, left in that toilet and she went on [with] her day.”
There is a lot to unpack here, foremost that 🔸fetal remains from a miscarriage are not a “child” or “baby,” and this language is both inaccurate and dangerous. 🔸

Nonetheless, Warren Municipal Court Judge Terry Ivanchak decided to move the case forward, shrugging off the matter of “the exact legal status of this fetus/corpse/body/birthing tissue/whatever it is,” as he so dismissively put it.

In a statement shared with Jezebel this week, Timko accused law enforcement of “demonizing” her client “for a common experience that many women share.”
She continued, “Brittany suffered a tragic and dangerous miscarriage that jeopardized her own life.
Rather than focusing on healing physically and emotionally, she was arrested and charged with a felony and is fighting for her freedom and her reputation.”
State law, Timko said, “does not support criminalizing someone for a pregnancy loss.”

https://jezebel.com/ohio-woman-faces-abuse-of-a-corpse-charge-for-miscarr-1851075340

cdarwin, 4 months ago to Ohio

How Ohio Republicans ignore voters – and the governor – in power grab to pass laws

In 2015, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment to limit partisan gerrymandering.

Voting rights advocates and elections experts celebrated the measure’s passage as a major win.

But the state’s new redistricting commission still had a GOP majority, and as they drew legislative and congressional maps in 2021, they refused to abide by the constitutional amendment’s guidelines.

The state supreme court ruled their maps unconstitutional five different times.

But the commission refused to comply, repeatedly submitting to the court maps with minimal changes until the one Republican justice who opposed the gerrymandered maps retired from the court at the end of 2022.

The commission made some changes to the maps in 2023 that softened, but did not eliminate, the Republican advantage.

Crafting maps with a partisan advantage is only one of the ways Ohio Republicans have used the electoral process to cement their power in the state.

The GOP-controlled state legislature enacted in January 2023 one of the strictest voter identification laws in the country – which voting rights groups have decried as disproportionately impacting poor and disabled voters.

They have enacted voter purges, including one in 2019 that mistakenly removed about 40,000 eligible voters from the rolls.

Last year, they tried and failed to make it harder for voters to amend the constitution through a direct vote – attempting to raise the threshold for ballot measures from a simple majority to more than 60%, in an explicit bid to block an abortion rights amendment that voters passed overwhelmingly in November.

🔥Now, Ohio voters are trying again to create a fair redistricting process through a ballot initiative that would create an independent redistricting commission rather than one led by politicians. 🔥

The coalition has until July to collect more than 400,000 signatures for the question to appear on the November ballot.

According to Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the government watchdog group Common Cause Ohio, which is part of the Citizens Not Politicians coalition, the group has trained about 2,000 volunteers to collect petition signatures.

“It’s clear there’s this disconnect between what it is that ordinary Ohioans want, and what it is that the state legislature chooses to do,” said Turcer. “There is real interest in ensuring that we have accountable government.”

👍If voters choose to adopt the amendment in the Ohio constitution, an independent commission will draw the state’s electoral maps, with a panel of judges determining members’ eligibility to join the commission.
Guardrails will be in place to prevent politicians and lobbyists from sitting on the board, narrowing the possibility of partisan influence on the map-drawing process.

But unless and until those become law, Republican legislators can do just about anything they want.
#ohio #gerrymandering #independentredistrictingcommission

@ohio
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/02/ohio-republicans-anti-trans-bills?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

cdarwin, 3 months ago to random

Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) writes:

"Disruption" is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector.

Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade.
A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook).

Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services.

How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?

That's the contention of "Coopting Disruption," a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

cdarwin, 3 months ago to cryptocurrency

The US government has suspended its effort to survey #cryptocurrency #mining operations over their ballooning energy use following a lawsuit from an industry that has been accused by environmental groups of fueling the climate crisis.

A federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order #blocking the new requirements that would ascertain the energy use of the crypto miners, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer “#irreparable #injury” if it was made to comply.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/27/crypto-mining-electricity-use

cdarwin, 7 months ago to random

Destroying Hamas is a political objective, not a military one.
Even if Israel claims success after assassinating senior Hamas figures, destroying their arsenal and tunnels, and dismantling their administration, they have not said what they will do the day after “victory”.
The Gaza strip will still be there, albeit mostly in ruins. The population who survive the war will still be there, mourning new losses of loved ones and their homes. And the poverty and other deprivations that fed Hamas will only have intensified.
The national rage, the massing of military might, looked disturbingly familiar to US president Joe Biden, who warned Israel last week:
“Justice must be done. But I caution this – while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/22/peacekeepers-fatah-or-anarchy-what-would-follow-an-israeli-victory-in-gaza

cdarwin, 8 months ago to random

Katie Porter has been focused on what’s making people’s lives hard.

In an oversight hearing last week on the year-old Inflation Reduction Act, Porter spoke about a resident of her district with “real person” problems: They haven’t had air conditioning all summer, but they also need to fix a 20-year-old dishwasher and a stove with only one working burner.
“How can the Inflation Reduction Act help this Californian afford a heat pump and lower their bills without breaking the bank?” Porter asked a witness, who then described the legislation’s tax credits for energy-efficient home upgrades.
“Treasury is working on guidance — ” the witness began.
“Oh stop. Stop there, Mr. Higgins,” Porter said, holding up a finger. “This Californian is hot today. Can they go. Get a heat pump. Using this credit. Today?”
The answer, as Porter knew, was no. Not yet. Maybe in a year. Government was moving slow, as usual, and Porter was impatient. There were real people out there with real problems. Including her. “You might be interested to know,” she said, “that ‘this Californian’ is me

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2023/09/20/katie-porter-senate/

cdarwin, 1 year ago to random

Palantir shows off an AI to go to war

#Palantir already sells its #domestic #surveillance services to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so it should come as no surprise that the company founded by billionaire #Peter #Thiel is working to make inroads into the #Pentagon as well.

On Tuesday, the company released a video demo of its latest offering, the Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). While the system itself is simply designed to integrate large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's BERT into privately-operated networks, the very first thing they did was apply it to the modern battlefield.

https://www.engadget.com/palantir-shows-off-an-ai-that-can-go-to-war-180513781.html

cdarwin, 3 months ago to random

Opinion: Congress has already disqualified Trump from the ballot

Opinion by Tristan Snell

This may come as a shock. When, one might ask, did Congress ever hold such votes?

Those votes came in the second impeachment of Trump, in January and February of 2021, in which majorities of both the House and the Senate backed an article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection.”

This was a finding of fact, by majorities of our elected representatives, after a full public trial in which Trump was able to mount a defense
— and it should be deemed persuasive, if not conclusive, in answering the factual questions before the Supreme Court.

Indeed, for the more right-wing justices, who are often fond of pontificating that courts should not make policy judgments and should instead defer to legislatures, one would think that such a clear public pronouncement from Congress on Trump’s engagement in insurrection would be a compelling precedent.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/08/opinions/trump-supreme-court-oral-arguments-election-snell/index.html

cdarwin, 1 month ago to random

The Founders drew a line between peaceful protest and armed insurrection

Today, armed protesters believe they are evoking the spirit of the Founders,
yet, the history of the Whiskey Rebellion offers a different perspective,
showing the Founders made a clear distinction between public assembly and protest
— protected by the federal Constitution
— and threats of insurrection.

The Founders were also weary of a tyrannical government,
after all they had just fought a war against King George III and Parliament over the issue.

But, figures like George Washington understood that armed protests and domestic violence threatened the young republic.

Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-1787 in Western Massachusetts exposed the weakness in the Articles of Confederation and spurred on the creation the federal Constitution.

When unrest started to brew in Western Pennsylvania, just years after the formation of the new federal government,
Washington made it clear the boundaries of acceptable protest.

The Whiskey Rebellion started outside Pittsburgh after the federal government passed a new excise tax in 1791,
which became called the “Whiskey Tax.”

Many local small farmers were also distillers and they considered the duty an unfair tax on their livelihood.

Over the course of several years, their protests became bolder and more violent.

Resistance came to a head on July 16, 1794,
when an armed mob of about 500 protesters attacked and burned the Pittsburgh home of tax collector John Neville.

The incident became known as the Battle of Bower Hill,
and although casualty numbers are unclear,
one of the leaders of the rebellion, Major James McFarlane,
died during the firefight and became a martyr to the rebel cause.

Many frontiersmen saw McFarlane’s death as murder by the federal government and further radicalized the countryside.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/30/founders-drew-line-between-peaceful-protest-armed-insurrection/

cdarwin, 11 days ago to random

The toxic surveillance business model
– and the big tech monopolies that built their empires on top of this model:

The roots of this business model can be traced to the 1990s, as scholar Matthew Crain’s work illuminates.

In a rush of enthusiasm to commercialize networked computation,
the Clinton administration laid down the rules of the road for the profit-driven internet in 1996.

In doing so, they committed two original sins
–sins that we’re still paying for today.

🔸First, even though they were warned by advocates and agencies within their own government about the privacy and civil liberties concerns that rampant data collection across insecure networks would produce,
they put NO restrictions on commercial surveillance.
None.
Private companies were unleashed to collect and create as much intimate information about us and our lives as they wanted
–far more than was permissible for governments.
(Governments, of course, found ways to access this goldmine of corporate surveillance, as the Snowden documents exposed.)

And in the US, we still lack a federal privacy law in 2024.

🔸Second, they explicitly endorsed advertising as the business model of the commercial internet–fulfilling the wishes of advertisers who already dominated print and TV media.

This combination was–and is–poison.

Because, of course, the imperative of advertising is
“know your customer,”
in service of identifying the people most likely to be convinced to buy or do the things you want them to.

And to know your customer you need to collect data on them.

This incentivized mass surveillance, which now feeds governments and private industry well beyond advertising,
with strong encryption serving as one of our few meaningful checks on this dynamic.

On this toxic foundation, over the course of the 2000s, the Big Tech platforms established themselves
through search, social media, marketplaces, ad exchanges, and much more.

They invested in research and development to enable faster and bigger data collection, processing, and to build and maximize computational infrastructures and techniques that could facilitate such collection and ‘use’ of data.

Economies of scale, network effects, and the self-reinforcing dynamics of communications infrastructures enabled the firms early to this toxic model to establish monopoly dominance.

This was aided by the US government’s use of soft power, trade agreements, and imperial dominance to ensure that the EU and other jurisdictions adopted the US paradigm.

This history helps explain why the majority of the world’s big tech corporations are based in the US, with the rest emerging from China.

The US got a head start, via military infrastructure and neoliberal policies and investment,
while China built a self-contained market, capable of supporting its own platforms with its own norms for content that further limited external competition.

https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/en/news-1/detail/the-prizewinners-speech

cdarwin, 8 days ago to random

Chief Justice John Roberts and the other justices
should think very hard about their next steps
because their colleague, Justice Sam Alito,
has made it perfectly clear with this response
that he thinks the ethics rules are a joke
and that we are rubes for even thinking that he should be held to them.

Here’s a list of demeaning quotes from Alito’s letter responding to Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse’s letterfrom last week calling on his recusal:

1 “As I have stated publicly, I had nothing whatsoever to do with the flying of that flag. I was not even aware of the upside-down flag until it was called to my attention.”💥Alito, who served in the military, wants you to believe that he did not notice an upside-down flag flying in front of his home.
2 “As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for several days, she refused.” 💥Come off it.
3 “My wife and I own our Virginia home jointly. She therefore has the legal right to use the property as she sees fit, and there were no additional steps that I could have taken to have the flag taken down more promptly.” 💥Is he describing a landlord-tenant relationship, or his family? Beyond that, this was a Supreme Court justice in January 2021, as the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was being discussed, impeachment was being pursued, and fences were being erected, but this man decided not to push whether there was an upside-down flag flying in front of his home? This honestly is as distressing an admission to me as anything Alito has said throughout this scandal. (Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern dig down on an aspect of this, Alito’s one-woman feminism.)
4 “[S]he was greatly distressed at the time due, in large part, to a very nasty neighborhood dispute in which I had no involvement. A house on the street displayed a sign attacking her personally, and a man who was living in the house at the time trailed her all the way down the street and berated her in my presence using foul language, including what I regard as the vilest epithet that can be addressed to a woman.” 💥First, see Jodi Kantor’s Tuesday report at The New York Times for more clarity on the disputed timeline of all of this. Then, return to this and realize that a Supreme Court justice is telling you that he thinks — even by his apparently inaccurate timeline — flying an upside-down flag is the appropriate, or at least an acceptable, response to a neighborhood political disagreement that his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, has that gets personal.
5 “The second incident concerns a flag bearing the legend ‘An Appeal to Heaven’ that flew in the backyard of our vacation home in the summer of 2023. I recall that my wife did fly that flag for some period of time, but I do not remember how long it flew.“ 💥This time, Alito saw a flag with the word “appeal” on it flying from his vacation home and he — in his defense — is telling us that he, a Supreme Court justice, was absolutely incurious as to the meaning of such a flag flying on his public-facing property.
6 “[W]hat is most relevant here, I had no involvement in the decision to fly that flag.” 💥This was, of course, the flag up on his property long enough that Google Street View captured it. Notably, he doesn’t even give us the “I asked her to take it down” line here.
7 “My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not.” 💥He is mocking us.
8 “I was not familiar with the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag when my wife flew it. She may have mentioned that it dates back to the American Revolution, and I assumed she was flying it to express a religious and patriotic message. I was not aware of any connection between this historic flag and the ‘Stop the Steal Movement,’ and neither was my wife. She did not fly it to associate herself with that or any other group, and the use of an old historic flag by a new group does not necessarily drain that flag of all other meanings.” 💥This is the most questionable part of his letter, because it makes statements of fact about his and his wife’s knowledge (or lack thereof), and, in so doing, makes (or does not make) a couple of other notable statements. He claims not to know why she flew it, saying only that she “may have mentioned” how old it is, but then also states absolutely that it was unrelated to the “Stop the Steal Movement.” First, it’s odd that he doesn’t say why she did fly it; he just states one thing she “may have” said and that it was not about “Stop the Steal.” Second, note that he made no similar disclaimer about the upside-down flag. [1/2]

https://www.lawdork.com/p/sam-alito-believes-you-and-perhaps

cdarwin, 6 days ago to random

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.

Manchin had previously announced that he would not run for reelection for his Senate seat.

His change in party affiliation now means he can run as an independent for the Senate,
or even for governor of West Virginia,
where he’d take on Republican rival Jim Justice.

He has not announced plans to do either yet.

Right now, the move makes him the fourth independent in the Democratic Caucus.

https://newrepublic.com/post/182133/joe-manchin-independent