thirdwave

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Week 37

Monbiot: "I seem to recall the country voting the Tories out last year. Part of the reason.. was their staggering incompetence and insouciance, epitomised by Liz Truss’s mini-budget. That catastrophe was, like Truss’s political career, formed and steered by the neoliberal junktanks of Tufton Street... We booted them out through the front door.. Yet they still appear to be in the house. Perhaps they came round the back..

After taking an interest in the Department for Business and Trade’s 'growth school' speaker sessions for civil servants, I sent a freedom of information request.. Among the external instructors used by the department’s 'growth school' so far are no representatives from trade unions, social justice, human rights or environmental groups, and no representatives from left or liberal thinktanks such as the New Economics Foundation or the Institute for Public Policy Research. But there are four who work or have worked for the Tufton Street junktanks that surrounded Truss."

The Lever: "The Secret Curriculum That Rewired America’s Judges.. For decades, big business-funded economics courses have been pushing the nation’s judges to the right. A new study in the Quaterly Journal of Economics reveals nearly half of U.S. federal judges attended crash courses in economics at the conservative-leaning Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges between 1976-1999 - and it changed how they behaved on the bench"

TASS: "Brazil not afraid of new US sanctions after Bolsonaro's sentencing"

You know what that means.. Time to bomb Iran.

F24: "Prisoner swap deal between France and Iran nearing 'final stages', says Tehran"

He was a "Trump whisperer?".. So many Trump whisperers..

Do not pity the man... he was a fricking centrist, of the Blair and Clinton mold...

NYT: "U.K. Ambassador to U.S., Peter Mandelson, Fired Over Epstein Links"

Charlie Kirk was having second thoughts about being a Zio before his death..? Maybe Israel had him killed. ISR is on a bombing, killing spree, why not an influential organizer?

There are bizarre dead zones in the map, eg SE Aleppo around the lake. Who is in charge there?

HTS took out a chunk out of the Druze (As-Suweida), and lost territory to Israel SW Damascus.

#Syria 04/19 - 09/11

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The Guardian: "More children around the world are obese than underweight for the first time, according to a UN report that warns ultra-processed junk food is overwhelming childhood diets.There are 188 million teenagers and school-age children with obesity – one in 10 – Unicef said, affecting health and development and bringing a risk of life-threatening diseases."

Yea wrote a little geocoder, seems to work

u.geoname("Astana","KZ")

Out[1]: (51.18, 71.445833)

AQI 5 is the highest, there is some pollution in China

u.pollution(*u.geoname("Chengde","CN"))

Out[1]: 
({'aqi': 5},
 {'co': 368.75,
  'no': 0,
  'no2': 26,
  'o3': 44.6,
  'so2': 11.04,
  'pm2_5': 133.69,
  'pm10': 154.14,
  'nh3': 3.29})

FCW: "California to Launch First U.S. Hydrogen Passenger Train: ZEMU Debuts Sept. 13"

"@MikeDunnAuthor@kolektiva.social

The weekend was a crazy leftist idea. In 1886 7 union members in Wisconsin died fighting for the 5-day work week and the 8-hour work day"

Gore Vidal: "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat."

The Guardian: "Scotland bans arms companies that supply IDF from receiving financial aid"

The National is not f-ing around

Al-Monitor: "Canada is evaluating ties with Israel after Qatar attack, foreign minister says"

"@notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com

I've been following this 'mutual safety standards recognition' stuff... This could be really, really bad. It would mean that US vehicles, like those giant dangerous SUVs and pickup trucks, could be freely imported into the EU in volume without having to pass EU vehicle safety standards (like pedestrian safety)."

European Transport Safety Council: "The EU and the US have published a Joint Statement on transatlantic trade and investment that says, with respect to automobiles, the United States and the European Union 'intend to accept and provide mutual recognition to each other’s standards'."

"When you store your knowledge and skills as parametric curves (as all deep learning models [like LLMs] do), the only way you can generalize is via interpolation on the curve. The problem is that interpolated points correlate with the truth but have no causal link to the truth. Hence hallucinations.

The fix is to start leveraging causal symbolic graphs as your representation substrate (e.g. computer programs of the kind we write as software engineers). The human-written software stack, with its extremely high degree of reliability despite its massive complexity, is proof of existence of exact truthiness propagation.

'Does a causal substrate necessarily need to be symbolic?' you ask. Could it be based on parametric curves?

Yes it does, because in such a substrate the model is isomorphic to the graph of causal factors of what you are modeling. And such a graph is necessarily very sparse, i.e. it's a symbolic graph. It has completely different properties from a continuous manifold...

Worth noting that the output artifacts of science -- the models it produces -- are symbolic in nature. Most commonly expressed in mathematical form, sometimes in code.

Science is a program synthesis process."

"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social

The political tactics version of the humble brag: Louise Haigh's article on withdrawing from UK Labour's deputy leadership election is really positioning for the (hopefully forthcoming) leadership election. Good for her."

Haigh, The Guardian: "I’m not running for Labour deputy leader. I want the freedom to fight for an economic reset"

Willison: "Torsten Sløk released this interesting chart which appears to show a slowdown in AI adoption rates among large (>250 empoloyees) companies:

(My first thought on seeing that chart is that I hope it represents the peak of inflated expectations leading into the trough of dissillusionment in the Gartner Hype Cycle, since that means we might be reaching the end of the initial hype phase and heading towards the slope of enlightenment.)"

F24: "Bayrou government toppled in confidence vote, plunging France into renewed crisis"

The Guardian: "Labour is dead, says Zarah Sultana as she calls for patience over party launch.. Co-leader [w/ Corbyn] of nascent leftwing party says more than 750,000 people have registered their interest"

ProPublica: "An executive order seeking to stop banks from discriminating against customers could be undermined by the administration’s gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been investigating the practice."

Al-Jazeera: "Spain has announced sweeping measures against Israel, including a total arms embargo, with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez saying the move is aimed at 'stopping the genocide in Gaza' and 'supporting the Palestinian population'.

'There is a difference between defending your country and bombing hospitals or starving innocent children,' Sanchez, one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, said in a speech"

The Lever: "Amedisys, the country’s largest home health care company, is urging Trump’s regulators to cut overtime pay for care workers."

NYT: "Deportation Fears Are Fueling Money Transfers to Latin America.. Money transfers to Guatemala, Honduras and other nations have increased in recent months, totaling billions of dollars. Undocumented migrants in the United States say they are sending money to relatives while they can."

DJT approval settled at around -6%.. The recent fall is still within trend..

TDB: 'ICE Launches Chicago Operation Hours After Go Ahead From SCOTUS for L.A. Raids"

FT: "Money flowing into green and blue hydrogen projects rises $35bn in the past year"

UA is doing its best especially in the past few weeks but it will all be in vain..

#UA #RU 09/01 - 09/09

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Al-Monitor: "Over 1,800 actors, entertainers, and producers, including some Hollywood stars, signed a pledge released on Monday to not work with Israeli film institutions that they see as being complicit in the abuse of Palestinians by Israel."

F24: "Gaza flotilla says boat struck by drone in Tunisian waters"

[Former Biden Aide] Ramamurti: "They will point to countries like China and say, 'Why can they build high-speed rail or housing or solar panels?'.. The reason is that the government there can direct private industry to build things far beyond the point of profitability"

Politico: "[2023] With Apple’s iPhone 15, the EU wins the charger war.. According to leaks ahead of the reveal, the iPhones are expected to use Apple's first new charging technology in more than a decade: They will feature a USB-C charging port, instead of Apple's proprietary Lightning solution."

"One of the driving forces behind the USB-C mandate is the EU's quest for sustainability and a circular economy. By EU estimates, eliminating proprietary chargers reduces e-waste by approximately 11,000 metric tons annually."

If it wasnt for the EU regulation, there would not be widespread USB-C adoption... Merchantile, ultra capitalist muckmuckers would have slaved people to their bizarre methods that only worked for them.

Hardware upgrade complete... now have an ultra portable Linux, USB-C for all things - power, headphones..

The private complex, surface state is pushing these people out in front, always working the victimhood arbitrage and the Israel affinity angle.. But executed at scale it looks like a conspiracy around a certain minority. You are placing a big fat target on their backs, when things go south and pitchforks come out, a lot of such people can suffer en masse, again. Stop what you are doing right f-ing now.

Tyler Cohen, AIPacman, the torta bitch, the Abundance guy at NYT.. Why are they all Jew?

Out-of-shape talentless bitch.. somehow always manages to stay around.. Massive Zio money must be behind that...

New York Post: "Paramount in talks to buy Bari Weiss’ Free Press for up to $200M, give her senior editorial role at CBS News"

TAC: "In China, as the assembled leaders of more than 20 nations waited in the hall for the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to begin.. Modi and.. Putin walked in holding hands. They approached China’s President Xi Jinping and formed a tight, intimate circle. The leaders talked and laughed as Modi joined hands with Xi. For a Trump administration bent on driving wedges between these leaders, this scene, more than any words that came out of the SCO summit, was a shocking blow."

"Public overwhelmingly back wealth tax package to fix public services and rebuild Britain..

Informed Comment: "One year ago, the UN General Assembly demanded that Israel must end its occupation of the Palestinian Territories within twelve months... The General Assembly voted, by 124 votes to 14.. that not only 'demanded' an end to the occupation within a year, but called on all countries to refrain from trade involving Israeli settlements..

A year later, Israel has failed to comply with any of the demands of the 124 states...most of the 124 countries that voted to demand an end to the occupation have done very little to enforce those demands. If they fail to enforce them now, they will only confirm Israel’s presumption that its corrupt influence on U.S. politics still ensures blanket impunity for systematic war crimes."

Great example of US mil executing orders for protecting corporate interests

"The US Navy helped Venezuelan Vice President Juan Vicente Gómez seize power in a coup."

US surface state ran Venezuella at one point..

"By the 1930s, under the presidency of Juan Vicente Gomez, three foreign oil companies controlled about 98% of production [in Venezuella]."

It was decided, top-down, the Gaza issue is "too divisive" and it was obeyed.. It's like they are working for AIPAC.. Should we call this guy David AIPacman?

"The Dark Money Behind “Progressive” Influencers (w/ Taylor Lorenz & John Ross)"

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Wired: "After the Democrats lost in November, they faced a reckoning. It was clear that the party had failed to successfully navigate the new media landscape... Now, Democrats hope that the secretive Chorus Creator Incubator Program, funded by a powerful liberal dark money group called The Sixteen Thirty Fund, might tip the scales. The program kicked off last month, and creators involved were told by Chorus that over 90 influencers were set to take part. Creators told WIRED that the contract stipulated they’d be kicked out and essentially cut off financially if they even so much as acknowledged that they were part of the program. Some creators also raised concerns about a slew of restrictive clauses in the contract.. Influencers included in communication about the program, and in some cases an onboarding session for those receiving payments from The Sixteen Thirty Fund, include Olivia Julianna.. Loren Piretra.. Barrett Adair.. David Pakman.. Leigh McGowan, and dozens of others"

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Both of those guys were pro-TR types in Syria.. There is a message here to "Turkey". Is US trying to warn against a potential attack on Kurds?

"[9/4, US] Drone attack targets leaders in Turkistan Party, HTS on Aleppo Road... the individuals targeted in the drone strike were Abu Faruq al-Uyghuri, a member of the Turkistan Islamic Party, and Abu Salamah, a senior commander in Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Free, Open Source, Community Driven

The Verge: "Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. Started nearly 25 years ago, the site was long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, yet today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation. It’s what Google puts at the top of search results otherwise awash in ads and spam, what social platforms cite when they deign to correct conspiracy theories, and what AI companies scrape in their ongoing quest to get their models to stop regurgitating info-slurry — and consult with such frequency that they are straining the encyclopedia’s servers. Each day, it’s where approximately 70 million people turn for reliable information on everything from particle physics to rare Scottish sheep to the Erfurt latrine disaster of 1184, a testament both to Wikipedia’s success and to the total degradation of the rest of the internet as an information resource."

Politico: "A memo obtained.. cautioned Democrats about relying solely on the emergent school of thought [Abundance], which criticizes overly bureaucratic regulations for slowing progress on housing production needed to drive down costs and infrastructure projects...

Progressives, led by Rep. Greg Casar.. argu[ed] that the party must rebuild its relationship with working-class voters by vilifying billionaires and corporate power. That's more in line with what the memo argued will reach voters, as 'majorities of Democrats and independents and two in five Republicans believe the outsized power of billionaires and corporations in our government is a bigger problem than red tape and bureaucracy'...

It described affordability as voters' primary concern, and posited they 'see Abundance-style policy solutions as less responsive' to that problem."

Little Marco, became SecState and now acting NSA, supporting the usual Zionist scum... MIC has him.

Why are you troubled Marco Rubenstein..?

MSN: "The U.S. State Department told CNBC on Thursday that it was 'very troubled' by Norway's $2 trillion wealth fund selling its stake in New York-listed Caterpillar... Fund management said last week that the sovereign wealth fund would exit Caterpillar and several Israeli banks over concerns about ties to the conflict in the Gaza Strip."

Arab News: "One of the European Union's most senior officials on Thursday called the war in Gaza a 'genocide,' ramping up criticism of Israel and slamming the 27-nation bloc for failing to act to stop it. 'The genocide in Gaza exposes Europe's failure to act and speak with one voice,' European Commission vice president Teresa Ribera said during a speech in Paris"

"@ben@werd.social

Just a thought, but if we're worried about competing with China, we might want to educate the population, invest in public health, create great infrastructure, build low-cost, high-speed transit, and provide the underlying conditions for people to do great, creative, well-informed work nationwide."