Week 43
The Lever: "For 15 years, lawmakers have been trying — and failing — to overturn Citizens United, the landmark Supreme Court decision that allows corporations and billionaires to overrun our political system with money. Now, some Congressional Democrats are going big — by trying to enshrine campaign finance protections in the Constitution... Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) [is the] cosponsor of the new Citizens Over Corporations Act, which would introduce a Constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling."
CNBC: "Rivian plans to lay off more than 600 workers.. Rivian and other EV manufacturers are facing a more challenging market than they did in recent years"
Politico: "Missed paychecks, canceled infrastructure projects and mass firings haven’t yet convinced congressional Democrats to change their government shutdown stance. But they are now facing down another pressure point threatening a program they’ve long championed benefiting millions of Americans.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed more than 40 million people, will start to run out of funds Nov. 1, President Donald Trump’s USDA is warning. At least 25 states plan to cut off benefits starting on that date — including California, the overwhelmingly Democratic state with 4.5 million SNAP recipients."
Companies need message control around this stuff... People need to be made aware much talk around AGI, singularity, AI Doomsday is non-sense.
Apparently this person didn't know said problems were already solved, LLM gave him the solution it had ingested from existing papers, he thought they were genuine discoveries. The worst part is getting dunked by your competitor Hassabis, online.
"OpenAI researcher Sebastian Bubeck falsely claims GPT-5 solved 10 Erdos problems. Has to delete his tweet and is ridiculed by Demis Hassabis who replied 'how embarrassing'"
Mona Lisa "was actually completed in France by Da Vinci and sold to the French royal family", so u could say France has the rightful claim on the piece.
Louvre thefts as a reflection of the zeitgeist? Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre Museum by an Italian in 1911, he claimed the art piece was "looted" from Italy, it was a national treasure that belonged to his country. The zeitgeist was rising nationalism. He was arrested when he tried to sell the work in Florence, 1913. One year later, World War I starts, fueled by rising nationalism.
#F24 #Louvre #Heist
Firstpost: "'Israel would lose all support from US’: Trump fires warning over West Bank annexation.. US President Donald Trump has dealt a major blow to the Israeli right’s plan to apply sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, warning that Israel would lose “all support” from the United States if it pursued annexation"
Politico: "‘Stupid political stunt’: White House castigates Israeli vote on the West Bank"
RT: "Ukraine conflict now belongs to Trump – ex-Russian president.. Through his latest policy reversals, the US president has made the war his own, Dmitry Medvedev has said"
TAC: "U.S. Sanctions Russia’s Top Oil Companies as Peace Talks Stall.. Bessent announced new measures targeting Rosneft and Lukoil as Washington increases pressure on Moscow."
"@foone@digipres.club
Hey remember how before the dot com bubble burst there were a lot of jokes about how tons of companies were betting the farm on 'doing X but on the internet', where X is something that's been done without internet for years?
I'm reminded of this for no reason"
"@PabloMartini@climatejustice.social
If you hadn’t been paying attention to politics, you might have found it weird how the British government reacted to the ban of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the upcoming Europa League match with Aston Villa...
Those of us who have been paying attention know that when Israel says 'jump', the British government says 'how high?' You will not find a clearer example of this than Lisa Nandy’s recent speech in parliament in which she made a passionate defence of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans while throwing British fans under a bus"
"@ethanschoonover@mastodon.social
Just, you know, super excited to pay federal taxes next year. For all the services. Super. Excited."
@PabloMartini@climatejustice.social
If it hurts MIC's work, useful. Congress is a key branch of gov but it is occupied territory (by 'special' interests).
Breaking Defense: "Pentagon clamps down on military interactions with Congress.. A Pentagon memo.. now mandates that all communication with Congress be routed through its main legislative affairs office..
The directive is a shift from previous policy, which allowed the military services, combatant commands and other Defense Department agencies to manage their own interactions with Congress — with senior leaders for those organizations often driving the level of engagement on Capitol Hill and each service having its own legislative affairs team."
TAC: "A Polish court ruled in the morning that the Ukrainian man allegedly responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline will not be extradited to Germany...
'If Ukraine and its special forces, including the suspect, organised an armed mission to destroy enemy pipelines, these actions were not unlawful. On the contrary, they were justified, rational, and just,' the court ruled. The judge added, 'The German nation was from our point of view hostile towards Ukraine as it was cofinancing the enemy—Russia.' One of course marvels at the pretzel logic..
International law is anything but customary and is almost always inevitably subservient to the balance and distribution of power. If there’s anything that is a lesson from this sorry episode, it is that the Germans.. have now lost all real power as well as respect in Europe...
[T]he logic of power.. dictates that you cannot be a vegetarian predator. America can perform subservience to the whims of EU and NATO occasionally to achieve long-term political alignments; the entire world still understands where the real power is...
This is clearly unsustainable. Germany must rearm"
Politico: "Appeals court backs Trump’s National Guard deployment in Portland"
The Lever: "A former White House official is joining Project 2025 and Abundance-allied groups to weaken oversight of artificial intelligence."
#Gunn #Supes The saving of the the dog Krypto was meant to be emotional, when the hero decides to look for him. But notice, he wasn't saving any dog, he was saving a quirky dog. By being quirky, and a "misfit" the dog was elevated to higher status in Gunn's universe because his movies are mostly about quirky, ragtag group of misfits. That's how much value Gunn places on this attribute.
#Ukraine 10/13 - 10/21
Klement Julienne - Mannix #music
The Epoch Times: "China’s Fourth Plenum, which runs from Oct. 20 to 23, is expected to shape the country’s future policy direction and may signal shifts in the top leadership.
Before the meeting, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) abruptly announced on Oct. 17 disciplinary actions against nine top-ranking generals, including Central Military Commission (CMC) Vice Chairman He Weidong and former CMC Political Work Department head Miao Hua. These generals were stripped of their Chinese Communist Party (CCP) memberships and military positions and transferred to military prosecutors for potential criminal charges.
The announcement fueled widespread speculation. He and Miao were widely considered to be among the closest military allies of CCP leader Xi Jinping, and the other seven were also regarded as trusted loyalists of Xi. Their downfall has fueled talk that Xi may be preparing—or under pressure—to voluntarily step down from his posts as CMC chairman and top leader of the CCP during the plenum. If this is the case, the CCP officials behind these moves—possibly CMC First Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia and former CCP leader Hu Jintao—are likely demanding Xi’s cooperation.
According to a recent leak by a Chinese whistleblower living overseas, Zhang—who is believed to currently hold de facto military control—had a secret meeting with Hu and former Premier Wen Jiabao, as well as Wang Yang and Hu Chunhua. Both Wang and Hu now serve in advisory roles within the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
Zhang allegedly briefed them on a series of unusual developments ahead of the Fourth Plenum, including irregular changes in the Central Guard Bureau, the frequent appearances of top Xi loyalists Cai Qi and Wang Xiaohong at the plenum venue, and the numerous changes to security arrangements—all of which raised fears that Xi’s faction might attempt a last-minute move during the meeting, the whistleblower said in his YouTube channel. Moreover, Zhang allegedly sought advice from retired leaders on how to respond."
The American Conservative: "Venezuela Regime Change Helps Exxon - not Americans"
#Ukraine #DeepDive
Helps to be on the lookout for viable scenarios, eg the internal CCP conflict shared earlier.. "Yellow alert" level significant events were 1) Xi extending his presidential term years ago, 2) his humiliation of Hu Jintao at a party conference, 3) and Covid.
#1 Even though China's system looks dictatorial from the outside, its party system difuses a lot of the power from a potential unitary leader to its members, to its commitees. Therefore anyone overriding that system and extending his power beyond would ultimately generate internal conflict.
#2 That internal conflict might have arrived through a former president, Hu Jintao who was punished by Xi extremely harshly signaling there might be other people like him and he had to send a message.
#3 The most likely scenario for Covid was the lab-leak theory. But that leads to the second likely scenario, someone in China intentionally caused the leak. Who is that someone? Someone inside Xi's camp or outside? Outside parties are possible.
All of the above puts you on alert. Then you wait for more events that match or debunk it.
#Peacemaker The ragtag quirky group of misfits which the viewer is supposed to love of course left the government (because gov is bad, for just being government), and became enterpreneurs, that's what heroes, lovable people do.. (identify with the employer, not the employed!). We saw a similar setup w/ the ultimate MCU hero Cap, he could lift a mystical weapon "the hammer" and this hero was anti-government - corporate moviemakers were hoping the brainwashed viewer would then be against anything government does (brrr like taxing the rich).
The American fascination with quirkiness, diversity is mostly the result of decades-long corporate psyop. In economic terms there are only few groups that matter: the rich, the poor, the employer and the employed. But if you amp up the number of groups, create a cloud of fake diversity which are centered on social characteristic, eg Ethnic Guy #1, Fat Guy, Ethnic Guy #2, Female #1, Deluded Jagoff #4, you are creating a smokescreen making it look like the real (and few) divisions do not matter. I'm not saying Gunn is conciously doing this, but he would not be where he is if his wheelhouse was something else.
Why did the new DCU make a dash for the "fighting Nazis" angle so fast? Maybe we need to look at Gunn's preferences to understand that.. He likes to make movies about "quirky, ragtag group of misfits" right? That's his wheelhouse. Gunn characters are quirky, "non-mainstream", they are "diverse" in that quirkiness.. What would be anti-thesis of such diversity? Well the homogenizing Nazis of course. Enter Earth-X with its Nazi Superman (will be played literally by a former Robocop actor).
Collider: "Sorry, James Gunn, but 'Peacemaker' Season 2 Was a Big Mess, and the Finale Proves It"
I had LLM "autocomplete" some machine learning code the other day. In computer vision background extraction it is common to do analysis per each pixel, looking at the distribution (frequency) of one single pixel, the values it takes throughout the video. The most frequent value can be deemed background. In a histogram that would be the biggest bump. For 3D you can introduce a "Gaussians mixture", input is R,G,B levels (3 values) for each pixel, to capture "the bumps" the mixture can have 4 or 5 Gaussians (the bell curve)... They are assumed to be combined by a weighting vector.
If background detection means finding the most likely value, per pixel you must get the bump with the highest "weight". But no, LLM gave me a combined value so background image ends up with "ghosts" of stuff that had passed over that background. I had to tell LLM specificaly to give me the max, not the mix. I cannot stress enough how stupid that earlier choice was. I bet the LLM did that because 99% of the time the mix is what is coded, so it wants to keep everything in that lane. It will suggest the most widely used scenario, without understanding the question or task.
Scam Alert #Tesla
Karphathy previously worked for Tesla but that is not a permanent stain on his record. He was a well-known reputable expert before that.
#Karpathy #LLM
#Burr #SaudiArabia
Russia prefers Xi per scenario. The Hu Jintao opposition would improve relations with the West, and be less supportive of Russia's war in Ukraine. Wǒmen zhèng shēnghuó zài yǒuqù de shídài.
This event strengthens the "Xi losing power" scenario.. One of the leaders of the opposition is said to be Zhang Youxia (along with former president Hu Jintao who was publicly humiliated a while back by Xi), The Spectator described Youxia as "Central Military Commission (CMC) vice chairman, [a] highly regarded military leader, a princeling like Xi, and a rare veteran of military action in the China-Vietnam War.. [He h]ad provided the military backing that underwrote Xi’s taking of a third term of office. Subsequently, their relationship faltered.".
The opposition is rumored to be more conciliatory towards the US.
The story of this internal conflict goes: Xi suffered an internal coup back in 2024, but according to some estimates he still retains about 50% of his power, not in military but in other branches of government.
Then China's rare earth move would be Xi's doing, to which US responded in similar measure, perhaps helping the opposition. The Xi opposition then responded with the recent military purge, as their control in the military is much stronger.
The guy in the picture He Weidong was a Xi loyalist. His name is even listed in a Wikipedia page of Xi supporters. Why would Xi dismiss his own loyalists? All nine dismissed were close to Xi.
That "expert" sounds pretty sure Zee Ping Ping himself made this purge.
BBC: "Chinese Communist Party expels top generals in sweeping military crackdown.. [an expert] told BBC Chinese that Xi's purges are meant to project strength"
#Ukraine #DeepDive
FCW: "China Builds World's Largest Pure-Hydrogen Power Project"
SPONTANEOUSLY IGNITED
New York Post: "Lithium battery ignites on Air China flight in mid air, horrifying passengers as flames burst out in cabin.. Air China said in a post on Weibo that 'a lithium battery in a passenger’s carry-on luggage stored in the overhead compartment spontaneously ignited'"
TAC: "Venezuela Regime Change Helps Exxon—not Americans"
"Fox News, Newsmax among journalists to turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules... [the] rules.. would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information -classified or otherwise- that had not been approved"
Mexico News Daily: "Mexico’s first green hydrogen plant opens in Querétaro"
Owen Jones: "Greens pull ahead of Labour.. And both Labour and the British media are rattled... the trajectory is clear - the Greens are surging, and Labour is falling back. The Greens are enjoying their best polling in their history. Just 13 months after winning the election, Labour is on its worst polling recorded in the post-war period...
So how is the British media responding? Bear in mind the British media is made up of aggressively partisan political actors. They should be the essential means of dispensing information about what’s going on in the world in order to educate citizens so they can make informed decisions - thus playing a crucial democratic role.
Instead, almost all British newspapers are owned by a handful of extremely rich media moguls who are wedded to an economic order from which they directly profit. They have clear political aims and objectives - in short, they are political campaigners. The BBC, meanwhile, is governed by a Board stuffed with Establishment types - and it is always susceptible to political pressure from the government."
Al-Jazeera: "India started making diplomatic overtures to the Taliban a year after the group’s return to power, re-establishing diplomatic presence in the country, tasked with overseeing the distribution of humanitarian aid. In the past two years, India has allowed the Taliban to quietly take over the Afghan consulates in Mumbai and Hyderabad.
Indian officials and diplomats have also held several high-level engagements abroad. In January this year, [AFG FM] Muttaqi also met India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.
At the same time, Pakistan’s ties with the Taliban have plummeted. Islamabad has accused Afghanistan’s rulers of sheltering armed groups, including the Pakistan Taliban, or TTP, which have carried out dozens of deadly attacks on Pakistani soil in recent years. The Taliban deny those charges.
It is in that changed regional geopolitical landscape that India is welcoming Muttaqi, said analysts."
Al-Jazeera: "[10/08] Dozens killed as Pakistani army, fighters clash near Afghan border.. Pakistan Taliban claims responsibility for attack on military convoy, leading to a deadly gunfight."
IC: "The terms of the Trump ceasefire in Gaza required Israeli authorities to allow 600 trucks of food and medical aid into the Strip daily, in a full court press by the United Nations and NGOs to flood the zone with nutrition after the Israeli blockade provoked famine in parts of Gaza. The Israelis are only allowing 300 trucks a day in."
Firstpost: "Egypt set to lead global stabilisation force in Gaza amid post-conflict security efforts"
"Moulton returns AIPAC donations over support for Netanyahu.. The representative and new Senate candidate announced Thursday that he would no longer accept support from AIPAC."
#Ukraine #DeepDive
Politico: "Mamdani dominated the NYC mayoral debate"
"@Nickiquote@mstdn.social
Sam Altman: I need a trillion dollars.
Investors: Here’s a trillion dollars.
Sam Altman: Now, hear me out: Wanking."
The Telegraph: "ChatGPT to allow AI porn for over-18s"
Ike would be somewhat surprised but he would understand, see the culprit immediately. He came up with the term military-industrial complex after all..
TAC: "The Republican Party once stood for the old republic, but in recent years has been controlled by militarists like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who were constantly braying to join the latest foreign war launched or imagined. Despite the Cold War’s end, a bipartisan coalition turned Uncle Sam into GloboCop.. and remake failed Third World states, while forever subsidizing the defense of rich industrialized countries and increasingly treating China and Russia as enemies...
Joining Ukraine’s battle does not fulfill the NATO alliance, which is, or at least originally was, based on defending its members from attack rather than attacking other states in defense of non-members. The original NATO advocates, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, supported the transatlantic alliance as a temporary shield behind which Europe could recover and then take over its own defense. He would be disappointed, and probably shocked, to learn that decades later 340 million Americans would be defending 600 million Europeans against 140 million Russians. How does this make any sense, especially for Trump, who long rightly challenged the Europeans for their determined reliance on Washington for all things security?"
"Paxos accidentally mints more than twice the global GDP in PayPal stablecoins.. Paxos, the issuer of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin, accidentally minted 300 trillion of the supposedly dollar-pegged token. For context, this is approximately 2.5x the global GDP, and around 125x the total number of US dollars actually in circulation.
Paxos later announced that the mint was an 'internal technical error', and that they had burned the excess tokens.
While PayPal promises its customers that "Reserves are held 100% in US dollar deposits, US treasuries and cash equivalents – meaning that customer funds are available for 1:1 redemption with Paxos," there clearly isn't much in the way of safeguards to ensure that is always the case. As with most stablecoin issuers, Paxos merely issues self-reported and unreviewed portfolio reports, and monthly third-party attestations (not audits) of reserves."
Cap not being able to lift "the hammer" and ten movies later he could, would be prepared, but against which villain, that choice was made by an individual director. That ain't bad... If MCU didn't go the way of M-She-U, become cuck in its later phases, their overall standing wld be much better today.
MCU did set up certain arcs, points they want to reach, but individual directors seem to be given some leeway.
#Movies #MCU I am pretty sure Thanos was chosen by Joss Whedon, not by management.
Reuters: "French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu promised on Tuesday to suspend a landmark pension reform until after the 2027 election.. The Socialists welcomed his concession, saying they would not vote to topple him in no-confidence votes on Thursday, meaning Lecornu will almost certainly live to fight another day."