Albert Camus's The Rebel suddenly came to mind while musing on the personalities driving so much destruction through the USA... It looks like his discussion takes a lot from Dostoeyevsky and Sade...
"Beginning with the premise of unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism." Complete freedom, which is the negation of everything, can only exist and justify itself by the creation of new values identified with the entire human race. If the creation of these values is postponed, humanity will tear itself to peices. The shortest route to these new standards passes by way of total dictatorship. "One tenth of humanity will have the right to individuality and will exercise unlimited authority over the other nine tenths. The latter will lose their individuality and will become like a flock of sheep; compelled to passive obedience, they will be led back to original innocence and, so to speak, to the....
...
> Unlimited freedom of desire implies the negation of others and the suppression of pity. The heart, that "weak spot of the intellect," must be exterminated; the locked room and the system will see to that. The system, which plays a role of capital importance in Sade's fabulous castles, perpetuates a universe of mistrust. It helps to anticipate everything so that no unexpected tenderness or pity occur to upset the plans for complete enjoyment. It is a curious kind of pleasure, no doubt, which obeys the commandment: "We shall rise every morning at ten o'clock"! But enjoyment must be prevented from degenerating into attachment, it must be put in parentheses and toughened. Objects of enjoyment must also never be allowed to appear as persons.
...
> ... insistence on complete freedom, lead to the total subjection of the majority. For Sade, man's emancipation is consummated in these strongholds of debauchery where a kind of bureaucracy of vice rules over the life...
...
> Their martyrdom consists in consenting to inflict suffering on others; they become the slaves of their own domination. For man to become god, the victim must abase himself to the point of becoming the executioner. That is why both victim and executioner are equally despairing. Neither slavery nor power will any longer..
...
The totalitarian theocrats of the twentieth century and State terrorism are thus announced. The new aristocracy and the grand inquisitors reign today, by making use of the rebellion of the oppressed, over one part of our history. Their reign is cruel, but they excuse their cruelty, 8 "He represented himself as man after his fashion, and then he gave up his idea." 9 "Slander and assassination in extreme cases, but especially equality." like the Satan of the romantics, by claiming that it is hard for them to bear. "We reserve desire and suffering for ourselves; for the slaves there is Chigalevism."
#AlbertCamus #TheRebel #CompleteFreedom #TrumpMusk #MuskDoge
2025
> ...especially galling because it's literally the same story Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control ray out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone":
- pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/don…
1932
> Since the greatest of virtues is business skill and since skill is shown in making people buy what they don't want rather than what they do, the man who is most respected is the one who has caused most pain to purchasers. All this is connected with a quite elementary mistake, namely, failure to realise that what a man spends in one direction he has to save in another so that bullying is not likely to increase his total expenditure.
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The text version at archiveDOTorg makes it quick to search for "military personnel" in the document: pages 138-139 and 555 seem to be the most relevant to the wacky use of the National Guard and active-duty military personnell for the LA protests.
> If all immigration agencies are not merged, including USCIS and ORR, then an appropriate third alternative would be to consolidate ICE and CBP to form a combined Border Security and Immigration Agency (BSIA)....
> The BSIA should establish clear mission requirements, responsibilities, and mandates under existing law regarding the persistent need for and utilization of U.S. military personnel and resources to assist BSIA with increasing whole-of-gov- ernment efforts and long-term strategy to secure our nation’s borders effectively. In addition, appropriate elements within the newly created BSIA should be designated as part of the U.S. National Security and Intelligence Community. pp138-139
> In addition to finalizing the southwestern land border wall, the next Administration should take a creative and aggressive approach to tackling these dangerous criminal organizations at the border. This could include use of active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in arrest operations along the border—something that has not yet been done. A new and forceful approach to interdiction will have a ripple effect on the operations of these criminal organizations, which currently operate freely without concern for criminal prosecution, and will lay the necessary groundwork for initial prosecutions of these organizations and their leaders. -- p 555
- archive.org/details/project-20…
- static.heritage.org/project202…
#uspol #Project2025 #ContractOnAmerica #MilitaryArrestOperations #LAProtests
/HT @Happy Pride! Happy Summer! 🌈 😎
Project 2025; Mandate For Leadership Heritage Foundation : Heritage Foundation : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
A comprehensive policy guide for the next conservative U.S. president, the book pulls from the expertise of hundreds of political appointees, policy...Internet Archive
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Hater Miller
Going Around Coming Around..
> Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary, was met with cries of “Shame!” while she dined at a Mexican restaurant in the midst of the family separation crisis in June. A woman at a bookstore in Virginia called Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, a “piece of trash.” (The owner called the police on her.) Press secretary #SarahSanders was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant by the owner last month.
... #StephenMiller is aligning himself with plenty of “uncivil” policies from the White House
vox.com/policy-and-politics/20…
#TrumpRegime #uspol #HatersRegime #USACivility
#HaterMiller
Maria Ressa: To Avoid Normalization of Kleptocracy
> “I didn’t want to be an activist, but when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism,” warns Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, whose new site Rappler faced attacks from former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.> I just came from Perugia, from the International Journalism Festival, where V-Dem, which does kind of a rating of all democracies globally — right? — their latest report now says that 72% of the world is under autocratic rule. Like, we have elected illiberal leaders in 72% — in these democracies around the world, right?
> The head of V-Dem publicly said that if the trends in America continue, that he expects democracy to die by the summer. Like, not just to wake you up, right? Like, literally. And actually, if we stop normalizing the death by a thousand cuts of rule of law, you can see this happening, right? For the Turkish grad student picked up from the streets from Tufts University, from all of the little things — we’ve talked here about the press. The press was attacked in the first Trump administration, right? Duterte echoed President Trump.
> ... we normalize new depths. Like, we should not be where we are, and yet that’s where we are. And what are you seeing being created? At the early days, in the first month, I called at the Filipinization of American politics. But I think it’s even worse, because what you’re seeing, not many mainstream covered the government pausing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — right? — saying, essentially telling Americans that it’s OK to be corrupt, because you need to be competitive.
> In 2018, MIT said that lies spread six times faster. That was before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it to X and turned it into a human cesspool, even worse than it was in 2018. So, if lies spread six times faster, and fear, anger and hate — this is across the world — if you use fear, anger and hate, it spreads — and I hate to — I put rabbit ears on “information” — the post spreads virally, right? So, there are more ways. Online violence is real-world violence. The reason why 72% of the world today is now under authoritarian rule is partly because our public information ecosystem is corrupted. Good morning.
> ... the biggest lesson we learned is that you are at your most powerful at the beginning of the attacks. Every day you do not fight back, you lose just a little bit more of your rights. We normalize just a little bit more of this kind of pseudo-democracy, right?
> Right? Social media was used to attack us. And it’s like fertilizer. Saying you’re the enemy of the press then lets people believe. That’s astroturfing... And that sets the stage. It’s like fertilizer. So, social media, then media capture. And Robert talked about the chilling effect. Forget the chilling — it’s Siberia. And business interests. I talked about the three Cs: corrupt, coerce, coopt. For every single institution that is broken down — media, academe, NGO capture, state capture. And each step of the way as you go down, rule of law breaks down, and you lose — it’s death by a thousand cuts of your rights.
> I didn’t want to be an activist, but when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism. So, in our case, I said, “We hold the line. This is the line where the Constitution gives us our rights.” The Philippines, like the United States, has three branches, coequal branches of government. And the United States is following the Philippines, what happened under Duterte, a very powerful executive, a coopted legislature. And it took Duterte six months to crush the checks and balances of the Philippines, to get rid of institutional checks on his power.
> ... you talked about the 10 arrest warrants I have. Eight years later, we’ve won eight of the 10 cases, but I still have to ask for the Philippines — for approval to travel from the Philippines Supreme Court. What rights you lose today, you will not get back. Right?
> ... anyway, sorry, I could talk about this forever. I feel like I have PTSD and déjà vu all combined. You know, it’s shocking America is where it is today.
> .., what happened with Rappler? There were constant attempts to shut it down, but somehow you moved the servers abroad or you did something to make sure that, despite the crackdown on the media, you were able to continue running.
> ... we told our people very early on, when the government first tried to shut us down in January 2018, “You may not want to be here. This is going to be a different thing.” Everyone has a different risk appetite, right? So we gave our reporters the option to leave Rappler, because I said, “We’ll help place you in another news organization.” Not one reporter took that. Right?
> ... once you know who you are and what you stand for and you’re ready for the worst case, then you stand up for your rights. I think that’s the challenge today. In How to Stand Up to a Dictator, the question I asked Filipinos, and I now ask — the reason why I thought it was coming for every democracy around the world is this tech is global. You know, what it proved is that we could all be manipulated in the exact same way, regardless of country or culture. It was like looking at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Oh my god! And we’re allowing this to happen. They’re doing it with impunity for profit. So, hold the line, don’t give up your rights, because you only get weaker over time.
> .... what’s at stake for the world today is whether or not an international rules-based order still exists, whether it’s Ukraine or Gaza or tech, right? And then, what the Philippines proved is that — and people will say, “Well, it’s power politics.” Everything is power politics. What the Philippines proved is that little Philippines actually honored an ICC — the very first time a Filipino president has been charged with crimes against humanity, when he was arrested. I was in the Philippines when that happened. We broke the story in Rappler for the arrest warrant. And when that happened, we didn’t know it was going to happen.
> I really want to tell Americans, that you take step by step towards the goal of your values, towards the rights you have. And you don’t know what will happen. It’s incredibly uncertain. There were times I thought I would go to jail. There were times I had to wear a bulletproof vest in the car. Right? But you hold tight. And I think that’s what — I lost my right to travel. Five times, I couldn’t travel. Then the Nobel Prize happened, and I could travel. But I’ve still lost some rights.
> Fear is real. I mean, in the Philippines, there were an average of eight dead bodies dumped on the sidewalk every night. We had one reporter going out every night, right? So, fear is real. And there were times I was angry at Filipinos for not doing more. But we kept going. And I think the Philippines shows you that it could take a while, but justice does happen. But it depends on what happens in America now — right? — where the world goes. It’s still true: What happens to America will — America catches a cold, so does the entire world. Right? So, look at the markets, as you’ve done. Anyway, hold on to your rights.
- democracynow.org/2025/4/24/tru…
#MariaRessa on #RodrigoDuterte #NormalizingKleptocracy #VDem
#FilipinizationOfAmerica
As Trump Attacks CBS, Maria Ressa Warns He Is Following Philippine Model to Crack Down on Free Press
As the Trump administration goes after universities, law firms and more, some argue that the free press will eventually become a target.Democracy Now!
The Onion:
> “Angelenos—don’t engage in violence and give the administration an excuse to inflict all the damage they have been inflicting carte blanche for months on end,” said Bass, adding that Trump and his team are just looking for a reason to respond with violence, as they would have done whether or not any of this happened. “Don’t fan the flame that has been fanned behind the scenes at the White House since day one of Trump’s term in office. You wouldn’t want them to start abducting people in broad daylight and deporting them, would you? No, so let’s not become scapegoats for the horrific violations of civil liberties that would have eventually landed at our doorstep regardless.” At press time, Bass warned that Trump was using the actions of protesters to justify sending in the National Guard that had been pre-deployed to the conflict days before it even began. ^1
The Atlantic:
> By militarizing the situation in L.A., Trump is goading Americans more generally to take him on in the streets of their own cities, thus enabling his attacks on their constitutional freedoms. As I’ve listened to him and his advisers over the past several days, they seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.... Second, as my colleague David Frum warned this morning, Trump is establishing that he is willing to use the military any way he pleases, perhaps as a proof of concept for suppressing free elections in 2026 or 2028. Trump sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle.... ^2
- ^1 theonion.com/protesters-urged-…
- ^2 theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
#TheOnion /HT #RebeccaSolnit's FB post share
#TheAtlanticMagazine #LAProtests
Protesters Urged Not To Give Trump Administration Pretext For What It Already Doing
LOS ANGELES—Responding to escalating clashes between civilian activists and militarized immigration authorities, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass publicly urged protesters Monday not to give the Trump administration any pretext for what they’re already d…The Onion Staff (The Onion)
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> ... to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.> An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
- poetryfoundation.org/poetrymag…
#JeffreyStClair's FB post on #TerryMoran's honest depiction of #StephenMiller as hate-motivated kept these parts of the poem #PrayerForMyDaughter by #WBYeats in mind.
A quick search got me to some background without the need to sift through FB..
- axios.com/2025/06/08/abc-terry…
- https://x.com/brianstelter/status/1931728449497858066/photo/1
ABC suspends correspondent for calling Stephen Miller a "world-class hater"
"It's not brains. It's bile," he said. "Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He's a world-class hater."www.axios.com
> ... roughly $1 billion per year on programs that subsidize the purchase of commercial seeds and fertilizers. There is little publicly available documentation of impacts, from AGRA, the Gates Foundation, or donor governments that have supported the initiative. This paper attempts to fill some of that accountability gap. Because AGRA declined to provide data from its own monitoring and evaluation, we use national-level data to assess progress in productivity, poverty reduction, and food security in AGRA’s 13 countries. We find little evidence of widespread progress on any of AGRA’s goals, which is striking given the high levels of government subsidies for technology adoption. There is no evidence AGRA is reaching a significant number of smallholder farmers. Productivity has increased just 29% over 12 years for maize, the most subsidized and supported crop. This falls well short of doubling yields, which would be a 100% increase. Overall staple crop yields have grown only 18% over 12 years. Meanwhile, undernourishment (as measured by the FAO) has increased 30% in AGRA countries. These poor indicators of performance suggest that AGRA and its funders should change course. We review more promising approaches African governments and donors should consider.
sites.tufts.edu/gdae/files/202…
#GatesInAfrica #TimWise #AGRA #BillionDollarPolicyMistake #GatesBillionDollarMistake #BillGates #BillionDollarMistake ?
Anybody that reads a bit into food (FoodFirst! 12 myths^3) and agricultural policy (Vandana Shiva on the Green Revolution ) knows the corprate expensive-input high-debt approach is awful.. These intentional mistakes build around common misundersandings (unsupported myths) are just ways to capture organizations I imagine.
- tiksi.net/display/db9d525e-8d2…
- archive.foodfirst.org/publicat…
#HungerMyths #FoodFirst
> According to an external assessment by Timothy A. Wise of Tufts University, severe hunger in AGRA countries increased by 30% between AGRA’s founding and 2018. Crop yield increases have been modest, and where they exist, they haven’t always been enough to cover the higher cost of farming with commercial seeds and agricultural inputs. Dependence on fertilizer has increased the debt and financial precarity of the small farmers who make up the majority of farmers in Africa. In some cases the limited yield increases have also been temporary, as soil fertility has diminished due to monoculture farming and fertilizer use. For instance, Ethiopian farmers “will say that the soil is corrupted, meaning it cannot produce food” without synthetic fertilizer, reports Million Belay of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).
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> Daniel Maingi, coordinator for the Kenya Food Rights Alliance, believes the Gates Foundation, working with its corporate partners, now has a license to test out new technologies in Kenya—with impunity— under the banner of charity...
> .. “Kenya becomes the testing ground…That is a big, big concern. It’s a big red flag.”..
> “In terms of food sovereignty, as we give Gates these privileges and immunities, Africa is going to be——not food sovereign, not seed sovereign—- we’re going to be slaves and masters of the big corporations,” Maingi told me.
timschwab.substack.com/p/diplo…
#GatesInAfrica #FarmingInAfrica #BigAgInAfrica #GatesFoundation #AGRA
> Although AGRA and other actors, such as the German government, have publicly stated that they are unaware of any cases of indebtedness of farmers participating in AGRA projects, the Ghana evaluation cites this problem very specifically. Farmers consider the AGRA approach extremely risky. There is substantial evidence showing that when harvests are poor, farmers regularly fall into debt. Farmers from Ghana said that even with good yields, they have to spend over 80 percent of their harvest income paying suppliers for seed and fertilizer. Others even question whether this model is worthwhile at all.
| 山によせて | Toward the Mountain |
|---|---|
| ひかりの箭をはなつ朝 | The Dawn releases the arrow of light |
| 山は霧のなかに生れ | The Mountain is born in mist |
| むらさきの山体は | The purple mountain body |
| こんじきの匂ひをもつ | has a golden smell |
| あたらしい日を信じ | Believing in a new day |
| あたらしい世界のきたるを信じ | A new world will come I believe |
| にんげんの哀しさも | neither our human sadness |
| 国の面する悲運のかげも | nor the shadow of bad fate over our country |
| 世界の精神的下降の現実も | nor the fact of the world's spiritual descent |
| わすれはてるわけではないが | do I forget but |
| いまこのあざやかな | now, in this clear |
| 朝のひかりにおぼれ | morning's light drowning |
| 悠々と非情の勁さにそびえている | to calmly rise in cruel strength |
| 山にまなぼう | learn from the mountain. |
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> We hear a lot about what democracy means in America. In the case of the Cheri Honkala Green Party campaign for Sheriff of Philadelphia, what democracy means is recognizing that the selective enforcement of laws is a reality in our history and, then, offering voters the real choice of a sheriff who will not enforce foreclosure orders in a depressed economy. Honkala is a well-known poor people's activist in Philadelphia who, over the years, has organized large street demonstrations and even gotten herself arrested many times occupying homes and doing other actions to call attention to the plight of the poor.
- truthout.org/articles/philadel…
#PhiladelphiaSheriff #CheriHonkala #USASheriffs #uspol
"I shot the sheriff" --- Bob Marley (then, later Eric Clapton)
*The Balad of Gregorio Cortez* movie: It's a mare. Es una yegua buey!!
In many places - not in all states, but in many states - sheriffs can hire and fire at will. So it's not uncommon to hire relatives. It's a fairly common practice. And that allows them to set policy on all sorts of things. So everything from what people wear in jail - there was a sheriff in Georgia who forced people inside his jail to get up every morning and march around and sing a song about how great the sheriff was.
...
... this tradition persists today, which is why sheriffs among law enforcement officers still have a lot of pay-for-service mechanisms. In many places, for example, landlords pay the sheriff to evict tenants. It's just a flat fee. So among also those things was that they would take people and lease them out to white land owners. They didn't just lease them out for farming. They were sent to mines, to poultry processing plants. In Florida, they were sent to collect tar in the Everglades. And I think it can't be understated just how dangerous and violent convict leasing was.
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... I happen to have a platform for some reason, and then it is my moral obligation to use that platform. And if my presence on this boat can make a difference, if that can show in any way that the world has not forgotten about Palestine, and to try once again to attempt to break the siege and open up a humanitarian corridor and deliver the extremely needed humanitarian aid, then that is a risk I am willing to take....We cannot just sit, sit around and do nothing and watch this like live-streamed genocide unfold in front of our very eyes. So we are doing this because we are human beings who care about justice. And when our complicit governments fail to step up, it falls on us, unfortunately, to do so....
We cannot have climate justice without social justice. The reason why I am a climate activist is not because I want to protect trees. I’m a climate activist because I care about human and planetary well-being, and those are extremely interlinked. For example, when we see the genocide in Gaza, of course, there are some very obvious links, that ecocide, environmental destruction is a very common method used in war and to oppress people...
AMY GOODMAN: Greta, as you attempt to bring in baby formula, medical kits, flour, prosthetics for kids with amputations, the Israeli military has threatened to block the Freedom Flotilla. The Israeli army says it’s prepared to raid your ship. We know what happened to the Mavi Marmara with the Israeli raid and the killing of nine activists on board. Ultimately, a 10th died. So, are you seeing drones? How are you prepared to deal?
GRETA THUNBERG: Yeah, yeah, we are seeing drones. Last night, there were two different moments where there were drones circulating above us. And we are — we have safety procedures that we will use, and we have different scenarios that we are prepared for to try to maximize our safety in a nonviolent way. So, we are trying to do our very best. And it shows quite a bit that peaceful volunteers who are carrying humanitarian aid necessary for survival is being threatened to be raided, intercepted or attacked. I think that says quite a lot about the priorities and approaches of Israel right now.
But we must also remember that this mission is not about us. It is not about the voyage or the people on board. This mission is about Palestine. It is about the genocide, the occupation, ethnic cleansing and the other methods of war and oppression that are being used by Israel against the Palestinians. And we do not only need humanitarian aid to be let into Gaza. We do not only need a ceasefire. We need an end to the occupation.
AMY GOODMAN: — South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham wrote on X, “Hope Greta and her friends can swim!” Your response?
GRETA THUNBERG: We can swim very well. It says a lot about their priorities, that in the face of genocide and systematic starvation of 2 million people, lawmakers, elected officials, whose responsibility should be to serve the people and to protect the people, that they, rather than ending their complicity in genocide and the massive slaughtering of civilians, are focusing on mocking people who are at least trying to do their bit. I think that says everything we need to know about their priorities.
democracynow.org/2025/6/4/gret…
#AmyGoodman #GretaThunberg #FreedomFlotilla #GazaGenocide #TheMadleen
Greta Thunberg Speaks from Aid Ship Heading to Gaza Despite Israeli Threats: It’s My Moral Obligation
As Gaza faces over three months of Israeli blockade, a group of 12 activists is sailing to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid.Democracy Now!
> The Anti-Defamation League calls Mack’s organization an “anti-government extremist group,” while he prefers to invoke Barry Goldwater’s 1964 battle cry: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Since founding the group in 2011, Mack estimates it has trained at least 800 sheriffs. Agencies in several states, including Texas and Virginia, have allowed officers to use these events for professional education credits....
> Over his long, peripatetic career, Mack has learned to persuade people: He’s been a car salesman, high school history teacher, reality show contestant (on the 2004 season of Showtime’s “American Candidate”), recruiter (for Gun Owners of America) and unsuccessful entrant into Republican primaries for governor of Utah and congressperson from Texas....
> In a 2019 study, political scientist Zoe Nemerever found that the presence of a sheriff with “Constitutionalist” views was associated with a higher likelihood of violent confrontation between their constituents and federal Bureau of Land Management employees. “Who has been violent in our country?” Mack told me. “The federal government has, quite often.”
Facebook’s internal conclusions echo a number of studies that implicate social media in an epidemic of mental health problems among young people. In 2017, YoungMinds and the Royal Society for Public Health published research singling out Instagram as having the most negative impact on young people’s mental wellbeing of all social networks. Emma Thomas, the charity’s chief executive, said that while social media could be beneficial, it also came with increased pressures.
theguardian.com/technology/202…
#FBBodyImage #MetaBodyImage #IGBodyImage #TeensSNS #BodyImageSNS #MentalHealthSNS
Facebook aware of Instagram’s harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals
Social media firm reportedly kept own research secret that suggests app worsens body image issuesDamien Gayle (The Guardian)
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🧵
> A spokesperson for 5Rights Foundation, which campaigns for changes to digital services to make them more suitable for children and young people, said: “Facebook’s own research is a devastating indictment of the carelessness with which it, and the tech sector more broadly, treats children
#5RigthsFoundation #DigitalServices #FB #Facebook #MetaCorporation
#DigitalRegulation #CommercialRegulation #ProfitRegulation
@bsmall2@writing.exchange @bsmall2@nerdica.net
They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing.How did a group of law enforcement officers decide that they were “above the law?” What are the stakes for local and national politics, and for America as a multi-racial democracy?
Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation’s founding.
- penguinrandomhouse.com/books/7…
#JessicaPishko #ConstitutionalSheriffs #spol
The Highest Law in the Land by Jessica Pishko: 9780593471319 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School’s J. Anthony Lukas Award A Publishers Lunch NonFiction Buzz Book| Named Most Anticipated by Los Angeles Tim...PenguinRandomhouse.com
My writing is organic and it always will be. I will never use chatbots to write because the effort is the point. Writing is often hard but it is supposed to be - the point is to sit there, think, read, write, re-write, edit, re-write... The process of thinking and struggle is what creates the work. The connection between people, the communication between writer and reader and vice versa, the message sent from one heart to another - this is what writing is. It is why 'AI' will never write.
- tansyhoskins.org/my-books-have…
#SalamiAI #TansyHoskins #SalamiWriting
/HT @MárciaW
A Jacobin post on Instagram^1 reminded me of this 1930s Bertand Russel writing
... The money spent by the Duke in this merry-making was obtained by taxing grain so heavily that bread was at famine prices, and vast numbers of the poor died of hunger.
A hundred years ago, in a society now extinct, the point of view which puts charity above independence now seems to us grotesque. But in newer forms it still survives and is still politically powerful...
russell-j.com/CHARITY.HTM
> The coalition named the ship “Madeleine” in honour of Palestinian fisherwoman Madeleine Kullab, the youngest professional fisherwoman in the world and the only one in Palestine.
> The ship also carries a number of international activists and a cargo of symbolic humanitarian aid intended to be delivered to Gaza. Most importantly, it carries a message of solidarity with Gaza, a message of defiance and determination to continue popular efforts to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, and an affirmation of the Palestinians’ fundamental right to communicate with the world by sea and their right to establish a humanitarian corridor to bring in aid and relief supplies during the war of extermination waged by the Israeli occupation state against Gaza.
> The departure of this ship comes less than a month after an Israeli drone attacked the “Dameer” ship in international waters off the coast of Malta, which was en route to Gaza...
znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-m…
#MadeleineShip #GazaBlockade #GazaGenocide #MadeleineKullab #ZNetwork
The Madeleine Ship: A Message Of Solidarity With Gaza And Resolve To Break the Blockade
Sunday, June 1st, a small ship from the International Freedom Flotilla Coalition will set sail from the port of Catania in Sicily (Italy). TheZaher Birawi (ZNetwork)
> Silence over one atrocity serves to legitimize all those that came before and those that follow. After Israel got away with bombing its first hospital in Gaza, it knew it could get away unscathed with bombing all hospitals and clinics in Gaza. And it did.
...
> The rules of war are set by the winner. What will the new rules look like after Gaza, where what was once forbidden became standard operating procedure?
> what needs to be explained is the inexplicable. What needs to be explicated is the silence in the face of horror.
> Israel has been brazenly upfront about its plans to subdue Gaza, depopulate it of Palestinians, and seize the Strip for itself.
counterpunch.org/2025/05/30/wh…
#JeffreyStClair #GazaGenocide #RuleOfWar #WesterValues #UnWorthyVictims ...
When the Dead Speak and the Living Refuse to Listen - CounterPunch.org
In this time of silence, many of the words that are spoken have lost all meaning. In fact, their meaning has been inverted, twisted inside out.Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch.org)
The famine in Gaza is completely engineered. This is famine as a weapon, designed quite literally to “starve out” the entire population of Gaza.Palestinian mothers are so malnourished that they can’t breastfeed their newborns. This is appalling enough, but Israel has also blocked the entry of infant formula into Gaza. But there is no shortage of food. Food is within sight of Gaza, inside trucks backed up for miles at the entry points Israel has blocked. If one can’t draw the line at the intentional starvation of newborns, where will one draw the line?
Phoniness Agitation
> ... fascist agitation has by now come to be a profession, as it were, a livelihood. It had plenty of time to test the effectiveness of its various appeals, and through what might be called natural selection, only the most catchy ones have survived. Their effectiveness is itself a function of the psychology of the consumers....
> .. the surviving appeals have been standardized, similarly to the advertising slogans, which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business. This standardization, in turn, falls in line with stereotypical thinking, that is to say, with the “stereopathy” of those susceptible to this propaganda and their infantile wish for endless, unaltered repetition.
> ... their very “phoniness” may have been relished cynically and sadistically as an index for the fact that power alone decided one’s fate in the Third Reich, that is, power unhampered by rational objectivity.
- counterpunch.org/2025/04/11/wh…
#TheodorAdorno via #JefferyStClair #FascistAgitation #PhoninessApeal
Roaming Charges: Who Shot the Tariffs? - CounterPunch.org
The contradictions of life in late-capitalist America under Trump: Most Americans want the return of manufacturing jobs to the US, as long as they don't have to work them.Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch.org)
For international friends of Berlin, here's a good overview what you'll see when you visit. Stucco everywhere, and stucco removed everywhere.
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The LLM push seems like the same pattern as the push for coal and steam instead of watermills..
AI systems reproduce bias, cheapen and homogenize our social interactions, deskill us, make our jobs more precarious, eliminate opportunities to practice care, and enable authoritarian modes of surveillance and control. Deployed in the public sector, they undercut workers' ability to meaningfully grapple with problems and make ethical decisions that move our society forward. These technologies dehumanize all of us. Collectively, we can choose to reject them.
- thedabbler.patatas.ca/pages/ai…
#SalamiAI #AISystems #TechProgress #WaterMills #FossilCapital
Andreas Malm’s more recent exploration of the origins of “fossil capital,” i.e., why British textile manufacturers in the mid-eighteenth century transitioned from riverside watermills to coal-fired steam engines. As Malm has examined in detail, watermills remained far more efficient and reliable for several decades into the coal era, and there was never a shortage of potential sites for new water-powered textile mills. However, rural workers who lived along England’s riverbanks were far more independent-minded, and more likely to abandon the mills when working conditions became too onerous, than often-desperate urban workers. The latter proved far more willing to work long hours under harsh conditions in steam-powered mills, which could be located anywhere.
- znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-d…
/HT @ASRG via @alex@social.alexschroeder.ch
The Dialectic of Tech and Society - ZNetwork
The development of GMOs and gene-edited crops reaffirms the many ways in which new technologies both reflect and help reinforce the commercial imperatives, and the larger social matrix, from which they emergedBrian Tokar (ZNetwork)
🐉今年も開催決定🐉
都城ふるさと夜市2025
7.19🔥前夜祭〜今昔寄席〜
7.20🔥本祭〜ゲゲゲの祭典〜毎度ローカルパワー炸裂なお祭りですが
今年はどローカル＋豪華客人をたくさんお招きした２日開催のスペシャルとなっております🔥お楽しみに🔥毎度お馴染み⚡️入場無料⚡️ハートフルカツアゲ投げ銭⚡️
来たらわかるさ
わわわのわ
夏の始まりに是非是非
🐉音の柱がおっ立ちます🐉
詳細は五月発表‼︎
果報は寝て待てよよよいよい
#都城ふるさと夜市
#南部式
#芋蔓一座
#ゴッタン
#アンダーブリッジ
- instagram.com/p/DIQKJNyyXpw/
- instagram.com/p/DJn1C55B3VG/
てらばる じんた on Instagram: "🐉今年も開催決定🐉 都城ふるさと夜市2025 7.19🔥前夜祭〜今昔寄席〜 7.20🔥本祭〜ゲゲゲの祭典〜 毎度ローカルパワー炸裂なお祭りですが 今年はどローカル＋
186 likes, 0 comments - jinta_terabaru_nanbushiki on April 9, 2025: "🐉今年も開催決定🐉 都城ふるさと夜市2025 7.19🔥前夜祭〜今昔寄席〜 7.Instagram
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>
"My own hopes and intuitions are that self-fulfilling and creative work is a fundamental human need, and that the pleasures of a challenge met, work well done, the exercise of skill and craftsmanship, are real and significant, and are an essential part of a full and meaningful life. The same is true of the opportunity to understand and enjoy the achievements of others, which often go beyond what we ourselves can do, and to work constructively in cooperation with others.... The task for a modern industrial society is to achieve what is now technically realizable, namely a society which is really based on free voluntary participation of people who produce and create, live their lives freely within institutions they control, and with limited hierarchical structures, possibly none at all."
- znetwork.org/wp-content/upload…
@bsmall2 #LookingForwardBook #MichaelAlbert #NoamChomsky #ChomskyOnWork #ParEcon #ParticipatoryEconomics
> "both of the major world propaganda systems have described this destruction of socialist elements as a victory of socialism. For western capitalism, the purpose is to defame socialism by associating it with Moscow's tyranny; for the Bolsheviks, the purpose was to gain legitimacy by appealing to the goals of authentic socialism."
znetwork.org/wp-content/upload…
#ChomskyOnSocialism #NoamChomsky #LookingForwardBook #MichaelAlbert
@bsmall2@nerdica.net
#android only #encrypted SMS #msgr. #OpenSource
github.com/deku-messaging/Deku…
f-droid.org/packages/com.afkan…
no need for #google #SMS #RCS #messenger
#encryption #IM #foss #floss #data #degoogle #grapheneOS #e2ee #privacy #security #fediverse
[h2]1932 Essay{/h2]
The world at the present day is suffering from two misfortunes : there are people who desire goods which they cannot purchase, and there are people who have goods which they cannot sell. Those who have goods which they cannot sell are adopting various ingenious means of disposing of their surplus.
Brazil, which suffers from a surplus of coffee, has taken to using it as fuel on the railways and to burning it on large funeral pyres in lonely valleys. There is a glut of rubber, which is unfortunately made worse by the fact that the natives cannot be restrained from tapping the rubber trees. Fortunately rubber trees are subject to a pest, which has hitherto been combated but which is now about to be encouraged. The world's cotton crop has, in the past, been threatened by the boll weevil, but now the boll weevil is welcomed as a friend, since it helps to prevent overproduction of cotton.
Nobody has thought for a moment that it might be a good thing if somebody could enjoy the produce of human labour. Our morality is ascetic, which makes us regard work as a virtue; it follows that production is good and consumption is bad. This ascetic twist has produced a world system in which half the world is poor because it produces too much and the other half because it consumes too little.
What is the cure for this queer insanity?...
... It seems clear that to improve trade, we must find some way of bringing goods to those who want them. So far, however, the collective wisdom of mankind has not been equal to this effort. People not yet in asylums suggest that the cure for unemployment due to overproduction is to be sought in longer hours. I think it is clear that to start the economic machine again working normally it will be necessary no longer to demand that each operation should at each moment be profitable. There is food rotting in the West of the United States and Canada; there are unemployed populations starving in all the industrial regions throughout the world. If the food were brought to the starving populations, and they were set to work such as would satisfy the wants of Western farmers, the world would be the richer even if no individual capitalist made a profit.The motive of individual profit has apparently broken down, and only organised public effort will restore the economic life of the world.
#BertrandRussel #RusselOnEconomy #RusselOnEconomicSystem #FruitsSystem #SystemFuits #GoingMad?
1939 Novel
>
The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy. A Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was released in 1940. ^1
Quotes
Behind the fruitfulness are men of understanding and knowledge, and skill, men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for greater crops of plants whose roots will resist the million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insects, the rusts, the blights. These men work carefully and endlessly to perfect the seed, theroots. And there are the men of chemistry who spray the trees against pests, who sulphur the grapes, who cut out disease and rots, mildews and sicknesses. Doctors of preventive medicine, men at the borders who look for fruit flies, for Japanese beetle, men who quarantine the sick trees and root them out and burn them, men of knowledge. The men who graft the young trees, the little vines, are the cleverest of all, for theirs is a surgeon's job, as tender and delicate; and these men must have surgeons' hands and surgeons' hearts to slit the bark, to place the grafts, to bind the wounds and cover them from the air. These are great men.
....
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
- ^1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grap…
#GrapesOfWrath #FruitsSystem #SteinbeckOnEconomy #SteinbeckOnEconomicSystem
One flight attendant said he kept waiting for the sports teams his new bosses had talked about as he flew deportation routes. “You know, the NFL charters, the NBA charters, whatever the hockey one is …” he said.
...
They worried about what would happen in an emergency. Could they really get over a hundred chained passengers off the plane in time?
...
“We have never gotten a clear answer on what we do in an ICE Air evacuation,” another said. “They will not give us an answer.”
They were reminded, over and over, that their job was a vocation, one with a professional code: No matter who the passengers were, flight attendants were in charge of the cabin, responsible for safety in the air.
...
Lala had been scared before her first deportation flight, worried that violence might break out. But fear soon gave way to discomfort at how detainees were treated. “Not being able to serve them, not being able to look at them, I didn’t think that was right,” she said.
...
Another recalled taking a planeload of children and their escorts on a domestic transfer from the southern border to an airport in New York. He tried to slip snacks to the kids. “Even the chaperones were like, ‘Don’t give them any food,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Where is your humanity?’” (A second flight attendant said that children on a New York flight were fed by their escorts.)
...
The guards often asked flight attendants to heat up the food they brought from home. They asked for drinks, for ice. “They treated us like we were their maids,” said Akilah Sisk, a former flight attendant from Texas.
“In their eyes, the detainees are not the passengers,” another flight attendant said. “The passengers are the guards. And we’re there for the guards.”
...
Nothing bothered flight attendants more than the fact that most of their passengers were in chains. What would happen if a flight had to be evacuated?
...
Neither the ICE Air handbook, nor FAA regulations, nor flight attendant training in Miami explained how to empty a plane full of people whose movements were, by design, so severely hampered. Shackled detainees didn’t even qualify as “able-bodied” enough to sit in exit rows.
To flight attendants, the restraints seemed at odds with the FAA’s “90-second rule,” a decades-old manufacturing standard that says an aircraft must be built for full evacuation in 90 seconds even with half the exits blocked.
... By the end of his first term, Trump was ready to call it quits on the sputtering war in Somalia, ordering almost all U.S. troops out of the country in late 2020.
The withdrawal was reversed by President Joe Biden but the tiny ISIS-Somalia faction remains “a significant threat to peace and security in Somalia,” while the larger militant group, al-Shabab, “continues to carry out complex attacks...
AFRICOM did not respond to requests for clarification about why it took 60 tons of bombs to kill less than 15 militants,
April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”
The Intercept’s investigation revealed that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but has not received a response.
theintercept.com/2025/05/23/la…
#NickTurse #Africom #Somalia #TrumpPentagon
In dreams begins responsibity.夢の中で責任が始まる
- eigomeigen.com/quotes/4780.php
#英語名言 #イェイッツ #夢と責任 #WilliamButlerYeats #イェイツの名言
無用の用 The usefulness of the useless..
It's been a few years since I ask classes of 40 to 80 students for the meaning of "Don Quijote". They tell me it's a store. My question was intstigated by the extra (Not on the test!! just for your enjoyment if you finish quick) reading on the back side of a worksheet. While discussing proverbs in comparison with science, literature, and slang Bertrand Russel mentions Sancho Panza.^1
Sancho Panza produced more proverbs than any other character in fiction
サンチョ・パンザは、他の小説の主人公の誰よりも多くの諺を創りだした。
Bertrand Russel also refers to Don Quijote to illustrate a type of thinking.^2
The classic example of subjectivity is Don Quixote. The first time he made a helmet, he tested its capacity for resisting blows, and battered it out of shape ; next time he did not test it, but “deemed” it to be a very good helmet.
Don Quijote illustrates "subjectivity" in On Education in 1925, and decades later Albert Camus's Myth of Sisyphus uses Quijote thinking to illustrate the difference between "lyricism" and "truism":
... there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.... If Faust and Don Quixote are eminent creations of art, this is because of the immeasurable nobilities they point out to us with their earthly hands. Yet a moment always comes when the mind negates the truths that those hands can touch....
- ^1 russell-j.com/PROVERB.HTM
- ^2 russell-j.com/wp/archives/2640
- russell-j.com/beginner/OE16-07…
- ^3 pixelfed.social/bobfisherphoto
- pixelfed.social/p/bobfisherpho…
- pixelfed.social/i/web/post/828…
#BertrandRussel #AlbertCamus #MethodsOfThought #TypesOfThinking
#RusselWithQuijote #CamusWithQuijote
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"I read a really great phrase recently that said something along the lines of 'why would I bother to read something someone couldn't be bothered to write' and that is such a powerful statement and one that aligns absolutely with my views."
..
"If you want to know why a decision is made, we will need humans. If we don't care about that, then we will probably use AI," he says.
...
"Even when you do a Google search it includes an AI overview, while some emails have a topline summary, So now it almost feels like we have no control. How do I turn all that off? It's snowballing."
bbc.com/news/articles/c15q5qzd…
#SabineZetteler
#AISalami #SalamiAI
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> All Crimean War hospitals were ghastly, she insists, and the statistics suggest that at least two had higher death rates than Scutari. McDonald also makes a persuasive case that Nightingale believed the blame for Scutari’s dreadful state lay elsewhere. In her letters, she pointed repeatedly at military doctors and administrators, chastising them for a host of “murderous” errors including sending cholera cases to overcrowded wards and delaying having the hospital “drained and ventilated.” The sanitary commission’s investigation confirmed Nightingale’s suspicions about the links between filth and disease, McDonald contends, and she became determined never to let those conditions occur again. “That is the foundation of all she does in public health for the rest of her life,” McDonald says...
> Throughout her sojourn, she faced the resentment of officers and bureaucrats who regarded her as an interloper. “There is not an official who would not burn me like Joan of Arc if he could,” Nightingale wrote from Crimea, “but they know that the War Office cannot turn me out because the country is with me.”
- smithsonianmag.com/history/the…
#FlorenceNightingale #LadyOfTheLamp #LadyOfTheHammer #Scutari
@bsmall2
The Defiance of Florence Nightingale
Scholars are finding there’s much more to the “lady with the lamp” than her famous exploits as a nurse in the Crimean WarSmithsonian Magazine
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#SewageSystem #hospitalhygiene #FlorenceNightingale #LadyOfTheHammer #NightingaleStatistician
@bsmall2@nerdica.net
#StatisticsGodliness
@bsmall2@fedibird.com @bsmall2@nerdica.net
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♲ @kennyc@diasporasocial.net:It is the birthday of British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (books by this author), born in Ravenscroft, Monmouthshire (1872). He wrote Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), A History of Western Philosophy (1945), and The Principles of Mathematics (1903). He won the 1950 Nobel Prize in literature. He is one of the most widely read philosophers of the 20th century.
writersalmanac.publicradio.org…
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Happy Pride! Happy Summer! 🌈 😎
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