A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.
To be clear, the sandpit is for regular commenters to pursue points that distract from regular discussion, including conspiracy-theoretic takes on the issues at hand. It’s not meant as a forum for visiting conspiracy theorists, or trolls posing as such.
John Quiggin 
Westminster subverted. Fake news created and promoted. Democracy damaged.
Culture wars first. Democracy second. A 4 day week, third.
And only then if newscorpse and the Speaker deigns it so.
The Speaker let Dutton’s dangerous denigration run for a week, AND protects Dutton from withdrawl, saying Albo today is too late to make a point of order.^1. That is how it seems to me from snippets in the granauld.
JQ, perhaps you might consider writing a piece about “Belatedly, the speaker says the comments were out of order. And news ain’t news”.
^1. “Question time begins…
“Speaker Andrew Wallace is talking about last week’s brouhaha, in which the defence minister, Peter Dutton, was making unfounded comments about the opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, and his relationship with China. Belatedly, the speaker says the comments were out of order.
” 2.13pm 14:13
“Albanese asks if Dutton can withdraw, the speaker says it’s too late – the request should have been made at the time.”
Updated at 2.13pm AEDT
theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/feb/14/only-a-third-of-australians-have-confidence-in-morrison-government-survey-finds
And so it begins in earnest at newscorpse. Morrison on the nose yet: “Breaking … from 1991
“It took the unAustralian’s Sherri Marks on more than 30 years to dig up some dirt on the leader of the opposition, Anthony Albanese, but she is nothing if not tenacious.
“Exclusive: Anthony Albanese criticised capitalism and family wealth as causes of social injustice while suggesting incomes above $100k a year were not deserved.
He made the remarks while arguing for death duties as assistant general secretary of NSW Labor.
— Sheri Marks on February 9, 2022
[edits to she who shouldn’t be named- did I cancel her?]
“The investigations editor’s “exclusive” story on page one of the Oz on Thursday was about Albo’s dark past as a “radical leftie”.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2022/feb/11/morrison-mixes-margaritas-and-ukuleles-as-tame-and-higgins-leave-bolt-shaken
“Only a third of Australians have confidence in Morrison government, survey finds
“The ANU’s Centre for Social Research and Methods found 34.5% of adult Australians had confidence or were “very confident” in the federal government, down from a peak of 60.6%
“in May 2020. Confidence also declined in the public service, down to 57.6%, and in state and territory governments, down to 52.3%, but these institutions were still rated higher than the federal government.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/feb/14/only-a-third-of-australians-have-confidence-in-morrison-government-survey-finds
Crikey!
“Canavan commie shock! A few other historical yarns for the Oz to make all new again
“When a politician’s latest words and deeds are a bit ho-hum, there’s no better way to shape the news than stepping back in time.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/02/11/canavan-commie-shock-a-few-other-historical-yarns-for-the-oz-to-make-all-new-again/
I won’t sully the msg board with above as JQ says of the Sandoit arenfor “points that distract from regular discussion”, and the points above are just that. They disrupt regular discussions. And googl and ab-news have a private university endorsed journalism ‘course’! A worry.
The COVID-19 infections will continue until public health improves! I’m being sarcastic obviously, as in the old joke “the floggings will continue until morale improves”. Of course, neoliberalism has worked this way as long as it has existed. Pay rises will be held down until productivity improves. House prices will escalate until everybody can afford a house, and so on. The consistent anti-logic of neoliberalism.
I object much more to mandatory infection, by live, wild, unattenuated virus, than I do to mandatory vaccination and mandatory masking. The current COVID-19 policies of most of the neoliberal West amount to mandatory infection of the entire populace. Our politicians, corporate CEOs, business leaders, lobbyists and Chief Health Officers keep telling us that everybody has to get infected. Yes, that is really what they are telling us both with their words and actions. Actions speak louder than words. Empirical outcomes speak louder. Even double vaxxed and triple vaxed people are getting sick again. Vaccination on its own is inadequate to halt this virus.
“BREAK THE CHAIN of transmission—have we just utterly forgotten the lessons of spring 2020? Few seem to give a damn anymore about stopping transmission. Letting it rip mass infection will only light the fire for future #Covid variants. #BA2 is coming.” – Eric Feigl Ding.
The vaccination-only policy, with leaky mRNA vaccines will become untenable and thus unsustainable. We will have worse and worse outbreaks from worse and worse variants. We need vaccinations PLUS socialized, centralized and mandated public measures of TTIQM (test, trace, isolate, quarantine and mask) to defeat COVID-19. Only a socialized medicine approach can defeat COVID-19. The neoliberal approach will lead, is leading, to worse and worse outbreaks, collapsing public health and safety and collapsing the economy, precisely as we are seeing now. The waves will keep coming and keep getting worse. Eventually, we will have to change course.
But of course predators and parasites naturally evolve to mildness, don’t they? That’s why great white sharks are so benign to seals (and humans in wet suits) and that’s why malaria and x number of other tropical dieases are so benign to humans. They all evolve to mildness don’t they? I am being sarcastic agian, obviously. Actually, evolution of pathogens to mildness or of pathogens and hosts to co-existence is relatively rare and usually takes hundreds of years at least.
The state of crude competitive nature is a war of all against all. We are in a war against the COVID-19 pathogen and it is winning. It is winning because we are hobbled by the tenets of neoliberalism. Until we jettison those tenets and the strategies and tactics derived from them, we will keep losing.
As I predicted at the start of the year – yeah! – Nvidia’s planned takeover of strategic British chip designer ARM has collapsed from regulatory opposition:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/softbank-plans-to-take-arm-public-after-nvidia-takeover-deal-collapses.html
Softbank will have to find a different solution to its excessive debt. But as Japanese, they are familiar with the concept of a living National Treasure. ARM is for now a Global Treasure. It should be left alone in its odd but productive niche, a low-cost and innovative monopolist that enables downstream competition.
Sheep may safely graze …
… under agrivoltaic solar panels. An engaging report from Temple University on test solar pastures in Missouri found that (a) partial shading (45%) boosted the biomass of native grasses, (b boosted carbon retention in the soil, (c) grazing sheep did not cut these benefits. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/02/08/livestock-increase-carbon-sequestration-by-up-to-80-in-pv-projects/ In drier Australian conditions, the benefits of shading are presumably higher. The news on agrivoltaics is SFIK uniformly good.
The research programme extends to grazing bison. It would be nice to see bison under PV, but I suppose it’s not likely. You would have to build the mounts like antitank defences.
Worth repeating. Please don’t skim this JQ.
^1. Democracy damaged by “the current government to the ABC – is profoundly undemocratic in two ways.” say Fergus Pitt and Quentin Dempster AM
^2. ABC MD David Anderson’s “Now More Than Ever: Australia’s ABC”*
^3. Censorship – (love Mad as Hell) and “Seven West Media’s West Australian newspaper locked out 102 printers”
Scary. Lucky we get a dose of democracy every couple of years. Forget “economics” if these vile & grotesque ideologues keep power.
*
1,2 & 3 ironically found here:
“ABC statistics, a new report reveals the relative value of the public broadcaster’s service to taxpayers.
> The ABC is provided with $41 for each Australian every year
> services which include the streaming service iView,
> four broadcast television channels,
> 11 national and digital radio services,
> a 53-station local radio network, national news, local news for 53 regions,
>podcasting,
> audio streaming and
>specialist websites.
“By comparison, the cheapest Netflix subscription costs $131.88 a year, a digital-only subscription to the Australian newspaper costs $520 a year and a Spotify subscription will set you back $143.88.
“The total for the three subscriptions would be $795.76 a year or almost 20 times the ABC’s per capita funding, according to a report by former staffers Quentin Dempster and Fergus Pitt about the contemporary history of political interference and harassment directed at the ABC.”…
…
“the usual hectoring by Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz who loves to cut him off mid-sentence, Anderson was asked how many hours a year he spent at estimates. Anderson, who released a 90-page essay about the public broadcaster this week, said he spent 13 or 14 hours at estimates each year and countless hours answering questions on notice.” ^2.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/18/a-tale-of-two-stories-as-the-age-and-the-australian-search-for-truth-amid-the-haze
*
^1.
“Insidious And Intentional: Political Interference And Harassment Of The ABC
Fergus Pitt and Quentin Dempster AM
“The current Coalition Government has enacted a sustained and intentional campaign of political interference, pressure, and harassment of the ABC, aimed to harm and impede this vital civic institution.
“This report investigates the broad range of new and historical tactics and mechanisms used by the Coalition – to interfere, harass, and pressure the ABC – that only when presented together reveal a systematic campaign across multiple fronts and upheld for many years.
“The key recommendations of the report are:
…
” Government hostility – like that shown by it attacks a crucial organ in our public sphere, and it’s counter to the needs and demonstrated preferences of the Australian people that value and rely on the ABC so much.”
https://www.thetruthandintegrityproject.org.au/news/insidious-and-intentional-political-interference-and-harassment-of-the-abc
^2.
Follow with; Anderson’s who 90-page essay about the public broadcaster.
“Now More Than Ever: Australia’s ABC”, Anderson
https://www.booktopia.com.au/now-more-than-ever-david-anderson/book/9781922633118.html
*
^3.
And more government interference of free expression :
“Take down
“Twitter melted down when Shaun Micallef revealed Mad as Hell had been taken down from iView to be edited. Were they too harsh on the prime minister they asked?”…
And the capital over workers kicker in Meade’s Guardian article following above;
“Stop the press
“Seven West Media’s West Australian newspaper locked out 102 printers on 4 February after their rejection of the proposed enterprise bargaining agreement which the union says would slash workers’ terms and conditions.”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/18/a-tale-of-two-stories-as-the-age-and-the-australian-search-for-truth-amid-the-haze
COVID IS NOT OVER.
All quotes from Erid Feigl-Ding Twitter.
“DEATHS INCREASING—new data shows both Danish excess deaths & deaths “due to (caused by) COVID” increasing—surging by 34% for total COVID deaths, & 26.6% for deaths “caused by COVID” in one week. Most COVID+ deaths due to COVID. (This is Denamrk CDC own table) #CovidIsNotOver
Worrisome—New lab experiments from Japan show that #BA2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older variants–including Delta! And yet as evasive as old #Omicron cousin BA1. #BA2 gobally surging—needs upgrade to VOC asap.
Just how fast is BA2??? It’s now 90% of all #COVID in Denmark. And there’s even two different BA2 versions! The H78Y is surging even more.
Let’s look at it this way—BA2 is much more aggressive than anything but the H78Y subtype of BA2 extra aggressive it seems. Meanwhile BA1 old Omicron near extinct in Denmark! That doesn’t happen by chance. We need to raise BA2 as VOC asap!” – Eric Feigl-Ding.
End Quotes.
Ikonoclast editorializes >>> This COVID-19 pandemic will get even worse before it gets better (if it ever gets better) UNLESS nations begin to take it super seriously and put ALL measures in place including mandatory vaccinations and mandatory TTIQM. The advent of a seriously dangerous variant is now almost certain. I mean something of the order of at least 10 times more dangerous than Delta and spreading as fast or faster than Omicron BA2. There is vastly too much unchecked spread on too many continents. This raises the chances of super variant arising to almost certainty. I wonder at what point all the COVID-19 deniers and minimizers will start screaming for action?
Australia will almost certainly have a BA2 wave this winter, I would suggest worse than our BA1 peak and plateau. Essentially, we are still heading towards disaster and doing nothing about it, just like climate change. I feel like I am detecting a pattern here.
Some are not so clear cut on Eric
https://undark.org/2020/11/25/complicated-rise-of-eric-feigl-ding/
Fiegl-Ding has been right about the big things, consistently. He’s over-warned a few times perhaps but that comes with the territory. When exponential growth of something very dangerous is involved, the true dangers are in under-warning, not over-warning. Fiegl-Ding has the courage to be a rebel with a cause and with cause. It’s actually the conservative herd which has been wrong most of the time on this pandemic.
According to Worldometer:
Global Coronavirus Cases: 422,448,086
Global Deaths: 5,894,237
Most case estimation methods suggest this is an under-count by about a factor of 4. So, we can say about 2 billion infected and 20 million dead… and counting with no end in sight.
COVID-19 keeps mutating, escaping natural immunity and escaping vaccine immunity. There is no telling what the next dangerous variant will be. If we don’t shut COVID-19 down, it will shut us down as any kind of decent, advanced society with any claim to care properly, or even to be able to care properly, for all its members.
We need to return to stome infrastructure.
The advantage of the cement and concrete is that when you start making the concrete, you start it off the construction process with a liquid. Something that can be shaped. Well actually you started off with various solids that you micronised, then added with water. But at the construction phase you have a liquid.
With stone its a solid all the way through. One of the reasons its a superior material. So its a fantastical information problem to bring all the solids together in the shape that you want. This is why we need a return to stone. Because we are now living in the information age. And we should be able to solve these informational problems involved with taking smaller interlocking solids, to make the one big solid object.
There is a place close to me where there is a largely wooden bridge that is only one lane and small cars go across it. This bridge is often closed for repairs. Just a short distance from this bridge is a stone bridge. With terrific arches. Heavy trains go over in both directions. I can’t remember it every closing down though its been there for more than a dozen decades.
Interlocking stones are better than bricks for these purposes. So computerisation will give infrastructure great power.
Lets get started. Supposing we aren’t too degenerate to want the good things in life.
Democracy? A billionaire seeks to purchase AGL, one of our largest electricity utilities, to drive his carbon emissions reduction agenda. Another billionaire spends $31m on pre-election advertising for his political party – about 100X that of the major political parties.
The question of being right or wrong doesn’t matter so much here – in fact I support rapid decarbonization while opposing the anti-vax and other stupidities of Clive Palmer’s politics. But in the main it’s the issue of how wealth transparently drives the Australian political agenda. Extreme wealth matters.
Likewise massive donations to favoured charities and institutions. Individuals can make allocations to match the gap between their preferences and those of ruling governments. But surely elected governments should sort out the major political priorities.
Ultimate irony! Ed Wood Wood Wood saying”We need to return to stome infrastructure”.
Reverse nominative determinism Ed?
And dare I ask, what do you mean Ed by;
“But if society is going to try and pull this off, while they are intellectually addicted to Keynesianism, its going to be a catastrophe. Something has to give. Be quits with the Keynesian nonsense and embrace a better tomorrow.”
Your comment from https://johnquiggin.com/2022/02/14/theres-never-been-a-better-time-for-australia-to-embrace-the-4-day-week/#comment-250625
… which I feel needs ro be fleshed out here in the venerable Sandpit, not in thread. What does ” Be quits with the Keynesian nonsense and embrace a better tomorrow.” really mean please?
Harry Clarke +1.
“and other stupidities of Clive Palmer’s politics. But in the main it’s the issue of how wealth transparently drives the Australian political agenda. Extreme wealth matters.”
I saw a UAP ad last night “sponsored by Clive Palmer” – as one sided and eye-d as cyclops. (That’ll teach me for turning on the telly!).
Something like trillion dollar debt forcing repayment over a trilliin years. Paraphrased in a Clive Palmer-esque exaggerated ine sided style.
Fair and balanced would dictate, when talking about government debt, we need electoral advertising law changed to also state reality in some way, not just allow wealth to drive the Australian political agenda.
Clive is neither fair nor balanced. And worse, platforms are incentived to allow and promote his merde.
Will a uap cyclops# continue to breed with fake news? Probably.
“Ultimate irony! Ed Wood Wood Wood saying”We need to return to stome infrastructure”.
Where is the irony?
Surprisingly stone and wood (in the form of cross-laminated timber) are our best building materials.
Example: 15 Clerkenwell Close in London. A six floor building. And its true that the materials I’m talking about are really only suitable for mid-range construction. Thats okay because its the mid-range buildings we cannot get enough of. One and two story buildings represent lateral sprawl. Whereas tall buildings are this logistical nightmare for traffic and tradesmen. You wind up with streets clogged with cars, and yet oddly empty foot traffic.
So the architectural firm went through their usual processes and wound up settling on stone as the most appropriate material. Stone is everywhere, but the ongoing business of using it, and the skills and producer goods to manipulate it are not. So they had to get their stone from France. Whereas it was surely available a few miles out of London, or indeed anywhere beneath their feet. At the end of the process they had this fellow who works out the “carbon impact” of their decisions. And his calculations were that it was a 92% saving over the alternatives. Carbon impact is a rough analogue to energy input. Now energy input SHOULD be a rough measure of cost. Yet the cost savings weren’t all that much. I see market failure in this story. Getting great infrastructure should be about reworking the superior materials already there under the ground for us. This building is actually poor quality stone. its only sandstone. Yet it will be lower maintenance than a concrete and steel building of the same size.
Its a pretty boxy looking building when all is said and done. It has more window space and light than traditional stone buildings, so thats a good thing. A stone building without arches strikes me as a bit heretical. Lets just say there is room for improvement but good on them for being pioneers.
People say the building grows on them. This building will be, or could have been made to be, much more electrically healthy than standard buildings of the same size. Not long ago at work I couldn’t lift my hand above my shoulder before lunch. So I was holding onto the bark of trees during the break and I made it through the shift. I say this by way of noting that if you are electrically “earthed” thats a much healthier situation to be in. There is the potential for people to be electrically grounded, in buildings of stone and wood, giving them the health benefits they might enjoy walking barefoot in the park. I can remember having an office job in a 40-odd storey building when I was a kid. I was getting nose-bleeds all the time. Okay so I didn’t know how to stay healthy back then, but these unnatural buildings themselves are unhealthy.
Why the market failure? What could have brought us to this place where we are neglecting materials that either grow naturally from the ground when we walk away from them, or are already in the ground waiting to be utilised? It always comes back to a finance led economy rather than a sole trader led economy. It always comes back to the poxy version of capitalism foisted upon us by the powerful.
Any suggestions for TV Series of the not too serious kind, movies or books (preferably science fiction/phantasy)? Been pretty much in private lockdown for quite a while now, news are less good than usual for the mood aswell. Doesn´t look like the covid numbers are not getting much better for a while either here.
hix, if you haven’t seen Breaking Bad it’s good. That’s it for me. I hardly watch.
The breaking bad storyline just seems too sad, in particular when my mood is rather mixed.
Just started watching Firefly, a high ranked sf series with just one season. And how does it start – with a depiction of a very non sf war. At least the non sf ness is obviously intentional in this case. Somehow you always get some scene where humans fight like it was not even 2020 in the far off future. Just once, if war is part of the storyline i´d like to see that close fighting done by robots of all sices only. Come to think of it, even in the peacefull sf, spaceships, flying cars and all that stuff is controled by humans. Or you get say a self driving system that is controlled by one big central computer and breaks down when the big central computer gets destroyed. Come on, at that technological stage self driving could be calculated by one persons phone for an entire planet!
hix,
Yes, I agree. Good, hard sci-fi is hard to come by. One is prepared to accept certain preposterous overall premises sometimes (it’s sci-fi after all) but one would prefer details to be very sciencey and to depict likely developments from where we are now. Sometimes, pure hard sci-fi would be good too. I think computing and genetics are fields where the writers can assume big advances quickly while still not flagrantly breaking the known fundamental physical and biological laws of the cosmos. This relates to both plots and aesthetics. Let me make some recommendations for movies and series in this and subsequent posts. First:
“Gattaca” – “Gattaca is a 1997 American dystopian science fiction film written and directed by Andrew Niccol in his filmmaking debut. It stars Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, with Jude Law, Loren Dean, Ernest Borgnine, Gore Vidal, and Alan Arkin appearing in supporting roles.” – Wikipedia.
Gattaca is far more than a mere dystopian movie. In fact it is not primarily dystopian at all. The plot is complex, interesting and human scale. The plot is film noir with considerable underlying and engaging Hollywood romanticism. The style is arthouse and retro without being obtrusively so. Genetics is much advanced but city infrastructure is believable and recognizable with reliance on electric cars and large solar power arrays. Technology has advanced to “Titan shots” rather than “moon shots” so still believable.
The arthouse style is noticeable if you look for it. Gattaca is a space shot city but has the infrastructure you would expect of an advanced city with recognizable cops, nightlife etc. There is a lot of back reference to earlier Hollywood and other sci-fi, I would say even right back to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”.
The name “GATTACA” itself of course refers to the ingredients of genes and genetics (guanine, adenine/adenosine, cytosine and thymine. Uricil and proline are less well known and their letters not used in the name. Look for the symbolic spiral helix staircase and the action on the staircase. Look for the gentle Hollywood romance treatment of the relationship between the Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman characters. Am I raving? I love this movie. More suggestions to come if you wish.
hix, agree “breaking bad storyline just seems too sad”, but I just can’t watch anything anymore where I can pick the plot. I couldn’t w bb.
hix, what are your preferences. Sounds like Ikon’s dystopia sf not in the cards either. Read the article Dropout below. Maybe like me you feel like dropping out!
And we Don’t need fiction, truth much stranger. a couple of reposts with a couple of books and movies referenced.
1)
10bn faces – yours – which trumps trump & putin. This may be used for the worst disruption in human history. First they came … but first they stole YOUR face.
“index of faces” – 10 billion. If you skim this you are doing disservice to the future of humanity.
Kids /grandkids photos online? You? YOU. ARE. TOO. LATE. Yes you too. I have never posted a personal image online.
YOUR face has been stolen, stored, 3D’d, fingerprinted, and financiancialised, ready for the far right ‘great replacement’ panopticon, while we were looking under the covid / neocon / bad govt / climate / immigration / culture etc street lamps. Far right 100. Social and humans 0. See wikipedia below for founder’s links to far right.
To wit “The company said that its “index of faces” has grown from 3 billion images to more than 10 billion since early 2020 and that its data collection system now ingests 1.5 billion images a month…”
“The facial recognition company Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable,” according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post.
“Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world.
“Facial recognition firm Clearview AI tells investors it’s seeking massive expansion beyond law enforcement
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/facial-recognition-firm-clearview-ai-tells-investors-it-s-seeking-massive-expansion-beyond-law-enforcement/ar-AATWNqJ
*
Meet your face host … far right enabler Australian named Hoan Ton-That …
“Going back to at least 2015, Huffington Post has linked Ton-That with the “far right clique” of Mike Cernovich, Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer, and Pax Dickinson, as well as close associates of Peter Thiel, Chuck Johnson and Jeff Giesea. Ton-That and associates worked on projects to advance the far- and alt-right political views, and Johnson posted about using face recognition to identify undocumented immigrants in the United States in early 2017. This group, and others, interacted on a Slack chat set up for WeSearchr[14][15] Two employees at Clearview AI belonged to white nationalist groups and had endorsed those views online.[14][16] The Verge reached out to Ton-That who was “unaware of the online writings” and said he was “not a white supremacist or an anti-semite.” They were reportedly dismissed from the company according to Ton-That in a statement claiming to not be “sympathetic to any of those views.”[16]
“He has claimed that Clearview AI is exclusively a “law enforcement tool”[17] and stated “that it’s fair game to help law enforcement solve crimes using publicly-available data.”[3] Lawsuits have been filed in regard to the legality of his company’s collection of data.[18] In the EU, Clearview AI’s photo database was deemed illegal.[19]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoan_Ton-That
“The Great Replacement also known as the replacement theory,[1][2] is a white nationalist[3] conspiracy theory, …”…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement
Awake now? Privately owned and sold. Yes you. Probably just the greedy controllers of conspiracy theorists, far right etc. Peter T and Elon will rocket off to elysium. The far right hoi poloi are just pawns and we still be here, armed.
Combine with my comment above ““Characterizing polarization in online vaccine discourse—A large-scale study” and the Woizle effect…”
https://johnquiggin.com/2022/02/21/monday-message-board-545/#comment-250687
… and individual advertisement targeting, …humanity is in a bezzle of control..
What will you do. Now. Don’t think these are too low brow.
Try reading;
https://craphound.com/category/attacksurface/
And Snow Crash.
..”] The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds, where they do tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the society around them.[12]Much of the world’s territory has been carved up into sovereign enclaves known as Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities (FOQNEs),[13] each run by its own big business franchise …”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
Truth always stranger than fiction. And let’s hope science fiction doesn’t come true for a change. But do you really think Dutton et al won’t use Clearview AI’s face database … against you. Or that ‘we’ – AUKUS – won’t have our own.
Think you are protected. I regard image harvesting like covid – no chance of keeping it out or in – and see “Clearview AI breached Australians’ privacy” as a joke – on us. Where are those images?
https://www.oaic.gov.au/updates/news-and-media/clearview-ai-breached-australians-privacy
Too late again…
“Fawkes software “cloaks” images to fool machines”
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/new-tool-protect-yourself-against-facial-recognition-software
Try deleting your face. Too late though.
. ..”In the meantime, the company still operates and your personal data might be accessible through their database.[1]”
https://www.wikihow.com/Delete-Yourself-from-the-Clearview-AI-Database
$4m to store in ssd ram? $40m – who cares. A never seen before dataset. So it can be handed around … 10 to 17th storage – a zetabyte … hard drive from Seagate or ssd ram. Your face ain’t yours anymore. It’s cheap.
And potentially able to be individually weaponised. They are armed. Especially if trump gets his social media enabled. No need of mid terms next time around. Nuclear strength via atomised personalised facial messaging. And I thought rupert was naughty.
2)
I fear I am going to drop out … of politics.
Scomo using The Manchurian Candidate (fn-dropout) against Albo is much more relevant, ironic of the current zeitgeist, and disgusting of Scott Morrison to invoke it as a political wedge against Labor. Scomo, Dutton etc are lower than low. “a place where there are lies everywhere”-fn-Zhao.
*
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Hannah Arendt
(fn-dropout)
” Addressing the American Psychological Association in 1955, the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer warned his audience that every acquisition of psychological knowledge opens up the ‘most terrifying prospects of controlling what people do and how they think and how they behave and how they feel.” [Tucker Carlson & Clive Palmer $Tn debt forever ads]
..
[Yet ironically imo] ” Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), declared that the communist enemy was waging a new form of ‘brain warfare’, seeking to ‘condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis but responds to impulses implanted from outside.’”…
…
“…including John Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate (1962).” .. “But it also captured other concerns about psychological manipulation from the 1950s: a fearmongering McCarthyite senator, ever-present television media, political propaganda, and a domineering mother, played by Angela Lansbury. The latter tapped into ‘momism’, a misogynist panic arguing that young American boys were emasculated victims of psychological pressures placed on them by their mothers. ” … “”…role of psychologists in corporate America. In his bestselling exposé of ‘depth’ psychology in the advertising industry, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Vance Packard described the large-scale efforts ‘being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences’.”
…
“a mind free from such control look like? This question preoccupied writers and thinkers across the political spectrum, not least Hannah Arendt. In The Origins of Totalitarianism(1951), she described the emergence of a new form of power in the 20th century, employing mass media, bureaucracy and psychological techniques to control every aspect of social and economic behaviour…
“The dropout: a history
“The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and societal control
https://aeon.co/essays/the-dropout-a-history-from-postwar-paranoia-to-a-summer-of-love
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fn-Zhao
“Reaction in China
“Zhao and the film’s success prior to and leading up to the Golden Globes and the Oscars were initially praised on Chinese social media outlets, as well as official state-controlled news media.[42][43][44]
“After the Golden Globes, Zhao was scrutinized by Chinese netizens over her remarks in a 2013 interview for Filmmaker magazine, in which she described China as “a place where there are lies everywhere”. In response to the controversy, Nomadland was pulled from theatrical release by Disney China, and the 93rd Academy Awards were censored by Chinese media outlets along with all mention of Zhao or the film on social media.[45][46]”
“Nomadland is a 2020 American drama film written, produced, edited and directed by Chloé Zhao. Based on the 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder,”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadland_(film)
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