Life imitates art, once again 🤌

Step into the arena, many many people far smarter than you or me have hashed this debate and still have no consensus.

There is no general consensus on the definition of terrorism. The difficulty of defining terrorism lies in the risk it entails of taking positions.

The political value of the term currently prevails over its legal one. Left to its political meaning, terrorism easily falls prey to change that suits the interests of particular states at particular times. The Taliban and Osama bin Laden were once called freedom fighters (mujahideen) and backed by the CIA when they were resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Now they are on top of the international terrorist lists.

General Assembly Resolution 42/159 acknowledges that the cause of terrorism often lies in the “misery, frustration, grievance and despair” that leads people to seek radical change. The resolution identifies the root causes of terrorism as occupation, colonialism and racism. A definition of terrorism should thus be comprehensive, in order to avoid double standards.

I appreciate the concern, but we all already live in the digital panopticon.

The basic setup of Bentham’s panopticon is this: there is a central tower surrounded by cells. In the central tower is the watchman. In the cells are prisoners – or workers, or children, depending on the use of the building. The tower shines bright light so that the watchman is able to see everyone in the cells. The people in the cells, however, aren’t able to see the watchman, and therefore have to assume that they are always under observation.

The Victorian idea was to ensure compliance of the incarcerated by actualizing the impression of omnipotent surveillance. They’ve built that into the framework of digital spaces by hijacking the ISPs at the source, creating a permanent man-in-the-middle.

The room… contains several racks of equipment, including [devices] designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic… [giving] access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore “the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic.”

‘Swimming in the noise’ was a decent way to stay unnoticed, but AI and ML processing throughput combined with metadata is carving that out rapidly.

An outside perspective helps - it is very hard to have the cognizance and understanding to see through subtle propaganda like this when it has been ‘normal’ your entire life.

Growing up abroad I almost exclusively saw print and TV media coverage of murder, fraud, rape, etc trials whilst almost never seeing a real image of the accused - just pastel courtroom sketches and videos of vans like that swerving into prison yards flanked by journalists throwing their cameras up at the tinted windows, hoping their photo flash can punch through and get a blurry headshot.

Conversely in the US where a lazy/complicit media will routinely engage in access journalism in a quid pro quo with the state/wealthy/famous, where they are fed information directly from the source they are ostensibly ‘investigating’ who will demand to remain anonymous, whilst also feeding the press select information and context that build a narrative. “Journalist” gets a story for their deadline with minimal effort and can repeatedly go back to that source in the future as long as they don’t challenge the state/PR narrative. Rinse and repeat, collect paycheck and vie for that Pulitzer headpat.

Why do you think we keep having these ‘open secret’ and #MeToo falls from grace despite decades of predatory behavior? Real journalists get careers cancelled, death threats, or assassinated in a carbombing for exposing the Panama, Paradise, & Pandora Papers, we have far too much lazy reposting masquerading as actual journalism.

This is a perp walk, the police/DA/et al made this happen - and ensured the media was there to capture the moment of him in ‘inmate orange’ flanked by heavily armed state police. Absolutely pre trial prejudicial influence.

Given the speed at which his arraignment and extradition from PA happened, and the fact that the NYPD could have chosen multiple different routes and methods to get him to NYC, he could have been shuffled into a regular prison bus in a police convoy from the airport, with blacked out windows - like is common in Europe where this kind of malfeasance actually results in mistrials and acquittals.

It also wins you direct scorn by the TSAa and an attempt at public shaming “We got an opt out. OPT OUT I NEED A MANAGER! You, stand over there and wait”.

At they very least you’re guaranteed no cellphone screencaps, fresh gloves and less radiation exposure whilst you’re stood at the machine and in the line waiting. Airports are still abysmal on privacy otherwise.

Perfidy has never been easier - no uniform to take off, just loose the insignia. The Hauge hates this one trick!

And a buttload of live-fire data from actual combat to boot. The CIA jacking a Hind-D was chill to research its flight profile limitations, radar signature, weaknesses, etc, but seeing how it’s used in practice and deviation from doctrine is key.

The Ka-52s had their feast of the counteroffensive’s battlefield when first committed, until we figured out their limitations and counter-meta. They haven’t had so much fun lately.

Coincidentally, unrelated, happenstance fact - you can gain the ability to attend shareholder meetings by purchasing a certain amount of shares - each company sets their own level.

Y’know, exactly like the meeting Brian was on his way to that December morning.…

Look at Syria. Not today, Syria before the revolution.

People were living through grinding poverty, political repression with performative elections of a nepo-dictator, avoiding a police state with literal death squads, and just trying to get by and support their families.

Until Mohamed set himself on fire, and thus the Arab world.

Americans as a whole are too comfortable (or at least, enough of them are) and propagandized into believing that this is the way it has to be, for a big societal movement to coalesce around “fuck that shit”. We’re still infighting between political camps, or distracted dealing with reactionaries.

Expect a lot more of the “nothing to lose” shooters before another Che Guevara. Maybe we’ll come close again and claw some back, or we’ll have the United Fruit Company again.

Listened to the first season a while back, I genuinely had one (1) note/dispute, for a series spanning nearly 11 hours on the Iraq invasion. They brought receipts, sources, archived media snippets, and a lot of context that mainstream media still glosses over with 9/11 remembrance justifications.

Very listenable, add it to your queue if you remotely enjoy geopolitics

The greed is mind boggling. The Heathcare CEOs should be racing to pay up the snitchline bounty, or even increase it. Regulatory fines are seen as a ‘cost of doing business’ but these ghouls cannot see past their own greed to understand how this hurts them, over 0.00026% of their 2023 profit. UHC alone rakes in over $2.6 million in PROFIT not income per day - this money is a blip on the financials to them. And so are our lives.

“health companies spent more than any other sector in 2023 with federal lobbying spending topping $739 million for the year.”

Health industries are also top spenders at the state level, according to the report, “continuing a trend that started in 2019.”

I could have done without the “Palestinian” erasure, and the conflation of IDF and civilians killed on Oct 7th - just like it’s important to delineate between 7,000-17,000 Hamas fighters and at least 20,607 dead civilians the IAF bombed callously with AI driven targeting.

But otherwise you’re mostly right; Iran/Hamas set the stage for the Israeli overreaction, Hezbollah attacking the north in ‘solidarity’ and Iran loosing their chess pieces, whilst Russia was bled out in Ukraine and distracted.

A lot of people don’t make it out of Rikers…

Forgot a step

0. “Allahu akbar!”

We can thank Steve for the leaps and bounds that happened in the early 90’s with CGI - tl;dr he was a brilliant animator who snuck in under the radar at ILM and was given run of the animation department because he/his working partner literally invented many of the cutting edge animation techniques, from scratch.

Dude has a tragic story (personality disorder & alcoholism) that led to him being uncredited and blacklisted, pretty well captured in a biopic, worth the hour-ish watch imo.

• The Abyss, 1991 - Academy Award for Visual Effects
• Terminator 2, 1991 - Liquid Metal for T-1000
• Jurassic Park, 1993 - work featured throughout, with the highlight of the T-Rex’s movement and skeletal modeling
• The Mask, 1994 - Nominated for Academy Award for Visual Effect

Exactly. “My nepo failson” was the issue he was willing to defy norms and undercut institutions for, feeding directly into Trumps line that the justice department has been politicized in prosecutions. He didn’t cross that line for;

• Palestine
• Student loan forgiveness
• Budget negotiations/default
• Supreme Court expansion
• Judicial reform/integrity
• Corporate greed excess leading to toxic rail spills or children working in slaughterhouses

The Republicans fight hard and dirty, playing from all angles and he slid backs and took it from them on multiple fronts. Sinema/Manchin holding up a vote? Trump has all his toadies marching to the same music, why can’t we? Tuberville playing obstruction in the Senate? It’s called the bully pulpit for a reason, whilst the president has no actual legislative power he can put a Senator under the microscope if he desired. Biden had no sustained fight in him

Jk on them, my most regular receipt is just that hotdog. Walk right through the registers, eat food, leave with nothing else.

It’s a damn good hot dog at an absurd price - on the scale of processed meats, let’s be real.

You know when NCD has actual writeups and citations shit is getting real. Getting Wagner coup vibes, what a time to be alive where we can glimpse into the sausage of geopolitics being made in real time.

I feel like you’re lost, and don’t understand NCD lol