The Techno Feudal Fucktopia

It's a little ironic, in that it's AI, but at least they tag it as such.

Remember two things:

1. All of our rights were won by people who didn't ask permission
2. They put Sarah Connor in a psycho prison for trying to stop AI data centers

Dr Richardson

Bad Thoughts

I'll go down this dark path for just a few minutes.

And BTW - I'm not advocating for any kind of "2nd amendment solution" here. I'm just indulging myself in a little Luigi Fantasy.

But ...

• Food companies: 12
• Oil companies: 5
• Healthcare companies: 12
• Airlines: 3
• Electric Utilities: 10
• Insurance: 12
• Retail: 7
• Private Equity: 10

There are about 70 companies in control of close to 85% of everything we're required to spend money on.

Wanna know what unites this country? A few dozen bullets oughta do it.

Yacht Buyers

The author makes one slip - he assumes the mega-wealthy can be shamed.

It can work with some - kinda - but it's wrong-headed, and needs to be stomped out of our thinking.

Plutocrats assume they're very special in a very special kind of way. They think their genius at "creating wealth" exempts them from the need for the moral code that binds the rest of us to each other.

The need to adhere to an ethical framework is just not something they believe applies to them.

Above all else, they need to believe their own press clippings about how they're different from other people, so they get to do things and live in ways that no one else can. They hate the "collective", so they have to hate anything that requires a collective effort - except of course the collective effort that keeps putting billions in their pockets, or the one that looks a lot like the crew of a SuperYacht.

The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft

If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels, many of them over 200 feet long.

The nominations for the World Superyacht Awards were all delivered in 2022, and the largest contenders are essentially floating sea mansions, complete with amenities like glass elevators, glass-sided pools, Turkish baths and all-teak decks. The 223-foot Nebula, owned by the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, comes with an air-conditioned helicopter hangar.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but the ceremony in Istanbul is disgraceful. Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate. If we’re serious about avoiding climate chaos, we need to tax, or at the very least shame, these resource-hoarding behemoths out of existence. In fact, taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to boost our collective “climate morale” and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice — from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.

On an individual basis, the superrich pollute far more than the rest of us, and travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. Take, for instance, Rising Sun, the 454-foot, 82-room megaship owned by the DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen. According to a 2021 analysis in the journal Sustainability, the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.

And that’s just a single ship. Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht. This fleet pollutes as much as entire nations: The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants. Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.

Then there are the private jets, which make up a much higher overall contribution to climate change. Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Ireland. (Private plane use has surged since then, so today’s number is likely higher.)

You’re probably thinking: But isn’t that a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of coal plants around the world spewing carbon? It’s a common sentiment; last year, Christophe Béchu, France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.

But this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier wrote last year in Le Monde.

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?

“If some people are allowed to emit 10 times as much carbon for their comfort,” Mr. Baumard and Ms. Chevallier asked, “then why restrict your meat consumption, turn down your thermostat or limit your purchases of new products?”

Whether we’re talking about voluntary changes (insulating our attics and taking public transit) or mandated ones (tolerating a wind farm on the horizon or saying goodbye to a lush lawn), the climate fight hinges to some extent on our willingness to participate. When the ultrarich are given a free pass, we lose faith in the value of that sacrifice.

Taxes aimed at superyachts and private jets would take some of the sting out of these conversations, helping to improve everybody’s climate morale,” a term coined by Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle. But making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.

Last June, @CelebJets — a Twitter account that tracked the flights of well-known figures using public data, then calculated their carbon emissions for all to see — revealed that the influencer Kylie Jenner took a 17-minute flight between two regional airports in California. “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.

As media outlets around the world covered the backlash, other celebrities like Drake and Taylor Swift scrambled to defend their heavy reliance on private plane travel. (Twitter suspended the @CelebJets account in December after Elon Musk, a frequent target of jet-tracking accounts, acquired the platform.)

There’s a lesson here: Massively disproportionate per capita emissions get people angry. And they should. When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

Change can happen — and quickly. French officials are exploring curbing private plane travel. And just last week — after sustained pressure from activists — Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam announced it would ban private jets as a climate-saving measure.

Even in the United States, carbon shaming can have outsized impact. Richard Aboulafia, who’s been an aviation industry consultant and analyst for 35 years, says that cleaner, greener aviation, from all-electric city hoppers to a new class of sustainable fuels, is already on the horizon for short flights. Private aviation’s high-net-worth customers just need more incentive to adopt these new technologies. Ultimately, he says, it’s only our vigilance and pressure that will speed these changes along.

There’s a similar opportunity with superyachts. Just look at Koru, Jeff Bezos’s newly built 416-foot megaship, a three-masted schooner that can reportedly cross the Atlantic on wind power alone. It’s a start.

Even small victories challenge the standard narrative around climate change. We can say no to the idea of limitless plunder, of unjustifiable overconsumption. We can say no to the billionaires’ toys.

SuperYacht sinks off Italian coast

Let's Review

Ayman al-Zawahri had access to more than a few assault rifles - in fact, he was surrounded by guys with assault rifles and RPGs.

A drone, operated from a thousand miles away, blew him to bits as he stood on his balcony in Kabul - and left his wife and kids unharmed.

And your punky little ass is gonna take on the US military with your AR?

On Shitty Politics

Republicans have been working hard to deny going all-in on Replacement Theory, but then they pimp it just as hard in their attempts to 'win' elections.

This has to be the apex of cynical manipulation. Their "platform" - the effects of their constant dabbling in Stochastic Terrorism - threatens them as well as the rest of us. But somehow they think they can stay in front of it without being trampled themselves.

And it's not just the monster they've created that they have to be wary of - there's this whole angle too:

You can prove yourself to be very effective at stirring up trouble and pointing it at your political targets as a means to disrupt and overturn a government - which makes you quite useful to the ones who will ultimately take power. But once they're in those positions of power - when they become the government - they can no longer afford to have revolutionaries in their midst, and you'll be among the first ones eliminated.

Why do you think the founders of this joint - having won their new nation through violent insurrection - why did they then set about designing and engineering a new form government very specifically intended to avoid the need for revolution?

CNN looks at some of the weird shit going on in the GOP

And I really wish the Press Poodles would dig deeper for the people and the dark money that we know has to be working behind the scenes.

Jan6

17 requests for backup in 78 minutes

A reconstruction shows how failures of planning and preparation
left police at the Capitol severely disadvantaged on Jan. 6

The question of whether or not we can continue to have dreams of justice in this country hangs in the balance here. And I realize saying it that way makes it sound hyperbolic and more than a little melodramatic.

But we're on the verge of something. We either get back on track towards a more perfect union or we lose ground that we may never regain.

On Looking Bad

So today, we have the story of another deep state AntiFa mole who infiltrated the GOP 15 or 20 years ago, so he could land a cushy Qult45 appointment with the State Dept, which put him in position to dress up like a Trump supporter and participate in a fake attack on the capitol building to stop the certification of an election that benefited his interests - and he did it just to make the GOP look bad.

Flash: The GOP doesn't need anybody's help to look bad.

WaPo: (pay wall)

On Thursday, the FBI arrested a political appointee of former president Donald Trump on charges that he stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to a criminal complaint, marking the first member of the administration arrested in connection with the insurrection.

Federal agents arrested Federico G. Klein, 42, a former State Department aide, on multiple felony charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, according to a criminal complaint published by the New York Times. (Politico first reported the arrest.) The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday.

Klein, who is also a former Trump campaign employee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday. It is unclear if he has hired a lawyer.

Klein was still employed at the State Department as a staff assistant on Jan. 6 when he joined a mob in a tunnel leading into the U.S. Capitol, the FBI said. Then he allegedly “physically and verbally engaged with the officers holding the line” at the building’s entrance, according to the complaint. After ignoring officers’ orders to move back, he assaulted officers with a riot shield that had been stolen from police, the complaint said, and then used the shield to wedge open a door into the Capitol.

At one point, Klein was caught on video shouting for more insurrectionists to come to the front lines, where officers were struggling to hold back the mob.

“We need fresh people, need fresh people,” he said, according to the complaint.

Klein’s arrest is the most direct link yet between the Trump administration and the rioters, despite attempts by some conservatives to dissociate the insurrection from the former president. Many of the 300-plus people who have been charged in connection with the insurrection have described themselves as Trump supporters, while some have ties to extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Klein had a top-secret security clearance that was renewed in 2019, the FBI said. A LinkedIn profile the FBI identified as Klein’s also lists a top-secret security clearance and shows that Klein has been politically active in the Republican Party since at least 2008, when he began volunteering for political campaigns. Before joining the State Department in 2017, Klein worked for the Trump campaign, which paid him a $15,000 salary.

According to a financial disclosure form filed by Klein, he was appointed as a staff assistant in the State Department on Jan. 22, 2017, days after Trump was sworn in as president. He worked as a special assistant in the Office of Brazilian and Southern Cone Affairs, where he was paid $66,510, according to a ProPublica database of Trump appointees and the criminal complaint.

After the insurrection, Klein continued working in the State Department until Jan. 19, when he resigned the day before Biden’s inauguration, per the complaint.


The Trump appointee faces several felony charges for his alleged role in the riot, including knowingly engaging in any act of physical violence against any person or property in any restricted building or grounds.

Klein’s mother, Cecilia Klein, told Politico that her son had admitted to being in D.C. on Jan. 6 but said he did not specify whether he had entered the Capitol building.

“Fred’s politics burn a little hot,” she told Politico, “but I’ve never known him to violate the law.”

Revolutions Are Stupid

...which seems like kind of a silly thing to say in a country founded by bloody violent insurrection, and marked throughout its history by near-constant warfare of one kind or another, with "enemies" of one kind or another.

We have a romanticized notion of "fighting for our freedom" and "watering the tree of liberty from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots".

That notion drags us back into a mythical past, where we can fantasize about our own heroism and having the courage to die for whatever cause (just or lost) being sold to us by people who benefit from our blood and struggle - and our willingness to commit murder in the name of God and Country - instead of bleeding and struggling and committing those crimes themselves.

So instead of thinking, "Thank the fake lord I never had to do such horrible things", we're fed a line of bullshit that keeps us thinking in terms straight out of the movie Fight Club - "I was never tested on the field of battle - how can I really know myself if I've never been in a proper fight?"

We lose the lesson. We get so fervent and hung up on glorifying the heroes of the revolution, we forget the part where those heroes put together a form of government designed to prevent the need for bloody violent insurrection.

And I hear it in my own rhetoric. It's there in the tagline on my little blog - "stay in the fight".

I don't have any quick and handy solutions, btw.

There's a metric fuck-ton of wrinkles and variations when I start to think about "the fight" and the lessons we should learn but always seem to miss.

It fogs my brain and makes it impossible to stick to my editorial rule about keeping these posts short and snappy.

Suffice to say - 

Today's Today

Tiananmen Square, 04 June 1989.

Beijing has been blocking these videos.

Once the violence starts, it'll "run its course" almost no matter what. And the government is always going to win as long as the police and armed forces are "loyal" to government leaders.

When this kind of thing happens in a society where the general populace is not well-armed, the optics get really bad really fast, government is seen as the brutal assholes they usually are, and they end up having to make changes and accommodations for people. We've seen that all over the world. 

But if we get this shit going here in USAmerica Inc, it's not just going to "run its course".

GoT Breakdown

YouTuber Eric Voss - New Rockstars

"Breaking the wheel" is a notion that carries an appeal that's almost universally popular - thus its political enshrinement as Populism - but in the end, it's almost as universally false.

Revolutionaries ride in promising some variation on "peace bread freedom and justice", but they deliver struggle and pain and sorrow and privation.

For as long as there's been any kind of political structure, people have been out to conquer the world. The world is bruised and bloodied, but it remains undefeated.

When will we ever learn?

Bad Ass Cassandra

Malcolm Nance, on Bob Cesca's Wednesday show

TRIGGER WARNING

We hear a lot of complaints about how the Dems aren't being forceful enough. While it's extremely frustrating to see it move slowly, we need to keep a coupla things in mind:

• It's a process. We follow process in America. Without process, we're not America.
• Dems own just one part out of the four component parts of our power structure. (one out of five if you include Republican control of a plurality of state governments)

There's no denying we're in a bad fix. We have to move and we have to move as boldly and as decisively as possible - but within the parameters of the law as much as is practicable.

So it's a major dilemma. Our strict adherence to process is the great strength of our form of government, but it's a strength that's being used against us right now by people who refuse to honor that process.

You should always try to get your adversary to fight in a place and at a time of your choosing, but when you can't do that - and you can't avoid the fight - then you have to go to where the fight is and work at shaping the battlefield from there.

It sure as hell doesn't look like we're winning much so far, but I think there's good reason to believe we're not exactly cooked either.

We're fighting from a position of relative weakness. We're outnumbered and out-gunned. But there's a few things to keep in mind.

First - Hillary had to run against Trump, and Bernie (and other 3rd parties), and The Press Poodles, and the enormous war chest funding of people with names like Koch and Mercer etc, and the full force of the Russian government - and she got 3 million more votes.

Second, George Washington went something like 3 and 9 - and we won that one.

Third, the USA went something like 25 and 2 - and we lost in Vietnam.

So if we can see this thing as an exercise in Asymmetric Warfare - and we put ourselves in the role of Insurgency - we can approach it with the understanding that the other side loses if they fail to win a decisive victory. 

We win by not losing.  We win just by surviving.

Quick Lesson

We stay because we believe
We leave because we're disillusioned
We come back because we're lost
We die because we're committed

Why I prefer my Revolution without the "R".

hat tip = driftglass

Today's STFU

This one from BET:

Dear Famous Liberals Who Refused To Vote For Hillary Clinton,

It’s time to call bullshit on your so-called social-political revolution — one that only a person of extreme privilege has the luxury to champion. Susan Sarandon, let’s start with you. I know you were “so excited and encouraged by the idea that maybe if everything is falling apart so obviously,” we would come together as a people. But spare me your sympathies now that Judgment Day has come.

But here’s what your privilege didn’t allow you to see: we had already come together. You were just too consumed with your own righteousness to see it.

Where, pray tell, was your hashtag outrage when we were screaming at the top of our lungs that we needed your vote to secure our rights and protect our lives? Oh wait, you were screaming over us that they — Hillary and Trump — were one in the same.

So, in case you're still complaining about the "evil duopoly", and how the parties are exactly the same etc, keep this in mind: pimping the fracas internal to the Dems goes a long way to making all that true.

"Take our party back" - now why does that sound so familiar?

Chris Hedges

There is something kind of appealing to the notion of just blowing it all up and starting over.  But you almost never get anything straightened out or settled that way. What you wanted the new thing to look like when you started the destruction is never what you end up with.

Revolutionaries always come in promising bread and freedom, and they always fail to deliver anything but a very long period of even greater suffering, because all that really happens is an exchange of one Ruling Elite for another.

Evolution not revolution.

hat tip = MockPaperScissors

Stay Focused

Panama & Meh

Between $21 trillion and $32 trillion are sheltered in tax havens according to the Tax Justice Network. pic.twitter.com/8H0ts59qx1

— The Int'l Spectator (@intlspectator) April 5, 2016

OK so I'm wrong a lot, and I'm hoping I'm real wrong on this one.  But I don't see much changing because of the outrage over what's being "revealed" in The Panama Papers about a really fucked up system.

Maybe we'll see a lot more about how bad and illegal all this shit is, and maybe we won't.

Maybe we'll get all het up over it and demand something be done, and maybe we'll just shrug it off.

We've been conditioned to accept a coupla things. First, if you're rich enough, then you're well-enough connected to political power, which means you can do just about anything you want and not have to worry about "the law".  We see this shit every time (eg) when some Wall Streeters get caught dirty dealing and then negotiate their way out of it - "agreeing" to pay some skimpy little fine - which may sound enormous until you notice it amounts to about 1/80th of what they fucked us all over for - and which was factored into the cost of doing business from the start.

Second though is a perversion of the Zorro / Scarlet Pimpernel thing. The noble scamp plays at being loyal to the crown while doing everything he can to countervail what he sees as the evil-doings of a corrupted king.

We've accepted the conditioning that Da Gubmint is rotten and that spending Federal Revenue on anything but Defense and Relieving The Tax Burden of The Rent Collectors is nothing but theft, so everything you do that can plausibly be tied to "fighting back" is not only understandable, it's the right thing to do. Tax Evasion is the right thing that all the smart guys are doing.  And all the smart guys are rich because they're smart because they're rich.  And I wanna do what's right for them because I'll be rich and smart some day too, and I'm sure they'll be eager to return the favor.

So we'll sit, and we'll watch, and we'll do nothing.

I'm not advocating anything other than solidly passive and peaceful political resistance - please, nobody do anything stoopid - but I do have to wonder when we can expect to see the first wave of kidnappings and assassinations.

It goes on like this and it's all but guaranteed not to end well for anybody.

Chris Hedges

People are not moved by fact or reason.  They are moved by skillful manipulation of their emotions.



And so, what is Hedges doing?  
And so, both sides...  
And so, we remain paralyzed.


Manufacturing Consent

And So It Begins(?)

The night of the long knives.

Mondo Cané.

Helter Skelter.

Maybe the revolution will be televised after all.

A crime of passion - one that defies the poor ability of your humble correspondent to describe it - was committed against the defenseless and unsuspecting rich white people living in the wealthiest neighborhood in all of USAmerica Inc.

Residents of Atherton CA discovered several defilements of their preciously private property - spray-painted with the obviously ominous phrase, "Fuck the 1%".

The vandalism took place between 6 and 9:30 p.m., along several blocks of Greenoaks Drive and the 100 blocks of Hawthorne, Rosewood and Heather drives, Wade said.

Not so funnily, there was also one reported instance of "Kill People" on the fence in front of one house.  Not cool, guys.  I don't care how fun it is for you to imagine giving a buncha tight-assed over-privileged dipwads nightmares about The Manson Family, it's not right to threaten anybody like that.

He said police have sought private security camera footage from residents, but so far have come up empty. Some residents don't have surveillance cameras and others didn't have them focused on the areas where vandals struck or didn't have them turned on, Wade said.

It is fun tho' - a whole lotta fun - thinking about all the prospecting calls the good folk in Atherton are about to get from the noble entrepreneurs in the Home Security bidness.  Like orcas on a baby whale.

But anyway-

Without leads or suspects, Atherton Town Manager George Rodericks cautioned against jumping to conclusions.

"We don't know if it was an organized group or a couple of teenagers," he said.

Today's Uber Patriot

From The Columbus Dispatch, via Charlie Pierce:

An Indiana National Guardsman was arrested outside Columbus on New Year’s Day after a state trooper found nearly 50 bombs and the blueprints for a Navy SEAL training facility inside his car, the Madison County prosecutor said yesterday.

Andrew Scott Boguslawski, 43, also had a remote-control device to detonate the bombs, Madison County Prosecutor Stephen Pronai said. Boguslawski’s civilian job is as a groundskeeper at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in south-central Indiana. Prosecutors could not say definitively yesterday whether the blueprints in his car were for the facility where he worked.
Boguslawski also had a bulletproof vest in his car, Pronai said.

“He said something to the trooper about making a bomb vest,” Pronai said.
Lt. Col. Cathy Van Bree, a spokeswoman for the Indiana National Guard, said Boguslawski is a specialist in the guard who does intelligence analysis and has top-secret clearance.

Pronai said Boguslawski, who is from Moores Hill, Ind., appeared to be heading to Indiana when a state trooper clocked him going 85 mph in a 70 mph zone on I-70. When the trooper came back to the car to give Boguslawski a ticket, he saw the handle of a gun between his legs.

The trooper ordered Boguslawski out of the car and called for backup. Investigators found three more guns in the car — all loaded — and 48 bombs. They also found material to make more explosives.

Pronai said most of the bombs were small. He said investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have searched Boguslawski’s house, and that local and federal investigators are trying to determine whether Boguslawski planned to attack the military facility. They are also combing through a computer, cameras and GPS found in his car.

Boguslawski is charged in Madison County with one count of manufacturing explosives, a second-degree felony. A preliminary court hearing is scheduled for Friday. He is being held at Tri-County Jail in Mechanicsburg in lieu of a $1 million bond.

Somebody please enlighten me as to how this dipwad from the American MidWest is in any discernible way materially different from any randomly selected Taliban/Al Qaeda dipwad from anywhere in South Asia or the Middle East.

And BTW - when Uncle Charlie talks, we should listen:

The argument really isn't about guns, per se. The argument is about a well-financed, and profitable in return, marketing strategy by weapons manufacturers and their sublets in Congress, and the media bubble that they all inhabit, through which people are fed a constant diet of indigestible paranoid crud about the government and the people in it. This isn't all coming directly from some crackpot on a shortwave in upper Michigan. It's the barely concealed subtext of everything that Wayne LaPierre has said in public in his entire career. It's what's behind the winks from Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods, who brags in her book-like product about giving a gun for Christmas as an act of "civil disobedience." There is a culture being created, and there are reckless, opportunistic people who are turning a buck on it, and not everybody marinating in that culture is necessarily the most well-balanced jar on the shelf. This isn't about guns. It is about weaponry. It is about why someone would arm themselves so luxuriously, and how they came to believe it was necessary. I think we've been awfully damned lucky so far.