mindless scaffolding
So perfect, yet succinct - bravo!
It’s always at best a starting off point, needing a real human to review and heavily edit. Even in the more refined spaces like surveillance where’s there’s a ton of research money thrown at it, it’s still just a pattern recognition probability gambler that needs human oversight.
These dumbfucks are too high on their own self righteousness to see the lasting damage they are causing not only to their own institutions, but the country. Absolutely GLAZING the CEO whilst completely omitting the insider trading charges leveled at him, and ignoring any and all context of UHC’s denial rates whilst pumping ’consumer satisfaction’ surveys as if health insurance is fine and dandy.
When the fourth branch flips over for belly rubs from the state, people see the base corruption and abandon mainstream media - and turn to alternatives. Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, etc where foreign influence propaganda and misinformation has no gatekeepers.
In America, ostensibly the richest nation in the world, we ration healthcare whilst the right wing politicians jeer about Canada’s system as a slippery slope to “death panels” denying care. Whilst UHC and the gang do the same thing, and that’s ‘controlling cost’ or ‘delivering efficiency’.
Distribution on a timescale is about capacity - if it’s slow for you to receive a service, that’s likely because there isn’t capacity. That capacity may have never existed because a bean counter deemed it more profitable to not hire nurses/buy dialysis machines/build a new hospital wing/etc. and have a backlog of cases.
Or that capacity exists, but is sequestered and reserved for those who pay even more; personal doctors, private clinics, or specialists who are kept idle on contract for demand surges.
Ken is harkening back to the old old school of journalistic credibility - “trust me that I’ve checked it out, and it met my standards of credibility and verification, but I won’t burn my source by revealing them”
The rub is discerning when a journalist/institution is lying/repackaging corporate or government press releases as “reporting”. Substack is a good way to free journalists of a corrupted editor, but they can also suffer from algorithmic/audience capture that incentivizes certain reporting - ie. hugbox news.
Compare that to the possibility Russia had when Russia worked on getting closer to the west after the fall of Gorbachev and becoming a democracy, If they had continued along that path, Russia would almost without a doubt be the biggest and most influential economy in Europe now.
This. They could have very easily been the “bridge to the east” for Europe, and vice versa for China & the islands. Trade, security, resources, etc instead of giving that role to Türkiye and Israel. Massive reserves of oil, gas, fertilizer precursors, and titanium. Combine that with Chinas heavy metals and labor pool, Russia could be in an economic powerhouse alliance, off ramping from a hydrocarbon economy into a manufacturing and innovation society. The Soviets kept abreast of the entire western output, their military hardware was super competitive until like the 80s.
Instead one guy threw it away.
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
NYPD barely bats above 50% for murder arrests in a ‘good’ period - not convictions. 33% is abysmal given their absurd budget and frankly unconstitutional practices like stop and frisk.
Within the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal cases can be cleared (or closed) one of two ways. The first is through arrest… The second way a case can be closed is through what is called exceptional means, where law enforcement must have either identified the offender, gathered enough evidence to arrest, charge, and prosecute someone, identified the offender’s exact location, or come up against a circumstance outside the control of law enforcement that keeps them from arresting and prosecuting the offender
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.”
“Must pass” is part of the language that ostensibly liberal media outlets like HuffPost use to cover for Democrats rolling over yet again.
Literally nothing “must pass” we’ve had how many government shutdowns from Republican shitfits over stupid culture wars and cynical “fiscal responsibilities” whilst rubber stamping national defense budget blowouts?
Democrats can add poison pill amendments too, or at least burn down the clock with the filibuster they cling too so desperately each time they achieve a majority. But they don’t, because deep down most of them are okay with this.
I guess the “Free staters” wanna die then, given their motto they’re so inexorably proud of parroting without any praxis:
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…
Someone did their Snowden reading:
Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit disclosure as to the origins of an investigation.
In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment
De facto illegal and shady as hell, but in use when the (feds especially) want to catch someone, typically via warrantless SIGINT mass surveillance. They’ll do the investigation using dragnets and broad searches through metadata and other means that are illegal and inadmissible in court, then an incredibly convenient cop/witness/informant will appear with information that permits an arrest/search under permissible means - under the hope that the suspect has incriminating evidence.
This is wayyy too convenient to get him, with all the evidence on hand, from a ‘concerned citizen’. We live in a police state, that serves the ruling and moneyed class.
Forgot a step
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 UK has a long tradition of pieing awful politicians - and guess what? It gets a laugh and memable pictures, but changes nothing.