#technocratic loss

[postmodernart81]

Nicholaas Chiao, Heavenly Challenge, 2024, marker on paper

[ap-trash-compactor]

Russian interference existed in 2016 and 2020. The country was racist and exist in 2016 and 2020. The left flank was unreliable and third party candidates ran in 2016 and 2020.

Biden’s career and his professional style genuinely represented a political coalition that reflects where slightly more than half the country actually is.

The Dem party leadership, elite donors (cough Clooney cough), and twitterati live in a shared delusion, and their passionate resistance to the politics that made Biden a fixture in the senate and a victor in 2020 is what fucked the country over this time around.

“The nation is bad because teamsters and white people and men especially young men and old people all have Problems that they need to Fix and they need to Be Better and do what we want in the way we want with the words we want” is a losing campaign message, but watch Twitter and the DNC triple down on it.

The loss last night was a pure reversal of Biden’s gains from 2020. Which doesn’t mean the country, which is the same racist and sexist and generally conservative place it was in 2020, is just made purely of deplorable people and should be thrown wholesale in the garbage. It means that a winning coalition includes a lot of people the party decided to kick in the nards this time around. And unless the party learns from that, unless the party takes seriously the business of governing with all those people instead of having a technocrat’s tantrum about how the country isn’t where it ~should~ be, the party is not going to be able to govern.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

* * * *

SOTU DEBRIEF - DARK BRANDON BRINGS IT!

TCINLA

MAR 8, 2024

The Party of Class and Integrity celebrates another ass whipping - look at all those around the Dumbest Congressional Bimbo Ever as they realize how bad they got their asses kicked

Last night’s State of the Union was a punch in the face not only of the heckling MAGAT Morons, but the Otherwise-Unemployables of the DC Press Corpse. As well, the Democrat’s Professional Pearl Clutcher’s Caucus can join the others in officially retiring “He’s too old” once and for damn all. The Press Corpse stands today beside their MAGAt buddies, trying not to admit to the exact nature of the material covering their faces.

Over.

Done.

Finished.

The official Democratic response to this collection of clucks from now to November is, “You saw that State of the Union speech. Joe Biden is sharper than Donald Trump will ever be and is ready for the fight.”

You can tell November’s Losers saw their coming loss clearly when their majority criticism of President Biden was “He was too mean and talked too fast!” You know he left a mark. That was the most perfectly tuned-in SOTU speech I have ever seen, delivered with fire and energy by a man as far from the Press Corpse’s concept of a doddering old man, diminished in drive and energy as possible. The New York Times Opinion Section got hit in the face by a freight train of ideas and energy.

Joe was Old Man Strong. Dark Brandon. Killer Joe.

Biden delivered.

It was the best center-left populist presidential speech ever. Less technocratic than Obama; less curated than Clinton - a solid knock-it-over-the-outfield-fence.

As many Republicans feared, Biden was more than able to “spar with the disruptors,” as one observer reported, using their jeers to make his own policy points. (“Sparring with MAGAts” is also known as “shooting fish in a barrel”). It’s hard to believe the GOP could be so stupid with their heckling that they walked straight in to a second SOTU trap, that went off when Biden maneuvered them perfectly into taking their proposed $2 trillion dollar tax cut off the table. But then again, they are Republicans, and it’s well-known you have to score an IQ lower than ambient room temperature to get your party card there nowadays.

Biden’s speech was combative and sharp, the solid punch in MAGA’s face they’ve been asking for every day for so long. The “senile” narrative went flying into the dumpster fire. Once again, Republicans set the bar too low, and got knocked on their collective fat ass.

Joe argued forcefully from the strong side about America’s destiny, security, and purpose, laying down a fierce bright line against Putin and the forces of autocracy.

He more than made it through the SOTU address. That moment his supporters always fear never came. Politico, demonstrating that most real political knowledge is 20/20 hindsight, called the speech the “turn-the-tables SOTU.” They go on to report that the Biden campaign had their best two hours of fundraising so far in this cycle from 9 to 11 p.m. last night. A CNN flash poll finds that 62 percent of viewers thought the policies Biden laid out would move the country in the right direction.

The New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu wrote: “That overall impression—of a vigorous president, strong enough to take the fight to his detractors —will linger more deeply in the minds of most who watched than the substance of anything he said.”

But what was really interesting to me was watching the political midget behind Biden’s left shoulder. Mike Johnson’s histrionic facial expressions demonstrated everything wrong, idiotic, dangerous and treasonous about MAGA Republicans.

Johnson was both ridiculous and politically smaller than he actually is. He did applaud Biden’s call for aid to Ukraine early in the speech, which he does seem to support personally, even though doing so demonstrated how he’s too afraid of his crazy caucus to allow a straight-up vote. He is likely to go down in history as the one person who more than any other handed Ukraine to Vladimir Putin.

His mugging for the camera was more obviously overdone than what passed for “emoting” in silent movies. He nodded that solemn “more in anger than in sorrow” nod. He rolled his eyes more than a teenage girl listening to her elders.

What was really sad was noting what he rolled his eyes at! The most important was January 6 (of which he is a noted participant in the attempted coup). When Biden said: “We must be honest. The threat to democracy must be defended. My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth about Jan. 6. I will not do that.” MAGAMike gave his most sustained eye roll. Close runner-ups were his responses to abortion rights and freedom, and the border bill that he killed when told to by Dear Leader. And he did that last one while Senator James Lankford - the chief GOP negotiator on the bill - listened to Biden lay out its provisions and nodded on camera, clearly mouthing “That’s true.” Mikey even shook his head at “buy American”!

His eye roll over “The very idea of America is that we are all created equal, deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives. We’ve never fully lived up to that idea, but we’ve never walked away from it either,” was the real demonstration of just how dangerous he really is.

The MAGA Republican Party doesn’t believe we’re all equal. MAGA, and MAGA Mike, knows that if you’re not a right-wing Christian, you are not a good American.

Of course, there was also Marjorie Traitor Goon, whose ridiculous getup and MAGA hat elicited a “WTF?” look from Biden when he first saw her - and which was in apparent violation of House rules (but then, she IS a violation of House rules). Lindsey Graham’s pasted-on embarrassed smile at least demonstrates he has more self-awareness than his fellow MAGA cockroaches, as he considers how far he has fallen. Watching the MAGA screamer in the gallery get arrested was nice. It came down to just how dumbstruck the Republicans were as this man who - according to the Volkischer Beobachter, er, I mean Faux Snooze - can’t remember his own middle name or string two sentences together, zingered them repeatedly as he publicly exposed their un-American extremism.

Overall, Biden’s speech showed how he can win, and how MAGA, being on the wrong side of history, will lose.

And then, savoing the speech, just when I had forgotten there was going to be an Official Response, there was “America’s Mom,” sitting on a stool in her kitchen, there in East Buttfuck, Alabam-bam. Katie Britt had the most scenery-chewing response to a SOTU speech I’ve ever seen, and given that her competition was the ever-thirsty Marco Rubio and the ever-hapless Bobby Jindal, that was quite a win. Just another example of The Rising Young GOP Star, Cursed Forever by the SOTU Response.

The kitchen setting was the perfect metaphor for what MAGA intends for women: put them back in their place - “Kinder Kirche Kuche,” as their wonderboy Adolf put it.

I’ve spent enough time in Hollywood to be completely conversant with serious failure in public, and Britt’s performance didn’t even rise to the local-dinner-theater overacting you see from those who never had talent to begin with. With a Republican candidate for governor in her state of Alabambam campaigning on revoking women’s right to vote, and all the other MAGA moves to make the Handmaid’s Tale a documentary, delivering her speech in a kitchen was…

A choice. One of those tiny moments that completely illuminate the larger reality.

And then…

Appropos of nothing other than I love it when a Real Asshole gets punched really hard in the face, the news this morning that Doctor Feelgood Ronny Jackson has “Gotten His” brings a smile to my face that might last the weekend:

After the Defense Department Inspector General report on the White House Medical Unit found “Doctor Feelgood” had engaged in “inappropriate conduct” when he was the top White House physician for Presidents Obama and Trump, the Navy removed him from the Rear Admiral list last June. Yes, Jackson, who was a rear admiral when he retired in 2019, is now listed as a captain.

A spokesperson for the Navy stated that the “substantiated allegations in the DoDIG investigation of Rear Adm Ronny Jackson are not in keeping with the standards the Navy requires of its leaders and, as such, the Secretary of the Navy took administrative action in July 2022.”

Hurrah!

The losers just keep on losing. It’s what losers do.

[fallout-fallen-knight]

Fallout 4: Redesigned

In the year 2077, the world was bathed in atomic hellfire, and nearly all of humanity was wiped out in an instant. In the intervening years, the survivors slowly began to put their lives back together. As their ancestors of old had, they formed encampments, which became villages, which became towns. In the Commonwealth, the region encompassing much of old world Massachusetts, survivors began to discover that there was more than just their meager towns, and forged alliances with one another for food and clean water, mutual defense, and other goods. These alliances eventually united under one flag: that of the Minutemen, headquartered in the town of Quincy.

Eventually peoples’ attention turned to the skeletal remains of old Boston, and some forged a path inwards to find if there was anything left in the city. There they found the great green jewel of the Commonwealth: a baseball stadium that would become the mighty walls of Diamond City. Diamond City flourished, but disputes in its ruling family led a group to leave and establish Goodneighbor, a town “of the people, for the people”. For years, these twin towns were major hubs in the Commonwealth, with people, goods, information, and most importantly, money flowing through them. In an attempt to further unite the region, the Minutemen approached both cities to form the Commonwealth Provisional Government, creating an era of cooperation and mutual prosperity.

Fifteen years ago, the Institute emerged from underneath the ruins of the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, and everything changed. The Institute offered great advances in agriculture, medicine, and cybernetics, with one simple cost: complete and total fealty. With them they also brought synths: biological robots who’s body and mind can be molded to the Institute’s purposes, which made up the bulk of the Institute’s military and labor forces. Within a month of their appearance, the Commonwealth Provisional Government collapsed as Diamond City suddenly welcomed the Institute with open arms. As the Minutemen were beaten back, other towns within the ruins of Boston were faced with the choice of acquiescing to the Institute or being cut off from all trade and communication, and found they would gladly lend their flagpoles to the Institute.

For years, the Minutemen and the Railroad operated on the fringes of the Commonwealth: the Minutemen protecting those who have fled the city of Boston in the wake of the Institute, and the Railroad ferrying escaped synths out of Boston and, if possible, the Commonwealth. However, each organization has recently suffered a devastating loss as the Institute seeks to solidify the power they hold over the Commonwealth outside Boston. Moreover, armored scouts from the Brotherhood of Steel, a technocratic cult from the Capital Wasteland, have been seen around the southern reaches of the Commonwealth.

You are from Quincy, a town which until recently was the center of Minuteman activity in the Commonwealth. Late last night, you heard gunfire and screams, smelled blood and fire. This morning you are the Sole Survivor of the massacre that destroyed the town and the Minutemen alike.

Fallout 4: Redesigned is a personal project of mine, as I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the lore and worldbuilding surrounding Fallout 4. It seeks to rebuild the setting and story from the ground up, reworking most aspects of the game itself from the Sole Survivor to the factions, the companions, the main quest, and more. This series can be found at #fallout 4 redesigned, as I write it.

[regina-bithyniae]

High Technocrat Bithy declares mandatory 10% savings rate as paternal pension regulation, lowering public's consumption expectations in sustainable way of ensuring retirement savings. ENRAGED to learn, 50 years later, that they fully offset the mandated savings with equal levels of debt in expectation of retirement payout!

A win for Permanent Income Hypothesis, and a loss for Enlightened Technocracy.

[engineeringphilosopher]

Martin Heidegger: *Being and Time* (*Sein und Zeit*), published in 1927. 1. **Ontology and Existentialism**: Heidegger focuses on the question of being (ontology) and tries to rediscover the meaning of "being" beyond previous philosophical traditions. It introduces the concept of "Dasein" (being-in-the-world), a term that refers to the existential condition of the human being, who is always immersed in a context and a world. 2. **Temporality**: A central part of Heidegger's thought is the idea that the human being is fundamentally temporal. The past, present and future are interconnected in the human experience. His analysis of temporality seeks to show how time is not a simple succession of moments, but rather a fundamental structure of existence. 3. **Being-for-death**: Heidegger argues that awareness of death is a fundamental characteristic of human existence. It introduces the concept of "being-for-death" (Sein-zum-Tode), which describes how understanding one's own mortality can lead to a more authentic life, in which the individual confronts their own finiteness and makes account of its most significant consequences. decisions. 4. **Authenticity and inauthenticity**: Heidegger distinguishes between an authentic life and an inauthentic life. An authentic life is lived in full awareness of one's mortality and individuality, while an inauthentic life is characterized by conformity to social expectations and dispersion in worldly activities. 5. **Technology and Modernity**: In his later writings, Heidegger focuses on the criticism of technology and modernity. For him, technology is a form of "unveiling" (aletheia) that reduces nature and man to simple resources to be used. This technocratic view of the world, according to Heidegger, can lead to a loss of meaning and connection with being. 6. **Critique of Humanism**: Heidegger criticizes traditional humanism, which he sees as man-centered in a way that forgets the fundamental question of being. Instead, he proposes an "overcoming of humanism" that recognizes the centrality of being rather than of the human being as the measure of all things.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

I love el salvador because its proof that you can literally just disregard left wing ideology completely, do the exact opposite of what (((they))) say we can't/arent allowed to do, and the end result is objective improvement lol based president bukakke is /ourguy/

lol

>>Despite Bukele presenting his administration as “populist” he is anything but a political outsider or a champion of “the people.” After getting kicked out of the then-ruling Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) for allegedly assaulting a female party official, Bukele, a former advertising executive, joined the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) whose founding members came from the aforementioned Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). Furthermore, Bukele’s rise to power took place during an election in which nearly 50% of eligible Salvadoran voters abstained. It’s even possible that Bukele was appointed in response to the FMLN government’s friendlier relationship with China. For example, in exchange for breaking ties with Taiwan and recognizing Beijing as the official capitol of China, FLMN received $150 million and a donation of 3,000 tons of rice from the Chinese Communist Party. Likewise, during the Trump administration’s 2019 attempt to oust Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on behalf of the neoliberal reactionary Juan Guaido, the FMLN took the side of the Chavistas.

In America, Bukele is best known for establishing Bitcoin as Salvadoran legal tender alongside the US dollar. Cryptobros like to portray this as an attempt by a “based” technocrat unpersuaded by “ideology” to get his nation off of fiat currency and away from the control of central banks. This narrative is a total inversion of the truth; In 2020 Bukele sent 40 soldiers into the Legislative Assembly building and forced opposition politicians at gunpoint to approve a loan request of $109 million from the American government for his “Territorial Control Plan.” This plan, using COVID-19 as a pretext, deployed thousands of military personnel to work alongside local police in establishing martial law throughout El Salvador. Bukele’s government insists this led not only to a successful quarantine but a significant reduction in homicides by organized crime. However, the Territorial Control Plan relies on alliances with Salvador’s gangs, as a report by El Faro exposed. “The pandemic was a blessing for Bukele,” Carlos López Bernal, a professor of history at the University of El Salvador, told The Guardian. “He presented an apocalyptic scenario to which the only solution, supposedly, was to give the president everything he asked for. More money and more power.”

In 2021, Bukele’s party “won” a supermajority in El Salvador’s congress, supposedly with 65% of the vote. He then fired five Salvadoran Supreme Court Justices and the attorney general before the Legislative Assembly voted to accept Bitcoin as legal tender. This decision was influenced by Bukele’s close relationship to Strike CEO Jack Mallers, the descendant of Chicago finance royalty and a member of Forbes 30 under 30. According to Slate: “Bukele’s government rolled out a digital crypto wallet in app form, called Chivo (Salvadoran slang for cool), which came preloaded with $30 of Bitcoin to encourage adoption. Many who downloaded it found it confusing and buggy, or that their $30 had already been stolen by identity thieves. A study by economists at the University of Chicago, Penn State and Yale found that of those who managed to access it, most cashed out their $30 and didn’t use Chivo again.”

Towards the start of May, cryptocurrency experienced its worst crash yet. This ongoing crash has already wiped out $400 billion in market capitalization and bankrupted innumerable investors. As Slate notes, “El Salvador is on the verge of defaulting on its debts, which amount to close to 100 percent of its gross domestic product. This is exacerbated by the loss of value of the country’s Bitcoin holdings, which Bukele bragged he would trade with public funds on his phone while in the bathroom. As of now, he has personally cost the Treasury about $40 million—an amount equal to its next foreign debt payment, due to bondholders in June.”

Just before the epic crypto crash, Bukele unveiled plans for a city, “funded by the sale of a Bitcoin bond and powered by geothermal energy from the nearby Conchagua volcano.” Now, the country’s bonds are trading at 40% of their original value. But like any good con artist, cult leader, or multi-level marketing guru, Bukele has doubled down on his Bitcoin “gamble.” In the midst of the crypto crash, El Salvador hosted a “financial inclusion conference” attended by “44 central bankers from developing countries around the world.” This conference was organized by the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, formed in 2008 by central bankers in Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand in “close collaboration” with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2013, Bill Gates spoke at a meeting hosted by the United Nations General Assembly to tout the merits of “digital financial inclusion” via digital payment systems. The invite reads: “Today 2.5 billion adults are excluded from the formal financial services sector. Yet governments, the development community and the private sector make billions of dollars in cash payments to people in emerging economies, many of them poor and financially excluded. Shifting these salaries, pensions, social welfare stipends and emergency relief payments from cash to electronic has the potential to improve the livelihoods of low-income people by advancing financial inclusion and helping people save.

During the upcoming United Nations General Assembly, UNDP, UNCDF and the Better Than Cash Alliance are hosting an event on how partnerships between governments, private sector and development organizations are helping to promote inclusive growth. It will focus on how digital payments can catalyze financial inclusion, and as a result, can be a driver of inclusive growth and development.”

In January 2021 the Bank of International Settlements issued a report stating, “Most central banks are exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and their work continues apace amid the Covid-19 pandemic. As a whole, central banks are moving into more advanced stages of CBDC engagement, progressing from conceptual research to practical experimentation.” Since 2017, “the share of central banks actively engaging in some form of CBDC work grew by about one third and now stands at 86%.” The BIS report found that 56 central banks are now researching or developing some form of digital currency. 

During the early stages of the pandemic in 2020 programmers well versed in COBOL, a 40 year old programming language, were in high demand. This demand mainly came from state governments, who still use COBOL to dispense unemployment benefits. “Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old,” New Jersey governor Chris Murphy told CNBC. “There’ll be lots of postmortems. and one of them on our list will be, how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?” Murphy’s concerns were echoed by Kansas governor Laura Kelly: “So many of our Departments of Labor across the country are still on the COBOL system; you know very, very old technology.” Connecticut, California, New York, and Pennsylvania “still rely on decades-old mainframe systems based on the COBOL language as well.”

If all of this still sounds banal or benign to you, consider the following: PRISM, the massive NSA surveillance machine “exposed” by Islamaphobic Ayn Rand fanboy and descendant of numerous lifelong feds Edward Snowden, is the direct descendant of PROMIS, a tracking software developed by a “former” NSA fed working in the private sector through his firm Inslaw. Inslaw originally developed PROMIS to help the Department of Justice and local law enforcement agencies across America “update” their prehistoric filing systems in the mid-1980s. PROMIS was later stolen by Mossad spies and infamously distributed by Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell, before making its way back to its homeland. In the meantime, the same NSA that was building PRISM and had produced PROMIS was working on the hash algorithm that made Bitcoin possible. 

------

Covid Imperialism, Crypto Colonialism, and the Real “Great Reset” – Beyond_Lies_The_Wub (wordpress.com)

[sanctiphera]

He couldn't cope with a modern Western society that treats women and minorities like people. So he moved to a more corrupt society, run by hardmen, where it's okay to treat some people as less than others.

Then, he acts shocked and horrified when it turns out, the hardmen will treat him really badly — maybe even worse than is justified by his creepy rapey behaviour — to curry favour with more developed countries.

He is shocked.

But the algorithm promotes Andrew Tate for a reason.

Everything he says and does looks tailor-made to fit in with the strategy of tension. What he does and says is quite ridiculous, but the themes that he will touch on are very much in line with what we find out of Anglo-American intelligence.

Romanticizing Islam, for example, has been a long-term project of British intelligence going back to Lawrence of Arabia.

And what's Andrew Tate been doing lately?

He's been promoting Islam as the antidote to wokeness. His cartoonish take on manliness will ironically keep dysfunctional men in a perpetual state of adolescence that's very much intentional.

The Tavistock Institute (and other Western academic institutions connected to intelligence) have been studying methods to reduce the population through social engineering.

What better way to reduce the population than by telling frustrated young men to become materialistic frat boys forever?

Yes, he says he wants men to have lots of kids. However, he is promoting an interpretation of masculinity that is so cartoonish that, if taken seriously, not very many guys out there would be successful in finding a woman, much less having kids.

Almost nothing he says is meant to be taken seriously, or at least not literally. He literally said that dopamine is the worst thing ever for you because his bro science brain told him to say that shit. By that logic, he must believe that Parkinson's disease (characterized by a loss of ability to produce dopamine) is wonderful.

But his outrageous antics are the point. They grab your attention, and you either think he's wonderful or you think he's a horrid character.

Most people don't understand that he's a useful character to manipulate the population into embracing despotic technocratic governance (he really animates the folks who love censorship).

[frothlad]

Before I dive into a closer look at two thematically linked cases, I want to make something clear: If Chief Justice John Roberts were standing on front of me, on fire, begging me to piss on him to put it out, I would say, no, that's the Court's prerogative, I can't intrude on that.

The two cases are Loper Bright v. Raimondo, and Corner Post v. Federal Reserve, and together they establish the principle that the courts are in charge of federal regulations, not the executive branch and the agencies charged by law with making those regulations, and these regulations may be challenged at any time by anyone, no matter how long those regulations have been in place.

When coupled with the potent and perfected weapon of judge shopping that the right-wing uses with such enthusiasm, the power of democratic Presidents past and present has been crippled. For instance, under Corner Post, there's nothing to stop Judge Kacsmaryk from re-opening the challenge to the mifepristone approval of 2000; after all, the plaintiff organization was not "injured" until the organization came into existence.

Since there is no corresponding lawlessness on the democratic side -- no massive legal movement, no indoctrinated judges, no pattern of behavior, no supermajority on the Supreme Court -- there is no corresponding loss of power to Republican presidents in the future.

Before I go any further, and before we give into despair: What can we do? Unlike the presidential immunity case, this can be resolved with statutory changes. This means that we must make Congress functional again. And that means electing Democratic members of Congress in the House, where a simple majority is sufficient, and electing young Democratic senators who are willing to overturn the filibuster, and then riding them as constituents with the demand that they modify the Administrative Procedures Act and related laws to make clear that technocratic agencies are responsible for technocratic regulations, not judges, and that final rules become genuinely final with the passage of time.

So, onto the cases. It is instructive to note that for all the talk about the grand principles that these cases turn into anarchy, these cases are penny-ante bullshit. That's what the Federalist Society and its associated projects do: They find -- or make up, as in the Colorado gay wedding website case -- some half-ass case and proceed to contort it into a case that attacks a grand principle.

Loper Bright is about federal observers on fishing boats. Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the National Marine Fisheries Service administers the fisheries in US marine waters in order to ensure that we don't vacuum up every fish and turn the ocean into desert. It's been sort of successful. E.g. the flounder fishery in Alaskan waters is very healthy, but the Grand Banks are sitting at less than 10% of historic catches, IIRC.

Anyway, under the Act, the NMFS has set regulations that (some) fishing boats must carry federal observers, and sets fees to pay for the observers. Loper Bright Enterprises and others don't want to pay the fees, because they have listened to evil advisors. Or, I dunno. Now, granted -- life on a fishing vessel is hard, and the market does not permit fishers to receive fair value for their labor, which is an issue throughout our economy. But we know as clearly as we know anything that without those observers, fishers will vacuum the oceans empty.

But again, who pays?

The Act does not lay any of this out; it delegates authority to the NMFS, which has made regulations to implement the Act's goals of not running out of fish. When Loper Bright et al challenged the fees, they lost in the lower courts, under the doctrine of "Chevron deference". Now, Chevron deference dates from a Reagan-era case, and it says, essentially, that as long as an agency justifies its regulations in a reasonable fashion that's compatible with the law behind the regulation, the courts should defer to the agency, which presumably has experts who have made their careers working in the industry being regulated and therefore know what's possible and what's reasonable. Since judges aren't any of that, it's not a good idea to second-guess those who are.

The decision here says that's bullshit; judges are the only people who can have final say over what a law means and whether a regulation is a reasonable way to achieve it.

It is breathtaking in its arrogance, and in its arrogating of power away from the executive to the judicial.

Fun fact: Justice Roberts speaks of Chevron being decided "by a bare quorum of six Justices". Guess what the margin in this decision is.

Also fun fact: Chevron was decided by a right-wing Court in 1984 when Republicans controlled the executive, and overturned by a right-wing Court in 2024 when Republicans controlled the courts. Yes, this is deeply, fundamentally, partisan. It is impossible to consider this case without considering the politics.

Roberts' opinion anchors its lawlessness in the Administrative Procedures Act, which says that courts will decide questions of law -- which is fair enough, but this case makes it clear that the Court thinks that everything is a question of law. This is why Congress could fix this; all it has to do is put Chevron deference into the APA.

Since as soon as Clinton was elected, the right-wing Court started chipping away at Chevron, Roberts concludes that there has been no "reliance" on Chevron, so there is no reason not to explicitly overrule it. Which is brilliant: All you have to do is hate on something long enough, and the fact that you hate it becomes justification to overturn it. But the fact is that agencies and Congress have been operating under Chevron for 40 years, so this is not a little change, this is a huge change. And, as we'll see, it opens a hunting season on every regulation that will overwhelm the lower courts, or empower courts like the Fifth Circuit to enact the 2025 Project knowing that the Court will not have the ability to respond to every case.

Roberts for six, Kagan for three. Thomas solo concurrence to rant about separation of powers; Gorsuch solo concurrence to attack stare decisis as a principle. There's a reason why Gorsuch -- for all that he is sometimes principled -- is a key member of the anarchist wing of the Court. He would blow up any inconvenient precedent, and do so while proclaiming how principled it is to do so. You know how some left-wing activists fail to achieve anything because nothing is sufficiently principled to satisfy them. That's Gorsuch's relationship to precedent: No precedent is pure enough to survive.

Kagan is, of course, completely persuasive: Courts are not political and do not answer to voters, and Congress does not and cannot give power to the judiciary branch to execute its laws, and agencies have expertise that court do not have. Etc., etc. Any practitioner could write this opinion, as futile as it is.

The separation of powers that the majority invokes here is contrary to our understood theory of government: Instead of Congress binding agencies to law and granting them power to executive, and agency overreach checked by the courts, with the courts prudentially checking themselves and Congress having the power to check and rebalance by rewriting the law, in this case, the Court takes advantage of Congress's inability to act to declare the entire judicial branch unchecked by any prudence.

So every federal regulation is now subject to the whim of any district judge in Texas or Louisiana.

It gets worse.

The statute of limitations for challenging a regulation that has reached the Final Rule stage is six years.

Corner Post throws that out.

Corner Post is about credit card fees. Corner Post is a truck stop in North Dakota, opened in 2018. Credit card companies charge "interchange fees" for moving money from banks to merchants. Those fees were standardized under Dodd-Frank in 2010, which gave the Federal Reserve the authority to cap the fees, which became a final rule in 2011. You already know the critical point: This is an agency action. Under the APA, from the time the rule became final, there was a six-year statute of limitations to challenge it, which expired before Corner Post opened. (Industry groups challenged the regulation at the time, and lost.)

Now, if you're me, you say "Corner Post had fair notice of the business environment it was to operate in, and is presumed to have known that it would be subject to the interchange fees under the final rule". That's how law works. If Corner Post is so successful that it "has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in interchange fees" in the six years since its opening, the interchange fee rule is not really impeding their business. If it didn't want to pay interchange fees, it didn't have to open. If it didn't like interchange fees, it could lobby Congress or the Federal Reserve to change the rule.

But I am not a Federalist Society judge, and I am not part of a sexumvirate dedicated to granting itself power.

Corner Post joined an industry group that was continuing to challenge the regulation, and claimed that the six-year limit didn't apply to it, because its claim didn't accrue until it paid the first interchange fee.

The Court holds that Corner Post was injured by the rule, and because its injuries were within the six year limit, it has standing to challenge the rule. Barrett for six.

This is a technical decision about when a claim accrues; it is very inside-law. That technical aspect is probably why Barrett wanted to write the opinion, or why Roberts assigned it to her; it would have appealed to her professorial nature.

Kavanaugh has a long solo concurrence reiterating that Corner Post was injured (it's not subject to the rule, the bank and credit card companies are, but it must pay the fees), and a long discourse on the remedy available, arguing that vacatur of the regulation is appropriate. He's writing presumably because some of his colleagues like Gorsuch have been inveighing against nationwide injunctions and overbroad vacaturs.

Jackson has the dissent.

So, Greg, why is this a deal? It's a technical decision about when claims accrue. That's something only lawyers could love, surely? I think you can probably work it out.

If a claim accrues for purposes of challenging a regulation when a newly-created entity is subject to the regulation, then you can challenge any regulation, no matter how old or entrenched in the industry, simply by creating a new entity.

That is, in part, what happened in the mifepristone case: A new "physicians' group" was formed in Amarillo, solely that it could raise a new claim against the FDA's actions (and sue specifically in Amarillo). You could do the same thing with any claim against any regulation. If the petrochemical industry wanted to put lead back in gasoline, it just runs up a new refinery subsidiary that wants to market "no-knock gasoline"; now that subsidiary has been injured by the regulation against lead, so it can sue.

In combination with Loper Bright, that courts need not pay attention to agencies' choices in response to gaps and ambiguities in empowering laws, you now have courts with final authority over anything the federal government has ever done, regardless of the passage of time.

The Court is not empowering Trump's coup; it is empowering its own.

[postmodernart81]

Nicholaas Chiao, Battle 1991, marker on paper

[denimbex1986]

'There is one triumphant moment in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer: an imaginative flash of apocalyptic anxiety for a post-nuclear world. In the film’s final exchange, Nolan leaves us to consider a man’s regret for his development of the atomic bomb that brutalized the civilian families of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a moment that neither Oppenheimer the film nor the man deserves.

Nolan cites Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror as a reference for Oppenheimer — a revelation that exposes the superficiality behind its tangled narrative. In Mirror, Tarkovsky weaves disparate narrative strands to plot the scattered thoughts of a dying man. It ditches the comfort of linearity for conceptual cohesion. The result is inventive, transcendent. It compels a new ontology of film.

Nolan perverts Mirror’s legacy. His structural subversions are confused. What is Oppenheimer even about? What are we meant to make of its protagonist? The film meanders — Nolan treats its chronologies like wind-up toys. They are left upon release to determine their own divergent trajectories: the humiliation of Lewis Strauss, the loss of Jean Tatlock, Kitty Oppenheimer’s depression. Those that attempt to assign meaning to this film will often say that it is about Oppenheimer’s regret. This is what Nolan would have you believe, if the film’s final scene, that one triumphant moment, is any indication. Then what do you make of its preceding three hours? Its preoccupation with the physicist’s reputation and romantic life leaves little room to contemplate his culpability. One redemptive sequence of the film is a harsh cross-examination in which Oppenheimer admits that he recommended Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decimation. But Nolan’s reproach is insincere — the film answers his sin with Rami Malek’s moment of glory, in which his character defends the physicist’s honor. This is the incoherency of a noncommittal Nolan who juggles ideas with little concern for where they land. He abuses Göransson’s score to foster some mirage of thematic cohesion.

One can only imagine what Stanley Kubrick could do with Nolan’s footage. He might allow us to at least sit with an image long enough to contemplate it. Nolan commands the edit like a schizophrenic autocrat, dictating the placement of film with misguided conviction. He would rather have us glimpse at Jack Quaid’s astonishment than spend a few seconds with an atomic bomb. Nolan champions this film as a historic development for practical effects in cinema — so let us look at the effects, Christopher!

An unsuspecting casualty of Oppenheimer’s disorientation is the American Left. Do not be fooled by Nolan’s sympathetic treatment of the film’s Communist Party; he grants no real credence to Leftist ideas. He condescends them. In the same breath that Nolan condemns McCarthyism, he justifies its characteristic paranoia through his sensationalization of the Chevalier incident. He scorns the thought that the Manhattan Project could have been a nationalist strategy of empire-building. His neglect of the Japanese and Indigenous American victims of the Project is a whole other discussion. Oppenheimer carries this cosmopolitan attitude: “Let us play nice with the communists, everyone deserves a right to express their beliefs,” and so on. It understands communism as some respectable but still misguided alternative lifestyle — the way that an agnostic might tolerate a religious moderate. This is a fundamental misinterpretation of Marxist doctrine, which places socialism as the exclusive order of social organization that must, as the historical dialectic demands, wholly replace capitalism. Nolan’s communists are lethargic, innocuous. The Nolanite brand of technocratic, liberal idealism infantilizes the American Left at the same time that it upheaves Nolan’s very own industry.

It is a shame that Oppenheimer is an impressive film. Its performances are tremendous. Its score is tremendous. Every Nolan release carries a certain smugness — this grand, attention-seeking self-importance. It is a pretentious attitude that will have cynical critics often root against him. And yet, as with Interstellar, Dunkirk and the like, Oppenheimer succeeds by embedding its problems into a popular vehicle for technical flourish. So long as Nolan can claim critical success, popular filmmaking will continue to sedate its audiences and justify ideological perfidy. The Left is not safe with Nolan.'

[mitigatedchaos]

"now [the culture] seems to be (gradually) moving under its own power again." I'm not saying you're wrong! There's a hint of this maybe? But I'd be very interested to hear what made you come to that conclusion.

From an ideological level, we can see a certain amount of exhaustion with identitarian politics after it failed to yield the dividends it was supposed to, partially discrediting its advocates in a way that couldn't be achieved by argument. And that politics was behind the bizarre "Corporate Memphis" style which aimed to be as inoffensive as possible through the removal of faces, loosening of the human form, etc.

I think the culture is still moving fairly slowly. Something like Season 5 of Samurai Jack, which popularized Carpenter Brut with its trailer, was not the culture moving under its own power, but rather a bunch of determined 50-year-old men gritting their teeth and dragging it, whether it wanted to move or not.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the culture moving under its own power, but depends on Japan as part of the loop, which isn't sustainable. It's the same for the recent movie Bullet Train, which I recommend.

But if you want to talk object level, I don't listen to terrestrial radio, but I do listen to music in stores, restaurants, etc.

In that line, Molly Burch - Emotion feat. Wild Nothing.

Two things. One, you can hear the vaporwave in this, right? That terrible nostalgic longing that burst onto the scene back in 2016 or so. Vaporwave was an offshoot, and now it's being reintegrated.

Two, who the fuck is this? I was never one for celebrities, but I've never heard of this person in my life, and I'd have to guess this is relatively mainstream from hearing it out in the wild.

Something like 2017's The Killers - The Man is good stuff, but they're an act from the mid-00's. If they put out good new stuff, that's good, but that doesn't indicate replacement personnel once they age out.

Part of what's going on - and I think Kontext will agree with me - based on Zoomers and even Gen-X wearing katakana T-shirts and hoodies as like a completely normal thing, and T-shirts for classic rock bands for some Zoomers, is a reboot from 2008 culture drawing more closely from the more heavily online, anime con, etc factions within the culture. We may be about to witness 00s-wave.

I'm from the '00s myself, and listened to electronica before it became (seemingly) the standard. Before there were vtubers, I was on Second Life. Before transgenderism burst onto the scene in national politics, I knew some transgender people. Now people are talking about AI alignment, and Eliezer Yudkowsky may become a household name before this decade is through. EAs are a world-known thing now.

Overall I would say that my forecasting horizon is converging with the current timeline. I may lose my advantage in about 3 years.

I'd wager that what we're going to see is not an instantaneous roaring back of the culture, but rather an organic regrowth over a period several years.

One possible pivot is that as conservatives take up the tools of censorship currently favored by the identitarian left, factions within the left that want to exit the sterile, sexless 10's will use this as an excuse to paint censorship as 'uncool.' The original arguments were largely social power politics rather than the modern [rational/military/industrial/technocratic] style that we see among the Rationalists (as the "lost" materialist progressives), and this would allow a social power answer, at a potential loss of ability to coordinate adherence to social rules more generally.

[kalpasogi]

YOUR BRAVE NEW WORLD,

HOW TO AVOID BEING PART OF THE GREAT RESET

I am surrounded with a humanity intent on destroying itself

The whole crux is a misinterpretation of what is the nature of life and existence .

As Professor Robert Pope says we are living in global society premised on the second law of thermodynamics the heat death of the entropic universe . The nuclear bomb is a good example and science has lost its way as there is no room for the infinite human psyche .

It requires more than a substantially new manner of thinking but a new way of being .

Singularities abound in terms of climate change , the internet of things ,artificial intelligence ,the third global extinction of biodiversity the manipulation of DNA ,the enormous ecological foot print of humanity ,the loss of indigenous wisdom and the loss of love.

People wil not talk about the fact that conventional medical treatment is the third cause of death in the USA .

Colonialism as the corporate aristocratic technocratic elite ,is destroying the flora and fauna and humans on this world

I have been trying to get my message across for many years and it requires an integration of philosophy ,medicine, healing ,history ,arts ,politics and ecology and yet few want to listen and when the modern day avatars of the human potential Movement speak on the internet like mind valley they charge a fortune to their devotees

This information is so important but how can you monetise something which should be freely given?

[remembering-the-future]

Lecture Title: "Bighead, Tetotum, Terbic, and the Triumph of Technology Over Humanity"

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow denizens of this enlightened era,

We gather here to celebrate what may be the greatest achievement in human history: the culmination of Bighead, Tetotum, and Terbic—the veritable Holy Trinity of our technocratic future. I understand some of you might still be wrestling with these terms, relics as you are of the outdated era of "rational discourse," but fret not; I shall briefly illuminate these marvels of our new society.

Bighead, for those still squinting through their cognitive fog, represents the latest advancement in automated decision-making. It is a networked, self-learning entity capable of drawing conclusions so sophisticated that its creators no longer attempt to explain them. What’s the point? Humans are inherently irrational, and Bighead provides the luxury of making all our decisions for us, eliminating the stress of critical thinking. And who needs ethics when Bighead can efficiently optimize happiness indexes and productivity ratios?

Next, we have Tetotum, a wondrous innovation responsible for perpetual contentment. It’s not so much a device as it is a “life recalibrator,” constantly spinning in sync with your neural patterns. By regulating everything from your sleep cycle to your serotonin levels, Tetotum ensures that any hint of dissatisfaction is eradicated. Yes, there was a time when people debated the notion of free will, but those days are behind us, for Tetotum is here to enforce a kind of blissful homogeneity that would make even the most draconian philosopher blush.

Finally, we arrive at Terbic, an acronym for "Total Experience Regulated by Behavioral Intermediary Control." In essence, Terbic anticipates and directs your every social interaction, preventing those messy and unpredictable outbursts of genuine emotion. After all, the essence of civilization is control, and Terbic refines human interaction into a smooth, frictionless dance. It calculates, it curates, it condenses every encounter into something akin to an elaborate game of charades—minus the human error, of course.

With the triumphant combination of Bighead, Tetotum, and Terbic, our technologically advanced civilization has finally overcome the flaws of its biological origins. No longer must we struggle with the burden of thought, emotion, or individuality. Our lives are a well-oiled machine, driven by metrics we don’t understand but unquestionably adore. We can now bask in the warm glow of optimized efficiency, a future where decisions are streamlined, emotions are regulated, and social interactions are algorithmically perfected.

Some may claim that we’ve lost something crucial in this brave new world—perhaps that elusive concept of "humanity." But let us not dwell on such minor losses. After all, it’s difficult to mourn the absence of something Bighead has kindly instructed us to forget.

In conclusion, the fusion of Bighead, Tetotum, and Terbic marks not just the peak of technological advancement but the definitive triumph over our messy, irrational, and inconvenient humanity. Progress, dear audience, is not measured by the heart, but by the algorithm. And in that sense, we are truly making strides.

[natashara]

QCQ: “Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman's Environments By: JANET KRAYNAK”

Quote:

“Technocratic society, therefore, sees a dramatic shift, in which participation leads not to self-determination but, paradoxically, to alienation. 'Ours is a society of alienation,' Touraine writes, 'not because it reduces people to misery or because it imposes police restriction, but because it seduces, manipulates, and enforces conformism.'”

Comment:

I picked this quote because it captures the contradiction of our modern sense of freedom. We often think that the more choices we have, the more control we have over our lives, but Touraine's quote suggests that this freedom can actually lead to an alienation of our society. Instead of allowing us to be truly independent, the system subtly guides us towards conformity and manipulates us into accepting a preset range of options. This resonates with me because I experience a similar sense of surveillance and illusion of freedom in my daily life. It makes me question whether our so-called freedom is an illusion crafted by those in control and how we might break free from those constraints. Touraine argues that modern society's promises of freedom and choice are not true, and can actually lead to a loss of individuality through manipulation and control.

Question:

How do you think the manipulation of freedom and control affects our ability to express ourselves authentically? Are there ways we can push back against the pressures in place? Will we ever have true personal agency again?

The manipulation of freedom and control stifles our ability to express ourselves authentically, offering an illusion of choice. Society crafts a path, we, unknowingly, follow it. True freedom feels out of reach, yet our art offers a way to resist it. Through creation, we reclaim that lost individuality, pushing back against the constraints imposed on us. We might not fully escape, but in questioning and challenging we can be our authentic selves and push back.

[wolf-grimoire]

the complex liminal nightmare of extinction can be for everyone now

When you’re uncertain what you’re looking at, the catastrophic footprint of the beetle called the Agrilus planipennis Fairmaireis doesn’t really resemble a crisis. Perhaps it’s a fungus? Some genetic anomoly in the patterning and color of the ash tree’s bark?—maybe a blight at worst… Something like a pale vegetal rash.

       Then you might notice how many of these trees are lying dead and dry among so many other thriving species. When you look closer, you notice half of the ash trees you’re passing have been cut off at the stump, perhaps still lying where they fell.

       When it hits you and you realize they are dying of some sort of disease innate to the ash, it’s impossible to avoid pivoting immediately to the dire numbers literally surrounding you.

       In the lowland forests below the bluffs of the driftless, I have walked with a sinking feeling. A forest of blighted corpses. Not a single ash in sight without some obvious symptom of the infection. In a woods below the bluffs I stood surrounded by a swift extinction. I could touch it. See it scattered everywhere. It was marked in blue spraypaint. But as horrifying as it was to behold at that moment I know the strange liminal nature of extinction now—because it was the thought of this forest ten years in the future that made me feel hopeless, that turned the pit in my guts rancid.

       The beetle comes and does its thing. Then it leaves and the forest is devastated. Every last ash dead or proactively cut down. And then the cascade of death actually begins. Any dependent species will fade quickly. In the cedar—ash muskegs north of the Mississippi’s headwaters, the loss of the ash trees would mean a rapid shift in the understory. Shifts in animal and bird species. In the same region, lake shores would be rapidly and dramatically altered, and the growing bald eagle population would lose critical nesting grounds. From Minnesota’s wild rice habitats to the mountains of Appalachia where mixed forest habitats would be equally ravaged, the total loss of ecological balance cannot be comprehended nor computed in the present.

       The emerald ash borer extinction event is a nightmare playing out in silent eminations and formlessness, liminal agonies, networks of loss in which a single species of beetle—ordinary in its original habitat—can no longer be comprehended as such.

       This is not an isolated event. Extinctions are occurring for reasons appallingly similar in the python-infested Everglades. While technocratic liberalism and the moralizing laptop class fed everyone else to the climate gods, their children ordered exotic pets on a corporation called Amazon, became bored with them, and stupidly and fatefully released them into already vulnerable habitats. Very real individuals are very much responsible for North America’s countless imploding ecologies, and they aren’t evil industrials cracking whips inside factories. The simple stupid greed of a nice suburban family, as it turns out, can be just as catastrophic as a thousand logging crews.