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mitigatedchaos · 4 years ago

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Review: SAC_2045

(~3,700 words, 15 minutes)

This post will contain some minor spoilers for SAC_2045.

Summary: You may have thought SAC_2045 was a poor entry in the Ghost in the Shell franchise - actually, it's just intended for younger audiences.

Previously: Standalone Complex 202045:1-4 (superseded)

-☆☆☆-

And what did you think of the remaining episodes of GitS:SAC_2045?

[ @irradiate-space ]

Standalone Complex

There's a certain indescribable feeling associated with Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex as a work, an artistic touch related to the director associated with it, independent of other considerations. SAC_2045 has it, which isn't too surprising since Kenji Kamiyama is back.

SAC_2045 is Standalone Complex. For a brief moment, while watching it, I inhabited my pre-2016 personality and outlook. I can't tell you how much that means to me. Since the arrival of streaming I've tended to bingewatch series, but on the first run-through I decided not to bingewatch this one.

If you approach this show as season 4 of Standalone Complex (Solid State Society being season 3), it's underwhelming. Now, viewing it again, it's become obvious that a conventional season 4 of Standalone Complex was never the intent of SAC_2045 to begin with.

For those of you who have delayed until now, the English dub has been uploaded - it released without one due to the pandemic. They bring back a number of the voice actors from the excellent Standalone Complex dub, though having already watched it with subtitles, I didn't feel the need to confirm the dub's quality.

Sustainable War

To properly describe a new theory of war is the same thing as to invent it. While the idea of war as a for-profit industry has been kicked around for some time, it's generally assumed that this is a kind of parasitic relationship on the part of the war-making industry.

As time goes on, warfare becomes more abstract (partly because warfare happens where it can happen), much like society itself is becoming more abstract as information moves more quickly and humanity gains access to more energy.[1] In SAC_2045, "Sustainable War" is part of the context of the world and its current issues, but we aren't really told how it works - if it's similar to contemporary information warfare and a blurring of the lines between state and non-state actors, it's bound to be quite confusing.

I believe my earlier assessment of "Sustainable War" is correct. The key feature of sustainable war, the reason they say it's safe if you leave it to the experts, is likely that it involves AIs constantly forecasting against each other and moving units around with few direct confrontations. The goal would be to lock in a victory without having to fire a shot, except for small skirmishes that don't escalate to major incidents (due to the AI forecasting).

The presence of armed separatist movements even in Japan may also indicate that the ruling institutional bodies are engaged in a kind of Post-International Politics,[2] which treats all international relations as fundamentally existing between subnational entities - however, I believe that later information suggests this wasn't their original intent.

What makes it "sustainable"? Since if done correctly, very little is actually physically destroyed, the cost is less than conventional warfare, and thus the war can continue indefinitely. Why does it threaten humanity with destruction? Because there's an awful lot of military hardware waiting for someone to actually pull the trigger.

Season 1: Ep. 2

So what is the intent of the series' creators? I think they may be telling us through this dialogue between Togusa and Section Chief Daisuke Aramaki in episode 2.

Aramaki: Seems time has toughened you up. Togusa: Is that supposed to be a compliment? Aramaki: It is if you want it to be. Togusa: Then thanks for the kind words. “I made the right decision by choosing this line of work over my marriage.” That’s what you’re saying? Aramaki: Perhaps. [...] Togusa: They're bringing back Section 9? [...] Aramaki: But my takeaway from the proposal is this: The PM's reason for the urgent reforming of Section 9 takes priority over his personal motives. I believe his true objective is meeting the Americans' demands for the dispatch of special resources. Togusa: So it's as the Liberals feared? An American-born Prime Minister would be no more than an American puppet? Aramaki: I've yet to meet him in person, so I can't really say. But this is an opportunity to have the Major and the rest of you undertake a major operation for me once more. Togusa: What sort of op? Aramaki: Over the past few years, I have searched for an answer on how to deal with a society in turmoil. I'd like you people to lay the groundwork that will help the next generation find that answer. Togusa: I don't know what a man in my position can contribute, but I'll humbly offer whatever assistance I can.

Those of us who cried, Kamiyama, tell us the future once more! based on Standalone Complex's prophetic analysis of a memetic crime wave were bound to be disappointed. SAC_2045 is less rooted in the near future than in the now - cyberbullying, endless war amidst historic prosperity, employment suppressed by automation, savings eaten up by the complex machinations of finance, and a breakdown of national borders? That's today.

Those of us who hoped for a Ghost in the Shell: Unicorn, a psychically overpowering work that synthesizes the full body of Ghost in the Shell into a single coherent form to elevate us to a higher level of understanding, should have tempered our expectations. To reach each new philosophical level is more difficult than the last - to achieve that with Ghost in the Shell of all things would have required a multidisciplinary genius near the limits of current understanding.

Kenji Kamiyama is just an anime director. And anyhow, Gundam Unicorn was a book before it was an animated series. And who among us even knew we'd have to write a book before 2015? Ghost in the Shell was well-understood enough, so I instead wrote 25,000 words worth of hypothetical country and became a blogger, like the infamous Scott Alexander.[3]

If we approach SAC_2045 from the lens that it's a humbler work designed for younger audiences, however, some of the creative decisions make more sense.

Purin

Just how old is Purin, the MIT grad who joins the team later on? If I had to guess, that's '23歳' on that profile she provides, and Ishikawa notes that she 'skipped a few grades' on her way to a PhD. But she acts like someone a lot younger. She's enthusiastic and we're assured she's intelligent, but seems to be lacking social training. For example, she makes the mistake of assembling an era-accurate music player for Batou combined with a playlist after consulting the Tachikomas to find out what he listens to. There are two ways to take this.

The first is that she's intended as a relateable character for someone who would make this class of mistake. It's the sort of mistake I might have made at age 13-14, meaning that the show would probably be aimed at someone that age or lower. Overly enthusiastic, doesn't understand romantic relationships, impulsive, poor reading of boundaries / poor modelling of others outside of certain domains, impulsive in a way that causes social screw-ups? Yeah that could certainly apply to an ADHD kid of about that age.

And all of a sudden the tone of the first five episodes with the gun-fighting, the literal Agent Smith, the decision to place the focus in America, and even the mystery of the series being much simpler than Standalone Complex 2nd Gig's plot regarding Asian refugees in Japan make a lot more sense. This is Ghost in the Shell for kids!

Wow, I didn't think that could be done!

...is what I should say, except that around the time I acquired the ability to futurist shitpost, and I used that ability to predict that it would.

Purin II

The second reading is that the youth of the future are fucked up. She probably has some tricked out modifications, both cybernetic and genetic. Now usually you would tell someone to try to become a well-rounded human being. But...

The global economy has crashed. Batou mistakes her for a robot - creatures that look like pretty young women are a dime a dozen. In the dating market, she would be competing with full sensory immersion VR pornography on the one hand, and at the upper end of society where cybernetics are more widely available, likely women with a similar appearance but decades more experience and professional standing.

Note that in the original Standalone Complex, the team take down an 80-year-old Russian spy with the full prosthetic body of a 20-year-old. Full cyborgs aren't common then, nor are they in SAC_2045 (though cyberbrains are ubiquitous), but if the economy recovers that may change, and the sector she's trying to get in to (full-time salaried government rather than marginal private employment it would seem) is going to be very tough to enter either way.

So Purin may have to be over-optimized even to just appear on the screen. In fact, she says,

"Just so I could work at Section 9, I moved most of my sentimental memories to external storage."

Youch! It's no wonder she's socially maladjusted. Just how much of her social learning (in particular key events necessary to rebuild logical inferences on the boundaries of behavior on the fly) has she locked away?

Purin III

But you know who Purin looks like? Notorious internet personality, Gamer Girl Bath Water seller, and IRL video game character Belle Delphine.[4]

Or rather, it's the other way around - 2D animation compresses real detail into suggestive abstraction, letting your mind fill in the rest. Going from those impossible 2D shapes to 3 dimensions creates strange results, like training your machine learning algorithm on the salient features of a cat's face, applying it to human shape, and putting pink hair on the result. Belle Delphine adopts that otherworldly kind of appearance as part of her act.

Technically, this a stylistic choice. Within the framework of SAC_2045, this is what "a 23-year-old female" looks like.

Purin is in fact so non-threatening that her big red coat obscures her figure. I'm gonna go with younger audience. Now if only I could remember what pronoun she uses.[5/☆]

Motoko

With a full prosthetic body, outward signs of human-like aging are almost an artistic expression, much like in a world with cheap tissue engineering, visible scars are a choice.

When she was first introduced in the original Ghost in the Shell manga, we don't know how old Motoko Kusanagi is. It was once said that her name is analogous to "Jane Excalibur," which in English would be an obvious alias. In the first movie (from 1995), she's cool, almost cold and robotic.

In the original Standalone Complex, Motoko has a more mature personality than in the manga, but she has a clearly adult look by the standards of anime. Seriously, check out this fantastic character design (combat suit), although admittedly the better-known "leather jacket and bathing suit" design is more ridiculous, fashion-wise.[6] (Fortunately, she gets pants in her much more stylish second season outfit.)

ARISE starts off with a young Motoko Kusanagi in a chaotic post-war period before the Section 9 we know was assembled. This shows in her character design, but it really shows in her personality. This was actually why I had joked about an even earlier Ghost in the Shell.

There is a sense in which the 2017 live-action movie's Motoko is even younger. Scarlett Johansson is a killer cyborg with amnesia. She doesn't even have one day of formal combat training.

Motoko 2045

Ilya Kuvshinov designed SAC_2045's Motoko Kusanagi.

Yes, that Ilya Kuvshinov. You could be forgiven for thinking this is a teenager that hardboiled assassins Saitou and Ishikawa in the background have been hired to bodyguard.

Despite this, Atsuko Tanaka has resumed her role as Motoko's voice actress. Standalone Complex's Motoko looked 25 and felt mid-30s. SAC_2045's Motoko looks 16 and has the voice and attitude of 40.

This may make more sense than you might think.

Through Whose Eyes?

Throughout much of Ghost in the Shell as a franchise, Togusa, the only non-cyborg on the team, who is pulled from a police department instead of a military background, tends to be character used to help the people of our time relate to the future. He's the guy that doesn't know the things we also don't know, so in explaining concepts to Togusa they're explained to the audience.

In SAC_2045, most of the team are off doing cool cyborg things in America. Aramaki (whose in-world function is to create the bureaucratic environment within which Section 9 operates) tasks Togusa with finding them. The original Standalone Complex first aired in 2003. It's been 17 years since it was created - a similar situation to finding someone that reached adulthood who was born after 9/11. And during this time, Togusa's life has changed - the family man is now separated from his wife. And the world has changed - Togusa is now working for a private security firm. Togusa's role in the first five episodes isn't to guide the new viewers.

His purpose is to guide or stand-in for the old viewers.

The New Viewers

"Do you still hold a grudge against the Major and the others for leaving you behind?"

For the original viewers, SAC_2045 is your world, too. Togusa is there. Togusa is you.

The new viewers are Purin. Enthusiastic and smart but awkward and not confident in their skills. How could they measure up to these much more talented and experienced characters? (Also consider who is going to watch any sort of Ghost in the Shell - it's probably going to be a moderately bright and introverted kid, who is the kind of person that may be more comfortable socializing with people outside of their age band.)

But Motoko is visually separated from the rest of Section 9. Batou, Saitou, Ishikawa, Boma... they all have a much more adult look in keeping with their appearance in previous versions of Ghost in the Shell. What gives?

Batou is sort of a cool adult male figure - this is actually a pretty natural use of the character and his sense of humor as previously established in other Ghost in the Shell properties. We especially see this come through in 「PIE IN THE SKY - First Bank Robbery」 episode, with the old folks and the 21st century bank robbery.

Motoko's difference in appearance is because she's acting as a bridge between the two. The new viewer (as represented by Purin) is supposed to grow into being like Motoko as they gain confidence and experience. (The characters aren't each limited to a single role, of course.)

But SAC_2045 is still a work that's shared between two groups, similar to how the excellent Into the Spiderverse features both the teenage Miles Morales and an older Peter Parker that has lost his way, with the loss of the vibrant young adult Peter Parker being what starts the plot going.

The Last Quarter

With this framework, the rest of the work should express its nature as targeted at a younger audience itself. Watch the last few episodes through this lens and you'll see how much sense it makes. One takes place at a school. Even the bizarre 3D style that resembles recent video games makes more sense. If we take Togusa's earlier conversation with Aramaki as a discussion of SAC_2045 itself, later on there's even a sort of acknowledgement that Ghost in the Shell is a difficult work for someone of a young age.

So with that context in mind, does it work?

Standalone Complex

If I remember correctly, years ago, when I was perhaps 15 or 16, I was watching a tiny CRT television some time after midnight, and I saw the thirteenth episode of the original Standalone Complex - NOT EQUAL. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I was immediately taken by it. And, from what I remember, I immediately understood it.

It was as though it were made just for me.[7]

To me, Ghost in the Shell is like a textbook. I thought that as a creator who has reached a place where I am able to be involved in that kind of work, I'm in a position where I have to convey its contents to a younger audience. Well, I knew it would be a lot of work, but I figured it would be my way of giving back to Ghost in the Shell. I thought that I needed to accept the baton and offer Ghost in the Shell to a young audience, to the same degree that Ghost in the Shell raised me to be who I am.

- Tow Ubukata, in a 2015 interview, regarding ARISE

For many people, Ghost in the Shell is a profound influence. I felt that it lifted me to a new level of understanding.

SAC_2045

But what about SAC_2045?

I can't view Ghost in the Shell with new eyes. When I first saw it, I wasn't the kind of person that casually memes futuristic ethical dilemmas as a means of practicing politics.

Compared to the anime I watched back when I was 13, would I have watched SAC_2045? Yes. Is it more philosophically and politically sophisticated? Yes. Would I have found it memorable? I think so.

Would a 13-year these days watch it? That's difficult to assess. I bet someone who does data science for Netflix could tell us, if they wanted. I'm sure Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki are considering the same thing.

2017

How does it stack up compared to the rest of the franchise?

For most enthusiasts it's going to be one of the weaker entries, though it certainly does a better job explaining itself than ARISE.

Compare it to 2017's live action movie, however, and I think we'll find it isn't the weakest. The reason is that the writers of Ghost in the Shell (2017) decided to tell a story about bodily consent in which becoming a cyborg is a form of trauma. On some level this may have been a reasonable decision, but they didn't commit to the concept sufficiently fully to execute it well enough to carry the movie - and simultaneously, they dumbed down parts of the regular Ghost in the Shell material for American audiences. As a result the movie flopped both financially and artistically - except for the visuals.

In fact, I wrote a sequence of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) on how to rewrite the live action movie as an actual Ghost in the Shell property. I feel no need to do so for SAC_2045 - and I can't even think of what changes would need to be made.

I look forward to the second season.

-☆☆☆-

[1] It's short, but that's a concept in this post. "Advanced by Left-Wing theorists, Ninth Generation warfare sees all acts as existing on a spectrum of political violence. Most acts of ninth generation warfare consist of extreme pranks."

[2] If we accept the idea of "Fifth-Generation Warfare" as motivated by a desire to prevent the enemy from using their conventional military assets, then a corresponding theory of international politics would involve preventing enemy factions within foreign governments from taking control of those governments' institutions - effectively treating all countries as in continuous level of conflict analogous to a soft civil war.

[3] There is a kind of technique to this, but in my case I substituted ADHD for raw IQ and conscientiousness, which is part of why my posts are so much shorter than, for instance, Moldbug's. In any case, technically, Scott's blog posts on the matter amount to roughly a mere 11,600 words, and the book of the black forest amounts to approximately 26,000 words (which I'm told is entertaining reading), but I'm sure if we go looking we can find an additional 15,000 words worth of worldbuilding from a man known for writing 16,000 word blog posts.

[4] Would it be more of a legal liability to sell regular water with GGBW branding, or actual GGBW that could prove to be a potential health hazard?

[5/☆] There's some future strand lurking beneath the surface here that I can't quite put into words; a culturally divergent moe meltdown where an appearance this ridiculous becomes normalized among some sub-population. To quote the Funko Pop Hatred post,

There are questions about the anatomy of anime people and their internal organs, and particularly about what sort of impact-dampening alien meta-material their softer bits are made out of, but at least homo sapiens gokuensis looks like it’s a branch off a similar starting hominid! Whatever transhuman engineering company was responsible for manufacturing the creatures in the typical harem anime has some weird ideas about human beings, but we’re clearly in their ancient lineage somewhere.

Under Late Safetyism, everyone is a declawed catgirl.

Anyhow, I don't want to alarm you, but I can't guarantee that this won't be the future somewhere. Both Purin and Belle Delphine resemble Xiaoice, "The AI Girlfriend Seducing China's Lonely Men." (2020)

[6] Motoko's ridiculous outfits are a major flex on the non-cyborgs, who aren't indifferent to ambient temperature and whose natural bodies may have unflattering features. Similarly wild fashions can exist in places like Second Life, a 3D digital platform with mostly user-uploaded content. Presumably they're also a flex on every Japanese salaryman who still has to dress like a normal guy.

[7] "It's as though it were made just for me" is also how I feel about the original game Mirror's Edge. Its follow-up, Catalyst, is also a personal favorite of mine.

#miti does media #longpost #flagpost #ghost in the shell #sac_2045 #standalone complex #review

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asinineapotheosis · 4 years ago

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PREPARING FOR THE END, BUT HOW WILL IT COME?

We live in an ever interconnecting world and never before has mankind faced the immensity of threats we do today. Below is a list of possible world ending crisis to prepare for:

1. Global Economic Collapse The most immediate and likely crisis to occur. It has happened on smaller scales in the past. Economies rise and fall like the coming of the tides. The difference today is how intricately connected global economies are. One nations economic collapse could easily domino into neighboring countries where their economies are tightly knit and these sudden changes effect even the most far removed of nations. Great Depressions are no longer localized. This year alone, some economies have shrank upwards of 26% and it isn’t stopping yet. There are no systems in place to stop the world from falling into a Global Recession.

2. Cultural Division It is true that we have always had cultural division, for as long as humans have been around in fact. But its no stretch to say that wars and conflicts between Religions, Ethnicities, Ideologies, Classes, and Political Parties have intensified. These days people are even often radicalized through the internet and media. You would think that being surrounded by information about other cultures and peoples would make humans more receptive and tolerant of those different from them but its seems that just the opposite is true. It seems that the more we are presented with other peoples the more we are drawn deeper into our own communities and cultures. The abundance of information can be overwhelming and cause us to withdraw and criticize other cultures. These criticisms are then sown and grown in the echo chamber that is The Internet where these feelings are reinforced and even nurtured as like minded people reciprocate these same thoughts and feelings. We’re used to seeing these sorts of conflicts happening in “smaller countries” but what happens when in starts in global Super Power, between similarly armed groups, when the violence spills into the streets and the fires are lit? It will take much more effort to extinguish them than it did to start them.

3. Global Xenophobia This is a biproduct of cultural division. The world is already suffering under a global pandemic which has disrupted trade and travel, so nations are hastily reworking their economies and looking inward, isolating themselves away from global interactions and turning to nationalism. This can create further distrust and divisions between nations and cultures and a build up of defenses instead of attempts at communications. Don’t be surprised to find that nations begin posturing and attempting to assert themselves, or old alliances and treaties to disappear. Nations will operate in their own self interest. This will further ingrain xenophobia. It is often the case that countries that follow a xenophobic line of thinking will accuse foreigners of bringing crime, spreading diseases, abusing welfare systems, bring opposing ideals and religions, taking jobs, and even dilute the racial make up of a nation. On a global scale, countries that fall wholly into this line of thinking will rot from within. Civil wars, violent upheavals in government, vigilantism, pockets of violence and utter chaos throughout the country. This is something we’re seeing everywhere today and small cracks become huge divides if they are not mended.

4. Artificial Intelligence Once the thought of AI as a threat took the form of the Terminator, robots conquering, subduing, and destroying mankind. But the truth is far more complicated and nuanced. Algorithms and programs serve up endless streams of lifeless content to be viewed, evaluated, and stored for later. AI produces a sea of countless distractions based entirely on our previous clicks, likes, search history, location, gender, age, and other demographics. In the age of information it is entire possible to live in an alternative reality of facts insulated from any input. In essence creating complex virtual communities of like minded peoples. Communal Subjectivity is the name of the game and it is constantly reinforced every time you look at a screen. The logarithms do not care, they do not feel, they have no opinions or beliefs themselves. Instead, they feed you your beliefs and prejudices. Ironic that machines that were intended to connect us all are actually driving us apart even further and create a landscape for further conflict. Furthermore, we are at a point in automation and so technologically dependent that it would be impossible to scale it back. What will happen if the technology is rendered inoperable due to conflict, EMPs, Solar Flares? How will people live? Transportation, electricity, water, refrigeration of medicine and food, etc... all gone. Who would they turn to? The Government? Their neighbors? Friends and family? Could you and your friends all survive a world like this? AI and Technological dependence is a fragile state of being. It really doesn't take much to break it. If it were to occur on a large scale, all of society would be unraveled.

5. Sino-American War War has changed. No longer is about troops and tanks on the ground, or long drawn out conflicts between nations. It is unlikely that a nuclear exchange between superpowers would occur in a way that we would imagine. More likely would be a handful of high altitude nuclear detonations to create EMP bursts and cripple electrical grids. The realties of this new form of war is beginning to rear its face and the threat is becoming clear. Terrorists and provocateurs can do more damage than any standing army. This atop the fact that they would have the benefit of dividing a nations populous rather than uniting it against a common enemy. So what would a war between the US and China look like? Not how you’d think. The US holds a over whelming advantage at sea and in terms of long ranged weapons. The only thing that has held the peace between these two super powers is the fact that their economies are tied together as a relationship between consumer and manufacturer, respectably. The US prints money and sells debt and China purchases that debt. So this war would most likely be Economic and the start of a shift away from the us dollar as the reserve currency of the world. There’s already talk about cryptocurrency backed by the Yuan and gold, a serious threat to US Dollar. As the trade war continues, the Dollar remains strong. But what would happen if the US Dollar weakens and the American market stops consuming and begins to retract? It is possible that we are already engaged in the early stages of a Sino-American war as foreign provocateurs sowing chaos in a US election process, or more covert attacks on the US computer infrastructure, alliances that exclude the US, or biological threats.

SO WHAT DO WE DO?

What do we do as the world teeters on complete and total destruction? Simple, we prepare. Make certain that any disaster will not leave you with the essentials of food and water. Have a plan and the equipment you need when the power goes out and supply chains stop. Have a plan to hunker down, make a stand, and then bug out if necessary. Prepare for the long-haul and not just the moment and you will survive any coming disaster.

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megacircuit9universe · 4 years ago

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Alien Tip Off

WED SEP 16 2020

Woodward’s tapes of Trump, extensively admitting how well he understood the dangers of SarsCoV2, way back in the spring... that it was airborne, that it was far more deadly than the flu, etc... have stayed in the news all week, with longer and longer clips being released that utterly destroy any possible, devil’s advocate, arguments in Trump’s favor on this... the single most important issue facing the nation.

It’s safe to say we’re all stunned!

He was simultaneously smart enough to grasp the true danger of the virus... yet stupid enough to... agree to go off about this on tape with Woodward and... still do what he did in his response to the threat.

The tapes don’t JUST justify his impeachment, and expose every Senator who voted to acquit, as dastardly cowards... but they gut any possible, devil’s advocate, arguments for Trump, by anybody with any grip on sanity.

This puts the current GOP Senate in great peril... even as it reduces the base of loyal Trumpist voters they were banking on... to only the criminally insane.

No more fluffy padding of evangelicals, and other right wing conservatives who, held their nose, so does speak, and went along for the sake of the party. They’ve now formed a very visible, and powerful movement to deny Trump, and any of his hardcore Senate loyalists... another term.

And they’re doing it for the same reason they originally held their noses and went along... to save their party from the brink of irrelevance in a world where the blast doors of history are closing on old school conservatism.*

Which brings us to TikTok...

The deadline for the TikTok ban, as outlined by a sketchy executive order by Trump a while back, draws near.

And while American companies like Microsoft and WalMart scrambled to get a deal done in time, China also chimed in last week and said... Yeah, no... if ByteDance sells it’s American operations... the new owners can’t have the algorithm without our say so... and... we’d rather see TikTok die in America than bow to Trump’s silly demands so... haha, just saying! :D

Meanwhile, TikTok has been challenging the original executive order in court, and everybody is now saying even if the deadline passes, Trump can’t just shut down an app like that... and he’d have to get both Android and Apple to agree to disable it in their app stores... which would lead to more litigation and... well, it could take many more months than Trump has left in power, to sort out.

Unless he gets reelected... or successfully remains in power despite being voted out.

Which brings us to the aliens!..

Monday night (September 14th) TikTok was suddenly flooded with videos of UFO sightings over the United States... concentrated in, but not limited to New Jersey, Colorado, and Nevada.

The earliest and most viral of these was being debunked immediately as the GoodYear Blimp, but... the people at Goodyear Blimp have since said, no... that was not our blimp.

The videos depict a lot of different types of UFOs... they don’t all look the same. Some were singular glowing orbs, or true flying saucer looking crafts, while other videos showed groups of strange lights acting in concert.

The common denominator for all of them, however, was... all are pretty lengthy and clear... corroborated by multiple TikTokers in any given area... and all have so far defied any rational explanation.

Blimps, drones, skydivers with flares, swamp gas, you name it... none of the off the cuff discredits have yet proven out... much less any explanation for why so many sightings happened simultaneously across the continent.

Of course, lots of alien lovers have been quick to tell us this is some message of peace or whatever... but when something like this happens, I can only go to my own model, as established here in this blog.

And I can draw no other conclusion than this... the Aliens were behind it, and they were deliberately using TikTok to spook Trump... and the other powerful men in his Junta (Barr, McConnell, etc).

Recall that earlier this year I speculated that Kim Jong Un was not only dead, but that it was likely the Aliens who killed him, because he was too likely to start a nuclear war.

North Korea has yet to admit that Jong Un is dead... but the rest of the world assumes, these many months later, that he must be. He’s not re-emerged, and the few video reels of him released this year... barely even try to be convincing.

The media hasn’t talked much about this, because so much other shit’s been going on this year... but no... I’m not backing off my conclusion that he’s dead, because nothing’s come along to even slightly prove me wrong on that, much less embarrass me about that conclusion.

He’s dead.

The aliens killed him.

And now those same aliens are using TikTok to spook Trump.

This implies that Aliens are a lot more familiar with the intimate details of our daily life than we normally think... knowing not only that we all have smart phones with cameras, but that we also have a hugely popular app that would ensure any sightings would go viral immediately... and that this is the same app Trump is trying to shut down.

What’s the message for Trump?

Well, first... a bit more context...

This past week, the other huge story in the news has been the west coast wild fires. We’ve seen out of control wildfires on the Pacific coast in late summer for the past four years, as we did in Australia in their late summer, this past January... but this year’s fires in America have been record breaking in terms of their devastation.

The aliens... who’ve been monitoring this planet periodically since humans first learned of fire... paying closer attention after we developed electricity... and who have been permanently stationed in the solar system since we figured out fission bombs at the end of WW2... have had, as their main objective, to stand down, and observe us... unless the planet is in danger of a cascading failure due to either a nuclear or climate catastrophe... or both.

In such cases, they are willing to intervene... for the sake of preserving the level of intelligence, and diversity of life that’s evolved here... because it takes so goddam long for this kind of intelligence, and this kind of diversity to evolve in the first place.

Still, they’d always rather just hang back and observe.

So... since World War Two... they’ve tolerated all kinds of nuclear bomb testing, and everything else, without feeling the need to do much more than hint, to world leaders, that humanity may not be alone in the universe.

Until very recently, when they pinpointed two individuals who were a direct threat to the planet... Kim Jong Un, and Donald Trump.

Jong Un had no real impact on the climate, but he did pose a nuclear threat, dangerous enough, they had to intervene and just off him.

Trump poses both a nuclear threat, and a climate threat, so... Jong Un’s death was a first warning sign, and this latest stunt on TikTok, at the peak of the wildfires, is yet another.

Don’t think you’re commanding the most powerful military force in the universe, because you’re not. We’re real, and you can’t touch us. We know what you’re doing. We know what you fear (TikTok), and we WILL take you out, Space Force or no Space Force... buddy!

Assuming I’m right about this... which I think you at least have to grant is possible this late in the game, given all that’s happened... it’s an unprecidented show of force, from an intergalactic army so shy of confrontation, we barely have any evidence they exist.

That tells you what a dire juncture we are at, right now, on this timeline**.

But the fact that the aliens would use TikTok to make this statement... does seem to suggest that they do have AI bot agents, on our internet, who are in communication with our own advanced AI bots from the future, left behind by our time travelers... and that they are all in cahoots to save the timeline.

Recall that while Alien propulsion tech is likely based in the manupulation of microsingularities, or mini-black holes, to frame-drag spacetime around the ship... for Aliens it’s more about space travel, than time travel.

Time travel doesn’t really mean anything on intergalactic scales. It only has meaning for primitive humans hanging very close to Earth, moving back and forth through the span of a few decades locally, to grab objects, get footage, and leave bot agents behind to promote human rights.

The aliens hanging out in our solar system are more or less just as pinned to our timeline as we are... or the bots those time travelers leave behind.

And if you don’t get that by now, I would suggest reading back in earlier entries, but maybe I’ll do another one as a refresher soon.

It was encouraging to see a TikToker on my For You Page this past week actually mention John Titor, and go into a little depth about him, but as usual, nobody could follow it.***

But more encouraging was this display by the aliens, that gave the first confirmation I’ve seen, that they do know and care what’s going on down here, in times as dire as we’re currently living through.

And with that roundup of a week’s news... it is time for bed.

*With GenX turning 50, Millenials turning 30, and GenZ turning 20, the tide is turning forever away from old school conservatism, with all of it’s racism, sexism, and classism. November 2020 could be the first time, all three of these generations turn out to the polls in force (millenials were too apathetic before this, and Z was too young to vote) to drown out the fading influence of the Boomers and Silents, once and for all.

My guess, as I’ve said, is that the current anti-Trump conservatives will all move to the Democratic Party, leaving the Republican Party to die as a haven for neo nazis and KKK sympathizers... while the progressive left will form a new party to counter the comparatively conservative new democrats, who at least acknowledge climate change, and don’t pin everything else on the single issue of abortion.

**Worth noting that this passed week news also broke that scientists had detected a marker for microbial life in the atmosphere of Venus. It appears to be the strongest evidence yet that life is not exclusive to Earth.

***Not to suggest I’m so much more clever than ordinary people. It took me upwards of fifteen years of studying physics through videos, lectures, and audio books to get the full picture of how Titor’s distortion unit worked, and how the many worlds theory resolves the kinds of paradoxes most people imagine would happen.

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ntrending · 6 years ago

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Can AI destroy humanity?| Popular Science

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/can-ai-destroy-humanity-popular-science/

Can AI destroy humanity?| Popular Science

“It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life. It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line. Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens. Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization. Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press. Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer. In less than thirty years, it will end.”

Jaan Tallinn stumbled across these words in 2007, in an online essay called “Staring into the Singularity.” The “it” is human civilization. Humanity would cease to exist, predicted the essay’s author, with the emergence of superintelligence, or AI that surpasses the human intellect in a broad array of areas.

Tallinn, an Estonia-born computer programmer, has a background in physics and a propensity to approach life like one big programming problem. In 2003, he had co-founded Skype, developing the backend for the app. He cashed in his shares after eBay bought it two years later, and now he was casting about for something to do. “Staring into the Singularity” mashed up computer code, quantum physics, and Calvin and Hobbes quotes. He was hooked.

Tallinn soon discovered that the essay’s author, self-taught theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, had written more than 1,000 articles and blog posts, many of them devoted to superintelligence. Tallinn wrote a program to scrape Yudkowsky’s writings from the internet, order them chronologically, and format them for his iPhone. Then he spent the better part of a year reading them.

The term “artificial intelligence,” or the simulation of intelligence in computers or machines, was coined back in 1956, only a decade after the creation of the first electronic digital computers. Hope for the field was initially high, but by the 1970s, when early predictions did not pan out, an “AI winter” set in. When Tallinn found Yudkowsky’s essays, AI was undergoing a renaissance. Scientists were developing AIs that excelled in specific areas, such as winning at chess, cleaning the kitchen floor, and recognizing human speech. (In 2007, the resounding win at Jeopardy! of IBM’s Watson was still four years away, while the triumph at Go of DeepMind’s AlphaGo was eight years off.) Such “narrow” AIs, as they’re called, have superhuman capabilities, but only in their specific areas of dominance. A chess-playing AI can’t clean the floor or take you from point A to point B. But super-intelligent AI, Tallinn came to believe, will combine a wide range of skills in one entity. More darkly, it also might use data generated by smartphone-toting humans to excel at social manipulation.

Reading Yudkowsky’s articles, Tallinn became convinced that superintelligence could lead to an explosion or “breakout” of AI that could threaten human existence—that ultrasmart AIs will take our place on the evolutionary ladder and dominate us the way we now dominate apes. Or, worse yet, exterminate us.

After finishing the last of the essays, Tallinn shot off an email to Yudkowsky—all lowercase, as is his style. “i’m jaan, one of the founding engineers of skype,” he wrote. Eventually he got to the point: “i do agree that…preparing for the event of general AI surpassing human intelligence is one of the top tasks for humanity.” He wanted to help. When he flew to the Bay Area for other meetings soon after, he met Yudkowsky at a Panera Bread in Millbrae, California, near where he lives. Their get-together stretched to four hours. “He actually, genuinely understood the underlying concepts and the details,” Yudkowsky recalls. “This is very rare.” Afterward, Tallinn wrote a check for $5,000 to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the nonprofit where Yudkowsky was a research fellow. (The organization changed its name to Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, in 2013.) Tallinn has since given it more than $600,000.

The encounter with Yudkowsky brought Tallinn purpose, sending him on a mission to save us from our own creations. As he connected on the issue with other theorists and computer scientists, he embarked on a life of travel, giving talks around the world on the threat posed by superintelligence. Mostly, though, he began funding research into methods that might give humanity a way out: so-called friendly AI. That doesn’t mean a machine or agent is particularly skilled at chatting about the weather, or that it remembers the names of your kids—though super-intelligent AI might be able to do both of those things. It doesn’t mean it is motivated by altruism or love. A common fallacy is assuming that AI has human urges and values. “Friendly” means something much more fundamental: that the machines of tomorrow will not wipe us out in their quest to attain their goals.

Nine years after his meeting with Yudkowsky, Tallinn joins me for a meal in the dining hall of Cambridge University’s Jesus College. The churchlike space is bedecked with stained-glass windows, gold molding, and oil paintings of men in wigs. Tallinn sits at a heavy mahogany table, wearing the casual garb of Silicon Valley: black jeans, T-shirt, canvas sneakers. A vaulted timber ceiling extends high above his shock of gray-blond hair.

At 46, Tallinn is in some ways your textbook tech entrepreneur. He thinks that thanks to advances in science (and provided AI doesn’t destroy us), he will live for “many, many years.” His concern about superintelligence is common among his cohort. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s foundation has given $1.6 million to MIRI, and in 2015, Tesla founder Elon Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, a technology safety organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tallinn’s entrance to this rarefied world came behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, when a classmate’s father with a government job gave a few bright kids access to mainframe computers. After Estonia became independent, he founded a video-game company. Today, Tallinn still lives in its capital city—which by a quirk of etymology is also called Tallinn—with his wife and the youngest of his six kids. When he wants to meet with researchers, he often just flies them to the Baltic region.

His giving strategy is methodical, like almost everything else he does. He spreads his money among 11 organizations, each working on different approaches to AI safety, in the hope that one might stick. In 2012, he co-founded the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) with an initial outlay of close to $200,000.

Existential risks—or X-risks, as Tallinn calls them—are threats to humanity’s survival. In addition to AI, the 20-odd researchers at CSER study climate change, nuclear war, and bioweapons. But to Tallinn, the other disciplines mostly help legitimize the threat of runaway artificial intelligence. “Those are really just gateway drugs,” he tells me. Concern about more widely accepted threats, such as climate change, might draw people in. The horror of super-intelligent machines taking over the world, he hopes, will convince them to stay. He is here now for a conference because he wants the academic community to take AI safety seriously.

Our dining companions are a random assortment of conference-goers, including a woman from Hong Kong who studies robotics and a British man who graduated from Cambridge in the 1960s. The older man asks everybody at the table where they attended university. (Tallinn’s answer, Estonia’s University of Tartu, does not impress him.) He then tries to steer the conversation toward the news. Tallinn looks at him blankly. “I am not interested in near-term risks,” he says.

Tallinn changes the topic to the threat of superintelligence. When not talking to other programmers, he defaults to metaphors, and he runs through his suite of them now: Advanced AI can dispose of us as swiftly as humans chop down trees. Superintelligence is to us what we are to gorillas. Inscribed in Latin above his head is a line from Psalm 133: “How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.” But unity is far from what Tallinn has in mind in a future containing a rogue superintelligence.

An AI would need a body to take over, the older man says. Without some kind of physical casing, how could it possibly gain physical control? Tallinn has another metaphor ready: “Put me in a basement with an internet connection, and I could do a lot of damage,” he says. Then he takes a bite of risotto.

Whether a Roomba or one of its world-dominating descendants, an AI is driven by outcomes. Programmers assign these goals, along with a series of rules on how to pursue them. Advanced AI wouldn’t necessarily need to be given the goal of world domination in order to achieve it—it could just be accidental. And the history of computer programming is rife with small errors that sparked catastrophes. In 2010, for example, a trader working for the mutual-fund company Waddell & Reed sold thousands of futures contracts. The firm’s software left out a key variable from the algorithm that helped execute the trade. The result was the trillion-dollar U.S. “flash crash.”

The researchers Tallinn funds believe that if the reward structure of a superhuman AI is not properly programmed, even benign objectives could have insidious ends. One well-known example, laid out by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom in his book Superintelligence, is a fictional agent directed to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI might decide that the atoms in human bodies would be put to better use as raw material for them.

Tallinn’s views have their share of detractors, even among the community of people concerned with AI safety. Some object that it is too early to worry about restricting super-intelligent AI when we don’t yet understand it. Others say that focusing on rogue technological actors diverts attention from the most urgent problems facing the field, like the fact that the majority of algorithms are designed by white men, or based on data biased toward them. “We’re in danger of building a world that we don’t want to live in if we don’t address those challenges in the near term,” says Terah Lyons, executive director of the Partnership on AI, a multistakeholder organization focused on AI safety and other issues. (Several of the institutes Tallinn backs are members.) But, she adds, some of the near-term challenges facing researchers—such as weeding out algorithmic bias—are precursors to ones that humanity might see with super-intelligent AI.

Tallinn isn’t so convinced. He counters that super-intelligent AI brings unique threats. Ultimately, he hopes that the AI community might follow the lead of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1940s. In the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists banded together to try to limit further nuclear testing. “The Manhattan Project scientists could have said, ‘Look, we are doing innovation here, and innovation is always good, so let’s just plunge ahead,’” he tells me. “But they were more responsible than that.”

Tallinn warns that any approach to AI safety will be hard to get right. If an AI is sufficiently smart, he explains, it might have a better understanding of the constraints than its creators do. Imagine, he says, “waking up in a prison built by a bunch of blind 5-year-olds.” That is what it might be like for a super-intelligent AI that is confined by humans.

Yudkowsky, the theorist, found evidence this might be true when, starting in 2002, he conducted chat sessions in which he played the role of an AI enclosed in a box, while a rotation of other people played the gatekeeper tasked with keeping the AI in. Three out of five times, Yudkowsky—a mere mortal—says he convinced the gatekeeper to release him. His experiments have not discouraged researchers from trying to design a better box, however.

The researchers that Tallinn funds are pursuing a broad variety of strategies, from the practical to the seemingly far-fetched. Some theorize about boxing AI, either physically, by building an actual structure to contain it, or by programming in limits to what it can do. Others are trying to teach AI to adhere to human values. A few are working on a last-ditch off switch. One researcher who is delving into all three is mathematician and philosopher Stuart Armstrong at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which Tallinn calls “the most interesting place in the universe.” (Tallinn has given FHI more than $310,000.) Armstrong is one of the few researchers in the world who focuses full time on AI safety.

I meet him for coffee one afternoon in a cafe in Oxford. He wears a rugby shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and has the look of someone who spends his life behind a screen, with a pale face framed by a mess of sandy hair. He peppers his explanations with a disorienting mixture of popular-culture references and math. When I ask him what it might look like to succeed at AI safety, he says: “Have you seen The Lego Movie? Everything is awesome.”

One strain of Armstrong’s research looks at a specific approach to boxing called an “oracle” AI. In a 2012 paper with Nick Bostrom, who co-founded FHI, he proposed not only walling off superintelligence in a holding tank—a physical structure—but also restricting it to answering questions, like a really smart Ouija board. Even with these boundaries, an AI would have immense power to reshape the fate of humanity by subtly manipulating its interrogators. To reduce the possibility of this happening, Armstrong has proposed time limits on conversations, or banning questions that might upend the current world order. He also has suggested giving the oracle proxy measures of human survival, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the number of people crossing the street in Tokyo, and telling it to keep these steady.

Ultimately, Armstrong believes, it could be necessary to create, as he calls it in one paper, a “big red off button”: either a physical switch, or a mechanism programmed into an AI to automatically turn itself off in the event of a breakout. But designing such a switch is far from easy. It’s not just that an advanced AI interested in self-preservation could prevent the button from being pressed. It also could become curious about why humans devised the button, activate it to see what happens, and render itself useless. In 2013, a programmer named Tom Murphy VII designed an AI that could teach itself to play Nintendo Entertainment System games. Determined not to lose at Tetris, the AI simply pressed pause—and kept the game frozen. “Truly, the only winning move is not to play,” Murphy observed wryly, in a paper on his creation.

For the strategy to succeed, an AI has to be uninterested in the button, or, as Tallinn puts it, “it has to assign equal value to the world where it’s not existing and the world where it’s existing.” But even if researchers can achieve that, there are other challenges. What if the AI has copied itself several thousand times across the internet?

The approach that most excites researchers is finding a way to make AI adhere to human values—not by programming them in, but by teaching AIs to learn them. In a world dominated by partisan politics, people often dwell on the ways in which our principles differ. But, Tallinn notes, humans have a lot in common: “Almost everyone values their right leg. We just don’t think about it.” The hope is that an AI might be taught to discern such immutable rules.

In the process, an AI would need to learn and appreciate humans’ less-than-logical side: that we often say one thing and mean another, that some of our preferences conflict with others, and that people are less reliable when drunk. But the data trails we all leave in apps and social media might provide a guide. Despite the challenges, Tallinn believes, we must try because the stakes are so high. “We have to think a few steps ahead,” he says. “Creating an AI that doesn’t share our interests would be a horrible mistake.”

On Tallinn’s last night in Cambridge, I join him and two researchers for dinner at a British steakhouse. A waiter seats our group in a white-washed cellar with a cave-like atmosphere. He hands us a one-page menu that offers three different kinds of mash. A couple sits down at the table next to us, and then a few minutes later asks to move elsewhere. “It’s too claustrophobic,” the woman complains. I think of Tallinn’s comment about the damage he could wreak if locked in a basement with nothing but an internet connection. Here we are, in the box. As if on cue, the men contemplate ways to get out.

Tallinn’s guests include former genomics researcher Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, who is CSER’s executive director, and Matthijs Maas, an AI policy researcher at the University of Copenhagen. They joke about an idea for a nerdy action flick titled Superintelligence vs. Blockchain!, and discuss an online game called Universal Paperclips, which riffs on the scenario in Bostrom’s book. The exercise involves repeatedly clicking your mouse to make paper clips. It’s not exactly flashy, but it does give a sense for why a machine might look for more-expedient ways to produce office supplies.

Eventually, talk shifts toward bigger questions, as it often does when Tallinn is present. The ultimate goal of AI-safety research is to create machines that are, as Cambridge philosopher and CSER co-founder Huw Price once put it, “ethically as well as cognitively superhuman.” Others have raised the question: If we don’t want AI to dominate us, do we want to dominate it? In other words, does AI have rights? Tallinn says this is needless anthropomorphizing. It assumes that intelligence equals consciousness—a misconception that annoys many AI researchers. Earlier in the day, CSER researcher Jose Hernandez-Orallo joked that when speaking with AI researchers, consciousness is “the C-word.” (“And ‘free will’ is the F-word,” he added.)

RELATED: What it’s really like working as a safety driver in a self-driving car

In the cellar now, Tallinn says that consciousness is beside the point: “Take the example of a thermostat. No one would say it is conscious. But it’s really inconvenient to face up against that agent if you’re in a room that is set to negative 30 degrees.”

Ó hÉigeartaigh chimes in. “It would be nice to worry about consciousness,” he says, “but we won’t have the luxury to worry about consciousness if we haven’t first solved the technical safety challenges.”

People get overly preoccupied with what super-intelligent AI is, Tallinn says. What form will it take? Should we worry about a single AI taking over, or an army of them? “From our perspective, the important thing is what AI does,” he stresses. And that, he believes, may still be up to humans—for now.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.

Written By Mara Hvistendahl

#Science

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christheodore-live · 6 years ago

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The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat

The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.

Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of “fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is “going to get killed” by a tax bill that actually will save him and his heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit—only there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual evidence, that “this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses.”

Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that “public lands will once again be for public use.” When environmentalists denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism “a false narrative.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the internet, says, “[T]hose who’ve said the internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong. …We have a free internet going forward.” And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as “evidence-based” and “science-based” are banned.

The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”

When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.

The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.

“Thus all our dignity consist in thought,” wrote Pascal. “It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”

We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister.

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christophertheodore-org · 6 years ago

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The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister.

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christophertheodore-net · 7 years ago

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The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister.

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viralleakszone-blog · 7 years ago

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How to price cryptocurrencies

Predicting cryptocurrency prices is a fool’s game yet this fool is about to try. The drivers of a single cryptocurrency’s value are currently too varied and vague to make assessments based on any one point. News is trending up on Bitcoin? Maybe there’s a hack or an API failure that is driving it down at the same time. Ethereum looking sluggish? Who knows: maybe someone will build a new smarter DAO tomorrow that will draw in the big spenders. So how do you invest or, more correctly, on which currency should you bet? The key to understanding what to buy or sell and when to hold is to use the tools associated with assessing the value of open source projects. This has been said again and again but to understand the current crypto boom you have to go back to the quiet rise of Linux. Linux appeared on most radars during the Dot Com bubble. At that time, if you wanted to set up a web server, you had to physically ship a Windows server or Sun Sparc Station to a server farm where it would do the hard work of delivering Pets.com HTML. At the same time Linux, like a freight train running on a parallel path to Microsoft and Sun, would consistently allow developers to build one-off projects very quickly and easily using an OS and toolset that were improving daily. In comparison, then, the massive hardware and software expenditures associated with the status quo solution providers were deeply inefficient and very quickly all of the tech giants who made their money on software now made their money on services or, like Sun, folded. From the acorn of Linux an open source forest bloomed. But there was one clear problem: you couldn’t make money from open source. You could consult and you could sell products that used open source components but early builders built primarily for the betterment of humanity and not the betterment of their bank accounts. Cryptocurrencies have followed the Linux model almost exactly but cryptocurrencies have cash value. Therefore when you’re working on a crypto project you’re not doing it for the common good or for the joy of writing free software. You’re writing it with the expectation of a big payout. This, therefore, clouds the value judgements of many programmers. The same folks that brought you Python, PHP, Django, and Node.js are back… and now they’re programming money. Check The Codebase This year will be the year of great reckoning in the token sale and cryptocurrency space. While many companies have been able to get away with poor or unusable codebases I doubt developers will let future companies get away with so much smoke and mirrors. It’s safe to say we can expect posts like this one detailing Storj’s anemic code base to become the norm and, more important, that these commentaries will sink many so-called ICOs. Though massive, the money trough that is flowing from ICO to ICO is finite and at some point there will be greater scrutiny paid to incomplete work. What does this mean? It means to understand cryptocurrency you have to treat it like a startup. Does it have a good team? Does it have a good product? Does the product work? Would someone want to use it? It’s far too early to assess the value of cryptocurrency as a whole but if we assume that tokens or coins will become the way computers pay each other in the future. This lets us hand wave away a lot of doubt. After all, not many people knew in 2000 that Apache was going to beat nearly every other web server in a crowded market or that Ubuntu instances would be so common that you’d spin them up and destroy them in an instant. The key to understanding cryptocurrency pricing is to ignore the froth, hype, and FUD and instead focus on true utility. Do you think that some day your phone will pay another phone for, say, an in game perk? Do you expect the credit card system to fold in the face of an Internet of Value? Do you expect that one day you’ll move through life splashing out small bits of value in order to make yourself more comfortable? Then by all means buy and hold or speculate on things that you think will make your life better. If you don’t expect the Internet of Value to improve your life the way the TCP/IP Internet did (or you do not understand enough to hold an opinion) then you’re probably not cut out for this. NASDAQ is always open, at least during banker’s hours. Still will us? Good, here are my predictions: The Rundown Here is my assessment of what you should look at when considering an “investment” in cryptocurrencies. There are a number of caveats we must address before we begin. Crypto is not a monetary investment in a real currency but an investment in a pie-in-the-sky technofuture. That’s right: when you buy crypto you’re basically assuming that we’ll all be on the deck of the Starship Enterprise exchanging them like Galactic Credits one day. This is the only inevitable future for crypto bulls. While you can force crypto into various economic models and hope for the best, the entire platform is techno-utopianist and assumes all sorts of exciting and unlikely things will come to pass in the next few years. If you have spare cash lying around and you like Star Wars then you’re golden. If you bought bitcoin on a credit card because your cousin told you to then you’re probably going to have a bad time. Don’t trust anyone. There is no guarantee and, in addition to offering the disclaimer that this is not investment advice and that this is in no way an endorsement of any particular cryptocurrency or even the concept in general, we must understand that everything I write here could be wrong. In fact, everything ever written about crypto could be wrong and anyone who is trying to sell you a token with exciting upside is almost certainly wrong. In short, everyone is wrong and everyone is out to get you so be very, very careful. You might as well hold. If you bought when BTC was $18,000 you’d best just hold on. Right now you’re in Pascal’s Wager territory. Yes, maybe you’re angry at crypto for screwing you but maybe you were just stupid and you got in too high and now you might as well keep believing because nothing is certain or you can admit that you were a bit overeager and now you’re being punished for it but that there is some sort of bitcoin god out there watching over you. Ultimately you need to take a deep breath, agree that all of this is pretty freaking weird, and hold on. Now on with the assessments. Bitcoin – Expect a rise over the next year that will surpass the current low. Also expect bumps as the SEC and other federal agencies around the world begin regulating the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies in very real ways. Now that banks are in on the joke they’re going to want to reduce risk. Therefore the bitcoin will become digital gold, a staid, boring, and volatility proof safe haven for speculators. Although all but unusable as a real currency, it’s good enough for what we need it to do and we can also expect quantum computing hardware to change the face of the oldest and most familiar cryptocurrency. Ethereum – Ethereum could sustain another few thousand dollars on its price as long as Vitalik Buterin, the creator, doesn’t throw too much cold water on it. Like a remorseful Victor Frankenstein, Buterin tends to make amazing things and then denigrate them online, a sort of self-flagellation that is actually quite useful in a space full of froth and outright lies. Ethereum is the closest we’ve come to a useful cryptocurrency but it is still the Raspberry Pi of distributed computing – it’s a useful and clever hack that makes it easy to experiment but no one has quite replaced the old systems with new distributed data stores or applications. In short, it’s a really exciting technology but nobody knows what to do with it.

Where will the price go? It will hover around $1,000 and possibly go as high as $1,500 this year but this is a principled tech project and not a store of value. Altcoins – One of the signs of a bubble is when average people make statements like “I couldn’t afford a Bitcoin so I bought a Litecoin.” This is exactly what I’ve heard multiple times from multiple people and it’s akin to saying “I couldn’t buy hamburger so I bought a pound of sawdust instead. I think the kids will eat it, right?” Play at your own risk. Altcoins are a very useful low-risk play for many and if you create an algorithm – say to sell when the asset hits a certain level – then you could make a nice profit. Further, most alt coins will not disappear overnight. I would honestly recommend playing with Ethereum instead of alt coins but if you’re dead set on it then by all means enjoy. Tokens – This is where cryptocurrency gets interesting. Tokens require research, education, and a deep understanding of technology to truly assess. Many of the tokens I’ve seen are true crapshoots and are used primarily as pump and dump vehicles. I won’t name names but the rule of thumb is that if you’re buying a token on an open market then you’ve probably already missed out. The value of the token sale as of January 2018 is to allow crypto whales to turn a few cent per token investment into a 100X return. While many founders talk about the magic of their product and the power of their team, token sales are quite simply vehicles to turn 4 cents into 20 cents into a dollar. Multiply that by millions of tokens and you see the draw. The answer is simple: find a few projects you like and lurk in their message boards. Assess if the team is competent and figure out how to get in very, very early. Also expect your money to disappear into a rathole in a few months or years. There are no sure things and tokens are far too bleeding edge a technology to assess sanely. You are reading this post because you are looking to maintain confirmation bias in a confusing space. That’s fine. I’ve spoken to enough crypto-heads to know that nobody knows anything right now and that collusion and dirty dealings are the rule of the day. Therefore it’s up to folks like us to slowly buy surely begin to understand just what’s going on and, perhaps, profit from it. At the very least we’ll all get a new Linux of Value when we’re all done. Image: Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash Read the full article

#blockchains #cryptocurrencies #ethereum #linux #Software

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gta-5-cheats · 7 years ago

Text

How to price cryptocurrencies

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/how-to-price-cryptocurrencies/

How to price cryptocurrencies

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Predicting cryptocurrency prices is a fool’s game, yet this fool is about to try. The drivers of a single cryptocurrency’s value are currently too varied and vague to make assessments based on any one point. News is trending up on Bitcoin? Maybe there’s a hack or an API failure that is driving it down at the same time. Ethereum looking sluggish? Who knows: Maybe someone will build a new smarter DAO tomorrow that will draw in the big spenders.

So how do you invest? Or, more correctly, on which currency should you bet?

The key to understanding what to buy or sell and when to hold is to use the tools associated with assessing the value of open-source projects. This has been said again and again, but to understand the current crypto boom you have to go back to the quiet rise of Linux.

Linux appeared on most radars during the dot-com bubble. At that time, if you wanted to set up a web server, you had to physically ship a Windows server or Sun Sparc Station to a server farm where it would do the hard work of delivering Pets.com HTML. At the same time, Linux, like a freight train running on a parallel path to Microsoft and Sun, would consistently allow developers to build one-off projects very quickly and easily using an OS and toolset that were improving daily. In comparison, then, the massive hardware and software expenditures associated with the status quo solution providers were deeply inefficient, and very quickly all of the tech giants that made their money on software now made their money on services or, like Sun, folded.

From the acorn of Linux an open-source forest bloomed. But there was one clear problem: You couldn’t make money from open source. You could consult and you could sell products that used open-source components, but early builders built primarily for the betterment of humanity and not the betterment of their bank accounts.

Cryptocurrencies have followed the Linux model almost exactly, but cryptocurrencies have cash value. Therefore, when you’re working on a crypto project you’re not doing it for the common good or for the joy of writing free software. You’re writing it with the expectation of a big payout. This, therefore, clouds the value judgements of many programmers. The same folks that brought you Python, PHP, Django and Node.js are back… and now they’re programming money.

Check the codebase

This year will be the year of great reckoning in the token sale and cryptocurrency space. While many companies have been able to get away with poor or unusable codebases, I doubt developers will let future companies get away with so much smoke and mirrors. It’s safe to say we can expect posts like this one detailing Storj’s anemic codebase to become the norm and, more importantly, that these commentaries will sink many so-called ICOs. Though massive, the money trough that is flowing from ICO to ICO is finite and at some point there will be greater scrutiny paid to incomplete work.

Latest Crunch Report

What does this mean? It means to understand cryptocurrency you have to treat it like a startup. Does it have a good team? Does it have a good product? Does the product work? Would someone want to use it? It’s far too early to assess the value of cryptocurrency as a whole, but if we assume that tokens or coins will become the way computers pay each other in the future, this lets us hand wave away a lot of doubt. After all, not many people knew in 2000 that Apache was going to beat nearly every other web server in a crowded market or that Ubuntu instances would be so common that you’d spin them up and destroy them in an instant.

The key to understanding cryptocurrency pricing is to ignore the froth, hype and FUD and instead focus on true utility. Do you think that some day your phone will pay another phone for, say, an in-game perk? Do you expect the credit card system to fold in the face of an Internet of Value? Do you expect that one day you’ll move through life splashing out small bits of value in order to make yourself more comfortable? Then by all means, buy and hold or speculate on things that you think will make your life better. If you don’t expect the Internet of Value to improve your life the way the TCP/IP internet did (or you do not understand enough to hold an opinion), then you’re probably not cut out for this. NASDAQ is always open, at least during banker’s hours.

Still will us? Good, here are my predictions.

Shop On SecondCovers

The rundown

Here is my assessment of what you should look at when considering an “investment” in cryptocurrencies. There are a number of caveats we must address before we begin:

Crypto is not a monetary investment in a real currency, but an investment in a pie-in-the-sky technofuture. That’s right: When you buy crypto you’re basically assuming that we’ll all be on the deck of the Starship Enterprise exchanging them like Galactic Credits one day. This is the only inevitable future for crypto bulls. While you can force crypto into various economic models and hope for the best, the entire platform is techno-utopianist and assumes all sorts of exciting and unlikely things will come to pass in the next few years. If you have spare cash lying around and you like Star Wars, then you’re golden. If you bought bitcoin on a credit card because your cousin told you to, then you’re probably going to have a bad time.

Don’t trust anyone. There is no guarantee and, in addition to offering the disclaimer that this is not investment advice and that this is in no way an endorsement of any particular cryptocurrency or even the concept in general, we must understand that everything I write here could be wrong. In fact, everything ever written about crypto could be wrong, and anyone who is trying to sell you a token with exciting upside is almost certainly wrong. In short, everyone is wrong and everyone is out to get you, so be very, very careful.

You might as well hold. If you bought when BTC was $18,000 you’d best just hold on. Right now you’re in Pascal’s Wager territory. Yes, maybe you’re angry at crypto for screwing you, but maybe you were just stupid and you got in too high and now you might as well keep believing because nothing is certain, or you can admit that you were a bit overeager and now you’re being punished for it but that there is some sort of bitcoin god out there watching over you. Ultimately you need to take a deep breath, agree that all of this is pretty freaking weird, and hold on.

Now on with the assessments.

Bitcoin – Expect a rise over the next year that will surpass the current low. Also expect bumps as the SEC and other federal agencies around the world begin regulating the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies in very real ways. Now that banks are in on the joke they’re going to want to reduce risk. Therefore, the bitcoin will become digital gold, a staid, boring and volatility proof safe haven for speculators. Although all but unusable as a real currency, it’s good enough for what we need it to do and we also can expect quantum computing hardware to change the face of the oldest and most familiar cryptocurrency.

Ethereum – Ethereum could sustain another few thousand dollars on its price as long as Vitalik Buterin, the creator, doesn’t throw too much cold water on it. Like a remorseful Victor Frankenstein, Buterin tends to make amazing things and then denigrate them online, a sort of self-flagellation that is actually quite useful in a space full of froth and outright lies. Ethereum is the closest we’ve come to a useful cryptocurrency, but it is still the Raspberry Pi of distributed computing — it’s a useful and clever hack that makes it easy to experiment but no one has quite replaced the old systems with new distributed data stores or applications. In short, it’s a really exciting technology, but nobody knows what to do with it.

Where will the price go? It will hover around $1,000 and possibly go as high as $1,500 this year, but this is a principled tech project and not a store of value.

Altcoins – One of the signs of a bubble is when average people make statements like “I couldn’t afford a Bitcoin so I bought a Litecoin.” This is exactly what I’ve heard multiple times from multiple people and it’s akin to saying “I couldn’t buy hamburger so I bought a pound of sawdust instead. I think the kids will eat it, right?” Play at your own risk. Altcoins are a very useful low-risk play for many, and if you create an algorithm — say to sell when the asset hits a certain level — then you could make a nice profit. Further, most altcoins will not disappear overnight. I would honestly recommend playing with Ethereum instead of altcoins, but if you’re dead set on it, then by all means, enjoy.

Tokens – This is where cryptocurrency gets interesting. Tokens require research, education and a deep understanding of technology to truly assess. Many of the tokens I’ve seen are true crapshoots and are used primarily as pump and dump vehicles. I won’t name names, but the rule of thumb is that if you’re buying a token on an open market then you’ve probably already missed out. The value of the token sale as of January 2018 is to allow crypto whales to turn a few cent per token investment into a 100X return. While many founders talk about the magic of their product and the power of their team, token sales are quite simply vehicles to turn 4 cents into 20 cents into a dollar. Multiply that by millions of tokens and you see the draw.

The answer is simple: find a few projects you like and lurk in their message boards. Assess if the team is competent and figure out how to get in very, very early. Also expect your money to disappear into a rat hole in a few months or years. There are no sure things, and tokens are far too bleeding-edge a technology to assess sanely.

You are reading this post because you are looking to maintain confirmation bias in a confusing space. That’s fine. I’ve spoken to enough crypto-heads to know that nobody knows anything right now and that collusion and dirty dealings are the rule of the day. Therefore, it’s up to folks like us to slowly buy surely begin to understand just what’s going on and, perhaps, profit from it. At the very least we’ll all get a new Linux of Value when we’re all done.

Image: Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash

0 notes

christheodore · 7 years ago

Photo

The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat

By Chris Hedges

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister.

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cerebusfire17 · 8 years ago

Text

Still curiouser and curiouser

I still don’t fucking get it and it’s driving me nuts. I could make millions of assumptions a day, and yet I know they’re only what I could possibly believe ***** did it for this reason or that.

And the only good reason I have is my husband--specifically, my relationship with him, as well as my daughter. Everything got worse when I got pregnant with my daughter, especially after the 12wk mark.

It’s the only thing I keep coming back to that makes the most logical sense, as well as something that happened a while ago that I totally forgot about. When we were still cool a few month ago, ***** wanted to do an RP with me on IWaikurp.com or whatever the hell it is right? We wanted to do a FF VII fanfic because we both love the game (She introduced me to it).

Everything was going good, until we got to Cloud and Sephiroth. She had Sephiroth opening the doors, with her same style: something relaxed without much intrigue, but just enough information to keep you curious. I wrote the next part, as Cloud, describing his day and then his reaction to seeing Sephiroth trying to open the door.

She tells me, after that entry and letting the RP get frozen, that she doesn’t want to write with me anymore, because I’m “too aggressive” of a writer..... And I would agree with that assessment, except the way I’m writing now is the same style I’ve written since we first exchanged stories in High school.

The reason, I believe, she didn’t want to write anymore, was because I actual take the time to write and make a story a fucking story. It wasn’t until I actually started to put my own style into the story rather than just write random words to continue a scene that bothered her, which was weird because she was asking me to lead and to come up with ideas the entire time. We were both working on the story, but when it came down to it, everything that we had written so far (if it’s still up) was based on everything I thought up, not her. She would ask, “what should we do here?” and I would say “Uh, idk, kill a whore, yaoi, Cid cursing ridiculously for tea--take your pick!”

I would always end up inviting her to give some sort of idea to the story, but it was like hitting a brick fucking wall. There was a girl I once knew named Harlie I tried to do an RP with. I kept us stuck in the church.

I understand why Harlie hates me so much now, but at least Harlie had the balls to say to my face, so she has my respect.

But ***** never gave anything. She never gave any ideas, never stuck with her ideas, never tried to inspire me to try and do something different. Everything became my idea, and after a while, I decided “Fuck it, I’m writing the way I normally write. I want my characters to have a powerful voice when I write about them.” And I will give you an example: Erizen--

“Tall, fraile to the eyes and unsettling to the stomach, this man walked through the streets with a silent vengeance, and reason to search for something he had been missing. Violet eyes met the strangers all around him: the vendors, the customers, the by-passers, the traffic, the police that gave him a glaring stare. Did I appear that suspicious, he wondered. He kept his eyes beneath the rim of the wet hat on his head, protecting his spectacles from the heavy rain that always followed him, no matter the time or place, or maybe the rain was all in his head. He was never too sure how real or illusory the world around him was. One of his soaked, pruned fingers pressed his spectacles back up onto his nose, before he reached the dinner. He just wanted something to eat. It had been so long, he couldn’t remember the last time food even tasted good to him. He was so used to eating quickly unitl he was full, until he was able to roam again and quickly. He was never prone to stick around to make friends or enemies.”

THAT’S HOW I WRITE ALL THE FUCKING TIME!!! I’ve attempted to work and polish and have my work critisized by strangers and people who I thought liked books but turned out they thought they could get into my pants, which was like “ew!”. I’ve worked my ass off to make my writing as nice as I can get it. I write descriptively surrounding the story. Me, slowing and handicapping myself for my friend just so she doesn’t feel intimidated by my practice and art, doesn’t help me or her. She wants to be a writer too, but if she can’t handle RPing with someone with an “aggressive” writing style, how is she going to handle it when people actually read her publications and realize that she hasn’t polished her work yet?

And I’m not saying she’s a bad writer or anything. It’s nothing like that, but it’s like she got so much WORSE! It’s like she doesn’t even care enough about her characters enough to make them feel like real fucking people. she just writes them for scenes. I’ve tried to give her criticism on her writing, like “you can try this with your character,” or “Make this person like someone you really hate and that will make them an interesting villain,” and she would blow me off every time, but would expect me to take everything she said with a pound a gold rather than a grain of salt. the only time she would see her advice was if I was writing directly to her, or in one of the 4 drafts I sent her with separate endings. IRONICALLY, it was the work without her advice that she enjoyed the most--the work that i specifically lied about--and then she would assume the work WITH her advice was my own and try to tell me how to improve it.

It was one of the first ways I found out that she didn’t pay attention to a fucking thing I ever said or did.

But it’s always been like this with her. When it came to Magic: the Gathering, we couldn’t play anymore because she didn’t want to lose--something about when her father would win a game, he would rub it in her and her brother’s face, which is like “okay, but I’m not your dad, so....”--and actually yelled at me the first time we ever played because she didn’t win. Every video game we would play together that was multiplayer was MMORPGs, with was more about developing the self rather than competitive algorithmic skills in a computing setting with victory defined by who uses the best combinations of correct codes the fastest and most efficiently.

Which is fucking weird, because she would play those games with everyone else and lose graciously. I could be like not even half a step closer to the finish line and she’ll give up in the middle of it. And it’s not like I’m talking shit or anything (because she gets upset really easily and I never wanted to hurt her feelings) but I could be dead silent, and if she thought she was losing, she would throw shit. And it was irritating to the point where I didn’t even try to get her to do anything with me anymore.

all she would ever do is throw a fit when she didn’t get her way, and I was sick of it. She HATES competition. Like, a lot. A lot more than most people. A lot more than most narcissists, now come to think of it. It was her biggest pet peeve cause she never wanted to feel like a loser.... which is stupid because she is and, like the rest of us, she needs to accept that she’s a scrub ass, insignificant loser like the rest of the population. It was like anything that would make her look... er, “Secondary”, pissed her off. A lot.

And don’t get me started on the time when I was dressed better than her. I fear there were occasions were she intentionally guided me to looking like I literally lived in a cardboard box.

I keep wondering if she felt like she was in competition with my husband, as if the baby was the last straw, like she knew that my daughter would be the very thing that made her realize that I would never be with her or want her. Well, technically, after the whole “leave-your-husband-for-me” shit, she lost on that anyway. I wonder if she thought I would try to do what she did when she got married: entice my best friend into an affair and then throw an ultimatum her way just to spice things up.

But this is how I feel, not what I know, and that’s why I’ll always be wrong in this and why I’ll never have an actual answer from this bitch, because If I’m wrong, then she never had a reason but was just looking for one, and If I’m right, then she would never tell me because that would destroy the illusion that she created, the lie, that I am the “toxic” one, that she keeps telling herself so she doesn’t lose her mind from all the guilt and regret she’ll feel eventually.

Honestly, maybe she did it on purpose more because I stopped writing all those poems and songs about her years ago. It got boring though. I can’t keep writing about a person forever, and I have other things to do. I actually stopped writing about her after she tried the shit with me while my husband was gone, now that I think about it. No, that’s a lie, I think wrote two more: for lament of emotions, of course. but after that, I was done. Maybe it was because she got sucked into the internet and I was trying to remain on planet earth? It’s hard to be a Pintrest mom when I’m a Grieving mother with bills to fucking pay.

Maybe she just got tired of trying to be a friend to someone she didn’t want to have anything in common with? It’s not like she and I were on the same page anymore; she didn’t even tell me sorry for the death of my daughter, so obviously compassion isn’t a priority anymore. Maybe she did it hoping at some point I would keep trying so she could give me an ultimatum about our relationship? Maybe she just said nix the ultimatum and to cut off the friendship because she realized that I didn’t want her like I used to. I was happier as friends, not as lovers, and that’s the only way we would have worked.

Maybe my daughter WAS the last straw for her, which makes me feel better that she did leave, if that was the case. I had actually made a resolution for the new years to become a much better person, leave all the negativity behind, and try and do better for others--only for this cunt to pull this shit nearly two weeks later....

That’s the amazing thing about it all: I decided to try and be a better person for my daughter, and my best friend decides that she’s going to be a better person by emotionally and mentally damaging me because I decide to be a better fucking person.... funny how things turn out.

I keep thinking about %%%%% and ^^^^^^. I don’t see it lasting very long. Matt even says that there’s no way--not without me there anyway. He seems to think I AM the reason they are still together, as a trophy system.

Then again, I wonder about her brother. I didn’t know he had come back to WV so quickly. He’s been strung out for so long....I guess he went back to live with her until he can get back to Parkersburg or some shit. God, I tried to relate to him he could confide in me with his issues and he took offense to it because he doesn’t want to look at himself as sick and needing help.

If I do ever end up pregnant again, I’ll have to do my best to hide my child from her and her family. Which is unfortunate because I love her mother, and her brother &&&&& is cool, as well as her sister in law when she decides to actually be something. She’ll be gone soon as well, so I won’t have to worry about that angle. I don’t really trust her anyway.

She only called for my side, and I haven’t heard a word since, which makes me think the two of them are closer than what she say. Everytime i’ve tried to reach out to her, as she’s told me to do, when I get my issues and panic attacks, she ignores them and all sorts of shit.

I’m quite tired of unreliable people, especially those who expect me to sacrifice my happiness for their egos. Doesn’t matter though, cause as soon as it happens. After it happens, it’s going to be like cutting off a popular show right in the middle of the best season, with no continuation of the show and no way to remake or reboot it--EVER. When it happens, and all finally comes to be, I know exactly who’s going to be desperate to suddenly hear my voice, and know how i’m doing, and what’s going with after it.

You’ll never know...

0 notes

christophertheodore-org · 6 years ago

Text

The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat

christheodore

The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat

By Chris Hedges

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister.

0 notes