…anyone else getting sick of it feeling like the morning after but not getting to have enjoyed the night before the way I swear I remember that working?

U.S. officials and experts are most concerned that Russia could try to interfere in the election through a “deepfake” audio or video using artificial intelligence tools or through a “hack and leak,” such as the politically damaging theft of internal Democratic Party emails by Russian military intelligence operatives in 2016.

The type of pro-Russia online propaganda campaigns that thrived on Twitter and Facebook ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is now routine on every major social media platform, though it’s rare for individual accounts to go as viral now as they once did.

Those influence operations often create matching accounts on multiple sites, which vary drastically in their moderation policies. Accounts from one pro-Russia campaign that Meta, the owner of Facebook, cracked down on late last year, an English-language news influencer persona called “People Say,” are still live on other platforms, though some are dormant.
[…]
“In many ways it’s a perfect storm of opportunity for them,” said Paul Kolbe, who worked for 25 years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and is now a fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “I think, for a lot of reasons, we will see the same approach, but amplified and, I think, with some of the constraints that you might have seen taken off.”
[…]
In what appears to be an effort to deepen divisions, Russia has amplified the political dispute between the Biden administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over security at the Texas border over the past month. Russian politicians, bloggers, state media and bots have promoted the idea that America is headed to a new “civil war.”

It was a quintessential move by a Russian regime with a long tradition of trying to manipulate existing political rifts, like immigration, to its advantage, experts said.

But there’s so far no sign that Russia’s disinformation operation in Texas has had any significant impact, said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council.

“So far, Russian operations targeting the U.S. have been opportunistic. They see whatever narrative is rising to the top, and they try to push it,” Brooking said. “Disinformation isn’t created in a vacuum. The more polarized a country is, the easier it is for foreign actors to infiltrate and hijack its political processes.”

…& the…uh…good news…is there’s so much noise it’s attenuating the signal?

In the U.S., though, Russia’s propaganda themes are now often echoed in comments from some Republican lawmakers and pro-Trump commentators, including the portrayal of Ukraine’s government as deeply corrupt.

The adoption of Russian state rhetoric in America’s political debate is a victory for Moscow, experts said. Putin’s goal is to spread doubt and division among Americans.

“An equally nice outcome for them is just what we had last time, where a third of the country doesn’t believe the vote,” Schafer said. “Democracy is questioned; the system gets questioned. So they don’t necessarily need to see their guy win to have it be a good outcome for them.”

…so…as came up late in the yesterday’s DOT….there doesn’t seem to be much reward to be gained…but…then again…if it’s a low risk proposition?

It remains extraordinarily difficult for a remote cyberattack to take over voting systems in the U.S. and change vote counts. The American intelligence assessment of the 2022 midterms found no indication that Russia had tried to hack into election systems or ballot counting that year.

But Kolbe, the former CIA directorate of operations official, said the Kremlin would most likely see trying to penetrate U.S. voting systems as a low-risk undertaking.

“I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t,” he said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find where they would see the risk part of the equation. It gets close to zero.”

…still…lotta needles moving on their own…so…at some point you’re reinventing the wheel

Such interference could come with plausible deniability. On the day of the 2022 midterm elections, the Mississippi secretary of state’s website, which hosts the official polling place finder for voters in Mississippi, was knocked offline most of the day after pro-Kremlin hacktivists on Telegram called for supporters to join in a low-level cyberattack against it.

Still, U.S. officials and disinformation analysts say Russia’s ability to manipulate voters shouldn’t be overstated. When it comes to spreading disinformation and fueling distrust in election authorities and election results, the biggest threat comes from within America’s fractured, polarized society, not from the outside.

“I am very skeptical, whether it’s 2016 or 2024, that the United States political and media culture needs any push from Russia,” said Gavin Wilde, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who specializes in Russia and information warfare.

“The Kremlin has every interest in seeing an American public, or American leadership, that’s less inclined to support Ukraine, that’s less inclined to punish Russia. Those incentives are certainly there,” he said. “But we’re already doing a pretty good job of that at home. I don’t know how much of a nudge the Kremlin thinks it needs to lend it.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/russias-2024-election-interference-already-begun

…speaking of nudges

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/02/28/supreme-court-to-hear-trump-immunity-claim-on-april-22/

…it’s basically just a block quote & a link to the court order so I would have been reproducing the whole thing if I tried “excerpting” that one…dr wheeler pegs the dates given for filing deadlines to extrapolate to an order in june & a possible trial date in the region of august…that’s the one about jan 6th…which is…D.C. I believe…which isn’t the only place he’s throwing the immunity hail mary…&…apparently even come-on-eileen has her limits

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected an attempt by Donald Trump to review a sensitive court filing submitted by special counsel prosecutors that detailed their reasons for wanting to redact some of the classified documents that would be turned over to the former president in discovery.

The attempt by Trump to access the filing was a brazen move that would have defeated the purpose of rules to protect national security in Espionage Act prosecutions and potentially thrown into disarray the scope and viability of continuing the case against Trump.

In a nine-page order, the presiding US district judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Trump should not gain access to the secret filing because his legal team could prepare a defense without it, even as she took issue with prosecutors’ reasoning for why access should be withheld.

The secret filing – known as a section 4 motion under the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa – has long been treated as inaccessible to defendants because it discusses the very classified information that prosecutors want to redact, as well as their reasons for the redactions.

If defendants were given access to the section 4 motion, including the referenced classified documents in unredacted form and the accompanying declarations from the US intelligence community, it would effectively defeat the purpose of the motion and the Cipa statute more generally.
[…]
The Cipa statute was passed in the 1980s to protect the government from the “graymail” problem, a tactic where defendants threaten to reveal classified information at trial, betting that the government will prefer to drop the charges rather than risk public disclosure of intelligence secrets.

There are seven sections to Cipa. At section 4, where the Trump case currently stands, prosecutors can ask to redact parts of the classified documents that defendants are entitled to receive in discovery that would not be “relevant” or “helpful” in constructing defense arguments for trial.

The basic goal of section 4, according to national security law experts, is to protect classified information from unnecessary exposure and graymail.

Trump was entitled to challenge the government’s section 4 motion and ask that the number of redactions be minimized, though a wholesale rejection by Cannon would almost certainly have triggered an immediate appeal by prosecutors to the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.

…see…the problem with fast-tracking your judicial ace-in-the-hole is…well…see that business where engoron blew up the man’s business licenses…which was arguably over-reaching…though I for one wouldn’t call it that…& then retracted that part of his judgement which makes it a much harder prospect to overturn…well…his floridian floozy done shot her shot a lot sooner & without any sign of that kind of experienced deftness or understanding of the broader process involved

Cannon has previously drawn scrutiny from the 11th circuit. Before Trump was indicted, she upended the underlying criminal investigation by issuing a series of rulings favorable to Trump before the appeals court ruled she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.

…now do the supreme court

…sorry…got distracted for a minute there

But it was highly brazen, even by Trump’s standards, to ask the judge not only to reject prosecutors’ request to redact the documents but also to see the underlying section 4 motion: it amounted to Trump’s lawyers asking to see the information prosecutors wanted hidden from Trump’s lawyers.

…the fishing expedition aspect of it is part of the asshole’s SOP…but…this isn’t some pissed off contractor he needs to keep out of his books so he can claim he hasn’t got the money he owes them while also telling his many, many creditors that he totally has *their* money…this is way out there on the top end of the proprietary information spectrum…& what he asked for there…you could just about use that whole mess as a clear example for why the whole CIPA thing fucking exists…how is that itself not admissible evidence of self-identifying as being guilty & trying to cheat the courts…& the country?

Trump’s lawyers argued they should be able to see the section 4 motion because the case involved a former president – once the chief classification authority; and in two cases involving terrorists, their lawyers with security clearances had ultimately been able to see some of the government’s motion.

The Trump team also argued that prosecutors had been wrong to suggest section 4 proceedings must occur “ex parte”, here meaning only the government would be involved in the litigation, because the statute suggested it was up to the judge to decide how to proceed.

Cannon wrote in her order that she agreed with Trump that it was up to her to decide whether to proceed ex parte, and at times took on a chastising tone towards prosecutors for suggesting otherwise. But Cannon ultimately decided not to create new precedent and rejected Trump’s motion.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/28/judge-deny-trump-request-classified-documents-mar-a-lago

…her, too…I mean…once you got this kind of vigilante bullshit running interference at that level…well…do you want ants? …because…that’s how you get…ah…you get it

The New York judge who oversaw Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial was sent an envelope containing a white powder on Wednesday, triggering a police investigation.

The envelope addressed to Judge Arthur Engoron, who clashed repeatedly with the former president and his legal team throughout the Manhattan fraud trial, was intercepted by two court officers just before 9.30am. Court staff check the mail as a security measure after the judge was inundated with threats before, during and after Trump’s civil fraud trial, including a bomb threat at his home on the day of closing arguments.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/28/judge-trump-fraud-trial-white-powder-mail

…no one was harmed in the making of this obvious example…which makes the threats to their floridian führer…less performative…but there’s your difference of degree…& your difference in kind?

One of the major reasons white non-college voters turned to Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 is the fear of lost white hegemony — that the United States will become a majority-minority nation sometime in the near future.

Almost simultaneously, however, the decisively majority-minority work force will be providing the bulk of the revenue going toward Social Security and Medicare.

In other words, the payroll taxes collected from a majority-minority population will be sustaining the white working-class men and women who are still alive by midcentury, dependent on those two programs for half their retirement income and for a large share of their medical costs.

….something, something…the hand(s) that feed?

The most important shift here and in other developed countries is the steady decline in the number of prime-age workers (from 18 to 64) and the steady growth of the retirement-age population (65 and older).
[…]
The declining Hispanic fertility rate is one of many demographic shifts in the United States. Some are advantageous to the right, others beneficial to the left.

Take, for example, domestic immigration between states. On the surface, red states are winners, and blue states are losers.

While these trends benefit red America, increasing its representation in Congress, the influx of liberal voters from blue states like California has proved to be a key factor in moving Nevada, Arizona and Colorado to the left.

William Frey, a demographer and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, pointed out in an email that

while several red states are the big migration gainers, many of their large in-migrant flows — say from California to Texas or New York to Florida — as well as immigrants from abroad — may help to make these states less red. This may have already occurred in Nevada due to its large inflow of Californians.

In addition, Frey provided data showing that interstate migrants are far younger (43 percent are 18 to 29) than resident populations (21 percent 18 to 29), a shot in the arm for Democrats, since young voters tend to be more liberal than their elders.

Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, described in an email some of the key demographic forces driving partisan trends:

Death rates are also high in the U.S. compared to its peers, and red states have been experiencing higher death rates lately because of the opioid crisis and MAGA’s hostility to public health measures.

A lot is going to depend on patterns and levels of internal and international migration, and that cuts both ways across the red-blue divide. Some red states such as Texas, Florida, Nevada and Utah are growing both from high rates of natural increase (births-deaths) and high total net migration (positive native and foreign migration), while other red states are waning because of low rates of natural increase and net migration (the plains states, Alabama, Mississippi and West Virginia).

In some blue states both natural increase and net migration are low (e.g., California), while others (such as Washington) have relatively high rates of both natural increase and net migration. The political implications are also determined by who is having the babies (immigrants) and who is producing all the deaths (older white boomers), as well as the geography of demographic change. In general, it’s rural areas that are shrinking and metro areas are growing.

…now…I’m no expert…but…wouldn’t a working-class identity be more or less predicated on…you know…the class working?

In addition to the declining share of the population made up of working-age adults, a second factor is the steadily declining labor-force participation of men, especially men without college degrees.

…even if some will tell you that a college degree & “real” work don’t go together

Declining labor force participation is heavily stratified by education. In 2022, 77.6 percent of men with college degrees were in the labor force, 11.6 percentage points higher than the 66.0 percent of men with high school diplomas who were working.

…&…honestly?

…I wouldn’t argue with @farscythe about that sort of thing…especially at this time of the morning…I may be a number of things…& nobody’s perfect…but I’m not that bloody stupid, am I?

…or at any rate my self-preservation sub-routines are functioning within acceptable operational parameters

The steady growth of the share of men effectively abandoning work is, according to Massey, a symptom of a larger phenomenon: the declining “ability of men to make material supports to family welfare through employment.”

…&…look…I’ll pour scorn on the idiots MAGA parts from their money for being dumb enough to throw good money after bad actors

…why you hittin’ yourself?

These trends, in Massey’s view, have been devastating to the lives of working-class men:

The loss of the ability to provide the material foundations of family life strike at the heart of intrafamily power dynamics and male identity, creating a huge social and psychological threat that men respond to by acting out in dysfunctional ways, making them even less desirable as marital partners.

Over the past five decades, the U.S. has evolved a dual family system of unstable precarious working- and middle-class households headed by precariously employed women in which precariously employed men move in and out after successively fathering children, and a stable professional-class system in which employed, well-educated married couples lavish attention and resources on a small number of children, facilitated by the outsourcing of household work to lower-class women (heavily immigrants).

…& kids get into being in a band because they hope their instrument will keep them warm on a cold night when they get old…I’m not unaware that the one thing arguably has nothing to do with the other the way that statement has nothing to do with the quote that precedes it…but…also that there are ways to look at it where both are talking about the same shifting sands upon which we construct our identity…& possibly more relevantly…our self-conception…shit like dignity & self-worth get involved…&…when the legs of that sort of shit get taken out from under like a rug-pull moment…a teenage dirtbag fishing for tail with a six-string is capable of coming out that mix looking like a positive role model…which ought to be grounds for some sober self-reflection on the part of a lot of members of the gender the supreme court hasn’t quite so openly had it in for…but…almost certainly won’t be…men…amirite?

Andrew Owen, a sociologist at Northwestern, citing Melissa Kearney’s work, argued in an email “that low-status women look around and don’t find promising marriage prospects because of the economic and social precarity of low socioeconomic status men.”

…&…that thing goes on about fertility rates this & labor market polarization that…but…can we not just call it? …I mean the whole incel thing is a big clue, no? …this all starts to sound like it stems from everyone getting…at a gut-feeling sort of a level…that nobody in their right minds is going to find the sort of people who want the kind of world that venal sack of crap is trying to brute force into existence by…apparently…molding it out of inhuman quantities of shite sprayed over everything in sight until it completely eclipses the underlying reality…what you might call an attractive prospect…&…there’s chris rock bit about how nothing on earth is more capable of embarrassing you in a public place than “a woman knows you ain’t gon’hit her”…&…in context…you at least know what he means even if you don’t think any part of it is comedy material…but…is there really a level of either fear or embarrassment higher than that induced by a dumb guy who knows nobody gonna fuck ’em voluntarily?

…I mean…you kinda wanna keep that sort in a public place at all times just out of basic self-preservation

Just as labor force participation is stratified by education, so too is fertility, but in the opposite direction.

In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that “total lifetime fertility rates were highest among women with a 12th-grade education or less (2,791 per 1000 women) and declined with increasing education through those with an associate degree (1,312) and bachelor’s degree (1,284).”

Looked at from a broader perspective, declining birthrates are intensifying competition for resources between the young and the old, according to Philip Pilkington, a conservative economist and the author of “The Reformation in Economics.”

…&…sure…correlated data is not a causative chain by definition…I mean…there’s a correlation between the part where this should be posted by now & the fact I ain’t got as much out of my system as I maybe need to if I’m going to feel like I’m done with this train of thought in a way that would lend itself to getting something useful done

…& even another correlation between that part & the part where I didn’t sleep for shit

…but the cause…in a proximate sense

…is I’ve spent more time than usual brewing more coffee than usual & it ate my cut&pasting time for the breakfast I didn’t get to having yet…so I figure I’ll just post the thing & keep adding to it for a change instead of pretending I can’t read a clock

…anyway…it was taking too long to find the clip…so here’s the transcript version of how come maybe this is all just an exercise in “write what you know”

OK. I just don’t fit in man. I don’t fit in anywhere, that’s my problem. You know my problem? I watch too much news. I don’t know if you ever, ever, ever sat and watched CNN longer than, say… …20 hours in one day. I’ve got to cut that out. If you ever watch CNN headline news for any length of time it’s the most depressing fucking thing you will ever do; “War, famine, death, AIDS, homeless, recession, depression, war, famine death, AIDS…” Then you look out your window it’s just: [imitates the sound of crickets chirping] Where is all this shit happening man? Ted Turner is making this shit up! Jane Fonda won’t sleep with him, he runs to a typewriter: “By 1992 we will all die of AIDS – Read that on the air. I don’t get laid, nobody gets laid”

bill hicks…relentless…though…could be you’d find it under other names…he was big on recycling, was bill…truly a man ahead of his time…or…maybe just out of step…either way…it’s a fair point…& I don’t think reading instead of watching really changes much about that equation?

…ok…wow…is that the time? …well, at least I’ve got something else done so my day may not be on track but it’s not all the way off the rails…damn if I wouldn’t just as soon go back to bed though…with or without company that sounds like a deeply attractive prospect…not gonna lie…but…maybe it ain’t all about who should or shouldn’t want to fuck who that way…maybe…it’s who’s fucking who in a few different senses?

“A war is slowly brewing,” Pilkington argued in a 2021 article, “Generation Against Generation.” “It pits parents against their children and children against their parents.”

As the share of the population made up of working-age men and women declines and the share of the elderly grows, Pilkington foresees a future

in which overworked young people may see nominal wage increases. But asset markets will inflate more rapidly than their incomes, and the rise in the prices of goods will outstrip their wage gains. In other words, they must run in place with lower real incomes while they rent property from older people because they are priced out of the property market. A young person in this situation might do his best to uphold the Fifth Commandment, but in all likelihood he will nevertheless see his situation as grossly unfair.

…I mean…when I was up against but not yet in amongst what we call the working-age demographic…the outlook was…well it din’t fill my cohort with the joys of spring…&…since then…the reasons why have more compounded than relented…so…the fact the youth aren’t wholly disaffected is something of a testament to the character of your modern kid that it’s easy to miss when they’re being insufferable?

Countries that were among the most successful in transitioning from agrarian poverty to advanced economies, Pilkington wrote, “have experienced astonishing declines in birthrates. South Korea and Taiwan have the lowest fertility rates in the world, at around 0.8 and 1.1 births per woman. China’s fertility rate, estimated at 1.16 in 2021, has been well below replacement for years.”

…& I’m not really trying to argue that anything boils down to something so trivially simple…but…speaking of correlation…seems like there’s a pretty high correlation between women knowing more…& choosing to have less kids…almost like…there’s a tipping point past which you start to question whether or not you feel like you can look ’em in the eye when they’re grown & say “yeah, actually I did know about all of that being that way before I dropped you in it without asking…& all things being equal…you’re going to have to deal with that on your own at some point because I most likely check out first”…&…well…that sure is some shit to have to contend with…so…at some point…could we fucking get this shit settled in a way that reflects the interests of the gender the other one seems so sure ought to be dealt with according to their interpretation of the teachings of witnesses definitively unavailable to a secular court…I mean…freedom fries eat your god-damned heart out

France to make abortion a constitutional right after senate vote [Guardian]

…I am sick to the back teeth with interests that aren’t in anyone else’s running the fucking show…& my tolerance for the justification being an innocent accrual of emergent properties born of a necessarily imperfect society that can’t be overhauled unless you do it while the parts are still moving has been on life-support for as long as I can remember so it’s a fucking miracle it didn’t end up dead & buried years ago…but we are running pretty hard up against the part where that’s always made things happening slowly an advantage to the point of building in all manner of ways to do that…& to stop anyone being able to make big changes in a hurry…because historically the people who want to do big picture stuff on the move-fast-break-things model have traditionally been the worst bets going…only…we need to do big picture shit on a tight timetable & the feature is a bug on that front…& the suicidal tendency has honed its techniques for slamming the brakes to a performative art form…& it’s fucking killing me, y’all

[…yeah…I still ain’t done…& I dunno if this counts as multi-tasking or goofing off…but I’ve had to relegate this to the device equivalent of a back-burner so when I do have a moment…flicking between the bits & pieces involved is slower than I’m used to…or I really am just dead on my feet today…because I swear this does not as a rule seem to require the time it’s taking me today…anyway…where did I put that one about…oh…right…there it is…ok…I’ll get to that part in a minute, then]

The populist backlash against net zero around the world is imperilling the fight against climate breakdown and must be countered urgently or we face planetary destruction “beyond comprehension”, the US climate chief, John Kerry, has warned.

He hit out at the rise of “disinformation” and “demagoguery” which he said were damaging the transition away from fossil fuels, and being used as tactics by special interests to delay action.

“People are not being told the truth about what the impacts are from making this transition [to net zero greenhouse gas emissions],” he said. “They’re being scared, purposely frightened by the demagoguery that is oblivious to the facts or distorting the facts. And in some cases outright lying is going on.”

Political leaders must be guided by the science of the climate crisis and reject the calls for delay, he said. “We have politics now entering into this – fighting for delay and fighting for progress. They’re procrastinating and they’re part of the disinformation crowd that are willing to put the whole world at risk for whatever political motivations may be behind their choices here,” Kerry told the Guardian in an interview in London.
[…]
Though Kerry refused to name any specific interests or politicians, his words reflect the concern among many that the climate is likely to be weaponised in the US election campaigns this year, and in other countries as billions of people around the world head to the polls.

Donald Trump, who is campaigning to be the Republican candidate for a second term at the White House, has repeatedly cast doubt on climate science, vowing to remove the US from the Paris agreement and roll back the policies boosting clean energy espoused by Biden.

Trump is far from alone – a growing backlash against climate policies has been fanned by rightwing parties and populist leaders across the globe, claiming that net zero is too expensive or has no point, while users of social media platforms such as X have been increasingly bombarded by falsehoods and disinformation from climate change deniers.

Kerry warned that the backlash against climate action was having a substantial impact. “We have our work cut out for us because they’re scaring certain companies. You’ll see people retrenching on some things, which is exactly the wrong thing to have happening right now. We ought to be speeding up,” he said.

…backlash, you say? …like…the bad kind of feedback?

Why Bangladesh is running out of options in the face of extreme weather [Guardian]

…so…that must be that god-awful noise I can’t stop hearing but never seems to be coming from anywhere in particular…or so I’m told…even by most of the people who don’t just say they can’t hear it & think they’re immune to dog whistles…by happy coincidence…or some fucking euphemism…I dunno…they keep flipping their stupid fucking script so I dunno what we’re calling it today…are we back around to patriotism again…or is that too shitty a fit for the party of championing the poster child for putting a sloppy grin on the face of the kremlin you could see from fucking orbit?

He said many businesses were set clearly on a path to a low-carbon future, but some were not moving fast enough. “The choice is, will we do this in time to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis? The question is, are you going to put your head in the sand and do business as usual, because you’re so greedy?”

Some countries and businesses might be tempted to backpedal on climate action, in the belief they could increase short-term profits by ignoring net zero, he said. “Why do we have a problem? Because we’re burning fossil fuels persistently, without capturing the emissions. How do you solve that problem? Capture the emissions, or don’t make them. Those are the two choices, and we’re not making those.

“Now maybe some of those guys are richer now [from exploiting fossil fuels]. For the countries well off enough that they think they won’t be affected that much, that they think they can get through it. And people with money will have an easier time adjusting. But the cost to less developed economies, the cost to emerging economies, the cost to poor people around the world will just be beyond comprehension, with billions affected by lack of food, lack of water, other implications.”

No country could hope to escape the consequences, he warned: “This is a multilateral major challenge to the security of every nation on this planet, because we’re one planet, and we’re all linked.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/28/populism-imperilling-global-fight-against-climate-breakdown-says-john-kerry

…hard to believe some of these people can possibly be related to actual functioning at-least-mostly-decent people…but you can’t pick your family…particularly if you haven’t gone to college…by the numbers, any road…&…numbers don’t lie…except for all the lies, damn lies & statistics…just try not to think about the GI:GO principle…or you’ll be getting less done today than me…& trust me when I tell you that’s not a sustainable level of shit-getting-done:shit-needs-doing…so…it’s not really that I feel like I’m running out of steam so much as I’ve been looking for anything that looks like it might pass for a landing I could walk away from…&…if we’re lucky…I think I might have a line on that…cui bono FTW?

Few people have more riding on the 2024 presidential election than tech magnate Elon Musk.

…the delusionally wealthy…they’re just like us, you see

Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, is waging at least 11 separate regulatory or legal battles with the Biden administration or independent federal agencies related to his sprawling business empire, according to a tally by NBC News. If those fights extend into next year and former President Donald Trump returns to the White House, Musk would be likely to gain from relaxed enforcement, experts in regulatory law said in interviews.

The 11 ongoing battles, which involve seven government entities, touch on a wide array of subjects, from unions to vehicle safety to privacy on the social media app X.

“He would be in much less trouble in a Trump administration because Trump shares his hostility to regulation and regulators,” said Richard Pierce, a law professor at George Washington University specializing in government regulation.

…I mean…apparently they get up in the morning & wonder whether today is the day they burn it all to the ground, too

“A second Trump term could very well shift the administrative and regulatory state in ways that would benefit Musk’s companies,” said Angela Aneiros, an assistant professor of law at Gonzaga University and a co-director of the university’s Center of Law, Ethics & Commerce.

“A second term, if it happens, will result in federal agencies’ shifting their focus away from investigations into regulatory compliance issues,” she said. Instead, she said, the focus of a Trump return would most likely be different priorities, such as immigration enforcement.

…uh huh…& there are…how many ways to skin a cat?

Trump’s allies are already fighting alongside Musk in at least one regulatory clash. America First Legal, a group founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sued the Federal Trade Commission in September alleging that it had been harassing Musk with an investigation of user privacy on X. Lawyers for Musk and X have used the same argument.

Musk wears many hats. He is the CEO and largest shareholder in Tesla and SpaceX, the largest shareholder in X and the founder of Neuralink, a brain science startup, and of The Boring Co., a tunnel-building startup.

Musk, 52, hasn’t said whom he supports for president, though he said in November that if the choices were Trump and Biden, “I would not vote for Biden.”

“I’m not saying I’d vote for Trump,” he added at the DealBook Summit in New York.

…motherfucker…I don’t give a shit…I don’t even give one of your shits…emoji or otherwise…who you fucking vote for…you get one of them, same as every other dipshit delusional asshole who’s objectively part of the problem…it’s EVERY OTHER FUCKING THING YOU SAY & DO YOU EPIC MONSTROSITY OF A FUCKING CLICHÉ OF CAPITALISM EATING ITS OWN ASS…how are you too fucking stupid to shrivel up & wither away like anyone with an ounce of self-awareness would if they were in your shoes…it…fucking beggars belief

Yoffie said the breadth and number of Musk’s business interests put him in a unique position, where he’s exposed to many regulatory risks.

“The fact that he is involved in so many of these activities inevitably puts him at the center of attention, compared to any other CEO,” he said.

…which makes him an exaggerated example…not a unique one…sometimes we call those archetypes…or stereotypes…or exemplars…but the cliché thing works for me?

Musk’s lawyers have said the White House should be able to get rid of federal regulators whom they accuse of harassing their client. In a court brief in November, they accused the Securities and Exchange Commission of “attempting to tarnish Mr. Musk’s record with baseless investigations” and said the SEC’s enforcement staff was in violation of the Constitution because it’s too difficult for the president to fire many of them.

…fucking listen to yourself…jesus fucking wept

…fucking obviously…you fucking asshats

“There needs [to be] comprehensive deregulation. Period,” Musk tweeted last year.

The arguments put forward by Musk’s lawyers could have far-reaching effects. They have said in court filings that parts of three federal agencies — the SEC, the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, and the Justice Department — shouldn’t be allowed to operate as is because the way Congress set them up violated the Constitution.

…look…I know…something about doing this in an even more fractured stop-start kinda way apparently has the ability to ratchet up how unhinged I sound…& when I’m this tired I don’t need any help with that…so

Stephen Diamond, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University in California, said Trump’s political movement is generally on the same page as Musk when it comes to regulatory action. Now, they’re all feeling emboldened to diminish federal agencies, he said.

New Deal-era bodies like the NLRB have “always rankled a certain segment of American business. They vociferously opposed the creation of these agencies in the 1930s, and they have looked for opportunities to weaken these agencies,” he said.

“Largely Musk is in that tradition, but he’s pushing it a little bit further,” he said.

Musk’s net worth was about $213 billion as of Monday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-election-elon-musk-biden-win-chances-regulatory-regulation

…drop in the proverbial ocean & all as it may be…but…how can I put this in a way that’s acceptably crazy?

…ok…

Helldivers 2, a hit video game from Arrowhead Game Studios, challenges players to work together as an elite team of soldiers to save Earth by pushing back invading hordes of space bugs, cyborgs and robots.

…bear with me

It’s a simple enough premise, a classic good-versus-bad tale — except for one particular wrinkle. As many people have pointed out since its launch, some of the propaganda-style in-game content and the plot of Helldivers 2 bears a striking resemblance to “Starship Troopers,” a 1997 science fiction film about humanity’s future war against alien bugs that has come to be seen as a tragic case of satire that initially went unappreciated.

The game lays it on thick, with cutscenes bordering on comedy that tout Earth’s united and militaristic regime, having already plundered the galaxy.

…in one of the hitchhikers’ books adams has a thing called a babel fish…it’s an explicit macguffin to untie his hands on the language issue with setting a thing in a world…or rather galaxy…with a lot of things that wouldn’t understand each other…but the way he lays it out is an imagined dialogue

“I would say most of the people understand it to be satirical,” said Christian Divyne, 29, a content creator and gamer who posted to TikTok about the Helldivers 2 discourse. “I think because it’s so overt in nature that people kind of get that it’s meant to be a bit and a joke.”

Where people are butting heads, Divyne said, is in conversations in which players say if they were in the Helldivers’ position, they would have no choice but to defend themselves and their country.

“They’re sort of just missing the point of what is an entirely fictional story,” Divyne said.

That’s led to a surprisingly fervent and meta debate about the video game: Is it actually a satire of fascism? And if so, is it worrying that some people don’t seem aware of that? Or don’t care at all?

Or, in terms more relatable to people who spend a lot of time on the internet: “Are we the baddies?”

It’s a discussion that has spread on X, TikTok, YouTube, gaming message boards and Reddit, becoming prevalent enough in the gaming community to inspire a video from an unofficial X account dedicated to news about the game.

…so anyway…it goes a little like this

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

…if only logic worked that way…as opposed to…say…the internet?

The online discussion — and at times, debate — around the game has echoed some broader pop culture discourse around the challenges and dangers of using satire in media that can sometimes be subtle or lost on people, particularly around the subject of fascism. Some players have sought to distance themselves from the topic altogether, while others have leaned into the conversation, posting about the importance of the game’s satirical messaging.
[…]
Those elements have helped earn the comparisons to “Starship Troopers.” Similar to the video game, the movie takes place on an Earth that is ruled by a singular government whose military forces are fighting bug-like creatures called “Arachnids” on their home planets.

…yes…yes…if you didn’t know…I am sorry to tell you there have always beena steady supply of those stupid enough not to get what starship troopers said as a movie…or the book it was based on…or how those are different…or even really how they’re the same in some ways, too…fuck it…there were people who didn’t get what robocop “said”…it’s true what they say…people are fucking idiots

“Starship Troopers,” meanwhile, has gone through several rounds of re-examination and updated appreciation in recent years. The topic was recently revisited by some users on X arguing not whether it was satire, but whether it was effective in its satirical efforts.

It’s a particularly timely topic as political scientists and historians have warned that support for fascism has been making a comeback in various parts of the world, including the U.S. Similarly, experts have observed a rise in ironic communication, like satire and parody, in recent years, as a tool to both examine and push back on dangerous ideologies like fascism.
[…]
“When you combine satire and parody, you’re going to get a lot more people missing it,” [Sophia McClennen, a professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State University, who has written several books about political satire] said. “And you’re going to get a lot of the people that you’re actually satirizing liking it. It’s a guarantee, because it means you actually did it right.”

A video game has reinvigorated a long-running debate about fascism and satire [NBC]

…uh huh

The World May Be Entering a Much Bloodier Era [NYT]

…so, anyway…back to mr adams for the last word before I face the music…or at least the empty space I need to fill with some before the tumbleweeds blow in

“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.”

…look both ways, folks…& mind out for the traffic…lot of that shit shouldn’t even be out on the road, if you ask me…but then…as ever…pretty sure nobody did?

…dunno if that makes up for the job I did on that post…but…cards you’re dealt & all that…at least I tried?

Aren't bosses something?…..
They're like gnats at a picnic man….Get the fuck out of here buddy, it's just a job. I smoked a joint this morning – you're lucky I showed. My bed was like a womb, man.

— Bill Hicks (@Bill_Hicks_RIP) December 23, 2023

[ETA: …not that further proof were required or anything…but…sleep-deprivation does terrible things to the memory, I hear…&…well…I forgot something I’m pretty sure I meant to find a spot for…unless we want to make it its own post & stick it permanently to the top of the list just to make us all feel better when the homepage loads?]

https://trumpdebtcounter.com

…honestly…if any of you lot get less than 10/10 on that quiz…you must be in worse shape than me…& I wouldn’t wish that on…no…wait…there are some anybodies I would, at that…but…not you lot…goes without saying…as…err…they say?