…it might be one of those days…I mean…where do you even start with these people?

Read more: https://t.co/J9E4j77q1R

— TLDR News UK (@TLDRNewsUK) October 15, 2022

…the irony that I’m citing TL;DR news is not lost on me…but holy hell that’s some beyond irresponsible nonsense on its face…the last thing anyone needs is for anyone who feels a bit crap to be able to demand antibiotics…shit’s getting to the point in some places that they’re down to antibiotics of last resort on account of various things up to & including over-prescription & folks not completing the course…& if those stop working…a world in which antibiotics cease to be reliable is plenty terrifying…but…& I can’t really believe I’m about to seem like I’m backing their play on this…it’s not exactly what it sounds like?

…for starters not all pharmacists are equal…some just dole stuff out, sure…but your compounding pharmacist actually makes the pills, for example…&…well…the idea that some of them can hand out prescriptions off their own bat…not actually new…it’s even potentially smart…it takes a degree of pressure off the wildly oversubscribed GPs & hopefully heads off a few folks who might otherwise have been headed for a spell in the hospitality of the NHS…hell, in some cases a pharmacist might even be more familiar with a patient than their GP…but…they don’t really seem interested in saying that…they’d seemingly prefer to sound like they want to do the dumb thing & let anyone who thinks they want antibiotics to have them without anyone telling them why that might be counterproductive…because apparently that’s how all of this works now…we appeal to people who prize their ability to make the misinformed choice…well…I say we…I guess I mean they…& I guess they do in many senses represent the misinformed choice…so…it’s on-brand, if nothing else…as is the mixed messages thing

Their conversation must have been awkward. Not to mention surreal. “I’m going to have to sack you for doing all the things we agreed in the mini-budget: I just can’t tolerate that level of loyalty from my chancellor. Imagine if every minister did exactly what I wanted. What kind of state would the country be in? Surely you must have realised I was bat-shit crazy and not to be trusted. But anyway, I’m demanding of you a futile gesture. If you resign then suddenly my credibility will be restored. People will begin to realise I know exactly what I’m doing.”
[…]
Her one fault had been to try to do everything too quickly. So she was going to do yet another U-turn on her budget and increase corporation tax after all. And hopefully that would do. But if the markets were still unimpressed then she still had some other unfunded tax cuts she could reverse. And to prove she was serious, she had appointed Jeremy Hunt as the new chancellor. Quite what was in it for Hunt was less clear. His economics are not that much different to Kamikwasi’s so perhaps he’s just hoping to break his predecessor’s record for length of time in office. A race to the bottom.
[…]
There were two final questions that went unanswered before Librium Liz dashed for the exit. Journalists left in the room were shell-shocked. Unable to process the shambles. It was the Trussterfuck of all Trussterfucks. There was literally no point to her premiership. All her leadership promises had unravelled. All that was left was to implement someone else’s plan. Anyone’s. She was a laughing stock. The Tories were a laughing stock. Give it a week or two and she would be gone. This press conference had merely been the Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/14/kwasi-kwarteng-liz-truss-offer-consciously-uncouple-train-wreck

…I mean…from john crace’s lips to god’s ears & all that…but the tories are going to have to change some party rules in order to roll over to yet another leader with this kind of rapidity…& it may be pretty hard for any prospective replacement to try this whole “we don’t need a general election” thing…so…that could be something of a rolling spectacle for a while…& it’s a fair bet that they’ll keep doing stuff in the meantime that seem shitty…like killing regulations on water quality & other stuff that’s pretty much diametrically opposed to the direction things ought to be going in of you’re interested in making anything better…say what you like about the tories…they still know how the game is played & why the quiet part is done quietly…& if they can eke out staying in government for just a little longer then they might get away with letting a whole skein of EU regulation just…expire…without being obliged to have got a replacement through parliament…I believe the technically term for this sort of thing is fuckery?

Peter Thiel is far from the first billionaire who has wielded his fortune to try to influence the course of American politics. But in an election year when democracy itself is said to be on the ballot, he stands out for assailing a longstanding governing system that he has described as “deranged” and in urgent need of “course correction”.
[…]
He’s not merely favoring one party over another, but is supporting candidates who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president and have, in their different ways, called for the pillars of the American establishment to be toppled entirely.
[…]
Over the past decade, ever since the supreme court dramatically loosened the rules of political campaign giving in its Citizens United decision, Thiel has placed sizable bets on candidates who are not only conservative but have sought to challenge longstanding institutional traditions and break the Republican party’s own norms: Senator Ted Cruz in Texas and Senator Josh Hawley in Missouri as well as Trump himself.
[…]
Thiel himself opined as far back as 2009 that he no longer believed democracy to be compatible with freedom and expressed “little hope that voting will make things better”. While a member of Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016, he flashed his institution-busting instincts by proposing that a leading climate change skeptic, William Happer, be appointed as White House science adviser. He also pushed for a libertarian bitcoin entrepreneur who did not believe in drug trials to head up the Food and Drug Administration.

Such proposals were too much even by Trump’s iconoclastic standards. Steve Bannon, Trump’s ultra-right campaign manager and political strategist, told a Thiel biographer: “Peter’s idea of disrupting government is out there.”
[…]
Campaign finance experts see Thiel as a symptom of a much broader problem: a political environment in which a small group of mega-donors are growing ever bolder in the size of the checks they write and the erosion of any nominal firewall between the war chests run by candidates and the funds controlled by outside groups dedicated to their success.

“It does seem to be getting worse,” said Chisun Lee, an expert on campaign finance who directs the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government program at New York University. “Outside spending in this federal midterm cycle is more than double the last midterm cycle. Since Citizens United, just 12 mega-donors, eight of them billionaires, have paid one dollar out of every 13 spent in federal elections. And now we’re seeing a troubling new trend … that some mega-donors are sponsoring campaigns that attack the fundamentals of democracy itself.”

Thiel’s spending has been dwarfed this year by at least three other mega-donors – Soros ($128m to the Democrats), shipping products tycoon Richard Uihlein ($53m to Republicans) and hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin ($50m to Republicans). And Thiel has some way to go to match the consistent giving, cycle after cycle, of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas casino magnate.

Many experts also believe the attack on democracy began long before it became as explicit as Thiel has made it, because the whole point of funneling large amounts of money into the political system is to sway policy away from the will of the majority to the narrow interests of the donors and their friends.
[…]
“You’re going to see much, much bigger individual contributions and an acceleration of contributions to Super Pacs [like the ones established to support Vance and Masters],” [Lawrence] Lessig [whose 2011 book Republic, Lost offers an enduringly devastating analysis of the relationship between money and political influence] said. “The candidates and the Super Pacs can’t coordinate on spending, but that doesn’t mean they can’t coordinate on the fundraising. Since the Super Pacs are outspending candidates by orders of magnitude, it’s all a dance to flush money into Super Pacs … They basically call the shots, and politicians can’t get anything through that they oppose.”
[…]
“If you’re a candidate and you know $10m is going to come in against you on a particular issue,” he said, “you are going to bend to avoid the effect of that money, whether or not it’s going to decide the race … If you’re someone who would otherwise be a strong climate activist, but you know that if you mention a carbon tax, a million dollars will drop from some anti-carbon tax Super Pac, you won’t talk about it.”

Thiel’s bid to overthrow the system, in other words, goes well beyond his ability to determine which party controls the Senate next year. The money will solidify the notion that the country is being run by psychopaths, at least among a hard core of Republican voters, analysts warn, and will further harden the ideological battle lines that have split the country in two and made common ground ever harder to find. It also brings the extreme opinions of NatCon further into the mainstream, making it easier for radical Republican candidates to run and win in future races, they say.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/15/peter-thiel-who-is-he-republican-donor-tech-entrepreneur

…you see…sometimes like-minded assholes show similar characteristics…I mean…you’d think it would be hard to fuck up the potential PR benefit of providing accessible internet to the ukrainians of late…but…hear me out…what if you did it by slapping down a bunch of hardware, waiting until they’d developed a considerable reliance on it & everyone was familiar with your “largesse”…& then invoicing for it while saying you’d withdraw it if you didn’t get paid?

Original story: SpaceX has asked the Pentagon to fund the Ukraine government and military’s use of Starlink broadband, saying the Elon Musk-led company can’t afford to donate more user terminals or pay for operations indefinitely, CNN reported.

…&…for added levels of asshole-ness…how about if it seemed like it hadn’t exactly been free-at-the-point-of-use in the first place?

Elon has decided not to pay for #Starlink (did Putin ask him to do so?) Also, Space X have already been covering just part of the costs. Elon’s charity effort was all a bluff. Btw. His net worth is higher than the yearly GDP of Ukraine even prior to the invasion. #ElonKompromat pic.twitter.com/f3PuOxwbVk

— The Naked Viewer (@TheNakedViewer) October 14, 2022

Ukrainians are paying for #starlink.

So @elonmusk:
– is a liar
– supports russian aggression
– pushes russian neratives
– misleads a lot people https://t.co/7ecRbmC5jj

— Taras Shevchenko 🇺🇦 (@tshevcom) October 14, 2022

…those look like…what do they call them….oh, yeah…receipts

Update, October 15, 5:57pm EDT: In a tweet early Saturday afternoon, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that satellite-based ISP Starlink will continue providing Internet service to Ukrainian forces battling the Russian invasion as well as the country’s government. “The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free,” Musk tweeted.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/spacex-says-it-cant-keep-funding-starlink-in-ukraine-asks-pentagon-for-money/

…I dunno…call me hopelessly naïve…but maybe those kinds of assholes ought not to be able to wield influence as disproportionate as their wealth…& in particular ought not to get away with claiming to do so under false pretences

In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Mr. Bankman-Fried but also the Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.
[…]
Mr. Musk has not officially joined the movement but he and Mr. MacAskill have known each other since 2015, when they met at an effective altruism conference. Mr. Musk has also said on Twitter that Mr. MacAskill’s giving philosophy is similar to his own.

…two things can be similar…they might for example both have a long wooden handle fixed to a metal blade at one end & be used for tasks related to trees…but a spade will dig a hole to plant one in & an axe will cut the fucker down

At its core, effective altruism is devoted to the question of how one can do as much good as possible with the money and time available to them. Mr. MacAskill was one of the founders of the group Giving What We Can, started at Oxford in 2009. Members promised to give away at least 10 percent of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible.
[…]
If the movement has an ur-text, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” published in 1972. The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people who were dying elsewhere in the world, emerged as a kind of “sleeper hit” for young people in the past two decades, according to Julia Wise, community liaison at the Centre for Effective Altruism, an organization Mr. MacAskill helped found.
[…]
While philanthropy is often boiled down to questions of dollars and cents, with an emphasis on the biggest checks written by the richest donors, behind the entire field are significant ethical questions about rights and responsibilities and the best way to help others. In the halls of older foundations, questions of whether to emphasize giving toward racial equity or to devote the most resources to preventing climate change, for instance, play out in their own version of the near term versus long term debate.
[…]
With an estimated $220 billion fortune, Mr. Musk could single-handedly make effective altruism the leading movement in philanthropy. Mr. Musk spoke at the EA Global conference in 2015, appearing on a panel about the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

…pinch of salt & all that…how fast that paper number shrinks when you start trying to unpick the bits of it that are leveraged in order to produce the spendable sort of wealth that governments are fond of taxing is…well let’s just say he can call himself the richest man in the world but I’d bet pretty much all I had that in a spending contest he’d be a long way from the last man standing…either way

In August, Mr. Musk retweeted Mr. MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.” Yet instead of wholeheartedly embracing that endorsement as many would, Mr. MacAskill posted a typically earnest and detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed — and many areas where he disagreed — with Mr. Musk. (They did not see eye to eye on near-term space settlement, for one.)
How a Scottish Moral Philosopher Got Elon Musk’s Number [NYT]

…so…maybe we’d be better off exploring the mysteries of the universe

On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes.

On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world — rules that Einstein never accepted. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed. God doesn’t play dice, Einstein often complained.
[…]
But a blizzard of research in the last decade on the inner lives of black holes has revealed unexpected connections between the two views of the cosmos. The implications are mind-bending, including the possibility that our three-dimensional universe — and we ourselves — may be holograms, like the ghostly anti-counterfeiting images that appear on some credit cards and drivers licenses. In this version of the cosmos, there is no difference between here and there, cause and effect, inside and outside or perhaps even then and now; household cats can be conjured in empty space. We can all be Dr. Strange.

“It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing,” Leonard Susskind of Stanford University wrote in a paper in 2017. “But those of us who are paying attention may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other.”

That insight, Dr. Susskind and his colleagues hope, could lead to a theory that combines gravity and quantum mechanics — quantum gravity — and perhaps explains how the universe began.
Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our Universe [NYT]

…seriously…it’s an interesting article…& you need to be kind to your mind

The mental health toll of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the subject of extensive commentary in the United States, much of it focused on the sharp increase in demand for mental health services now swamping the nation’s health care capacities. The resulting difficulty in accessing care has been invoked widely as justification for a variety of proposed solutions, such as the profit-driven growth of digital health and teletherapy start-ups and a new mental health plan that the Biden administration unveiled earlier this year.
[…]
Some social scientists have a term — “reification” — for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.

For people in power, the reification sleight of hand is very useful because it conveniently abracadabras questions like “Who caused this thing?” and “Who benefits?” out of sight. Instead, these symptoms of political struggle and social crisis begin to seem like problems with clear, objective technical solutions — problems best solved by trained experts. In medicine, examples of reification are so abundant that sociologists have a special term for it: “medicalization,” or the process by which something gets framed as primarily a medical problem. Medicalization shifts the terms in which we try to figure out what caused a problem, and what can be done to fix it. Often, it puts the focus on the individual as a biological body, at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions.
[…]
Before we go further, let me be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that mental illnesses are fake, or somehow nonbiological. Pointing out the medicalization of social and political problems does not mean denying that such problems produce real biological conditions; it means asking serious questions about what is causing those conditions. If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.

This principle is what some health researchers mean by the idea that there are social determinants of health — that effective long-term solutions for many medicalized problems require nonmedical — this is to say, political — means. We all readily acknowledge that for diseases like diabetes and hypertension — diseases with a very clear biological basis — an individual’s body is only part of the causal reality of the disease. Treating the root cause of the “epidemic” of diabetes effectively, for example, would happen at the level of serious infrastructural changes to the available diet and activity levels of a population, not by slinging medications or pouring funding into clinics that help people make better choices in supermarkets filled with unregulated, unhealthy food. You’ve got to stop the guy running over people with the car.
[…]
Psychiatric sciences have long acknowledged the fact that stress is causally implicated in an enormous range of mental disorders, referring to the “stress-diathesis model” of mental illness. That model incorporates the well-documented fact that chronic stressors (like poverty, political violence and discrimination) intensify the chance that an individual will develop a given diagnosis, from depression to schizophrenia.

The causal relationship may be even more direct. Remarkably, all throughout decades of research on mood disorders, scientists doing animal studies had to create animal models of anxiety and depression — that is, animals who showed behaviors that looked like human anxiety and depression — by subjecting them to weeks or months of chronic stress. Zap animals with unpredictable and painful shocks they can’t escape, force them to survive barely survivable conditions for long enough, put them in social situations where they are chronically brutalized by those higher up in the social hierarchy — and just like that, the animals will consistently start behaving in a way that looks like human psychopathology.

This doesn’t mean that all psychiatric symptoms are caused by stress, but it does mean that a whole lot of them almost certainly are. There is increasingly strong evidence for the idea that chronic elevation of stress hormones has downstream effects on the neural architecture of the brain’s cognitive and emotional circuits. The exact relationship between different types of stress and any given cluster of psychiatric symptoms remains unclear — why do some people react to stress by becoming depressed, while others become impulsive or enraged? — indicating that whatever causal mechanism exists is mediated by a variety of genetic and social conditions. But the implications of the research are very clear: When it comes to mental health, the best treatment for the biological conditions underlying many symptoms might be ensuring that more people can live less stressful lives.
[…]
Solving the mental health crisis, then, will require fighting for people to have secure access to infrastructure that buffers them from chronic stress: housing, food security, education, child care, job security, the right to organize for more humane workplaces and substantive action on the imminent climate apocalypse.

A fight for mental health waged only on the terms of access to psychiatric care does not only risk bolstering justifications for profiteering invoked by start-ups eager to capitalize on the widespread effects of grief, anxiety and despair. It also risks pathologizing the very emotions we are going to need to harness for their political power if we are going to win solutions.
Mental Health Is Political [NYT]

…& the way this circus is going is like to drive anyone halfway sane completely nuts

But whatever path Trump chooses, the decision of constitutional consequence appears certain to also become a pitched political spectacle – with each side seeking to achieve their own goals as the congressional investigation into the Capitol attack prepares to finish its work.

The driving factor pushing Trump to want to testify has centered around a reflexive belief that he can convince investigators that their own inquiry is a supposed witch-hunt and convince them that he committed no crimes over January 6, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Trump has previously expressed an eagerness to appear before the select committee and “get his pound of flesh” as long as he can appear live before an audience, the sources said – a thought he reiterated to close aides on Thursday after the panel voted to issue him a subpoena.

…&…what? his testimony before congress wouldn’t be on pain of perjury? I don’t know if there’s a harder-to-tuen-over-on-appeal thing going on with that subpoena…like alex jones not getting to spew bile in those damages hearings on account of having defaulted away his right to that kind of reply…but while that ring of the circus does whatever the hell it’s gonna do…you could always keep up with the steadily growing run of teaser clips for that dutch dude’s doc on roger the not-so-artful dodger

Breaking: Another Roger Stone video has dropped. This time Stone is talking about Donald Trump: “run again you’ll get your fucking brains beat in”

Newly released video from @cguld pic.twitter.com/yQYRcYXesN

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) October 15, 2022

Attempts to seek judicial enforcement against Trump would be even more time-consuming and given the justice department’s internal position on absolute immunity – a stronger protection than executive privilege – the effort might be wholly unsuccessful, legal experts said.

The select committee could alternatively refer the former president to the justice department for contempt of Congress as it did with former aides Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, but the justice department would probably decline to prosecute on the immunity standard, the experts said.

The calculus appears to leave Trump with a political prisoner’s dilemma, one person directly familiar with the investigation said – adding that they believed the panel will be perceived in history as having done as much as it could to uncover Trump’s connection to the Capitol attack.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/15/trump-testify-january-6-subpoena-capitol-attack

…after all…it might not take much wit to look at someone who says “it’s not fair how they won’t let me tell my side of it” but demurs when offered the opportunity to do exactly that on penalty of perjury & conclude that they know full well that the nearest thing they have to a defense of their actions is demonstrably constructed of outright lies & misrepresentations…read all about it?

Pennsylvania’s most widely circulated newspaper showed up, without fanfare or explanation, in the mailboxes of about 1 in every 5 households in the state this April.

A 12-page tabloid with a circulation of 953,000, it has arrived every month since, with articles from the Associated Press, crosswords, recipes and useful updates on which nearby towns had the lowest gas prices. But nowhere in its pages does it disclose its true mission.

The Pennsylvania Independent is, in fact, a new sort of political-journalism hybrid becoming more popular on the left — just one part of a quiet four-state, $28 million election year effort by the liberal-leaning American Independent Foundation and partner groups aimed at swaying voters in the midterm elections.
[…]
The Independent has quietly positioned itself on the edge of an emerging and controversial industry fueled by ideological donors who are looking to further political agendas with the trappings of old-fashioned journalism, down to the ornate Gothic nameplate fonts.

As local newspapers have collapsed amid a rise in online advertising competition, niche news products with private funding sources have sprouted to fill the void. Some, like the American Independent network of papers, function as a sort of direct mail persuasion piece, while others republish and repurpose content on hundreds of websites with hyperlocal names like the Fond Du Lac Times in Wisconsin and the Boulder Leader in Colorado. Additional experiments have sought to build actual newsrooms in key swing states to attract audiences to more ideological views.

The projects have alarmed journalism educators, who worry that the newcomers deceive readers, undermine the reputations of existing journalistic brands, and fail, in some cases, to meet even the basic standards of the professions, like revealing conflicts of interest or seeking out multiple perspectives on contested issues.
[…]
Progressive defenders of the projects, however, argue that they are legitimate attempts to build an unapologetic media ecosystem to counter the prominence of conservative news.
[…]
Dmitri Mehlhorn, the co-founder of Investing in US, an investment fund backed by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, says the new operations are necessary and effective.

“You end up funding things like The American Independent and Courier and PushBlack at the end of a long decision tree, where you are looking for ways to fight disinformation,” Mehlhorn said. “We believe at this point that you have to have your news be objective, and that is not consistent with pretending to be nonpartisan.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/14/newspapers-partisan-midterms/

…one thing’s for sure…tomorrow’s monday…assuming nobody disagrees?