🔻Heat Death of the Universe🔻

A tragicomic podcast about a wide range, falling under the enormous Janus-faced purview of cultural & political commentary. @ImbalancingAct & @ROHDUTCH

[A Left-Wing Account ™️ @PushDemsLeft]

If you were writing the villains in a horror movie like this it would seem too on the nose, but it's real -

Israel is using our tax dollars to build their own Alligator Alcatraz for Palestinian people.

[🔻Heat Death of the Universe🔻 @heatdeathpod]

@whereisplanet9 @zei_squirrel He would but they have a mountain of the most disgusting Kompromat on him so...

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

@piersmorgan In the months leading up to his death Graham had advocated for direct US military interventionism in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and had just returned from a trip promoting the US proxy war against Russia. He was pushing war until the very end.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is pretty insane: if you read the details of this new policy 👇 that now bans scientific collaboration with China, it's entirely driven by the Department of War.

Which means that civilian scientific research in the US is now driven by military logic - something that had basically never been the case since WW2.

I'm not making it up, you can read the new policy of the National Science Foundation for yourself: https://t.co/Bjx8sbIrcW

They explicitly write that the basis for this new prohibition is to be "aligned with the Department of War's approach to collaborations": a civilian science agency - the one that funds most fundamental research in the US - is now openly modeling its policies on the military's. The Pentagon decides who the enemy is, and science falls in line.

It doesn't take a genius to understand how this will backfire. Cancer, for instance, doesn't care about geopolitics. Some of the most promising research in oncology, like every other field, depends on international collaboration (and especially with China who are extremely advanced in cancer research, and most research fields). Putting soldiers in charge of who scientists can talk to is a guarantee that these problems will be harder to solve.

It's also the US repudiating pretty much its entire philosophical approach to scientific research for decades: the notion that science thrives on openness. Even at the height of the Cold War, Reagan - not exactly a peacenik - enacted a directive called "NSDD-189" that stated that fundamental research must remain open and unrestricted.

This is, obviously, the complete opposite direction.

The only precedent I can think of for this is the Wolf Amendment, passed in 2011, which prohibited NASA to engage in bilateral cooperation with China. The result, 15 years later: China is the only country in the world to have its own space station and to have landed on the far side of the Moon.

That's the track record of the policy they now want to extend to all of US science 🤷‍♂️

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

John F Kennedy was correct when he said “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

That’s why police robots are being aggressively normalized today. The empire managers want to make sure violent revolution is impossible, too.

The New York Times’ sports department The Athletic has a creepy new article out titled “The ‘Robodogs’ on World Cup patrol in Mexico” about how wonderful and awesome it is that the international soccer tournament is being patrolled by surveillance robots.

The article is functionally a PR piece for police robots, gushing about how “cute” and “cool” onlookers find the dystopian technology.

The piece opens with the cheery paragraph, “A group of police officers patrolling a stadium with three dogs on a World Cup matchday wouldn’t usually raise eyebrows. But when those three dogs are high-tech robots equipped with video cameras that can sustain speeds of 20kmph, you can understand the fuss.”

“The K9-Xs are made of aluminium and high-strength plastic,” The Athletic writes. “They have facial recognition and behavioural analysis systems installed, which means they detect when a group of people become agitated and send video to the police force’s centre for command, control, communication and computers.”

In a video segment accompanying the article, The Athletic’s Tomás Hill López-Menchero refers to the robots as “creatures” and says the robots “went down a treat with the public” in the World Cup audience.

It’s little things like this that help normalize police robots in public consciousness. Calling them “dogs”, giving them the name “K9”, calling them “creatures” instead of machines. It’s pretty clearly designed to evoke the image of something normal that westerners are familiar and comfortable with.

But westerners should not feel familiar and comfortable with these things, and we should not see them as normal. The fact that we’re seeing more and more use of police robots around the world should frighten us all, and the fact that popular institutions like the World Cup and the New York Times are being used to normalize them should freak us the hell out.

Our rulers are always acutely aware that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that we could turn on them at any time. This has been the case for as long as there have been rulers. History is full of examples of the masses turning against their government and establishing a new order, and the oligarchs and empire managers have long been preoccupied with the task of ensuring that this never happens to them.

Autonomous killing machines nullify many of the problems presented by human security forces. You don’t have to worry about the robot army siding with the people, or refusing to fire upon their fellow citizens. An army of militarized police robots would provide the oligarchs and empire managers of the western empire with a perpetually obedient force of bulletproof trigger-pullers who can shut down any uprising when the time comes.

The increasing ubiquitousness of police robots is not separate from the exploding prevalence of surveillance cameras and AI facial recognition, the push for digital IDs and the eradication of online anonymity, or the increasing instances of online censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. A technological cage is being constructed around the public to ensure that we can be stopped from turning against our masters.

The story of humanity in the 21st century is the story of a race between revolution and the technologies designed to prevent it. A race between the awakening of collective consciousness to the urgent need for revolutionary change on one hand, and the technological ability to quash a people’s rebellion on the other.

We’re all in this race, whether we realize it or not. We’d better pick up the pace.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Israel wiping out entire families is so normalized that Amnesty can publish this without generating any media coverage.

[Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb]

We've been quiet recently because Mark Goodwin and I have been working to write the most comprehensive investigation into Polymarket's origins and ambitions to date.

We found that Polymarket's "official" origin story, that Shayne Coplan founded the company alone in 2020 and then built "the company in his bathroom", is a lie. Polymarket really started years earlier as another company called TokenBnk that was deeply tied to Israeli interests, specifically a crypto company founded by Benjamin Netanyahu's niece and nephew. Coplan has actively tried to obfuscate this company from his story and it's not the only thing either.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we unravel the real history of Polymarket, directly connecting the company to Peter Thiel's efforts to resurrect controversial DARPA programs from its now defunct Information Awareness Office. Polymarket appears to have been chosen by Thiel and his associates to succeed in resurrecting DARPA's Policy Analysis Market where another Thiel-linked company, Augur, had previously failed.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we explore the current influence of prediction markets and Polymarket, including how an insidious effort to have prediction markets replace representative democracy as a governance model is already being slowly implemented by the White House.

Read Part 1 here: https://t.co/xTmU5RzoZz

[Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled]

Video evidence further confirming early reporting by @intifada and @TheGrayzoneNews that Israel invoked the Hannibal Directive on October 7
https://t.co/lLO5xNRsVn

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

There is a big problem with the premise behind your question.

You assume that "consent of the governed" is a Western concept that starts with Locke in the 17th century because, presumably, you were taught that the Enlightenment was the dawn of political philosophy rather than what it actually was: Europe finally crawling out of its dark ages and discovering ideas that Chinese civilization had been using for over two thousand years.

As early as ~300 BCE Xunzi developed the concept of "consent of the governed" in China, with one of the most famous metaphors in Chinese political philosophy: the ruler is the boat, the people are the water - water carries the boat, water capsizes it (水能载舟，亦能覆舟).

And Xi quotes it constantly, you can find literally dozens of speeches where he speaks about it. In fact it's arguably his most central governance principle.

So the notion that China needs to be asked what it thinks of a concept it invented is, in a nutshell, exactly the kind of Western arrogance and ignorance my post is all about. It's like asking the Chinese what they think of this great Italian invention that is pasta...

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Israel wants you to believe that multiple UN reports and experts are lying. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel…are all lying.

But you should believe the people who did this…

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is genuinely shocking, and says so much about our approach to China.

I decided to check for independent reviews of the English version Xi Jinping's latest book, published a year ago, to see what people had to say about it since I hadn't read it myself.

To my surprise, I couldn't find any: not a single thoughtful review about the book out there! Even on Amazon, check it for yourself (https://t.co/1LVlhACA53): the book has only 3 ratings, that's it.

No matter where you stand on China, you’ve got to admit that’s pretty crazy: the sitting president of the world's rising superpower publishes a 700-page book explaining exactly what he's doing and why, and we don’t even care to look.

If there ever was a fact that illustrates just how willfully ignorant we are about China, this is it.

All the more because we then go spew the usual clichés around how secretive and impenetrable the Chinese system is: the book is on Amazon for $21 for crying out loud!

Anyhow, this felt so wrong that I figured I'd fix it. I bought the book, read it attentively and wrote what I hope you'll agree is a thoughtful review of it.

The book contains genuinely surprising passages, such as Xi writing that oversight of the Communist Party by "the judiciary, the public, and the media" was not just something the Party must “readily accept,” but something that he framed as historically decisive - an essential component to "escaping the historical cycle of rise and fall" that has doomed every dynasty in China's history.

Other passage that I'm sure would surprise many: a common narrative out there is that China blames the West for the century of humiliation and is driven by revenge. Well, Xi explains that's not true at all: the century of humiliation was China's own mistake, originated in the Ming Dynasty's disastrous "policy of national seclusion" that "resulted in China missing out on the opportunities presented by the Industrial Revolution" and "led to China’s decline."

All in all, the book is remarkably self-reflective and thoughtful. For instance Xi recognizes that his drive for “full and rigorous internal governance” - including to rid the Party of corruption - risked "instill[ing] fear and apprehension, or intimidate members into inaction.” He emphasizes the need for pragmatism in this regard, codified in a framework called the “Three Distinctions” that separates honest mistakes - made while experimenting, reforming, or operating without precedent - from deliberate violations committed for personal gain.

And many other surprises still. I found it a genuinely fascinating read for anyone interested in how the Chinese system works and how Xi thinks - or anyone interested in governance, period, as so much of what he writes is pretty universally applicable.

This is the link to my review of the book, an article I titled "The Book the West Refuses to Read": https://t.co/DYowWEESOd

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

A new UN report says Israel is committing genocide by DELIBERATELY TARGETING PALESTINIAN CHILDREN and I can’t find anything about it from @nytimes @AP @washingtonpost @CNN @SkyNews…

How is this not the top headline at every major news outlet?

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

“anti-Israel tropes”

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

After another ceasefire was announced in Lebanon, Israel has continued to bomb, with their officials claiming they have freedom of action to keep striking.

Israel doesn’t abide by ceasefires, not ever.

If the Americans want their deal with Iran to actually work, they need to impose consequences on the Israelis for this.

[Ali Abunimah @AliAbunimah]

My latest:

Israel tries to wreck US-Iran deal after losing war

https://t.co/R2ohatCs4s

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🇵🇸 Oxfam’s Global Humanitarian Policy Lead Bushra Khalidi told the UN Security Council that Israel has deliberately dismantled the humanitarian systems needed for Gaza’s recovery, blocked organizations including UNRWA and Oxfam, destroyed civilian infrastructure, and left Palestinians “denied even the basic conditions to survive.”

Khalidi said the ceasefire is failing as Israeli forces continue killing Palestinians and confining Gaza’s population to ever-shrinking areas of the Strip.

She said aid deliveries and truck counts are being used to create the appearance of progress while hospitals lack medicine and fuel, water and sewage systems remain in ruins, and families struggle to access food, clean water, shelter, and healthcare.

Khalidi says that Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe is the result of deliberate political decisions, including ongoing siege, denial of movement, obstruction of aid, destruction of civilian infrastructure, annexation, and dispossession.

She urged governments to stop enabling these policies through political, economic, trade, and military ties, warning that Palestinians in Gaza are being denied not only self-determination, but even the bare minimum needed to survive.

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

What this lying genocidal scumbag doesn't tell you is that Hezbollah attacked the IDF IN LEBANON. You have a requirement under the deal to get the fuck off their sovereign territory. They didn't violate the deal, you did. Because you're trying to ratfuck it as everybody with a functioning brain knows.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

This is the reason Israel slaughtered dozens of people in Lebanon.

Israel does not want peace, they will burn Lebanon, Gaza, the region, and anything that stands in their way. They do not care about the global economy or U.S. interests. They will not stop, they must be stopped.

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

israel is the most entitled nazi goverment i have ever seen, 80+ yrs of unquestioned loyalty by the west and now when they're asked to stop murdering lebanese children, they treat it like its another holocaust! they literally believe its illegal for others to defend themselves

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

I have never heard of a country invading a neighbor and then calling it unfair that their soldiers died in that invasion. I don’t think any other country ever even thought to make that complaint.

On top of that, Israel now wants to retaliate for its soldiers being killed while invading their neighbor.

This is pure madness. Just leave Lebanon.