… in all circles, the die has been cast with this capitalist-vicious scientism pushing anything that comes out of the brain as all systems go . . . Intended Consequences Always ‘Unintended’!
I was going to rail and rail on this new fascism — AI-AR-MR-VR — the emphasis being artificial/virtual/augmented and now mixed reality.
Out of effing Cornell, these are the times, the genuine wasteful and wasted times — never solving food, air, water, housing, education, community, shared existences, crime, aging, growing up. The concept of skewed or uneven “power” seems to be the point — ‘Smart’ glasses skew power balance with non-wearers, say researchers by Patricia Waldron , Cornell University
This is the mixed up shit of the Oppenheimers or Sam Altmans or Dells or . . . .The point of the glasses is $, and the point of fancy universitie$ like Cornell is $, and so we get vapid, surface-level shit giving us nothing in this fake article/blurb/PR spin. Never people railing against the products, what the ethics entail, or covering the absolute inhumanity of these toy$, and what the fuck, man, scans, body scans, mixed reality — putting porn star boobs and dicks on the unsuspecting passerby with these smart glasses? Putting the observed people’s eyes and faces into the Web, so you can look for homes, bank accounts, credit ratings, weak points, etc.?
The fact that ANYONE would allow these toy$ to be produced, that a world of free market$, freedom to exploit, freedom to dehumanize, freedom to $ocial engineer future generations, somehow the reality is clearer every nano-second — Savages or Socialists. And that is socialism in an anarachist sort of way, not some top down motherfucking way, not the same say CAPITALISM is, top down — More Money, More Might, More Military, More Murderous Thinking, MAKE RIGHT.
They fucking call them “fun filters” and that in itself is a fun thing, reducing anxiety of the weater? Powerlessness, disadvantaged, loss of control for those of us observed by these pricks with smart goggles? Sounds like fucking TSA on steroids, or what fucking banks do to us when we walk in, all those fucking CCTV cameras everywhere, drones over your backyard picnic, palm scans for submarine sandwiches? Lattes?
Then, these paragraphs mention participatory design process? What about participants including those who question the validity of the glasses, of the AR-VR-MR-AI?
According to the wearers, the fun filters reduced their anxiety and put them at ease during the exercise. The non-wearers, however, reported feeling disempowered because they didn’t know what was happening on the other side of the lenses. They were also upset that the filters robbed them of control over their own appearance. The possibility that the wearer could be secretly recording them without consent—especially when they didn’t know what they looked like—also put the non-wearers at a disadvantage.
The non-wearers weren’t completely powerless, however. A few demanded to know what the wearer was seeing, and moved their faces or bodies to evade the filters—giving them some control in negotiating their presence in the invisible mixed-reality world. “I think that’s the biggest takeaway I have from this study: I’m more powerful than I thought I was,” Fu said.
Another issue is that, like many AR glasses, Spectacles have darkened lenses so the wearer can see the projected virtual images. This lack of transparency also degraded the quality of the social interaction, the researchers reported.
“There is no direct eye contact, which makes people very confused, because they don’t know where the person is looking,” Fu said. “That makes their experiences of this conversation less pleasant, because the glasses blocked out all these nonverbal interactions.”
To create more positive experiences for people on both sides of the lenses, the study participants proposed that smart glasses designers add a projection display and a recording indicator light, so people nearby will know what the wearer is seeing and recording.
Fu also suggests designers test out their glasses in a social environment and hold a participatory design process like the one in their study. Additionally, they should consider these video interactions as a data source, she said.
That way, non-wearers can have a voice in the creation of the impending mixed-reality world.
And this is the world you and I never will be a part of — focus groups, participatory design gatherings, charrettes. Never. And take a look at this fellow, the megalomania, the celebrity cultism, the waste of human time:
Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” received a 10-minute standing ovation after its premiere at Venice Film Festival, despite a flurry of walkouts.
Though some audience members left as soon as the 80-minute experimental action film finished (and at least 25 departed before that), Korine’s hardcore fans stuck around for a rousing 10-minute ovation at the midnight screening. As Korine greeted the crowd and did a happy dance, chants of “Harmony! Harmony! Harmony!” rang out. Each time the applause started to die down, Korine waved his hands in the air like a conductor, and the cheers started up again.
Smug mother fucker:
It’s a snap shot of a fool playing movie makers, but then the same mug could be someone designing a 15-minute city or country, or some UkroNazi Zionist planning the next wave of children-killing drone attacks on Donbas.
Strippers twerking, demon-like crime lords chanting “dance bitch” and Travis Scott’s major-role debut are just a taste of what “Aggro Dr1ft” had to offer — which was not everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, the premiere was not the first time “Aggro Dr1ft” prompted walkouts. At a press screening on Friday night, at least 20 people left during the film.
Quaint — WikiCIApedia:
Korine was born to a Jewish family in Bolinas, California, the son of Eve and Sol Korine.[6] His father was an Iranian Jewish immigrant.[7] His father was a tapdancer and produced documentaries for PBS in the 1970s about an “array of colorful Southern characters”; he would take Korine to carnivals and circuses[8] and taught him how to use a Bolex camera.[9] As a child, Korine watched movies with his father, who rented Buster Keaton films for Korine and took him to see Werner Herzog‘s Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) in the theater. Korine reminisced that “I knew there was a poetry in cinema that I had never seen before that was so powerful.”[10][11]
Korine spent his early childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area living with his family on a commune.[12][13] In the early 1980s, they relocated to Nashville, Tennessee,[13] where he attended Hillsboro High School before moving to New York City to live with his grandmother.[14] As a teenager, Korine spent his summers in San Francisco, “skateboarding, living on rooftops, running away from my parents, getting in fights. You know, girls. At that point I was just getting into movies, but the idea of making films happened later in high school.”[15] He began frequenting revival theaters, watching films by John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alan Clarke. In an interview with Bruce LaBruce, Korine briefly mentioned that he studied Business Administration in college. Other sources[16] state that he studied Dramatic Writing at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for one semester before dropping out to pursue a career as a professional skateboarder.
Moving on: Just one download of stories on a Sunday defines the criminal times we live in.
Guts, lungs, sea expansion, wasted trillions on more air jets,
HUMANITY — Proving that change is possible if the will to create it is present, Chinese megacities like Beijing that were once famous for their apocalyptic grey skies are enjoying the lowest levels of air pollution they’ve experienced in the 21st century.
Falling 42% from an average high in 2013 when Chinese air pollution was higher than 50 particles per cubic centimeters of city air, the change has increased the lifespan of Chinese urbanites by 2.2 years.
The news comes from a report published by the University of Chicago called the Air Quality Life Index which listed some of the actions taken by the Chinese government to reduce air pollution, described by the CCP as a “war on pollution.”
This has included reducing the presence of heavy industry like steel production in city centers, as well as restricting coal power plants from being built inside cities while shuttering those that were already there.
Some cities like Beijing have reduced the number of cars allowed on the roads during peak hours, similar to London’s congestion charge. Lastly, China’s mass urban tree-planting campaigns have been well documented.
While the life expectancy has risen on average 2.2 years, some cities have seen far more drastic increases. Citizens living under the new “Beijing Blue,” are predicted to live 4 additional years, while those 11 million in the north-central city of Baoding are predicted to gain 6.
Israel officially asks US to send over 25 more F-35 fighter jets
The Defense Ministry has submitted an official letter of request to the US military’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office, to advance Israel’s procurement of a third F-35I squadron.
The additional 25 aircraft, to be delivered in batches of three beginning in 2027, would bring the Israeli Air Force’s F-35I fleet to 75.
The deal is estimated at $3 billion, financed by US military aid to Israel.
We talked about SAD, GAD, general anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder. We have these monsters, these Israeli’s, these techno-fa$cist$, these multi-millionaires and hucksters and those oh-so-tragically-hip freaks bombarding the world with more and more ennui: Welcome In – by Mr. Fish!
“If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma,” Dr. Maté writes. “Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources — these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
Chris Hedges gets it right, and in every sense, collectively, the real people of the world — those not of the sociopathic variety — are trapped and retrapped, in a self-imposed and outside-imposed feedback loop: Our Collective Trauma is the Road to Tyranny/ American society spawns trauma and this trauma expresses itself in a variety of self-destructive pathologies, including the erosion of democracy and rise of neo-fascism
He repeats this theme in much of his work looking at capitalism, Americanism, inverted totalitarianism. Trauma creates the counterfeit:
Trauma numbs our capacity to feel. It fractures our self. It disconnects us from our bodies. It keeps us in a state of hyperarousal. It makes us confuse our desires, often artificially implanted by the consumer society, with our needs. Traumatized people view the world around them as hostile and dangerous. They lack a positive image of themselves and lose the capacity to trust. Many replace intimacy and love with sexual sadism, which is how we became a pornified culture. Trauma creates what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls a “counterfeit” world defined by phantom enemies, lies and dark conspiracies. It negates a sense of purpose and a life of meaning.
Alas, 90 percent of the people can be right, up against the Ten Percent, those in the Point Zero Zero Point One Percent, the One Percent and the Nine Percent, who control 90 percent of the money, power, land, narrative, politics, etc. And, 90 percent of the people can be wrong 100 percent of the time when considering many individual myths and sacred cows. No need for me to fill in those mythologies and sacred lies, sacred mistruths, all the miseducation, misdirection, and half-truths.
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.
The news feeds, the bombardment of stories here and there and everywhere, in our own curated news aggregators, in our own self-styled daily reads and views of articles and podcasts, this is the overload, the mental cuts, death by one hundre thousand bytes, death by sucking on the firehose of senseless information, and then of course, the unending barrage of science and technology and the political.
It is the collective Stockholm Syndrome, Collective New Generated Impotance, the Endless Choices of Afluenza Putting Societies in Neutral.
Hedges cites Dr. Bessel van der Kolk:
“… trauma is when we are not seen and known . . . .Our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms”
Imagine, more Yankees moving to Europe (what the fuck does that mean, since Europe is gutted thanks to the USA and EU Proxy War Against Russia), and those Californians who moved to Austin now think the place is too laid back and shallow in terms of Silicon Valley socipathy. And then all the silica allowed in foods, for decades, “which were thought to be inert and are widely used in food and cosmetics – can facilitate oxidation of cell-protecting antioxidant thiol molecules by converting them to disulfides.”
Western society, where I used to work, Portland, and for the same outfit quoted, CCC:
Measure 110 was crafted to help people with substance abuse disorders get treatment instead of time in custody. This idea is central to the work of Central City Concern, a Portland nonprofit that offers residential substance abuse treatment to people experiencing homelessness. But Central City Concern CEO Andrew Mendenhall also believes that it may be time for Portland to restore some penalties for public drug use.
“We feel that the balance between public safety and individual accountability has been out of balance,” Mendenhall told OPB in June. “And we know the goal here is to bring the community back into better balance.”
Mendenhall said he would support a ban if it came with clear court diversion options for people arrested, like the ability to lessen charges if someone agrees to participate in a treatment program.
Ahh, so where are those options? Israel? Ukraine? Four trillion a year for MIC?
“We know treatment programs work,” he said. “But the problem is supply and demand… We know there are not enough treatment options available today.
A world without ice is definitely one big GAD problem:
Ice sheets act like a blanket, sitting over the warm earth and trapping heat on the bottom, away from Antarctica’s cold atmosphere—and this means that the warmest place in the Antarctic ice sheet is at the bottom of a sheet, not on the surface. As an ice sheet thins, the warmer underground water can exfiltrate more readily, and this heat gradient can accelerate the melting that an ice sheet experiences.
“When the atmosphere warms up, it takes tens of thousands of years for that signal to diffuse through an ice sheet of the size of the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet,” Robel explains. “But this process of exfiltration is a response to the already-ongoing thinning of the ice sheet, and it’s an immediate response right now.”
Broad implications
Beyond sea level rise, this additional exfiltration and melt has other implications. Some of the places of richest marine productivity in the world occur off the coast of Antarctica, and being able to better predict exfiltration and melt could help marine biologists better understand where marine productivity is occurring, and how it might change in the future.
So the world for the rich is going to be faster, as the ice melts, the suicides spike, food is contaminated, and other such stories listed above:
The plane is designed to fly at Mach 2.2 — 2.2 times the speed of sound, or around 1,700 mph (2,700 kph). The first flight will occur over the Mojave desert in the same patch of airspace where, in October 1947, Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 experimental aircraft.
Yes, it is either / or, but capitalism and Holly-Dirt and Propaganda and social engineering and sociopathy rule the majority. Either barbarism or collective action/socialism/the rights of humanity and ecosystems over PROFITS.
Corporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, mass shootings (now almost two per day on average), domestic and sexual violence, drug overdoses (over 100,000 per year) and suicide (49,000 deaths in 2022) — are the consequences of a deeply traumatized society.
The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated. The virtues of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice, are belittled, neglected and crushed. The professions that sustain community, such as teaching, manual labor, the arts, journalism and nursing, are underpaid and overworked. The professions that exploit, such as those in high finance, Big Pharma, Big Oil and information technology, are lavished with prestige, money and power. (Chris Hedges).
Paul Haeder, Author 