DNVDK

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Stanislaw Ulam spiral

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Consensus Complex - The Cynical Myth of Bourgeois Propaganda It is that Noam Chomsky too fell from his pedestal in recent months, otherwise the this would be the perfect time to find a quote from Manufacturing Consent and post it here. With mass hyper layoffs becoming a reality at least in some sectors (predominantly in US tech) this year, energy prices rising due to an unprovoked war with Iran and the subsequent uncertainty of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, there has not been a time since the 70s that felt so volatile. Add developments in AI and a coming financial crisis to that (the 4th in the last 25 years) and it's looking a bit bleak for society. A classic way to align the masses is by conducting a kinetic conflict but the downside of that is the economic destruction, the hassle, and the political unrest it brings with it. So the sweat spot is wíth kinetic conflict at all times and at arms reach, but never close enough for actual - statistical significant - risk. I assume this is what the more cynical bureaucrats call; 'having your cake, and eating it too' as it forces enormous investments in defense, infrastructure (roads/grid/fuel - not education/culture/healthcare) without the political, economic and unfavorable optics of actual boots on the ground in the EU/NATO. This is a updated, bourgeois type of fascism that removed the strong leader and replaced him with an amorphous political construct with a similar certainty in their convictions. This time around the war machine doesn't need the intellectuals to rally 'round the flag, all it needs is the middle class to waive their rights calmly and to carry on. To stock up on food to survive for 72 hours. To buy electric cars so their standard of living can stay the same in the post-fossil near future. To prepare their sons (and thanks to inclusivity - their daughters too) to become 'sneuvelbereid' - willing to die, for the upcoming wars. And the middle class want to look up. At a family with a murky past but a spotless reputation in the last decade. Both the Dutch crown princess and the queen joined elements of the military industrial complex in what is impossible to see as anything else than blatant propaganda. Discussed in newspapers, podcasts and talk shows at length, usually in the form of an interview with a general emphasizing the courage of the crowned soldiers. With both the European political arena and all of the centralized media in The Netherlands located in Brussels, it could be described as the Consensus Complex.

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*It's nice that ChatGPT would take the trouble to sign this meme

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Well, that's another route to the same perspective :)

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Very much enjoying Mo Bitar's ramblings this weekend. It is an honest take on the existential dread that developers are experiencing in the wake of AI. His take on delusional CEOs is beautiful and his entire channel follows the developments (or the disintegration) slow-motion. The flip-flopping between wanting to uninstall Codex and going all-in on vibecoding is a perspective that we can look back on in 5 years having a particular feeling on.

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It's been quite the week - and regardless of what the depths of this email dump truly are, it shows something about our society in the way that Wikileaks or the NSA files leaked by Snowden were. They give a glimpse into parallel existing realities that are hinted at for decades, maybe even longer, but usually find shelter under some form of plausible deniability. Situations or stories indicating otherwise are dismissed of structural or systemic by being labeled an incident, and for those courageous enough to double down there is always the insinuation of being a theorist that is surprisingly effective for both self- and other forms of censorship. There will, however, be more consequences down the road than in the aforementioned situations where it were relatively limited elements of government that stepped out of line. You can restructure departments if needed - if only in the public perception. This time it is different; the people, institutions, families, locations and networks implicated are so vast and interconnected that a parallel reality emerges that feels eerily familiar for anyone interested in the Roman Empire. And while I'm quite aware of the decline of the empire every since someone made the connection between the fall of Rome and their interest in celebrity chefs and the launch of the first season of Chef's Table and all it's replicas - this depicts another step in that decline. It's unclear how much information will follow still, and how thorough the investigations will be, but I had AI quickly merge the iconic Hollywood sign with the cinematic universe of They Live as a way to put an image to this situation. Now I will further contemplate on this whole thing while reading the words of Pam Bondi; "The Dow is over 50,000 right now. (...) If everyone on the list get's prosecuted, the whole system will collapse." over and over again.

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Meanwhile, in Appeltern

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Geopolitics and dystopian fiction are merging at such a rapid pace that investigating and imagining a high quantity of possibilities as a strategy has become a valid strategy. Where speculating about upcoming developments felt rash, bordering on irresponsible, in this day and age it appears the only way to calibrate for a world that is becoming more unstable and difficult to gauge each week. This lead me to the triptych above, speculating how Venezuela and Greenland could possibly become entangled in a geopolitical thread without having rationality-mechanisms hold me back. There are numerous ways it could develop; drugs, strategic/incident or terrorism. This iteration chose the latter and envisioned a narrative where Hezbollah of Latin America (this narrative exists) decides to send cells to Greenland through Iceland to setup strategic camps close to the US coast from the north. And as there is virtually no reporting in Greenland through its thinly populated areas, it would be physically impossible for the rest of the world to check/doubt the narrative developed by the US government. As the Maduro-drug-kingpin narrative is not believed by anyone and was still not enough of a reason for the international community to step in, it provides a hall pass for US leadership to come up with any narrative they can dream up. And with the sheer number of bloated egos running that show they will try to boast sooner rather than later. The extreme amount of AI imagery in the Maduro case both in official media and more commentary/satire also makes clear that reality as we know it will never be a shared experience again. Update 1: Alternative scenario - Proposal to marry-off Barron Trump Update 2: Okay, we're going full Genghis Khan apparently *Linked is the Rand corporation rapport that describes the developments of 'Iranian soft power in Venezuela' in a 20 page PDF found on the page.

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UVB-76

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Theater, spectacle, fog of war, preemptive, morality, Western, exceptionalism, greater Israel, trade route, Strait of Hormuz, WWIII, black & gold triangle, uranium.

The weird got so weird that pundits from all sides seem to agree on the terrible choice to attack Iran. The war pigs have the power, sorcerer of death's construction.

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Happy new year - may the chaos be merciful!

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With the speed at which geopolitical developments progress at the moment - and with a couple of days downtime over Christmas - I got interested in nuclear weapons once again. Have always been fascinated by them ever since I was very young as they are mostly theoretical and technologically so very different from anything else we use. The combination of a leap in physics on the one hand and their speculative qualities on the other - they're the closest to an actual diegetic sci-fi object. There are currently 22 USA-owned B61-12 nuclear warheads in Volkel, The Netherlands (article from 2023) which is about 50km, or less than an hour, from where I live. I knew of their existence for decades but for some reason was under the impression that these were surplus bombs from the Cold War era, probably catching dust because for sure there would never be a nuclear threat in my lifetime. Turns out it doesn't really work like that. These are constantly serviced, updated and state of the art weapons of mass destruction. Much smaller than I thought they would be (these specific ones are the size of a rolled up carpet) with a payload of up to 1250 kilotons - 83 times that of Little Boy that destroyed Hiroshima. And as much as I theoretically understand the usefulness of the thermo-nuclear Mexican stand-off we know as mutually assured destruction, it is still completely baffling to me that these could be fitted to regular F16/F35 fighter planes and effectively destroy countries in minutes. Not to start about ICBMs, MT nukes, high altitude drones and other developments that the Boeings, Northrup Grummans, Lockheed Martins and all their adversary competitors of the world have cooked up. Looking back at the Cuban missile crisis and other near-escalations the equilibrium has been stabilized by negotiations and diplomacy - none of which seems on the table at the current time. So we - humanity - are to a large extent going to be dependent on the next Stanislav Petrov to not get pulled into doing something without thinking it through.

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So.. the Lockheed Martin Special is apparently back on the menu.

Make the Military Industrial Complex art again!

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The Samson Option Israel's deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a “last resort” against a country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel. Commentators also have employed the term to refer to situations where non-nuclear, non-Israeli actors have threatened conventional weapons retaliation. The name is a reference to the biblical Israelite judge Samson who pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and thousands of Philistines who had captured him. Storytelling/narrative is the predominant factor in most debates as identity is increasingly the defining lens through which the world is perceived. Referring to mythical figures from biblical scripture to define a geopolitical tactic is a cunning linguistic trick - of which the term nuclear ambiguity that is also mentioned in the Wikipedia article is another bewildering example. I'm proposing the call a spade a space and refer to the tactic described in the most objective manner: a tantrum.

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News The general term 'media' is often what we critique but I'm currently interested in understanding the most counterproductive and toxic of all: the hysterical, amygdala rubbing advertising monolith we collectively understand as news.

As a species we've developed offspring with ever faster calculating brains over the course of thousands of years. The reason for this is simple; the faster you are able to spot a danger, the less likely you become to the dangers that lurk in the corner of the cave. Fast forward to Ancient Rome where the Acta Diurna (daily journal) was instigated by Julius Caesar and presented daily in or near the forum. So this first type of industrial media was developed and controlled by (or at least with the blessing of) the ruling emperor about 40 years after the term 'bread and circuses' was established. Skip printing press, skip television, fast forward to today. This daily outing has become a realtime perpetual outing. In the last 25 years, the commercial necessity of capturing as many viewers as possible has also been supersized by the Peter Thielization of the world that fully embraced zero-sum mindset where there are only winners and losers. As a result the pluriform media landscape that existed by the end of the 90s has been acquired completely by a very small group. This directly results in newspapers with different titles that print the exact same thing ('Why not, it is objective!') and TV stations that regurgitate identical, teleprompter fed, monologues and factoids. And looking back at this quarter of a century, it is clear this will only accelerate into a news cycle that is fully built around cliffhangers. The ideal situation for this conglomerate is 24/7 OJ Simpson chases. 'This is just in!' 'Important developments!' all while seeing images of people you never met and places you have no intention of visiting. The London subway and Boston Marathon bombings, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, wildfires, flooding, murder, a celebrity dead in their bathtub. It is important that you stay up-to-date. People describe themselves unironically as 'political junkie' while the actual net result of politics being grossly overestimated. Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the covid pandemic can be seen as the trifecta of hysteria and changed the landscape forever. The sheer outpour of daily news and the level in which political, military and commercial interests are intertwined with this barrage can now only be viewed as the politico-industrial complex. Or more accurately; the military-political-industrial-media complex. And yet - news is for the most part consumed without any suspicion. The complex has done an amazing job in providing co-workers world wide with one dimensional phrases parroted from the trustworthy men and women without characteristic personalities. The notion that gets proposed from time to time to introduce critical thinking to children in schools is simultaneous objectively a good idea and a total and utter impossibility as the 'thinking' part is turned off so effectively by the complex that the addition of 'critical' is just cruel. What to do about it? In the words of Marshall McLuhan given to Timothy Leary - Turn on, tune in, drop out.

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Not fully sure why this struck a chord when I came across it two weeks ago, but it did. It is a blatantly silly video that seems like the result for when you ask one of the GPTs 'to scour the internet, feel the cultural temperature and output a meme-worthy video set to mediocre rap'. However - it has been a while since I got exited by anything AI (with the exception of Friend.com this summer, but that interest was nothing more than dystopian awe).

Disclaimer: this clear deepfake could be mistaken for reality by some and I get the risk in that, but it also reminded me of a type of satire that wasn't there for a long while The images are created using Grok-2, the AI image generation tool by x.ai/x.com that removed all guardrails for its model. The video is made by The Dor Brothers who have a very questionable track record and newer videos that they are put out immediately make it clear that they are in here for the hype - at best. It goes to show that all this image generation output only becomes valuable if there is something that was consciously imagined and decided by the human creator. This first video seemed to have some of that, but it seems that they are unaware of why it worked and instead went full Infowars appetizer.

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There are 8 years between the video on the bottom (YouTuber Casey Neistat trying out the DJI Phantom 4) and the one above; a documentary about the drone squadrons of Ukraine. When I first watched the video of the filmmaker in New York experimenting with this flying camera it was exiting to see where the technology got to; the fact that these were becoming so affordable meant all kinds of new projects were suddenly possible.

In recently re-installing the X app I was exposed to innumerable clips of vast landscapes and desolate fields with the same aesthetic as I was by now used to from watching this 4K footage in the last 8 years progress into. But instead of summer holidays, scenic city views or motorcycle follow-shots the footage now showed Russian soldiers being blown to bits by soldiers flying slightly modified versions of the DJI drones you can pickup at any electronics store.

Watching the desperation on the faces of the soldiers being targeted and the resolution and frame-rate in which you see a human body being teared to pieces, with the same clarity and vibrance as an Apple commercial, is something that exists now.

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Tactile captcha just to be sure.