Newsletter, 11/22/24

Weather Report, Biomedical, 4IR

[The amphitheater in the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria. Image by Omar Sanadiki/Reuters, via Al Jazzera ]

Starting with a weather report. Well over 2 inches of rain today in my Berkeley spot (and still raining), almost 3 inches since Wed morning.  In northern Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, 1 to 2 feet (!) have fallen in the same period.

Biomedical. This crosses into 4IR.  First new blogpost by Alison McDowell in a while, she once again takes on MAGA/MAHA head on.

Web3, What Works Government and DOGE – The Kennedy Legacy of Do-Gooderism, Alison McDowell, 11/20/24. 

[WARNING: LOTS of screen shots, videos, diagrams,…. easy to get lost]

Was LBJ’s Great Society “social safety net” a spiderweb from its initial conception? Elizabeth Hinton’s book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime” offers insights into the history of government welfare in the United States and an assessment that it provided the foundation for an expansive police state used to surveil and prey upon poor communities of color. As a Harvard (now Yale) professor however, Hinton neglects to offer her readers vital information necessary to contemplate an extension of these programs into a planned future of cybernetic social impact governance. I anticipate such a program is on our doorstep and will likely be rolled out under the banner of renewed democracy, bottom-up redistributive social justice, and gamified social systems leveraging tokenomics embedded in welfare allotments and venture-capital-backed UBI (Universal Basic Income). 

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that in this reductive, polarized, TikTok’d, limited-attention-span world, few seem capable of engaging in intelligent discussion about a potential future where AI-managed hedge funds make millions of wagers “shorting” human capital securities. You know, liquid assets, like debt attached to low-income toddlers monitored in their Bezos-funded Montessori Headstart classrooms, watched by “machines of loving grace” on Educare’s “We Play Smart” surveillance play tables or maybe Sep Kamvar’s ceiling mounted cameras and felt slippers with embedded sensors. You know, to assess their “character,” and manage them for their planned role as child diviners (aka Platonic daimonology).

In today’s video I remind readers about the intersection of Health and Human Services (now being overseen by Mr. “Personalized Vaccinomics / Free Markets in Energy / Sacred Economics, Bitcoin” Bobby Kennedy), data-driven pay for success finance, and “accountable” “what works” government. The groundwork for the latter having been diligently prepared over the past fifteen years by Ronald Cohen’s Social Finance, George Overholser’s Third Sector Capital Partners, and the Harvard Kennedy School with support of Bloomberg Philanthropies among others.

My thought experiment is that Peter Thiel’s Palantir (an all-seeing eye set up as a social impact bond evaluator and data governance advisor) is actually administering a web3 fitness landscape intended to groom the collective unconsciousness of humanity for distributed intelligence applications utilizing psychedelic and meditative-enhanced astral projection into alternative dimensions as “self-sovereign” nodes in a global bio-hybrid computing network.

Claude Shannon’s original “computers” were the women programmers at Bell Labs. Thus, the future of “work” in a world where engineered intelligence comes to dominate white-collar knowledge work, could very well tap the working poor (United Way’s Alices) as remote viewing “computers” to walk infospace labyrinths in search of encrypted artifacts that can be found only on the other side of the looking glass.

[Embedded video]

What might it be like to live in an outside-in robot engineered by your HMO? For a glimpse into such a future listen to my follow up commentary and read aloud of Van Diamondfinger’s 2017 short story “The Domestic Front” originally published in Oxford American in which a man experiencing profound depression tries to disengage from his AI smart housing system.

My comments. The video presents two Alison McDowells.  The present one is on for the first 50 minutes.  She talks super fast, often becomes incoherent, and talks down to people. With a few good things in between too. though lots of nonsensical stuff like her contemplated usage of psychedelics by the control apparatus, showing how little she knows about this topic and human history.  And she totally fails to understand the limits upon any such a social structure by the growing crisis of capitalism as a mode of production and of growing energy and raw materials shortages,  as well  as spreading and worsening ecocide. She believes that whatever think tanks put forth is not only plausible but a done deal; 

Starting at 50:00, there are a couple of short corporate presentations followed by her commentary while standing on Blake St in downtown Denver, focusing a bunch on Palantir.  Pretty comprehensible and effective,  And at around 1;08;40, her video from 2018, Blockchain: Life on a Ledger is played. And it’s the best video i’ve ever seen from her. She talks deliberately but at a pace that’s easy to keep up, and offers comprehensive explanations of everything.  She ends by counseling resistance to what it obviously an effort to route society onto a global digital panopticon.  

Blockchain: Life on the Ledger, Alison McDowell, 9/4/18, 20 minutes. 

"I created this video as a follow up to the one I prepared last year on Social Impact Bonds. It is time to examine the ways in which Blockchain could interface with social impact investing to further concentrate power and wealth and exacerbate long-standing forms of global oppression under the guise of philanthropy. This narrative flips the prevailing sales pitch for Blockchain on its head and offers a strong critique of a technology many consider a powerful disruptive force. 

With decentralized identity, we are cuing up permanent records for the masses with potentially disastrous consequences. Is it prudent to place our "trust" in a technology of unknown origin? No one knows who or what Santoshi Nakamoto actually is and whose interests this invention advances. Why would we be so naive as to remake the world's social and economic structures around this code? What would it mean to live life on a ledger?”

The blog post’s embedded video can also be found on You Tube, here

Reflections on DOGE, Social Impact Welfare, and the Kennedy Legacy of Do-Gooderism, Alison McDowell, 11/20/24, an hour and 28 minutes.  

4IR. Two items about SW Asia.  First, developments today in SW Asia.

Israel bombards Beirut suburbs as fighting rages in southern Lebanon. At least five healthcare workers from the Islamic Health Organization are killed in Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon, Ministry of Public Health says. 11/22/24.

Israeli forces have bombarded southern Lebanon and the suburbs of Beirut, killing at least five medics and crumpling a multistorey building, as ground troops have clashed with Hezbollah fighters in the south. Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reported Israeli warplanes launched strikes on Friday on two buildings just inside Beirut’s southern suburbs.

A missile struck the middle of an 11-storey building housing shops, a gym and apartments located on a usually busy street in the heavily populated area. The impact sparked a fireball and caused the structure to collapse on top of itself, littering the road with debris. 

Ending this segment and this edition, a report from two days ago about the war being extended big time into Syria, and also about the alleged US-broked cease fire talks.

At least 36 killed in Israeli attack on Syria’s Palmyra: State media Syrian Ministry of Defence statement says attack causes ‘significant material damage’, state media report. 11/20/24.

At least 36 people have been killed and 50 wounded in an Israeli attack that hit residential buildings in the Syrian city of Palmyra, Syrian state media report. The air attack was launched from the direction of al-Tanf in eastern Syria and caused “significant material damage”, Syria’s Ministry of Defence said in a statement on Wednesday that was quoted by the state news agency SANA. Al-Tanf is an area near the Iraqi border controlled by the United States. [Yep, US troops are still occupying a part of Syria]

Since the Syrian war began in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria, targeting the army and Iran-backed groups. But since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023, it has ramped up its strikes in Syria as hostilities with the Iran-aligned Lebanese armed group Hezbollah have intensified. Last week, the Israeli military said it had attacked transit routes on the Syrian-Lebanese border it said were used to transfer weapons to Hezbollah…...

Syrian state media reported several Israeli attacks last week in Homs province, which borders Lebanon. Palmyra is located in Homs. Palmyra is known for its ancient city, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was seized by the ISIS (ISIL) armed group in 2015 and partially destroyed before it was recaptured by the Syrian army.

Lebanon ceasefire talks

The attack was carried out as US envoy Amos Hochstein is in the Middle East for talks on a potential ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel and as Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said the group would not accept an agreement that violates Lebanese sovereignty. In a recorded speech on Wednesday, Qassem said Hezbollah seeks a “complete and comprehensive end to the aggression” and “the preservation of Lebanon’s sovereignty. … The Israeli enemy cannot enter {Lebanese territory} whenever it wants.”….

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said after Qassem’s speech that any ceasefire must ensure Israel has the “freedom to act” against Hezbollah. “In any agreement we will reach, we will need to keep the freedom to act if there will be violations,” he told foreign ambassadors before Hochstein’s expected arrival in Israel. “Secondly, we will have to enforce that they will not be able to build again their force in Lebanon, they will not be able to bring again ammunitions, missiles to manufacture it or to bring it from Iran through Syria by sea and through the airport{[in Beirut} in any way,” he added….

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, as Israel banned Al Jazeera from reporting in the country and in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut said Hochstein is expected to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday to discuss the proposal. “It’s also worth mentioning that the Israelis have been speaking throughout the week, including Netanyahu himself, that even if there is a ceasefire deal in place, Israel is still going to do whatever it sees fit, and if it means violating that ceasefire agreement, they are going to do that,” Salhut explained.