#761
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
Ahh of course, should have known the source of the purported nerve agent was charlie’s house. every motivation to do this horrible terror crime, at the notorious charlie’s house. answers so many questions
#762
mt.real
Post rating: +
both the front page and the uk section of bbcnews.com no longer mention anything about this. i did find one article titled "should you be worried about nuclear war?" though
#763
Post rating: +


never forget
#764
Post rating: ~


Disclaimer: I'm not sure I can vouch for the author of this video, but, I was thinking the same thing on this issue.
#765
Post rating: +
Look, I only listened to a minute of that because I have a weak stomach for youtuber rhetoric, but she says something about how she thinks the goal of the cambridge analytica story is to push for some kind of international control over the internet. I'm quite happy to entertain the idea that the guy she's talking about is a fake - he seemed really off to me in the interview i watched when the story broke - but if her conclusions veer into NWO-style rightist paranoia I don't really care to listen to her for another 20 minutes. So can you summarise? I thank you.
#766
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
Cambridge Analytica as far as i know are a small collection of incompetent frauds like most companies that work in their field. imo what most of the people accused of “fixing elections” on social media have going for them is someone decently skilled at making them sound more successful than they are. Like the original “fake news” guy who posted those “parody” stories on facebook, there’s no evidence that what he put up did anything at all that was any different than a normal day on facebook with a bunch of weird stories exploiting algorithms to get clicks, but that guy is probably going to be rolling in money for life because after he was accused of being a key player in a big time election he played reporters like fiddles. Social media are basically arcane wizard magic to most capitalists, including young ones.
#767
Post rating: ~

Edited by ghostpinballer ()

#768
Post rating: +
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/19/police-identify-skripal-novichok-salisbury-poisoning-suspects

"Investigators are working on the theory that the substance was in a discarded perfume bottle found by the couple in a park or elsewhere in Salisbury city centre and Sturgess sprayed novichok straight on to her skin, the source said."

lmao, wtf they're not even trying
#769
Post rating: +
*frantically shoveling red pills into my mouth, chewing and struggling to swallow but powering through anyway*
#770
Post rating: ~
there's a lot of weirdness around the edges with this guy tbf but yeah, fuck that NWO/illuminati noise. should be enough to say his story doesn't quite add up w/o then going on to make stuff up.
#771
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
sick of tapping down punch to grab a hidden power-up in the Park, only to find my enemies have replaced the contents with a harmful poison
#772
Post rating: +
*spritzing myself with novichok to own the russians*
#773
Post rating: +
#774
Post rating: +
you know how it is guys yor out late picking wild bottles of perfume in the park and one of them turns out to be full of novichok
#775
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
tfw how it is guys yor out late picking wild bottles of perfume in the park and one of them turns out to be full of novichok
#776
Post rating: ~

cars posted:

tfw how it is guys yor out late picking wild bottles of perfume in the park and one of them turns out to be full of novichok




happens to the best of us guys we've all been there

#777
Post rating: ~
#778
Post rating: +
political cartoon: putin and trump toasting each other with glasses of novichok, trump is wearing a tshirt saying #traitorpresidentt
#779
Post rating: ~

Petrol posted:

Look, I only listened to a minute of that because I have a weak stomach for youtuber rhetoric, but she says something about how she thinks the goal of the cambridge analytica story is to push for some kind of international control over the internet. I'm quite happy to entertain the idea that the guy she's talking about is a fake - he seemed really off to me in the interview i watched when the story broke - but if her conclusions veer into NWO-style rightist paranoia I don't really care to listen to her for another 20 minutes. So can you summarise? I thank you.



I understand your distaste. I just have a curious tolerance of the whacky stuff sometimes. I think that writing CA off as snake oil misses at least part of something bigger. I'm going to make a decent list of the relevant details with links and get back to you.

#780
Post rating: +
I listened to a broadcast of ralph nader's radio show and he was interviewing sy hersh and they stumbled onto libya 2011 and he said something to the effect of "i've got a story i've been chasing there for seven years now and the full extent of it, it's profound what's been buried there" or something to that effect

and having read "the red line and the rat line" and some of his stories from then which connect the us geopolitical covert dots between syria and libya, I'm curious about the extent to which whatever the cia and state dept had planned for ukraine was occurring simultaneously with that

whenever the euromaidan shit broke out and especially once yanukovych was oustered obama seemed genuinely taken by surprise in speeches at the general course of events and I can't help but wonder to what extent libya and syria were a prelude, and/or to what extent did agency resources overlap

Edited by insta_gramsci ()

#781
Post rating: +
i guess in other words the net effect of what us planners intended for syria and accomplished in ukraine, even down to the methods used (especially the sophistication of psyop and disinformation techniques used--i'd like to see or read a piece on the refinement of the us disinfo apparatus as it applies to ukraine and especially syria) is just way too congruent for both to have occurred in a vacuum, totally independent of each other
#782
Post rating: +
even just the victoria nuland phone call is a pretty clear insight in the way u.s. officials essentially assume they'll be dictating personnel and policy in ukraine's internal administration, and asides from the usual colonialist mentality, it's quite likely born from having facilitated the overthrow in the first place. the fact that the media focused on the "fuck the eu" portion of the call obfuscated the rest, really.
#783
mt.real
Post rating: +++++
the post in the north korea thread got me digging into the SIPRI Arms Transfers data, which seems great.

their data is a little annoyingly formatted and isn't exactly what i want -- there is noise in there like engines for existing vehicles, total counts of missiles, etc. so i wrote some scripts to clean it up to what i actually thought was interesting.

so, here are counts of all the aircraft, ships, and armour vehicles actually delivered between each country, in 2016 and 2017.

the top 25 results:
United States -> Iraq 3833
United States -> Saudi Arabia 2257
United States -> Afghanistan 2167
United States -> UAE 1152
UAE -> Egypt 1012
United States -> Egypt 858
United States -> Mexico 824
Switzerland -> United States 748
France -> China 529
United States -> Canada 519
Russia -> India 500
China -> Pakistan 397
France -> Saudi Arabia 368
Russia -> Bangladesh 367
United States -> Morocco 365
Germany (FRG) -> Algeria 352
Turkey -> Saudi Arabia 350
Italy -> Brazil 314
United States -> Pakistan 282
Bulgaria -> Iraq 280
United States -> Jordan 266
Canada -> Unknown recipient(s) 260
Russia -> Algeria 257
United States -> Japan 231
Spain -> Iraq 231

pastebin of all arms (not just vehicles, e.g. includes 40,000 anti-tank missiles that Russia delivered to India): https://pastebin.com/db7gXfPe
pastebin of armour/aircraft/ships only: https://pastebin.com/MnND0BZc

i think i'm going to try putting this on a map in an interesting way and then maybe make a thread about it. i find the all arms numbers really fascinating even if they are misleading, 100 tanks is a lot more important than 10,000 missiles. the way SIPRI gets around this internally is by assigning every object a value ("trend indicator value") but they don't publish that except in aggregate.

every transaction they track is individually listed in their database though, with comments on almost everything, which lets one do all sorts of digging. incidentally if you are curious, the 260 vehicles Canada sold to "unknown recipient": "Designation uncertain; possibly from UAE production line; recipient possibly Egypt".

please note also my little number crunching script might have some huge bug in it and everything could be wrong.
#784
Post rating: ~
that's really fucking cool, nice work
#785
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
Wow the United States keeps sending more & more guns and bullets and trucks to Iraq, after ISIS somehow ended up with all the guns and bullets and trucks the United States sent there before and used them to attack Syria! What a bunch of screw-ups, wowie zowie!!
#786
mt.real
Post rating: +++++
Ok, here is a thing that I have to stop fucking around with, so here:


The shading of each country is linked to where they get ships, aircraft, and armoured vehicles/tanks from. Some countries have fixed colours, and so wherever they exported heavy war materiel, their colour is transferred to the target country (or non-state entity), in the proportion of their imports coming from there.

The source countries/colours are:
- Some countries exported but didn't import, according to SIPRI data, so they needed colours of their own: Ukraine (orange), South Africa (cyan), Switzerland (yellow), Iran (magenta).
- Three countries are too important to not give colours to: USA (blue), Russia (red), China (green).
- All other countries started as black.

So (you probably already get this, but just to be clear) all the countries that didn't get a unique colour had a colour assigned to them by proportion of where they receive arms from. After one round of assigning colours, this is repeated, etc etc until the colours stabilize. This means, for example, if Chad gets tanks 100% from Brazil, and Brazil gets tanks 100% from Australia, and Australia .. etc all the way back to USA, eventually Chad will be 100% blue; if there are other proportions in the mix and a chain extends back to a different colour source, then that colour will bleed in.

(Interesting Note: if I didn't set unchangeable colours on them, the USA would be yellow (and so would most of the map), Russia would be orange (and so would the red bits), and China would be whatever USA's colour was, via France.)

So it's a little bit of a mess with this many colours, but it seemed dishonest to just arbitrarily say everything South Africa does is aligned with the US or Switzerland e.g.

To clarify some things that are hard to see, but seem uniquely interesting:
- Ukraine exported to Democratic Republic of the Congo (100% of their imports), Russia (100%), Thailand (76%), Venezuela (40%), and also less than 2% of the imports each of Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Senegal.
- Iran exported only to Syria. 22% of imports into Syria (the state) were from Iran.
- Switzerland exported to: Australia (8% of their imports), Canada (2%), Germany (78%), Ireland (50%), Jordan (1.4%), Malaysia (3%), Qatar (14%), Saudi Arabia (1.6%), USA (84%!)
- China exported to 30ish countries. 94% of imports to China were from France.

Edited by drwhat ()

#787
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
Whoa thats a good useful map, to me, daddyholes.
#788
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
Also fun to see that Libya is still colored jet black based on the information available, a country that has suffered under a bloody, NATO-crafted war within its borders for seven years, with at least one of its warring factions run by a guy whose release from Libyan prison was negotiated by the U.S. government and who lived in a house in Literally Langley Virginia for 20 years with no clear source of income before showing back up in Libya post-Gaddafi to lay waste to it.
#789
mt.real
Post rating: +
Libya is covered by two of the blue dots floating in the south atlantic. But good gif.
#790
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
change the colors so I can see that on a phone. Not my fault and I'm therefore not owned.
#791
[account deactivated]
#792
Post rating: +
Interesting that when Junjiu Huang and coworkers from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou actually did gene editing on human embryonic tissue in 2015 people went crazy and were calling for a worldwide moratorium. The paper was also refused from Nature and Science for ethical reasons. It anyway gave a lot of practical problems (including much more off target mutations than expected) and at that time it was essentially shown the technique was not (yet) viable at all for the uses described in the article above. And now, just 3 years later, we are supposed to edit the genome of 1 billion women so that they can have bank accounts? uhh
#793
[account deactivated]
#794
Post rating: +
bioethics is a pretty strange sort of subfield that as far as i can tell only exists because wealthy university donors want to promote eugenics and racism with undertones of genocide. i just got done working with a community organizing campaign around a local "bioethicist" who mostly wrote about how to develop market mechanisms that function the same way that fascist government policies about reproductive rights would. a lot of serious discussion of nazi policies with the only critique being a hayek-esque complaint that the markets should perform this function not the state
#795
mt.real
Post rating: ~
there are people in genetics who focus a lot on ethics who are not terrible, but i don't think they put "bioethicist" in their title or anything. i think it's reasonable to recognize that the technologies exist and are going to be made into dystopian horror tools unless you put together what looks like a coherent consensus among experts and organize it to lobby / etc and look like the obvious right option, and get out in front of the insurance companies. but obviously you end up with a lot less / zero funding and you have to do it in your spare time etc as usual, but someone has to do it
#796
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
interesting developments because last i knew "bioethics" was a panel you put together that was 75% non-biologists and served to whitewash anything you did by saying "careful, now!" and then everyone on the panel would go write a book about it.
#797
Post rating: +
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-using-dna-ancestry-websites-to-investigate-migrants/

Canadian immigration officials are using DNA testing and ancestry websites to try to establish the nationality of migrants, the Canada Border Services Agency said on Friday.

#798
mt.real
Post rating: +

shriekingviolet posted:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-using-dna-ancestry-websites-to-investigate-migrants/Canadian immigration officials are using DNA testing and ancestry websites to try to establish the nationality of migrants, the Canada Border Services Agency said on Friday.





#799
Post rating: ~
having watched a few "human mail challenge" videos im starting to think that utuber Kill 'em FTW is trying to kill em, ftw
#800
mt.real
Post rating: +

tears posted:

having watched a few "human mail challenge" videos im starting to think that utuber Kill 'em FTW is trying to kill em, ftw


i just loaded that up and that guy makes the la beast look like a pinnacle of charisma and didn't even have the decency to get injured. why do these parents support their failed children like this