Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

https://t.co/Z2aLwF1Ez3

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Despite the massive triumphs of the world's largest corporations and most rapacious billionaires during the covid crisis, neoliberalism is in ideological retreat: more people are more critical of the idea that "free markets" can solve big problems than at any time in my life.

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The Democratic nomination race was a fight between the neoliberal wing of the party and the Democratic Socialists, with the candidates representing a spectrum between those two sides (and the odd outlier on either side).

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Supposedly, the party grandees brokered peace between the two main factions, but the left is rightfully suspicious about whether Biden - and Republicans-who-sit-as-Dems like Joe Manchin - will deliver anything beyond symbolic gestures.

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One bright spot: Bernie Sanders is finally chairing the Senate Budget Committee, giving him enormous power over muscular covid relief packages, Medicare expansion, and rolling back Trump and Bush tax-cuts on the

This is where Sanders' long experience in the Senate, and his virtuoso work using its procedures to advance his position, will serve him well. As we saw with McConnell, the ability to wield procedure is a powerful asset in getting stuff done.

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It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.

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Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.

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In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.

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This isn't law as we know it, it's Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn't completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.

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Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

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As the Qanon prophecies fail and the cult-members struggle to resolve their cognitive dissonance, it's a good time to revisit the history of paranoid, conspiratorial political movements in American history - the "paranoid style" that has dominated since the Revolution.

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After all, the very first skirmishes of the US war of independence were based on a conspiracy theory: that the levy on tea was a prelude to a sellout of the colonists to transnational mercantalist interests. US politics have always been conspiratorial.

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I found @zacharykarabell's @politico history of the Know Nothing party especially useful, as it tells the story of what happens when surging, paranoid, fractious political movements

The American Party was a secret 19th century organization founded on a conspiracy theory: that Irish immigrants were secretly planning a takeover of the US on behalf of the Pope.

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When you hear the phrase "free market," you probably think of "a market that is free from regulation" but that's the opposite of the phrase's original meaning!

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Adam Smith used the term to describe a market that was free from "economic rents" - money earned by owning things, rather than doing things. Smith recognized that markets attract parasites - "rentiers" - who seek to drain wealth by "investing" rather than building and doing.

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Which meant that, in the absence of muscular state intervention, markets would become less and less free - more and more dependent on the whims of rentiers who used money to breed money by creating toll-barriers between parts of the productive economy.

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For Smith, markets were only free if they were regulated. But that's the opposite of the way that we talk about free markets today. Today, a free market is a market where you are free to collect rents - passive income from owning things, at the expense of people doing things.

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This is true in so many metaphorical ways, but it's especially true when we're talking about actual rent - actual homes that people need to survive and produce, whose primary role today is to serve as an asset class to be maximized, not a basic human right.

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jm watching as jk, part of the mafia, storms his house and jk being totally confused as to why the man looks so unbothered by it, standing at the top of the stairs with an unfazed expression.
+

and when jm approaches jk with a walk resembling the grace of an elegant snake, jk feels immediately bewitched by him, watching him come closer with his breath stuck in his throat, unable to move, the weapon in his hand slowly sliding out of his grip when jm pushes him down

by his shoulders to make him sit down on the couch behind him.
"w-who are you," jk can't help but stutter out with wide eyes.
to his bewilderment, the man doesn't move to sit next to him on the couch. feeling the pressure of the mysterious man's hands on his shoulder,

jk gasps as he straddles him instead, the man raising one hand to graze a finger over jk's sensitve neck, making jk shiver in surprise. jk wonders if the soft touch was only an illusion, because the seductive expression falls from the man's face from one second to the other,

and suddenly he's grasping jk's chin between two fingers to harshly tip his head up toward his, pushing their faces dangerously close. jk doesn't dare move a single muscle when he locks eyes with the most beautiful man he's ever seen, even forgetting to breathe. the man fixes him

Tony Blair is LOTO, behind the scenes, other Blairites are involved too. Keir Starmer is just a front man, Alexandre Samuel Barros-Curtis is Labour's version of Dominic Cummings, he's THE top man. Everything makes sense from this perspective. #LabourLeak #StarmerOut 👇 #BREXIT

According to his LinkedIn profile, Barros-Curtis’s day job is as a consultant solicitor “Providing specialised legal advice in the area of derivatives and structured finance” in particular “Hedging, project financings, securitisations, credit derivatives” #LabourLeaks #HedgeFund

He has worked extensively on derivatives and structured finance matters in Europe and Hong Kong; as well as formerly working for the Clinton Foundation. Asked to comment on Mr Barros-Curtis and his role in the party Labour said they do not discuss staffing issues. #LabourLeaks

Starmer's team members were accused of what's called "DATA - scraping" - seeking to obtain certain information from a wider set of data. Mr Barros-Curtis was also the DATA controller for Keir's campaign website. Who hired Asaaf Kaplan and When?.

Tony Blair has said he would not want a left-wing Labour party to win a general election.

The former prime minister said that even if he thought a left-wing programme was the route to victory, he would not adopt one. 2015

20 of my favorite Jim Rohn quotes:

[Thread]

Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better

Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills

Don’t wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom

~Jim Rohn~

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan

And guess what they have planned for you?

Not much

~Jim Rohn~

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune

~Jim Rohn~

How sad to see a father with money and no joy

The man studied economics, but never studied happiness

~Jim Rohn~

Musicians and their constant battle with substance abuse: A [thread] of studies & findings on the subject 👇

45% of UK musicians reported issues with alcohol. "Entertainers experienced performance-related incentives to drink before, during and/or after a show; including anxiety, matching their intoxication level to the audience’s, and ‘reward-drinking’"

(Forsyth, et. al. 2016)

One study of 226 musicians in New York State found that substance use was “markedly elevated compared to general population samples”

(Miller & Quigley, 2011, p. 401)

One study of 168 significant and famous jazz musicians found that their mean age at death was only 57.2 years.

(Patalano, 2000)

One study of the autobiographies of rock musicians reported that 62% contained a description of the artist’s personal addiction story. (Oksanen, 2013)

Also, the confessional recovery memoir is now an established and popular genre. (Oksanen, 2013; Forsyth, Lennox & Emslie, 2016)