Number Five

Oct 01, 2023

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/blackhistorystudies_samora-machel-patrice-lumumba-kwame-nkrumah-activity-7081233845383000064-ffpv/

29/11 week 12

Aaron

Lundi 20 novembre - Soirée Aaron Swartz : film The Internet's Own Boy

Une soirée spéciale Aaron Swartz avec la projection du film The Internet’s Own Boy. Le film raconte au travers du témoignage de ses proches, la vie et la mort du développeur et cybermilitant Aaron Swartz. Suivi d'un moment d'échange avec des intervenants spécialistes de la science ouverte.

conspiracy or just the way the world works?

German exports

https://x.com/Kasparov63/status/1728931802218389521?s=20

Buffett

Hedging their bets

Stuart Wiffin

September 18, 2022

Some economists and legal scholars (such as Henry Manne, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Daniel Fischel, and Frank H. Easterbrook) have argued that laws against insider trading should be repealed.

Read full story

Tobin

A later “Keynesian” economist from Yale, James Tobin, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, proposed many years later a similar idea, which came to be called the Tobin Tax. The idea was to tax all foreign currency transactions to put a damper on speculation in that market.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-dont-we-tax-the-buying-and

ted singer Slavin

3.16 then 10.26

https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world

22/11

who dare call

conspiracy

The ruling classes constantly use lobbyists and soft power to sabotage tax increases, labor laws, and any other policy that increase the relative power of the poor.

5. America’s aid to Israel is not in America’s best interest, but is maintained through the power of AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups mainly supported by America’s Jewish community.

6. The Jews are behind Brexit as a plot to weaken Western Europe.

7. Climate scientists routinely exaggerate or massage their studies to get the results they want, or only publish studies that get the results they want, both because of their personal political leanings and because they know it is good for their field to constantly be discovering exciting things that their funders and their supporters among the public want to hear.

8. As above, except with replace climate science with “race science”, with “power posing“, with “the side effects of some drug that earns a pharma company a lot of money”, or your own favorite example.

9. When European trains get bombed, with leaflets distributed near the scene repeating jihadist propaganda, it’s actually a false flag by a rightist trying to discredit Islam.

10. When several prominent Trump critics receive bombs in the mail, it’s actually a “false flag operation” by a leftist trying to discredit Trumpism.

The CIA has fixed elections in dozens of foreign countries over the past seventy years or so.

A UFO cult has taken over the government and is using it as a base through which to carry out the designs of its extraterrestrial masters.

The Bilderberg Meeting secretly plots ways to create a one-world government.

week 11 The Economist

A more discreet but no less resolute aspirant is Edouard Philippe, formerly Mr Macron’s prime minister (pictured, with Mr Macron). Like Mr Darmanin, he comes originally from the conservative Republican party, and tops polls as the most popular French politician with 55% approval. That is 13 points ahead of Ms Le Pen in ninth place and 18 points ahead of Mr Darmanin in 18th, according to Ifop, a polling group. Mr Macron trails in 23rd place, on 32%. A new poll out on September 3rd suggests that Mr Philippe is the candidate best placed to appeal to both the centre and the conservative right in 2027, well ahead of Mr Darmanin.

Others too are said to be mulling over theirs, including Jean Castex, another ex-prime minister, Yaël Braun-Pivet, head of the National Assembly, or even Gabriel Attal, the 34-year-old education minister.

Vanity fair pilot

Bush denies

15/11 week 10

Dominic Cummings on human rights and secret services

https://x.com/Dominic2306/status/1724733926172655952?s=20

empathy

The AI responses also rated significantly higher on both quality and empathy. On average, ChatGPT's responses scored a 4 on quality and a 4.67 on empathy. In comparison, the physician responses scored a 3.33 on quality and 2.33 on empathy. In total, ChatGPT had 3.6 times more high-quality responses and 9.8 times more empathetic responses than physicians.

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2023/05/02/chatgpt-empathy#:~:text=The%20AI%20responses%20also%20rated,quality%20and%202.33%20on%20empathy.

Bush and John Green

aubrey de grey https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_a_roadmap_to_end_aging

week 11

Saudi flights (see below ctl F vanity)

the impact of TV is strongly challenged by social media

non binary

08/11

Can we trust them?

Primary sources Russia rock

You’re going to get the old stock-in-trade of never commenting on security matters

except where we want to, obviously

30 secs

part 2

Lie to me trailer from here surprise, dated men

Liespotting

Rumsfeld 90% here 6.57 Clinton

putin on ISIS

Sergeant B

Sandel warcrime

down to Aaron film and race

What are the real problems?

wordwatchers wordpress

putin ukraine

https://wordwatchers.wordpress.com/

Wordwatchers

Tracking the language of public figures

wordwatchers.wordpress.com

much more. a performative 51.15

let me tell you assure you

in fact

Dr. Pennebaker’s books include:

“Opening Up by Writing it Down”
- “Expressive Writing: Words that Heal”
- The Secret Life of Pronouns”

You can find out more about The SelfAuthoring Suite, which helps people write about the difficulties and uncertainties of the past (Past Authoring), present (Present Authoring) and Future (Future Authoring) at www.selfauthoring.com. NPR did a popular story on the suite: The Writing Assignment that Changes Lives

these websites:

JW Pennebaker at U Texas Austin

2 Rules for Life Live Tour: www.jordanbpeterson.com/events
My new book: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life
My first book: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning
Dr Jordan B Peterson Website: jordanbpeterson.com/
Self Authoring Suite: selfauthoring.com/
Understand Myself personality test: understandmyself.com/
Blog: jordanbpeterson.com/blog/
Podcast: jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/
Reading List: jordanbpeterson.com/great-books/

week 7 25.10

Greta

Demagogy

Take a complex issue and pretend it’s simple

Simplistic

Blah blah blah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franska_Skolan

Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malena_Ernman

2009 eurovision

Grandfather

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Thunberg

Volcanoes? Lightning? geothermal?

Nuclear

talk to animals

Hersh

harari banal

It concluded: “there is no contradiction between staunchly opposing the Israeli subjugation and occupation of Palestinians and unequivocally condemning brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians. In fact, every consistent leftist must hold both positions simultaneously.”

Harari cited a statement from 30 Harvard student groups issued the day after the attacks which said it held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. He said this suggested “the people that murdered babies don’t even have 1% responsibility, and 100% responsibility is on Israel’’.

He pointed to another statement by the Democratic Socialists of America on the day of the attacks which said: “Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.”

Giving the historical example of some US and European socialists supporting Stalin, he said: “This is not the first time the radical left, in pursuit of some fixed vision of justice, finds itself aligned with some very brutal movements and regimes.”

That approach may be founded in a “belief or fantasy that absolute justice is possible [where] one side is absolutely to blame for everything, including the crimes of the other side”.

“[But] reality is complex,” he said. “The same people can be victims and perpetrators at the same time. In most conflicts the blame for crimes and atrocities is not shared 100%/0% but somewhere in between. This is quite banal, but still people find it hard to accept this.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/24/yuval-noah-harari-backs-critique-of-leftist-indifference-to-hamas-atrocities?utm_term=653892cf85d7a4268c72bf19168e16a1&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUK&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUK_email

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/09/they-are-in-my-house-kibbutz-survivors-tell-of-hamas-attack

more here

and aaron film here

U.S. university students race

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/577722-more-than-a-third-of-white-students-lie-about-their/

and John Brown

Quick search for :

Musk Feynman Doughnut, Bezos Shellenberger Friedman Paxman Drucker Livingston Graham twitter Hitchens Gates Lessig Lessing El Salvador Taleb galloway (to add)

and TOEIC meta analysis non binary carbon brain paypal Panama Abbas fentanyl

How the world works- Blackrock Bridgewater and ABCD

binary non binary

https://x.com/SteveStuWill/status/1712317175120425074?s=20

11/10

Glenn Greenwald

https://x.com/zei_squirrel/status/1713619679707599113?s=20

He worked pro bono much of the time, and his cases included representing white supremacist Matthew Hale in Illinois, who, Greenwald believed, was wrongly imprisoned,^[21] and the neo-nazi National Alliance.^[22]

About his work in First Amendment speech cases, Greenwald told Rolling Stone magazine in 2013, "to me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy ... not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate".^[23]

Greenwald was described by Rachel Maddow during his period writing for Salon as "the American left’s most fearless political commentator."^[22]

Daniel Ellsberg (April 7, 1931 – June 16, 2023) was an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.

Shellenberger

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE

As Nato

Nat geo

Wesley Clark

aaron swartz

https://x.com/therealGavin1/status/1711879540002242728?s=20

sagan https://x.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1711800767441473861?s=20

sagan on youtube

week 7

HISTORY LOEWEN

https://www.timesofisrael.com/egypt-intelligence-official-says-israel-ignored-repeated-warnings-of-something-big/

babies

Deutch moral equivalency

Ny times

https://www.amazon.com/One-Billion-Americans-Thinking-Bigger-ebook/dp/B082ZR6827

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

There’s this guy- LHO

and interviews

John Brown

John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was a prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, Brown was captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

An evangelical Christian of strong religious convictions, Brown was profoundly influenced by the Puritan faith of his upbringing.^[1]^[2] He believed that he was "an instrument of God",^[3] raised to strike the "death blow" to American slavery, a "sacred obligation".^[4] Brown was the leading exponent of violence in the American abolitionist movement,^[5] believing it was necessary to end American slavery after decades of peaceful efforts had failed.^[6]^[7] Brown said that in working to free the enslaved, he was following Christian ethics, including the Golden Rule,^[8] and the Declaration of Independence, which states that "all men are created equal".^[9] He stated that in his view, these two principles "meant the same thing".^[10]

Brown first gained national attention when he led anti-slavery volunteers and his sons during the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the late 1850s, a state-level civil war over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. He was dissatisfied with abolitionist pacifism, saying of pacifists, "These men are all talk. What we need is action – action!" In May 1856, Brown and his sons killed five supporters of slavery in the Pottawatomie massacre, a response to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces. Brown then commanded anti-slavery forces at the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie.

In October 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (which became West Virginia), intending to start a slave liberation movement that would spread south; he had prepared a Provisional Constitution for the revised, slavery-free United States that he hoped to bring about. He seized the armory, but seven people were killed and ten or more were injured. Brown intended to arm slaves with weapons from the armory, but only a few slaves joined his revolt. Those of Brown's men who had not fled were killed or captured by local militia and U.S. Marines, the latter led by Robert E. Lee. Brown was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men, and inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty of all charges and was hanged on December 2, 1859, the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States.^[11]^[12]

Brown has been variously described as a heroic martyr and visionary, and as a madman and terrorist.^[13]^[14]^[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

John Brown’s body

The "Battle Hymn of the Republic", also known as "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory" or "Glory, Glory Hallelujah" outside of the United States, is a popular American patriotic song written by the abolitionist writer Julia Ward Howe during the American Civil War.

Howe adapted her song from the popular soldiers’ song "John Brown's Body" in November 1861,

Battle hymn of the republic

Updating priors A A Gill migrants Yann Le Cun

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/

eyes glaze over

https://www.linguee.com/english-french/translation/my+eyes+glaze+over.html

collocation eye mind

wide broad

what your mind does

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1711379738445402131?s=20

NYT

Jobs and Musk hard

conspiracies

General Wesley Clark

Changing frequency over time[edit]

The rate of reversals in the Earth's magnetic field has varied widely over time. 72 million years ago (Ma), the field reversed 5 times in a million years. In a 4-million-year period centered on 54 Ma, there were 10 reversals; at around 42 Ma, 17 reversals took place in the span of 3 million years. In a period of 3 million years centering on 24 Ma, 13 reversals occurred. No fewer than 51 reversals occurred in a 12-million-year period, centering on 15 million years ago. Two reversals occurred during a span of 50,000 years. These eras of frequent reversals have been counterbalanced by a few "superchrons" – long periods when no reversals took place.^[12]

Laithwaite

http://www.cleonis.nl/physics/phys256/gyroscope_physics.php#:~:text=An%20object%20left%20to%20free,perpendicular%20lines%20a%20stationary%20plane.

Float https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/may/11/uknews

Entropy

Gyro precession

More gyros

7.10

Now they kill at a distance, from the air, assassinating without trial, secure in the knowledge that even the Guardian will approve of the illegal death of a monstrous man.

He’s this Rorschach test: People read into him what they see,” he said of Mr. McCandless. “Some people see an idiot, and some people see themselves. I’m the latter, for sure.”

Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941,

N Y times obituaries

The New York Times wrote after he died on Aug. 25, 1900. “His doctrines, however, were inspired by lofty aspirations, while the brilliancy of his thought and diction and the epigrammatic force of his writings commanded even the admiration of his most pronounced enemies, of which he had many.”

Those enemies included organized religion, especially Christianity, democracy, mediocrity, nationalism and women. Nietzsche railed against these and other adversaries on pages often densely packed with allusions, symbolism and language closer to romantic poetry than fusty metaphysics. Here is a sampling of his best-known writings:

Out of life’s school of war: What does not kill me, makes me stronger. — “Twilight of the Idols”

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. — “Beyond Good and Evil”

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console our selves, the most murderous of all murderers? — “The Gay Science”

Unlike many of his philosophical predecessors, Nietzsche did not argue for a specific weltanschauung, or worldview, even though his writings may suggest one. He distrusted any thinker who proposed a comprehensive system for interpreting the world, and he often wrote in a manner that allowed for multiple interpretations.

A critical examination of his work in The New York Times in 1910 explained his approach:

Nietzsche is not a philosopher in the strict and technical sense of the word. He has no system or consistent body of thought professing to explain all aspects of the universe. He does not expressly deal with epistemology, ontology or, indeed, with metaphysics in general. He concentrates himself on the moral and aesthetic aspects of things, on their “values,” as is now the custom to say, owing to Nietzsche himself, who introduced the term; and he does so with a literary force and artistic power of presentation which makes his writings specially stimulating and is really the cause of his comparative popularity.

The name Huey P. Newton can elicit cries of “hero” or “criminal,” and the space in between reflects the distance in racial perspectives that the United States has failed to bridge since Newton helped found the Black Panthers 50 years ago, when the civil rights struggle was moving beyond the South to black neighborhoods in the North and West.

Newton advocated armed self-defense in black communities, where the organization also provided social services. They would patrol the streets, guns drawn, turning them on drug dealers and police officers alike.

Expressing a willingness to defend oneself with weapons was hardly revolutionary. When Frederick Douglass was asked in 1850 what he believed to be the best response to the Fugitive Slave Act, he replied, “A good revolver.” And Malcolm X advocated the same.

The Black Panthers, which never grew beyond a few thousand members, tried to combine socialism and black nationalism. Its charter called for full employment, decent housing, and the end of police brutality.

Unlike black separatists, the Panthers welcomed all races and found wealthy liberals willing to give them money. But the group’s social programs — like a breakfast program for schoolchildren and clothing and food drives — came undone partly by the corruption of the leadership.

Historians have detailed its mistreatment of female members, extortion, drug dealing, embezzlement and murder. At least 19 Panthers were killed in shootouts with one another, the authorities or other black revolutionaries.

While “by any means necessary” became a mantra of the group, J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. also did whatever possible to target the Panthers. As many members went off to prison and the group dwindled, Newton became a despotic and paranoid drug addict, wielding dictatorial powers with a small coterie, and knocking off anyone in his way.

While the Panthers’ time of influence ended quickly, Newton never escaped the organization. In 1980, he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. But he was shot to death on Aug. 22, 1989, in a crack cocaine deal gone bad. He was 47, a victim of the same streets he had once tried to make safe.

Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah were divided on what should happen once the British left. Gandhi, more an idealist than a realist, wanted an undivided nation; he chose to remain out of government.

The British negotiated with the Muslim League, led by Jinnah, who believed that a separate state was the only way to protect the rights of Muslims, who were a minority; and the (mostly Hindu) Indian National Congress, led by Nehru, who grudgingly went along with the British decision to divide India on the basis of religion.

Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to Asia, arrived in India 36 days before the date of the partition to draw the lines to split one of world’s largest and most ethnically diverse countries. On Aug. 9, he finished drawing the map, but the British viceroy, his superior, kept it a secret. He didn’t want the British to be blamed for any ensuing violence. But it prolonged the uncertainty for millions and very likely increased the loss of life to come.

Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment” — a split second that reveals the larger truth of a situation — shaped modern street photography and set the stage for hundreds of photojournalists to bring the world into living rooms through magazines such as Life and Look. In 1947, he and Robert Capa helped create the photographer-owned cooperative photo agency Magnum.

“Those whom the gods love die young,” the ancient Greek dramatist Menander wrote. In a 1962 speech he gave by the sea in Newport, R.I., Mr. Kennedy’s father — prophetically for the son — sounded a related theme:

“I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.”

At 17, like many other Americans, Medgar Evers enlisted in the Army during World War II. A star athlete in high school, he participated in the Allied invasion of Europe, rising to the rank of sergeant before his honorable discharge in 1946.

But for Evers, who was born on this day in 1925 to an African-American farming family in Decatur, Miss., even the segregated Army was more welcoming than the Jim Crow South to which he returned after the war.

The racial injustice there rankled so much that he resolved to fight it, becoming the first field officer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Mississippi.

“Obviously not all white people are wealthy, and obviously many minorities are rich and powerful. Lots of white people are disadvantaged. But white privilege is something specific and different from the ordinary rising and falling of a free society. It’s the fact that simply by virtue of being a white person, of whatever socioeconomic status, you get the benefit of the doubt”.
Schools which teach pupils that “white privilege” is an uncontested fact are breaking the law, the women and equalities minister has said.
Addressing MPs during a Commons debate on Black History Month, Kemi Badenoch said the government does not want children being taught about “white privilege and their inherited racial guilt”.
“Any school which teaches these elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law,” she said.
She added that schools have a statutory duty to remain politically impartial and should not openly support “the anti-capitalist Black Lives Matter group”.
https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf
https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality/transcript#t-1113210

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 (equivalent to $43,000 in 2019) to each former internee who was still alive when the act was passed. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."^[31] The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $3,460,000,000 in 2019) in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned.^[30]^[32]

Black history or world history?
https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/11/black-history-month-events-that-should-be-taught-to-every-pupil
https://www.biography.com/tag/black-history
Who do we choose to remember? Millionaires, sportsmen, entertainers, politicians?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/lumumba-50th-anniversary-african-leaders-assassinations
https://www.ted.com/talks/peggy_mcintosh_how_to_recognize_your_white_privilege_and_use_it_to_fight_inequality

MAY 3, 2020

sed to work for Gary Killdall, and I worked with some of his people from DR. I was Gary's personal electronic engineer, building his custom embedded systems as he was designing the earliest smartphone back in 1987... Called the Intelliphone, people confusingly called it a pbx. I was the hardware designer. What I designed was both the handset of the smartphone, AND the central office switch gear (the switch gear is similar to a PBX, but is was just the support infrastructure for the actual invention, the button-free smartphone, years before apple even had the ipod... Gary had elimited buttons in favor of the "application defined user interface"... rolls right off the tongue... His design sketch looks just like a modern smartphone, only no switches or buttons at all. Prototypes were larger of course, we had to get the design working before the electronics would eventually be crunched into the small package needed to make a phone, we were 90% there when I left the project to go work for IBM...

But the story of Gary out flying the plane when IBM visited isn't actually what happened. 90% of the work Gary did at the time was for IBM. He met with IBM dozens of times, and sold them dozens of operating systems and other software. IBM was Gary's main customer. While it is possible that Gary missed a meeting, why would missing one meeting out of literally thousands he didn't miss doesn't make such a difference? He met with IBM constantly in those years, and he had people on staff who's job it was to manage that. The OS for the PC was not the only business he had with IBM at the time, far from it.

And you missed the whole PC AT story. When you booted the original IBM AT, it said on the screen "IBM Multi-user System". What was the IBM Multi-user System? Why the IBM AT was NOT designed to run msdos, it was designed to run a new multiuser OS. The AT would ship with 16 port serial cards, and Wyse has a PC emulation built into their dumb terminals that allowed a single AT to be used as computers for a whole room of people. It was a multitasking operating system that would have made a really large difference in the computing landscape. What happened? The sad story there is that Intel was having problems with the 286 chips. The prototype chips that IBM was using for development worked fine, but the yields were low for the chips, so Intel had to redesign the CPU die to improve yields for the production runs for the AT. When IBM finally got the redesigned chip, that had been testing their systems using the prototype chips, and didn't spot a problem the new chip created until the warehouse was full of assembled systems. It turns out the new 286 chips had an issue with running protected mode instructions, so in an 11th hour decision, IBM execs decided to open all of the boxes, remove the OS kit, and replace it with a dos disk... In one fatal moment, a spec change caused the new OS to be temporarily pulled. The OS did get used, but it was only used in IBM brand grocery store scanner registers, it never found use as the major advance in dos technology that it was. Eventually DR named the new OS Concurrent Dos and put it up for sale next to DR Dos, but as sad stories goes, the pretty blue box it shipped in probably didn't find very many desktops to grace.

And no story about this would be complete without talking about Microsoft Windows... When Windows came out, it was not much more than a buggy toy OS. However a small number of people discovered that DR DOS running under Windows was a winning combination because DR Dos had a memory manager that made windows much better on the DR Dos platform. Windows 3.1 was shipped with code to detect what OS it was running on, and to create a fake blue screen if the OS was DR Dos.

Gary was a generous educator, Bill was a shrewd business man. Gary's instinct was to share information, and make his fortune from his genius. Bill made his fortune by making the right decisions at the right time. Great engineer VS great business man. Had my own experiences with that, engineers don't make the best business men, too honest and idealistic. Gary died a wealthy man, his house in Austin had a glass garage housing his collection of famous race cars lovingly restored by the original crew... His house in Pebble Beach is where he kept is Lamborghini collection... Big collection, big garage. So yeah he stubbed his toe with the events you mention, but he was well on his way to being a decade early with truly groundbreaking smartphone tech...

But I gloss over so many details... would love to have a conversation about Gary's /actual/ mental state and activity just before his death. He did have burn scars from the unfortunate events you discuss, but his state of mind and what he was doing at the time was so much more complex than the stories out there, and if not for his death, the next chapter would have re-written tech history.

Show less

Ielts

Example: The charts below show the reasons why people travel to work by bicycle or by car. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

https://www.ieltsessentials.com/blog/2017/12/18/common-academic-writing-task-1-questions

Speaking

A new law you would implement where you live to make it a better place.

You should say:

what law it would be

will it be easy to introduce such a new law

Roger Penrose

University of Oxford, UK

“for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”

and the other half jointly to

Reinhard Genzel

Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany and University of California, Berkeley, USA

and

Andrea Ghez

University of California, Los Angeles, USA

“for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy”

9.11

Michael Moore, Osama, flights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_9/11_controversies#Saudi_flights

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/sports/world-cup/harry-kane-england.html

https://stuartwiffin.wordpress.com/

Corruption

Two books examine the global role of corruption

It is a slippery problem, for both authorities and authors

Oct 10th 2020

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World. By Tom Burgis. Harper; 464 pages; $28.99. William Collins; £20.

On Corruption in America. By Sarah Chayes. Knopf; 432 pages; $28.95. Published in Britain as "Everybody Knows"; C. Hurst & Co; £20.

Afew years ago Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, described corruption as “the defining issue of the 21st century”. Whereas the 20th century saw ideological battles between democratic, fascist and communist regimes, he argued, the chief divide among today’s governments is whether they primarily serve the interests of their people (as in Denmark or Canada) or of their leaders (as in Zimbabwe or Russia). The worst are “kleptocracies”, states whose very purpose is to enable elites to plunder resources, in which bribes, favours and violence are the methods of rule.

In an era when prime ministers and presidents from Malaysia to Ukraine amass billions in cash, and Western banks that handle the money turn a blind eye to its provenance, Mr Fukuyama’s thesis commands widespread assent. Yet the lineaments of corruption can be hard to define, not least because corrupt people tend to be good at constructing excuses for themselves. After all, isn’t government supposed to encourage commerce? Shouldn’t politicians and businessmen talk? Corruption on a grand scale is fantastically complicated and tough to write about, not least (in Britain especially) because of libel law. Two new books take up the challenge.

“Kleptopia” does the job brilliantly. Tom Burgis of the Financial Times spins his tale of global corruption from the ground up. He begins with a hero straight out of a John le Carré novel. Nigel Wilkins is an ageing, introverted economist with an obstreperous streak. He takes a job as a compliance officer at the London office of bsi, a Swiss bank, just as the global financial crisis strikes. He soon suspects that bsi is laundering money for a long list of the international high and mighty, and surreptitiously copies reams of documents which he tries to bring to the attention of the Financial Services Authority. It ignores him.

Mr Burgis also follows the story of enrc, a metal and minerals outfit that listed in London in 2007. Partly owned by the government of Kazakhstan, the firm was founded by three Central Asians who bought ex-Soviet factories at discount prices, quickly becoming billionaires. The listing brings an injection of cash from Western investors; they also expand into Africa, taking in more money in Zambia and Congo. A parallel storyline concerns Mukhtar Ablyazov, a former Kazakh minister and banking tycoon turned opposition leader. In this telling, after Mr Ablyazov falls out with the regime, he, his family and his staff face lawsuits, surveillance, false arrest and torture. In 2009 he fled from Kazakhstan, where he has been convicted in absentia of murder and accused of fraud and embezzlement, all of which he denies. (He also left Britain after a judge ordered him jailed for concealing assets; he has just been granted political asylum in France.)

“Kleptopia” is wonderfully if grimly entertaining, replete with tales of Zimbabwean thugs, late Soviet gangsters and kgb officers-turned-entrepreneurs, as well as a Romeo-and-Juliet romance between the children of rival oligarchs. Mr Burgis’s depiction of the interlocking worlds of post-Soviet business and politics captures the way corruption binds together economic and political power. He meticulously demonstrates how, once overseas money enters Britain (attracted by the protections of its legal system), the associated power struggles and skulduggery follow.

When Western governments and media try to take on Kazakh wrongdoing, they are misled by what Mr Burgis terms a “presumption of regularity”. European courts treat international arrest warrants from Kazakhstan as if they emanated from a genuine national legal system, rather than the ruling clique. Worst of all, money-hungry Western banks, lawyers, public-relations firms and security consultants exacerbate the sleaze, developing a sort of international kleptocracy-service system. As the web widens, readers unfamiliar with Kazakh or Russian politics will start to come across names they may recognise, such as Felix Sater and Donald Trump.

Sarah Chayes, too, is intrigued by wide webs of corruption. Her interest in the issue began in the 2000s, when she worked for an ngo in Afghanistan. As she wrote in her excellent previous book, “Thieves of State” (published in 2015), she soon realised that resentment of government corruption was the main factor driving Afghans towards the Taliban—and that American intervention was making corruption worse.

The hydra rears its heads

Her new book ranges more widely—too widely. She begins with the decision by America’s Supreme Court in 2016 that voided the influence-peddling conviction of Bob McDonnell, a former governor of Virginia. He and his wife had accepted lavish gifts from a vitamin-supplement manufacturer, and asked the state health authority to consider recommending its products. But because no explicit bribe was offered in exchange for an official act, the court ruled unanimously that a guilty verdict could criminalise the normal conduct of democratic politics. Prosecutors say this standard has made it almost impossible to convict American politicians of corruption.

Ms Chayes tries to set this event in historical context, but she overdoes it. She starts by looking at the vexed origins of money itself, going on to tackle fractional reserve banking, credit bubbles, graft in the Gilded Age and the labour movement. But, lacking a framework to distinguish legitimate links between commerce and the state from the crooked kind, the book soon drifts into lazy condemnations of capitalism. To describe the global mechanism of corruption, Ms Chayes uses the metaphor of the hydra—an image that has been common in polemics against international finance since the 19th century. Some passages have the tinge of conspiracy theories.

In a way, her book illustrates the risk identified by the Supreme Court: to the oversensitive, every handshake can seem suspect. Yet Mr Burgis, too, ends his analysis with a description of a web of money-laundering, legal harassment, propaganda and violence that enmeshes the world. America and Britain, he thinks, are ever-more like Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan: “Like a parasite altering a cell it invades, so kleptocratic power transforms its host.” ■

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This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "The way of the world"

Trafigura

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_British_privacy_injunctions_controversy

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-10735255

implicit bias training

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/lorie-fridell-implicit-bias-policing.html?fbclid=IwAR23LQmEYNRMHHkMatK0sPyWI6DPQTAu9TRAmy91lEzBuIOCmg1OZ_LCRKI

Cambridge

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/worklife/campus/a30196028/what-its-like-black-student-cambridge-uni-taking-up-space/

Benin

https://jeminformetv.com/2020/06/14/mwazulu-diyabanza-au-musee-du-quai-branly-demande-la-restitution-des-objets-sacres-voles-par-la-france-en-afrique/

Benin https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/28/time-repatriate-africa-looted-art-artifacts-cultural-heritage-benin-bronzes-nigeria-ghana-europe-british-museum/

Video

https://jeminformetv.com/2020/06/14/mwazulu-diyabanza-au-musee-du-quai-branly-demande-la-restitution-des-objets-sacres-voles-par-la-france-en-afrique/

Mindset

Sandberg

Wire

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/21st-century-wire/

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/ken-griffin-and-david-tepper-top-institutional-investors-rich-list.html

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/here-full-explanation-behind-oils-unprecedented-negative-price

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/complete-history-oil-markets

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/texas-or-canada-where-will-oil-hit-0-first

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-03/greeks-crude-oil-market

Coleman Hughes

Defining non defining

That here has to be which because the clause is not identifying/specifying/ defining

it is non- defining ie giving extra information, so which cannot be replaced by that.

see here for a good explanation but some clunky examples

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/relative-clauses-defining-and-non-defining

Better examples here

https://www.ef.com/wwen/english-resources/english-grammar/non-defining-relative-clauses/

and here

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/grammar/relative_pronouns/relative_pronouns_in_non_defining_clauses.html

https://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/relative-clauses.html

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abcd

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https://x.com/ylecun/status/1708159037425209399?s=20

AA Gill

He remained a committed supporter of UNHCR campaigns, including speaking at The First Global Forum on Statelessness in the Hague, and travelled extensively with UNHCR to Jordan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Mexico, DR Congo, Italy and across Europe.*

He wrote searing, powerfully moving pieces on each of his journeys, published in the Sunday Times Magazine.

https://www.unhcr.org/media/aa-gill-balkans

AA Gill Lampedusa

https://x.com/StevePeers/status/807683176575471616?s=20

https://x.com/camillalong/status/939897479650299904?s=20

Towton

https://x.com/camillalong/status/939897822643703808?s=20

Lampedusa

https://x.com/camillalong/status/939905762092093440?s=20

Braverman the Rwanda dream

https://x.com/ByDonkeys/status/1708165280512245959?s=20

Italian waters German NGOs