The Braindump Blog

🎥 Watched The Mauritanian.

In an era where people that should know better are expanding the remit of the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention camp, I finally got around to watching this film. It’s the true story of one person’s experience of Guantanamo’s original setup.

It’s absolutely horrific. The person in question is Mohamedou Ould Slahi who was alleged by the authorities to have been involved in planning the appalling 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. He certainly had some prior contact with al-Qaeda, having trained in one of their camps back in 1990, but claimed that he had severed all connections with the organisation in 1992.

The authorities claimed otherwise, although according to the film they really had very little evidence for it. He certainly wasn’t actually charged with any offence or permitted a court trial before being incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. Whereupon all the horror stories you may have read about that went on there were visited upon him. Per Wikipedia:

Slahi was subjected to sleep deprivation, isolation, temperature extremes, beatings and sexual humiliation at Guantánamo. In one documented incident, he was blindfolded and taken out to sea in a boat for a mock execution.

Basically he was tortured. They even threatened his family. This would have course all been illegal on American soil, but was seemingly par for the course there.

Eventually he was released - but not before having to undergo 14 years of this appalling treatment.

When he came out he wrote a memoir which was published as “Guantánamo Diary”. The Mauritanian is the film adaption of that. Which makes it extremely disturbing of course.

A lot of the focus of the film is on the lawyers who finally defended him - Nancy Hollander and Theresa Duncan - and the difficulties of doing so when your suspect is locked up in Guantanamo, sections of the public are very against the idea of defending anyone who might remotely be involved in terrorism, evidence be damned, and, at times, you’re not quite certain that your client isn’t guilty of a horrific offence.

Nonetheless no-one should face punishment without a fair trial - essentially on the whims of the authorities - and certainly no-one should be tortured.

Also from this month’s Byline Times - concerns for the ongoing ‘insect apocalypse’ based on studies done in the past few years.

The first was based on research conducted by a team at Radboud University in the Netherlands and published in 2017. It revealed that the overall biomass of insects caught in its traps in German nature reserves had fallen by three quarters from 1989 to 2014.

The second was published in 2019 and reviewed 73 reports of insect decline from around the world. The summary was equally bleak. Looked at globally, 41% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds, and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, suggesting that they could vanish altogether within a century.

This is important for all sorts of reasons - not least that almost all ‘terrestrial’ food chains require insects in order to function.

Some terrifying sounding statistics on political violence in the US in this month’s Byline Times.

The technical definition of a civil war is a thousand combatant deaths within a year, according to the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. The definition of civil strife starts at 25 deaths within a single year.

During the five past years, rightwing extremists have killed, on average, more than 60 people a year in the United States. Therefore, by definition, America is already in civil strife, and some argue that it is now on the threshold of civil war.

And later:

Today’s political violence is almost exclusively right-wing, as documented in a study conducted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies which found that, of the 893 terrorism incidents that took place on US soil between January 1994 and May 2020, left-wing groups and individuals were responsible for 22 of the 3,086 deaths. These numbers do not include the dozens, if not hundreds, of planned right-wing attacks that will have been foiled by law enforcement authorities.

Marche says that the mainstream media is yet to understand and articulate the size and scope of this growing domestic terror threat, arguing that even fringe groups within the anti-government patriot movement are “sizeable”, with one - Sovereign Citizens, which rejects government authority and existing legal systems attracting more than 300,000 active members alone.

Finally, some good news:

…calling your boss a dickhead is not a sackable offence, a tribunal has ruled.

Regarding the upsettingly wide-spread and often violent anti-immigrant protests last year that occurred after the appalling Southport murder:

Two out of every five people arrested after participating in last summer’s riots had been previously reported to the police for domestic abuse

…

Previous offences include actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint and non-molestation orders, controlling coercive behaviour and criminal damage.

These protests aren’t really anything to do with ‘protecting our women and girls’ (whatever the ‘our’ in that common claim is supposed to mean).

We know many of the protests were instigated or attended by some extremely racist far right extremists. And now it seems like a high proportion of those arrested for their criminal actions at these protests are themselves have a history of violence, often against women.

This is an idea I’ve not seen before on the kind of site that suggests you write a letter about the cause they’re interested in to your MP.

If you want to write a letter to your MP on the issues raised in this blog post, there is a ChatGPT prompt to assist you in doing so, with full instructions, here.

One word of warning, though: please ensure you have the correct MP. ChatGPT can get it wrong.

It’s good that they add that warning to check it got your MP right! You should probably read it very carefully to check it got everything else correct if you go this route.

I’m not sure that I feel this is in general a good idea, but if it helps people get more politically engaged and is effective then perhaps there is a place for it? But you have to be very sure that you’re campaigning for your MP to actually address the issue you care about in the way that you want them to.

In things that seem truly unbelievable until they turn out to be true, it turns out that at least one of the swathe of ridiculous, cruel & dangerous anti-immigrant protests currently happening in the UK was led by someone who has been convicted for illegally bringing immigrants into the UK.

Yes, a people smuggler. Presumably protesting against…himself.

Lee Twamley, photographed at the front of Britain First’s “March for Remigration” in Manchester this month, has served prison time for trying to smuggle Vietnamese migrants into the UK.

That aside, in general, whilst I’m certain not every participant in the protests is a far right extremist, I think everyone needs to be aware that much of this action is being organised by and/or participated in by some very unsavoury extremists, many with a criminal background.

If you decide to attend one of them, please know who you’re aligning yourselves with, whose agenda you’re supporting - inadvertently or otherwise. Know that some of the people who may have influenced you to turn up to the protest are far more of a danger to women and children than the average asylum seeker could ever be.

The march Tawmley attended was put in place by Britain First, which has instigated:

…a series of events that have brought an assortment of neo-Nazis, misogynists, crackpots and convicts onto the streets of Nuneaton, Birmingham and, on 2 August, Manchester

Such as? Hope Not Hate runs down some lowlights of these hypocritical criminals:

Current and former Britain First activists have been convicted for theft, burglary, drugs offences, numerous kinds of violence (including domestic abuse), terror charges, child abuse and more.

For example, while Golding rails against the supposed lawlessness of London under Mayor Sadiq Khan, his own brother Jamie — himself now a Britain First activist — unleashed an astonishing crime wave across London and Kent in the mid-2000s, culminating in his confession to 171 burglaries across the region.

Despite endlessly decrying “imported rape gangs”, we have previously revealed that former Britain First activist Warren Gilchrest has been convicted of multiple sexual offences against children under the age of 13. Gilchrest is currently serving three years for his role in the racist violence in Manchester last summer.

We have elsewhere detailed Paul Golding’s own long list of convictions. The Britain First leader has also been caught on tape admitting to having violently assaulted his then-partner Jayda Fransen and another woman.

Regarding the recent “put England flags everywhere” initiative, also known as “Operation Raise the Colors”, Hope Not Hate reveals:

…that the co-founder and organiser of the group is longtime Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) ally Andrew Currien (AKA Andy Saxon). Formerly a key member of the English Defence League’s leadership bodyguard team, and now running security for the far-right party Britain First, Currien has previously been jailed for his part in a racist death. He was one of six men convicted in 2009 after a 59-year-old man was crushed to death by a car following a violent brawl.

And the infamous ongoing protests at the Bell Hotel in Epping Forest?

…the Bell Hotel has been targeted by dedicated far-right activists since 2020, several of whom were involved in last night’s protest. This includes Eddy Butler, a former British National Party (BNP) organiser previously linked to a violent neo-Nazi group; Callum Barker, an activist for the fascist Homeland Party; Toni Collins (AKA Ginger Toni), a key figure in the circle surrounding Tommy Robinson; Lance Wright, involved in the neo-Nazi music network Blood & Honour; former Combat 18 activist Phil Curson; and activists associated with the anti-Muslim group Britain First.

📚 Finished reading Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West by Catherine Belton.

This is an highly detailed, lengthy, prize-winning book on the rise of the current President of Russia, Vladimir Putin and the people around him. Given world events, we probably all have some sense of who Putin is and what he is like. But if you want some insight into how his background and how he got to such a position of (catastrophic) power, then this tome will surely fill your needs.

Right from the start, while the Communist Party was still in power, he and his KGB allies were consolidating wealth and power for the future by forming a kind of corrupt kleptocracy, leveraging a combination of the state, the intelligence services, corruptible big businesses and organised crime, to further their own interests.

That group eventually managed to seize power, install Putin as president (twice, so far), and replace the former ministers of state and other high-ups with their own loyal set of wealthy oligarchs who either did as they were told, or suffered greatly for not doing so .

Politics, business, crime and self-interest were intermixed. Political opposition, in practical terms, was outlawed. It seems likely that they went so far as to permit or even overtly stage deadly terrorist attacks - lives that were lost in order to consolidate yet more power for Putin & co.

As well as amassing their own personal fortunes, this gave Putin et al. the ability to control massive amounts of often corruptly sourced money that, between building various gold palaces for themselves and their friends, they went on to use to undermine, amongst other things, Western institutions and democracy. Cue the election meddling and foreign funding of extremist politics of today.

This included the exploitation of all-too-willing and greedy Western corporations who were happy to turn a blind eye to all sorts of criminal and unethical practices if they thought they could make a bit of money by doing so.

The last chapter ends with the curious overlap between a “network of Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organized-crime associates” and Donald Trump that’s been seen over the past few decades.

This will of course be fuel for anyone concerned about any links between the Russian authorities and the current US President - although the book does not set out to make a case for that within the political realm. But it does demonstrate that, at the very least, Trump owes the Russian oligarchs an awful lot of favours in terms of them constantly bailing him out of his failed businesses and their unmanageable debt, and was, in the very best case, unknowingly used as a means to launder their dirty money.

The book was written in 2020, and so doesn’t have anything on Putin’s latest war crimes and attempts to destabilise the planet. But we all know, and are living with, what happened next.

It is, especially in retrospect, hard not to agree with a reviewer of this book from the NYT who was wondering with concern five years ago whether:

…a cynicism has embedded itself so deeply into the Anglo-American political classes that even the incriminating information it documents won’t make an actionable difference

📚 Finished reading Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough.

Oliver Bullough examines what Britain did next in order to try and maintain its status after the decline of its previously mighty empire (thankfully).

Fresh out of opportunities for quite so explicit an exploitation of other people and places for its own economic ends, the country apparently decided to proactively take on a role akin to that of a “butler to the rich” - a metaphorical Jeeves, to any Bertie Wooster who had enough money to pay for the ever-so-professional, ever-so-discreet financial services on offer. After all, who wouldn’t trust you if you were associated with one of the famed and “respectable” centuries-old British institutions?

The clients of these services were by definition all very wealthy. Unsurprisingly, the mix of that base requirement and a reputation for professional discretion meant that the corrupt, the criminal and the kleptocratic oligarchs and other miscellaneous billionaire types - and on occasions autocratic regimes - were amongst the most desired clients for the “global faciliator” that the UK became.

The book casts light on some of the ways in which Britain and its associated territories explicitly, and often knowingly, enabled all sorts of financial crime, money laundering and other unethical practices. Witness the development of the British tax havens and “offshore financial centres”, which are still to be found in places like Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands.

These are places where the wealthy can hide their illicitly gained wealth from the rest of us, conducting transactions that would never be permitted if known about.

The assertion here is that “respectable” British institutions - think of our elite legal, financial and PR firms, as well as, on occasion, the government - are actively helping wealthy, often foreign, clients conceal their money and protect their reputations by escaping any form of accountability.

In short, Britain is enabling global corruption; helping not only to further enrich the already-incredibly wealth, but to extra-reward those whose massive fortunes come via some form of criminality.

All of this comes, of course, at the expense of the everyday British citizen, amongst others. Every penny (well, billions of pounds) of tax avoided, of criminal costs incurred, of state services provided, of money illegitimately siphoned to foreign lands is a penny less that could be put to good public (or private) usage over here.

All is not lost though. Or at least it does not have to be. As is typical in this sort of book the author does have some suggestions as to how to reform the system in order to cajole the country into being less amenable to being little more than a bag-carrier for the wealthy criminal. Basically we they all boil down to “we need to increase transparency and accountability”.

For example, the state needs to put substantial resources into the agencies that tackle financial crime, including tax avoidance. We need to close any of the extensive remaining loopholes that mean some financial “moral crime” and tax dodge is in fact legal. Any trick that enables the wealthy to launder their ill-gotten wealth or evade the tax due on it needs to be cracked down upon.

However, how we get the state to do that is another question. I’m sure he would agree that it’s unlikely to happen if the issue is left entirely in the hands of the politicians of the day. Can we find a solution, or are we destined, as a country, to pride ourselves only on how discrete a servant we can be to the criminal and corrupt who can afford what we ask? Is there a higher vision to our national culture than simply an ability to paste on a layer of veneer to finances the oligarchs of the day?

The issue isn’t only a local one. By helping corrupt kleptocrats and their organisations move money and hide wealth, worldwide corruption is encouraged and concealed, with global costs both financial and democratic.

The general idea of the book wasn’t a all new to me, but the wealth of detailed case studies meant I came away feeling that the self-evident facilitation of financial corruption was embraced even more widely and even more knowingly by our institutions than I’d have expected. Leading, of course, to the construction of yet another set of urgent reforms we need to add to the ever-growing list of “how do we solve the permacrisis” ideas.

And this is from a book written in 2022. Something I think we can say without too much doubt is that the subservience of companies and states to corrupt billionaires has most certainly got not one iota better since then.

Nigel Farage’s interview in last Saturday’s Times is somewhat revealing and very disturbing.

We seem to have reached the stage where he feels able to say the quiet part out loud, where he confirms the suspicions that many of the decent folk of the UK have had for some time: that there are few limits to the moral depravity he is prepared to sink to in order to rile up hatred in the UK to his advantage.

Firstly, if he became Prime Minister, he plans to pull the UK out of many international agreements.

These include:

• The European Convention on Human Rights
• The Refugee Convention
• The Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking Convention
• The UN Convention Against Torture

Yes, it seems he does not want to align the UK with being against human trafficking or torture. The first you would think should be of paramount concern to this person so concerned with “small boats”. The second you would think should be of paramount concern to anyone who hasn’t truly lost all vestige of humanity.

More locally, he also intends to disband the UK’s Human Rights Act. And, to the extent that he intends to replace it with anything, it won’t be anything that guarantees your human rights - the idea of which he seems to think is somehow a negative because human rights in his view are “state-given”. Apparently he sees the role of the state as solely to limit your freedoms and punish you . Not to help protect you, your dignity, your freedoms and indeed your life.

For be in no doubt: whilst he will use examples of various types of immigrants in the rare cases where he bothers trying to justify his lunatic ideas, these laws are not in place to protect only immigrants. If you are whatever Farage would accept as a being a 100% native British citizen then the exact same laws are what protects your rights too.

If Farage disbands these laws, you will lose rights and freedoms.

• Your right to not be tortured? It’s guaranteed by article 3 of the UK Human Rights Act
• Rights to a fair trial, of not being punished unlawfully? Article 6 and 7 of the act.
• Right to freedom? Of thoughts, belief, religion, expression, assembly, to marry - the UK HRA, article 9, 10, 11 & 12.
• Right to privacy? The UK HRA article 8. and so on.

Farage is proposing to strip the very legislation that enables your freedoms, quality of life and privacy, and that of your loved ones.

In withdrawing us from the world stage he will continue in his perverse ambition to make Britain weaker, poorer, less powerful; all in the name of making it crueller.

This is nothing new. This unpatriotic chancer was one of the “masterminds” behind Brexit which the majority of the UK agrees made our country, and us, its people, weaker, poorer and less influential on the world stage. We have become rule takers, not rule makers. Immigration has sored. As has poverty. The NHS seems to be in a chronic decline. Essentially, the exact reverse of what Farage promised would come as “Brexit bonus” has come to the fore, and the vast majority of us are substantially worse off as a result.

Even if you support the ethos behind some of his policies, you would almost certainly not want this dangerous and incompetent fool to get his hands anywhere near the levers of power. He has shown he cannot deliver what he promises - probably because he has no real intention of doing so. He just wants to maintain his vast wealth, increasing power, fame and ability to appear on whichever TV show he likes.

Immigration is of course the area in which his avaricious cruelty is brought most to the fore.

His “plans” include:

…the arrest of asylum seekers on arrival, automatic detention and forced deportation, with no right of appeal, to countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea.

There are plans for deals with third countries such as Rwanda, a “fallback” option of sending people to British overseas territories such as Ascension Island…

He will require the wide sharing of our personal data in order to help them do this.

The NHS, HM Revenue & Customs and the DVLA will be required to share data automatically so illegal immigrants can be tracked down and arrested.

At best this will lead to a rise in anyone who could be perceived as an “illegal immigrant” to avoid seeking healthcare, paying their taxes or getting a driving license, with all the consequent problems off pushing people into the illegal economy and induce extra cost for the tax-payer.

But it also feels very likely to end up with the data of all of us, immigrants or otherwise, being used for purposes we dislike or subject to leaks and hacks. The British public does not in general appear to like their health data being shared, even when it’s for well-meaning reasons that do not involve trying to deport you.

In Farage’s words:

The aim of this legislation is mass deportations

People entering the UK in order to claim asylum “illegally” (and note: there is currently no real legal way for someone to claim asylum - so he is basically referring to all asylum seekers) would be immediately arrested, temporarily detained on some hastily constructed ex-RAF-base holding pen and then shipped off.

“They have no right to claim asylum,” he says. “They would be arrested and detained.”

A total abrogation of responsibility, with cruel and unusual consequences.

Why is this needed? Well, his excuse is that asylum seekers are in general the scum of the earth, rather than the reality of being often desperate people fleeing from a tortuous trauma of course.

You have these young men from different cultures, Afghans being perhaps the worst example, who are literally free at licence to go out, work in the criminal economy and commit crimes…

This is of course an absolute lie. No-one is free to work in the criminal economy and commit crimes. He and his corrupt buddies may not have noticed - but our country has laws. And if you are caught committing crimes then you are subject to them, no matter your status.

You do not get a “commit murder without penalty” card just because you weren’t born in Britain. In fact the only real difference is that a wider array of punishments are available to you if you are a foreign national such as an asylum seeker - mostly involving being removed from the country,.

In fact one of the responsibilities explicitly mandated by the Refugee Convention that Farage wants to remove us from is that refugees must “abide by the national laws of the contracting states”.

After all, a much-overlooked fact is that the only reason you know about the tiny number of cases where it has been alleged in recent times that an asylum seeker committed a crime is because they are being investigated and making their way through the British legal system under the full force of the existing British law.

We don’t need special magical laws against migrants committing crimes because we already have laws against anyone committing crimes.

After a stint in the pre-fab camps, Farage envisions the survivors being deported to third-party countries. Such as?

He wants to sign deals with countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea, despotic regimes with dire human rights records.

Yes, Afghanistan. As in, the place ruled by the Taliban. The group famed for their “public executions and torture”.

But what of the risk of people being killed or tortured if they are sent back to their country of origin? The Taliban are unlikely to look kindly on people who have fled.

asks the interviewer, quite reasonably.

And now perhaps we see one of the reasons why he wants to extract the UK away from the laws on torture.

“I’m really sorry, but we can’t be responsible for everything that happens in the whole of the world”

Farage responds, far less reasonably.

No-one is particularly asking him to be responsible for what happens in the rest of the world, although people may well have views on the morality of that position. But, if he wants to become PM, we should be asking him to take responsibility for what wants to make his own country do; for what will be done in our name.

Britain sending asylum seekers to places where we know they may be tortured is Britain taking an action. Why on Earth does he want us to abandon the convention against torture if Britain isn’t implicated in his plans?

If there’s a few immigrants he can’t immediately send to these kind of places then, well, he wants to resurrect the totally failed, probably illegal and much ridiculed Rwanda deportation plan that the last Conservative administration had.

He is open to reviving the Conservative Party’s Rwanda plan

As a reminder, the Rwanda scheme cost the tax-payer £700 million and managed in the end to have gotten 4 - yes, four - people to leave the country. This does not seem very DOGE-aligned, even if it was moral, legal and he actually had the ability to make it work; which based on his past history he clearly does not.

Or failing even that, he might accept sending asylum seekers to the British Overseas Territories, such as Ascension Island, as a last resort

But wouldn’t some of this require the other countries to agree to take Britain’s small share of the asylum seeking population? Well, yes, obviously, but apparently he thinks we’ll be able to bully them into it.

Here he is, back channelling his hero, Donald Trump.

“We have enormous muscle on these things,” he says. “We can be nice to people, we can be nice to other countries, or we can be very tough to other countries.

But all the diplomatic levers that we have, if we have to use them, on visas, on trade, sanctions … I mean, Trump has proved this point quite comprehensively.”

Apparently forgetting the fact that part of the US’s considerable ability to seemingly bend some countries to its will (at incredible expense to the weakening US itself) comes from the fact it is such a big player on the world stage.

Farage’s own Brexit has lessened the wealth, trade, power and influence of the UK. Many countries have rather less to fear from the UK implementing whatever self-harm policies he has in mind that being shut out of the US economy, services, and so on.

It’s part of the empty-headed Reform technique of stealing US policies verbatim, without realising that they do not themselves in fact live or campaign to govern in the US. It may have escaped the attention of someone who spends far more time gladhanding his rich US pals and contributing to the American economy than helping members of his own UK constituency, but the UK is a different country to the US, with different needs and different abilities.

This is why they ran some council election campaigns on a plan of sacking all council DEI officers when in fact there were none to sack. Why they ran on closing down low traffic neighbourhoods in areas where there were none to close.

Anyway, to conclude:

“…look, I can’t be responsible for despotic regimes all over the world”

he says.

But we can and must hold him responsible for the despotic regime him and his big-business cronies seem to want to create in my home country, the United Kingdom.

(This article was cross-posted from wrongreform.uk)

The Wayback Machine is a superbly useful tool in finding out what various websites in the past looked like. You can use it to dig up the tragically high number of websites that have suffered from the ravages of link-rot, or to see what still-here websites used to look like in the past.

The latter use is particularly important for journalists and us everyday citizens in this modern era when, for instance, the current US administration, being the most-censorious, anti-free-speech, scared-of-words governments over there in recent times is forcing its agencies to quietly remove or edit sections of their websites - including removing, potentially forever, many important datasets on subjects like health and climate change.

It’s one of the few sites that, like Wikipedia, I think is a wonderful example of the internet used for unalloyed good, and like Wikipedia, worth donating to now and then if you have spare money.

But how do the website snapshots get to the Machine in the first place? They do operate their own crawler, but that’s not the only way. They enlist the help of several third party organisations to get at content they otherwise might not have found and catalogued in time

One of these external organisations is the Archive Team.

The Archive Team focuses on grabbing content that’s hosted by services that are or were at risk of closure or some other kind of deletion. In the past this has included GeoCities, Yahoo Video, Friendster and others.

In their official words:

Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions - and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever.

Per co-founder Jason Scott:

Archive Team was started out of anger and a feeling of powerlessness, this feeling that we were letting companies decide for us what was going to survive and what was going to die

And recently I discovered it was extremely easy to join in with the “rogue archivists” in this important project. You should consider it too.

The easiest way is to download their “warrior”. This is a program that runs inside a virtual machine you first install on your computer (e.g. VirtualBox). Once that’s up and running and you’ve chosen the project you want to work on, it simply automatically downloads the at-risk items that need archiving and then uploads them to Archive Team in the format they need to eventually end up on the Wayback Machine.

All the software is free. And don’t let the need for a Virtual Machine put you off. It was a very simple process for me - something you could complete in a handful of minutes, and fully documented here.

The main caveat is that you need to have a “clean” internet connection. What that means is detailed in the “Can I use whatever internet access for the Warrior?” section on this page. It basically means no VPNs, DNS accelerators, ISP connections that inject adverts, proxies, content filtering firewalls, being in a country that heavily censors the internet, and so on. Your computer basically needs to be able to access the webpage its archiving in its pure, unadulterated form.

But if you’re good with that, why not join the effort to preserve that wealth of content out there that’s at risk of forever vanishing?

A few of their current projects:

Meta Ad Library: Database for advertisements for Facebook and other products by Meta. IRC Channel US Government: Archiving the US government. IRC Channel #UncleSamsArchiv Radio Free Asia: Non-profit media organization owned by USAGM. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Non-profit media organization owned by USAGM. Voice of America: An internationally-broadcasting state media network at risk of closure.

Telegram: Archiving public messages in various newsworthy and/or otherwise notable Telegram channels

There’s a lot of other ways you can get involved if you have technical ability or computational resources. But this is something you can run very easily on your average everyday computer whilst you’re using it for whatever you turned it on to do.

AI to help police catch criminals before they strike

says a press release from the UK Government last week.

This does not fill me with confidence. We’re heading towards the era of actual Minority Report it would seem - possibly another example of the torment nexus humanity constantly fails to avoid creating.

Firstly, to make an obvious technical point, someone isn’t a criminal before they commit a crime. They are in fact an innocent person. Nonetheless, crime prevention is obviously better than letting it happen. Which is one reason why we already have plenty of laws around “conspiracy to commit” crime, which if you break, make you a criminal, with a potentially length prison sentence. These are examples of “incohate” offences:

An inchoate offence is one that is incomplete.

Anyway, what is the actual government plan? Basically it’s to have someone make a crime hotspot map that has to somehow involve using the black box magic of feeding sensitive personal data into “advanced AI”.

Innovators have been tasked with developing a detailed real time and interactive crime map that spans England and Wales and can detect, track and predict where devastating knife crime is likely to occur or spot early warning signs of anti-social behaviour before it spirals out of control

which:

…will be rooted in advanced AI that will examine how to bring together data shared between police, councils and social services, including criminal records, previous incident locations and behavioural patterns of known offenders.

Why do I feel like it’ll involve dumping a load of person data into some privately-controlled-by-a-weird-billionaire version of ChatGPT and asking it to make a map?

Outside of the potential use of ChatGPT (which to be fair is something I just assumed, it might well having nothing to do with it) - it’s not like this type of thing hasn’t been done before. Witness the rise of “predictive policing” using now-less-fashionable forms of AI.

The typical implementation did not go well.

To quote a headline from the MIT Technology Review:

Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.

Why? At least partially from the nature of the data they tend to be fed:

Yet increasing evidence suggests that human prejudices have been baked into these tools because the machine-learning models are trained on biased police data. Far from avoiding racism, they may simply be better at hiding it.

The UK Government’s own “Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation” wrote in 2019 that:

The evidence suggests that there is an absence of consistent guidelines for the use of automation and algorithms, which may be leading to discrimination in police work. … Multiple types of potential bias can occur. These include discrimination on the grounds of protected characteristics; real or apparent skewing of the decision-making process; and outcomes and processes which are systematically less fair to individuals within a particular group.

Now, some of these efforts were from a few years ago. Unquestionably, the nature and abilities of AI tools has radically changed since then. It does make sense to me that there is a potential good use of these type of tools in the field of crime prevention - even if we don’t know what it is yet. Plus more people have spent more time thinking about the potential perils embedded in these systems that we should aim to avoid.

So maybe it’s just a bad headline and this effort will prove to be something that will materially help society. But I feel it’s far more likely to be the government getting on the generative AI hype train with some underspecified request that will end up offloading the responsibilities of the state, as well as a big bucketload of public money, to some blackbox software under the exclusive control of an agenda-ridden US tech billionaire which ends up doing nothing more than further embed inequality and prejudice into the criminal justice system.

I hope I’m wrong.

Also, in extreme irony:

This announcement is the second challenge to be announced as part of the Programme, building on our Clean Energy challenge aiming to deliver cheaper bills for households across the UK by shifting electricity demand during evenings and weekends by two gigawatts by 2030 – the equivalent of 1.5 million homes.

Feeding tons of data into some unspecified “advanced AI” is unlikely to help any clean energy challenge.

📚 Finished reading America, América by Greg Grandin.

This book, by a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, was a lengthy, yet extremely readable, 500-year history of the modern Americas that really quite shifted my views of the birth of the modern-day United States, whilst providing insights into the history and influence of the nations of South America that I had essentially no knowledge of.

Sure, it covers the horrors inflicted on the indigenous population coming from the violent greed of various European colonisers - a ghastly, but at least somewhat well-known history - but it was much of the the interplay between the ever-changing north and south of the American continent that was fresh to me. I learned a lot more detail about the rulers and other key figures from North, and especially South American history.

The general premise is that the identity of the United States was formed not only in relation to the commonly-held idea of “looking east” to Europe, but rather in relation to its southern neighbours, South America. And likewise Latin America’s various identities were shaped by their constant political and/or actual battles against its expansionist-inclined northern neighbour.

A key issue throughout the book is the author’s contrasting of the northern Anglo-American approach to expanding their territory - violently conquering so-called “terra nullis” - vs the countries of Latin America which were often more included to think of indigenous people as being part of the existing communities rather than as something between the non-existent and rival nations.

Grandin asserts that it was really Latin America that was the key driving force behind liberal internationalism. After their own wars of independence, the republics of southern America pioneered “American International Law” - which (in theory) promoted the equality of nations great and small, respect for the sovereignty of other nations, and, in general, the idea that you usually shouldn’t intervene in the business of other countries. These are ideas that ended up influencing the founding of transnational organisations such as the League of Nations and the UN.

This is a contrast to a more “might is right” expansionist doctrine, whereby if your country happens to be big and powerful then you have every right to - and maybe even a duty to - control or conquer other nations which cannot physically defend themselves.

These were ideas more associated with the early years of the United States (some might say they are unfortunately making a comeback). The US used its “Monroe Declaration” - originally celebrated as an expression of solidarity by Latin American nations - as an excuse to manipulate and assault the countries to its south and elsewhere; undermining foreign governments, enacting regime changes and so on.

Although there were exceptions on both sides. The author seems to be quite a fan of the US President Franklin Roosevelt. His “Good Neighbour Policy” led to the recognition of the sovereignty of other nations and their right to govern themselves. This, in the view of the author, gave him the moral authority to fight against the rise of global fascism.

The inhabitants (and colonisers of) southern America were of course not morally pure. Far from it. This book details enough for us to realise that the author certainly does not intend to portray ever resident of the south as morally heroic. But rather that there was a real difference between the typical Latin American vision of democracy (“vibrant and egalitarian”) and that of it northern neighbour (“tepid and unequal”); the presence of social and economic rights, vs the critical focus being solely on political rights (for some).

It’s also an exceptionally readable book. I believe it is over 700 pages long which would normally put me off. But I’m glad in this case it did not. It is, at least to me, an absolutely fascinating and quite radical rethinking of, in particular, the history of the US as I knew it, as well as the history, intellectual and otherwise, of South America -including the latter’s philosophical influence on several of the concepts that drive the ideas of international law, democracy and human rights as we know them today.

Or knew them.

The book has tremendous contemporary relevance. Some of the sentences above might resonate as topics we urgently need to be concerned with today, even whilst they are told from the perspective of events of up to several centuries ago. It would appear that this history of politics and justice is not always a one-way journey. And, as always, as trite and predictable as it is to say it: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

I’ll end with a quote from the book’s own blurb, which, as naturally biased as it will be, reflects how I felt about this exceptional book. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in history, the Americas, geopolitics and related subjects - or simply in how the world we know today came about.

At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world.

A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.

Some facts and figures that are useful to know as the battle around inheritance tax in the UK will most likely come to the fore again following reports that the government is considering changing it.

The vast majority of deaths do not involve any inheritance tax charge at all:

in the tax year 2022 to 2023, 4.62% of UK deaths resulted in an Inheritance Tax (IHT) charge, increasing by 0.23 percentage points since the tax year 2021 to 2022. This means that IHT is payable on fewer than 1 in 20 estates, as it has been since 2007 to 2008, and broadly since statistics were first produced

And the rate paid by those who do is far lower than the headline 40% rate.

t…he average effective tax rate paid by taxpaying estates was 13% (compared to the headline marginal rate of 40%), reflecting the impact of exemptions, reliefs, and tax-free allowances.

These charts based on a report commissioned by the Bible Society, leveraging a poll run by Yougov, tell a story that surprised me.

Over the past few years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of young people - aged 18-34 - that report believing in God.

And some of them seem to be actively engaging with their beliefs, with a massive increase in the % who report going to a Christian church at least monthly.

It’s still a minority pursuit to be sure. But, nonetheless, the upswing reflects a 400% increase in the 18-24 group.

The increase is dominated by young men, with not so far off twice the proportion of young men reporting that they regular attending church than women.

I haven’t read the full report, but I do intend to, to see if it it includes any theories of why this is.

📚 Want to read: Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp.

The usual cheery reading.

Luke Kemp surveys the history of the fall of yesterday’s ‘great civilisations’ (not that I think he’d call them that) in order to find the patterns in why they are no longer with us.

America or Tiwanaku in South America, or the sprawling empires of Egypt, Rome and China, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power that hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down.

And whether it always led to catastrophe:

These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population.

And, naturally, what it means for us living in today’s world:

Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible.

Good to know!

Let’s hope there are some concrete ideas herein to save us from ourselves. After all:

All of us now face a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last.

I first heard of the book from this newspaper article which covers some of the author’s theories and thoughts.

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world

This is one of those articles that makes you remember that how things are is not how things had to, or have to, be.

With a tiny bit of imagination there’s a way to develop technologies that serve the interests of the users, not the handful of secretive billionaires that own them.

And it doesn’t require us to invent any new process. There are people and communities out there that show us how it can be done.

There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. … The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose top-down “solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. … While most of what we consider to be “hi-tech” is closed off behind proprietary algorithms, the open-source technologies above all require community involvement. This can be immensely empowering, and can improve public trust: it’s hard (and unwise) to give yourself over to a technology that won’t tell you how it works, particularly when its predefined settings allow only for meagre approaches to “user privacy”. … Tech bros may want you to believe there is no point in making something new unless it is difficult, inaccessible and exclusionary. But technological innovation is about collaboration as much as it is about competition. For many people across the world, a product’s value isn’t in a sky-high valuation, or in it being impossible to take apart (as with impenetrable iPhones). Often, the smartest technologies are those that distil a problem down to its bread and butter components in order to disseminate a solution to the masses.

So, while innovative individuals and communities around the world quietly get on with improving their lives and those around them, it’s high time the rest of us stopped being passive recipients of technology, and started asking ourselves what kind of world we want to live in and how to create it.

Democrats Act Like Elections Are Complicated. They’re Not.

Our research found that economically populist policies - like a higher federal minimum wage, limits on imports to protect US jobs, and expanding Medicare - appeal to working-class people on both sides of the aisle

A US article, but imagine it’s relevant here in the UK too. Basically, if you want to win back some ‘working-class’ votes then it pays to address the issue that modern day life is basically unaffordable for an incredible number of people.

The claim is that this idea is a big part of Zohran Mamdani’a success in the New York mayoral campaign.

The usual relationship between religion and political party in the UK - something that has really stood the test of time, and isn’t explainable entirely by factors like voter age - appears to be breaking down.

The Conservative party has been very close to English Anglicanism since its emergence in the mid-19th century. Catholics and free-church Protestants (such as Baptists and Methodists) have tended towards the Labour and Liberal/Liberal Democrat parties. Even as Britain has become more secular, these relationships have persisted.

Upsettingly, the new dynamics appear to be rather in favour of Reform.

In addition, Reform is as popular as the Conservatives among Anglicans, and as popular as Labour among Catholics. This suggests it is appealing across the traditional denominational divide more successfully than either of the major parties.

If there is to be a single party that attracts the bulk of Britain’s Christian support, at this point it is far more likely to be Reform than anyone else.

📺 Watched seasons 1-3 of The White Lotus.

I missed this the first time round, but it appeared to feature in many people’s lists of “what to watch if you love Severance” - which I did, so I did.

It’s a dark kind of comedy that each series follows the lives of a different set of well-to-do guests and less privileged employees of a different branch of a luxury hotel/spa chain called The White Lotus.

The show has a magical way of projecting stress and ominousness even whilst there’s a sense in which, especially in the earlier episodes of each season, not a lot is exactly happening.

Rightfully acclaimed for its implied social commentary and satirical take on the winners of modern-day capitalism.

📺 Watched season 3 of Beyond Paradise.

The set-in-Britain spin-off of its more famous cousin, Death in Paradise sees Detective Goodman’s local town continue to suffer from an extraordinarily high murder rate.

To be fair, he and his team are a lot better at solving them than the typical real-life crime-solving rate we see in the rest of the country.

Previous seasons.

🎶 Listening to Cacophony by Paris Paloma.

I’m told a big chunk of folk who have social media accounts will already be very familiar with at least one of the songs on this album - “Labour” - which, by addressing the vast amount of unrewarded domestic labour that even in this day and age women are often expected to do on behalf of men, has formed the soundtrack to plenty of feminist-inspired Tiktoks.

But there’s plenty more on here to keep listeners interested beyond that hit, a good selection of which include further very necessary & modern-feeling feminist takes.

🎶 Listening to Mirror Starts Moving Without Me by Pom Pom Squad.

More angsty than the band name would suggest, the album’s name apparently comes from the horror movie trope where standing perfectly still, looking at yourself in a mirror and, all of a sudden, your reflection moves. Aargh.

In line with that, you can expect songs along the themes of the struggles of dealing with the ever-changing nature of one’s identity and self-image - even when you’re a justifiably famous star of the indie music world

🎶 Listening to Wake Up, Shut Up, Work by Millie Manders and The Shutup.

I came across this one looking for modern day political protest type songs. Sure enough, this high-energy combo of at least pop punk, rock, rap & ska covers a lot of subjects that we certainly should be protesting about - everything from toxic relationships, sexual violence, sexism, mental health struggles, all the way up to the horror that is modern-day genocide.

🎶 Listening to I’m Doing It Again Baby! by Girl in Red.

The first of a ton of belated and brief media-diet entries I’ve built up whilst being distracted by other projects. Normal service may resume soon, who’s to say.

This album is a sequel to 2021’s If I Could Make It Go Quiet, which is also worth a listen. This newer one is not quite as emotionally dark as the original was, but still manages to convey the artist’s apparent inner turmoil perfectly well.