The Braindump Blog

An older article from MSNBC explains why Elon Musk’s basic misunderstandings of free speech are a problem for all of us. Of course he’s not the only one who suffers from such delusions. And the dynamics of why this matters specifically in the Elon case have changed a whole lot since the era of the Twitter files in 2022 of course.

But as a refresher, the US First Amendment, like most parts of the Constitution, applies primarily to state action:

A private business no more violates the First Amendment by banning particular types of speech in its operations than I violate the First Amendment by not allowing particular types of speech in my home.

Privatised social networks aren’t able to violate it even if they wanted to.

And secondly, even if the First Amendment was relevant, then not everything that one could possibly imagine being posted online is covered by it. Some of the stuff that Musk was arguing at the time was being hidden in constitution-breaking ways included photos of Hunter Biden’s genitalia uploaded without his consent. It’s rather ludicrous to imagine that anyone has a protected right to see that. Personally, I’m very glad I do not.

That would be like arguing that someone who posts revenge porn to the internet has a First Amendment right to have it preserved for all to see.

In fact, in California where Twitter is headquartered, sharing photos of someone’s intimate body parts without their consent is explicitly illegal, covered under the revenge porn law, as well as it being against Twitter’s own policy. Of course Musk is free to rewrite Twitter’s policy as and when he wants to, so I’ve no idea if the latter is still true.

The British TV channel GB News - right-wing mouth-piece for the worst of Conservative/Reform lame ‘anti-woke’ culture-war-obsessed warriors - has taken a break from its massive cost cutting exercise in order to burn £100k converting its existing gender-neutral toilets in separate female and male facilities.

Probably because someone laughed at them on Twitter about having them as far as I can gather.

Per The Mirror:

…a source told this newspaper senior GB News figures were so infuriated by the “woke” bathrooms that they spent eye-watering sums to “fix” them.

I’m sure the country sighed in relief at their brave action. At least that’s £100k they can’t spend on making their inflammatory, offensive and inane programs I suppose.

Today is the big vote for our British Parliamentarians on whether we should introduce a law to allow for assisted dying.

Most of the British public are in favour of such a law in principle - 65% for, 13% against in a recent More In Common survey.

One surprising thing to me is that the support for such a law - not necessarily this particular law to be clear - in the British population at large doesn’t seem to be in any way partisan. At least according to a report from that survey More In Common conducted.

Or even all that demographically split for that matter.

Perhaps we found a miraculous issue that is certainly both emotionally and morally charged - but hasn’t descended into an unpleasant 50:50 culture war issue.

The importance of religion to someone seems to be amongst the biggest differentiators - the more religious you are, the more likely you are to oppose such a law. But even in this case more people in every category measured support rather than oppose the idea.

Some good work by Skeleton Claw:

From The Register:

A local Japanese government agency dedicated to preventing organized crime has apologized after experiencing an incident it fears may have led to a leak of personal information describing 2,500 people who reached out to it for consultation.

This is a particularly unfortunate hack given that organised crime gangs have something of a reputation for seeking revenge on anyone whom they might regard as disloyal or a threat to their impunity.

It happened as the result of one of the classic phishing exercises:

A staff member was using his work computer when he received a popup warning him his computer had been disabled and to call a number for support. He did so, followed the instructions, and unintentionally gave criminals remote access

The insatiable and unmet demand for GLP-1 medications is unlikely to decrease anytime soon. Semaglutide - branded versions of which include Ozempic and Wegovy - was the top selling drug in the US, with net sales of $14 billion last year.

Recent research from Shi et al suggest that around 137 million adults in the US have conditions that make them medically eligible for treatment with it. That would include folk who meet the current criteria for needing it to assist with diabetes, weight management or cardiovascular disease.

137 million people represents a little over a half of the estimate 250-million-ish adults in the US. Of that 137 million, around 15 million patients are currently estimated to be on a GLP-1.

There are signs in the research that GLP-1 drugs might help with a wide variety of other conditions. If they get approved for use beyond these three domains the number of course will only go up.

It was fun to learn that training to be a CIA agent involves playing board games.

Not just any old off-the-shelf game mind. These are special CIA-created playthings, including such hidden hits as:

• Collection: vibes of Pandemic - ‘a group of players must work together to resolve three major crises across the globe.’
• Collection Deck: a Magic The Gathering like game that ‘focuses less on collaborative work and more on the sheer act of collecting intel’.
• Satellite Construction Kit: ‘players cooperate to manage resources, budget, and time to build and maintain connected satellites.’
• Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo: used ‘to train analysts who might work with law enforcement and other partners around world to find a well-armed, well-defended, well-protected bad guy’.

I suspect that board games are a vastly underutilised opportunity for education. Apparently for the CIA they’re particularly good for helping agents learn how to cross-reference vast amounts of information in order to understand how situations they might face in real life might work.

“People playing a game, together they’re experiencing the designers' mental model of insurgency in Afghanistan and sharing that model,” he says. “They are learning it, very quickly, because they’re inside, operating in it. Pushing levers, pulling cords, seeing what happens. Stories are very sticky, and they’ll remember their own stories.”

The Guardian will no longer officially post on X, formerly known as Twitter. I’m sure one could critique the decision as having come a bit belatedly. But good for them for doing it at all when so many other journalistic sources seem to think it’s still an essential part of their business.

And even better, they spell out their rationale:

This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.

As they spell out, they “can do this because our business model does not rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants’ algorithms”. That’s a good lesson for us all. If your business depends on someone else’s company treating your favourably then that’s rather risky, even it’s not run by a dangerous and unpredictable megalomaniac.

I hope it goes well for them and that readers continue to support them. Who knows, it might even bring in extra punters. Supposedly they raised an extra couple of million of dollars in donations when they went out of their way to endorse Harris, and criticise Trump, in the recent debacle of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times censoring their journalists.

📚 Finished listening to Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn.

In this book, Cal Flyn visits the places that humans have been, oftentimes ravaged , and left in order to explore the nature of “life in the post-human landscape”.

…we will travel to some of the eeriest and most desolate places on earth

There are many such places. Some she covers include:

• The Chernobyl exclusion zone - the site of the infamous 1986 nuclear disaster, and its nearby towns.
• The abandoned settlements of the Scottish Highlands.
• The empty villages of the Greek Islands of the Aegean
• The now desolate industrial areas of Detroit.
• Poveglia Island, a former quarantine station and mental asylum.
• Kolyma, Siberia, previously home to forced labour camps
• The Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea
• The Usambara Mountains in Tanzania, where imperialists planting species from their native country overran the indigenous species of the area.
• The huge slag heaps of West Lothian, Scotland, a legacy of the production of oil.
• Place à Gaz in France, where unused chemical weapons were burned after the first world war.
• Various Soviet collectives of times past.
• Arthur Kill, New Jersey, where toxic chemicals from industrial processes cause harm to anything or anyone that lives there.

However well it is written - and it does contain many surprisingly poetic sentences, beautifully evoking the strange environments under discussion - one might think that this would be nothing other than a book of despair, a dystopia of what we did to our planet.

But that’s not really the case. For, as she documents, in many of these places nature has found a way to to re-emerge, to live once again, sometimes even to thrive.

Humans have given up and fled the area, and may never return - or at least most humans, in some of these places a few people remain, for better or worse. But the rest of our planet’s organisms have not give up so easily.

This should be a book of darkness, a litany of the worse places in the world. In fact, it is a story of redemption: how the most polluted spots on Earth - suffocated by oil spills, blasted by bombs, contaminated by nuclear fallout or scraped clean of their natural resources - can be rehabilitated through ecological processes,

This does not necessarily things have reset to what was there before, before humans tore the place apart. Apart from anything else, tragically, many species of life have been lost for good. What emerges from these post-human places is often something new, a different ecosystem, organisms that thrive in or managed to adapt to the mess we left behind. These places aren’t permanently destroyed, forever destined to be places without life. Instead we see regeneration, a natural re-wilding of a type, untouched by human planners.

And sometimes in a form that might even save us from ourselves - witness the regrowth of forests in previously abandoned Russian farmland that may apparently in theory, though having developed simply because humans left, lead to them meeting their Kyoto Protocol commitments.

This might give us hope that whatever we do to our planet, we will not truly kill it. If we continue to behave in the depraved and irresponsible way that we seem to have so far, it’s possible that we might wipe out humanity, sure, or at least render our lives to something more like how she tells us that the residents of Slab City live, but planetary life would go on.

Quite incredibly, yesterday was the 1000-day anniversary of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

I now believe the Bluesky mass migration is for real, having learned that even dril made the leap.

From Kosu:

State Superintendent Ryan Walters sent superintendents an email Thursday afternoon mandating districts show students a video of him announcing the new Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism and inviting students into a prayer for President-elect Donald Trump, among other topics.

This from nearly-Trump’s America is one of those instances that is so ridiculous that if it was fiction you’d think it a foolish exaggeration. Instead it’s just weird and scary.

I mean, the ‘Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism’. Come on. Apart from anything else surely that should be either no offices or two offices. Just call it “Office of I HEART TRUMP PLS GIV ME JOB” and be done with it.

The accompanying speech is of course full of violent rhetoric about the “radical left” and “woke” and all the usual buzzwords these ridiculous folk like to use.

Here it is, for those who like to punish themselves.

So strange that he forgot to pray for their actual current president, Biden? Oh, and neglected to defend the religious liberty of any religion that isn’t whatever subsection of Christianity he presumably follows - no doubt the one that adds “Trump” to bullet-point two of the Ten Commandment’s list of acceptable gods to worship.

On which note, this isn’t this guy’s first failure on this front. Previously he’s sent a memo to mandate that “the Bible”, including the all-important 10 commandments, must be taught to everyone in grades 5-12.

Americans United for Separation of Church and States have it right. There is nothing about “religious freedom” to be seen here. Rather:

This is textbook Christian Nationalism: Walters is abusing the power of his public office to impose his religious beliefs on everyone else’s children.

Another weirdo lawmaker from that area of the country was previously trying to get a law in place to make it required to display a poster of the 10 (Christian) Commandments “at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall” in every school. That’ll stop those pesky kids from inappropriately committing adultery I guess.

Britain’s social care system appears to be in a real mess following years of neglect and underfunding. Let’s hope this government will be able to fix at least some of the sins of the previous few administrations.

Today’s abhorrent story concerns children who are subjected to Deprivation of Liberty orders.

DoLs fall under the Mental Capacity Act. In theory they should only be used when taking away someone’s freedom is essential to prevent them being harmed.

Mind provides an example use-case:

Jon lives in a care home. He has memory problems that have become worse over time. His condition means that he’s less aware of danger than others. He’s unable to cross a busy road on his own and doesn’t understand that it’s dangerous to cross a nearby railway line.

Jon needs constant supervision. He has to be stopped from going out on his own. This usually involves keeping him in a locked room and physically stopping him if he tries to go out on his own. To keep him safe, this has to be done on a regular basis.

However the number of DoLs being used on children has doubled, to at least 1000 per year, since 2021.

The government’s guidance says that these children ‘will likely be placed in a children’s home or a care home service’. But in reality at least half - we apparently don’t have an accurate count - of these very vulnerable children are being placed in entirely unsuitable, unregistered, dangerous and illegal accommodation run by profiteering comercial firms, sometimes supervised only by a security guard.

This is, of course, due to a lack of state facilities and personnel, leading to a reliance on the private sector. When does that ever go well?

From the Guardian:

“Caravans, Airbnbs. We found a child in such bad accommodation with disabilities that there were rats eating through their feeding tubes every night,” De Souza said. “We’ve had children in tents. It’s absolutely shocking.”

To compound the horror, often they’re stuck behind locked doors 100s of miles away from their family and receiving very little in the way of education.

Yet another issue that should be a top priority for this government to try and fix. Apparently we can expect an announcement this week.

📺 Watched Rivals.

This is an adaption of Jilly Cooper’s book of the same name. Former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is likely a fan. It’s set in the 1980s with plenty of occasion to enjoy reminiscing about the fashion and music if you experienced it first hand. And lots of “rumpy pumpy”, as it seems entirely appropriate to describe it as in such an innuendo laden show.

Witness a bunch of very rich and even richer English folk generally get up to no good. Rupert Campbell-Black is a perfect name for such a character, and there he is, clearly supposed to be the world’s most handsome man (a relatively young Conservative politician whenever he’s not messing about - perhaps more plausible in the 1980s? I don’t know). David Tennant (aka Doctor Who) is also in the mix, as Lord Baddingham.

Basically almost everyone in the show is awful. Constant cheating on their partners, making offensive comments, winding up their neighbours, committing business-related subterfuge all that good stuff. I super-cringed at the storyline where the afore-mentioned Campbell-Black seemed like he was heading for a relationship with someone who appeared to be portraying a teenager and definitely way too young for him. But hey, 1980s Conservative MPs gotta Conservative MP.

Pure fun/rich people being naughty nonsense, although very occasionally it hits on a serious topic, prejudice and abuse amongst those. But mostly its over-the-top silly fun if you like seeing rich people behave terribly. One of the rare things that Rishi Sunak, big fan of the books, is unambiguously correct about is that you need to have escapism in your life. Particularly during times when he and his colleagues are in charge.

It’s apparently led to a massive revival of interest in 1980s fashion. Which you too can follow along with using the #80soutfits on Tiktok apparently, if you really want to.

🎮 Played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

This a 20 year old visual novel videogame, reissued on a wide variety of platforms. You play Phoenix Wright, a hopefully-up-and-coming defence lawyer.

The game consists of you participating in several court cases, with the goal being to have your clients declared not guilty. During the game you’ll regularly alternate between a couple of phases. The first is “investigation”, wherein you travel to various locations looking for clues, and interviewing whosoever is around to interview. It’s here where the story of each crime, or potential crime, is to be elucidated. You also collect up physical evidence for later use in court.

Then we have the court case phase. In that setting, you argue your case in front of a judge. This is mostly done by cross-examining witnesses, which involves picking from a set of phrases to say and backing up your claims by selecting appropriate pieces evidence. The main task here is to find contradictions. Is the witness saying something that doesn’t make sense, that’s inconsistent with what they previously said? That’d be suspicious, right?

The witnesses are of course usually lying, often in quite dramatic ways. But, as a simulated lawyer, you making foolish choices here could lead your client to prison, or simply make the judge angry enough to throw you out of the court room. Mostly it’s easy and kind-of-logical enough to figure out the right approach; only very occasionally did I feel like I was clicking random buttons and hoping for the best.

The cases are generally a bit on the wacky side. There are incredible twists and turns, wild new evidence pops up all the times, worthy of the most cliff-hangery of TV crime series. It’s also pretty light-hearted. Sure, we’re talking about some of the most serious offences going - including murder - but it’s usually comedy cartoon style murder being committed, not very graphic or disturbing in how it’s presented.

If you don’t like games with a lot of reading then this isn’t for you. But if you enjoy a detective story and want the chance to defend some clients in a visual novelly style, then this is a classic of the genre that should probably be given a whirl. And it works fine on a phone, if that’s useful to know.

It’s also where the ‘Objection!’ meme came from.

🎥 Watched A Haunting in Venice.

This is an (apparently loose) adaptation of Agatha Christie’s book ‘Hallowe’en Party’, directed by Kenneth Branagh no less.

The film opens with famed detective Hercule Poirot trying to get on with a nice quiet retirement, spending more time thinking about what type of eggs to eat than murder.

Of course this doesn’t last long. His friend, author Ariadne Oliver, persuades him to come to a creepy old house for a séance. She wants his to try and debunk a medium which she has come to believe is legitimately communicating with the dead. Poirot is a massive sceptic about these things, but is eventually persuaded to give it a go.

The event takes place at a house where a young girl, daughter of one of those present, committed suicide. Or was perhaps murdered. One thing naturally leads to another and it turns out that she is not the only violent death the house will be unlucky enough to witness. But…whodunnit?

🎥 Watched Dune: Part 2.

The battle for power (and spice) continues at Paul Atreides, his mother, and his surprisingly vocal unborn sister, encounters the Fremen who have to decide whether he’s a real deal prophecy or not.

A whole lot more happens than that of course. And it was so long since I watched the first part - this one’s release was delayed as a result of last year’s Hollywood strike action - that it took me a while to remember who anyone is. Perhaps I’ll face this obstacle again as it ends in a slightly frustrating way that just guarantees there’ll be a part 3.

But totally worth the watch nonetheless, especially if you’re anything of a sci fi fan. A “a work of total sensory and imaginative immersion” according to the Independent.

It’s a near-Christmas miracle, Donald Trump’s election victory has already improved folk’s economic situation, just as he promised - before he even got inaugurated!

Well, at least if you’re one of the top 10 richest people in the world.

The day the result was declared those 10 people saw an increase in wealth of a record-breaking, astonishing, disgusting $64 billion dollars. $27 billion of that went to Trump’s very own dancing idiot, Elon Musk.

These increases are of course mostly down to the stock market going up. Elon’s Tesla shot up 15%, which is possibly, if anything, quite restrained given that the person that owns the company may well be the same person that sets the rules wherein it and its competitors must operate.

Remember when we used to care about things like “conflict of interest”?

This of course tells us all we need to know about a) Trump’s likely policies and b) investors. I suppose those who already pillaged society for an unfathomable and undeservedly huge amount of humanity’s resources look forward to an era even more devoid of taxes and regulations - and little competence to police any that do still remain.

The wonderful Onion has bought Alex Jones' despicable “Infowars” site.

At least I think it’s true? It’s not only famously satirical website The Onion that’s reporting it.

It comes as a result of Alex Jones' Infowars bankruptcy auction, following him being court-ordered to pay over $1 billion to people on the basis of defaming them and their families.

Those families are on board with the idea,. Via Status:

“The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” said Robbie Parker, whose daughter was killed in the 2012 school shooting.

The Onion will end up owning Infowars' website, product inventory, social media accounts, customer lists, studio, trademarks and video archive.

Alex Jones is of course not pleased at this outcome claiming, of course, that it’s a “total attack on free speech” and that it’s the pseky Democrats shutting him down as “part of a political vendetta”.

The Onion’s take on their owner, Global Tetrahedron’s, motivation for doing so:

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars

Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over.

The less obviously satirical reporting suggests that they’re going to relaunch Infowards next year, featuring:

…satire aimed at conspiracy theorists and right-wing personalities, as well as educational information about gun violence prevention from the group Everytown for Gun Safety.

I’m reluctant to volunteer my own evidence-free theory into the morass of folk providing weirdly definitive sounding yet conflicting explanations for Why Trump Won from a few minutes after it became clear that he did. But something about this quote from a book I’m currently reading, 1Q84, made me wonder whether it could reflect part of the explanation:

Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.

…

If a certain belief – call it ‘Belief A’ – makes the life of that man or this woman appear to be something of deep meaning, then for them Belief A is the truth. If Belief B makes their lives appear to be powerless and puny, then Belief B turns out to be a falsehood. The distinction is quite clear. If someone insists that Belief B is the truth, people will probably hate him, ignore him, or, in some cases, attack him. It means nothing to them that Belief B might be logical or provable. Most people barely manage to preserve their sanity by denying and rejecting images of themselves as powerless and puny

Ignore for the moment that it’s said by a character who at present appears to me to be a detestable and self-serving cult leader (I refer to the character in the book of course, it’s merely a coincidence if someone else in this post might fit the same description).

Google receives its biggest fine yet. $20 decillion.

A decillion is a one with 33 zeroes after it. So rather more money than exists in the entire world (which is probably merely something in the region of trillions or quadrillions depending on how you measure it).

Sadly, much as I’m usually on the side of folk taking action against big tech monopolies, in this case it’s just Putin being annoyed he’s not allowed to post his propaganda on YouTube quite so often - so probably best to avoid paying up.

Trump’s election promises weren’t only meaningless because they were almost certainly bullshit (referring of course here to the academic definition of such), but also because the Biden administration has already done a lot of them.

Kevin Drum provides the facts and figures to show that in the US:

• Inflation is already down
• Illegal immigration is down
• The economy, as measured by GDP, is already strong.
• Imports from China are down
• Interest rates are falling
• Oil and gas production is at the highest level in US history
• Crime is already low, and the murder rate is fallen further.

There’s really not much left for Trump to do. All he has to do is not bollix things up.

There’s little left to like about the British honours system, if there ever was. In recent times it became, functionally, mostly a way for people who donate a lot of money to the Conservative party to feel like a special Very Important snowflake and/or get into the House of Lords to aid whichever cruel and unusual cause the leader of the day was trying to get through the Commons . Although some people who aren’t made of true evil do also get recognised, which can make it a bit confusing.

As are the specific names given to the honors. There are actually five classes on offer, which Wikipedia lists as being named in the follow preposterous manner:

• Knight Grand Cross or Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (GBE)
• Knight Commander or Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE or DBE)
• Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE)
• Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE)
• Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE)

I personally thought a GBE was some kind of handheld Nintendo console, but there we go.

In any case, you might note that they all heavily feature the word “Empire”, which for a country that no longer has one, and almost certainly should be very ashamed of what it did when it did have one, is odd. And off-putting to quite a few people outside of the stereotype red-faced self-entitled political donors who fantasise about nothing more than ruling over the disenfranchised masses whilst holding Margaret Thatcher’s hand. Several folk have in fact turned down receiving the honour because of the connotations associated with the E word.

Benjamin Zephaniah, poet, was offered one. He wasn’t keen:

Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought. I get angry when I hear that word “empire”; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.

Howard Gayle, footballer, also had to politely decline:

The fact is that I felt it would be a slap in the face for so many to be part of that British empire process. When you look at what the empire did to my family and our ancestors, it just doesn’t bear credence.

So finally, the name might be changed. Apparently even the King of England is on board with switching the E in OBE to mean Excellence instead of Empire. I mean, the exact same thought had been had 20 years ago, but I suppose it’s just possible its time has finally come.

Presumably if the honour is there to celebrate “Excellence” then in theory most of the ones awarded in the last few years will have to be handed back. Honestly I suspect the system is quite honestly so rotten that abolishing it wholesale is the only real answer - but in the absence of that an acknowledgement of what “empire”, then and now, actually meant is better than literally nothing.

Who knew that Michael Gove got one particularly foolish part of his political philosophy from a 1967 episode of Doctor Who?

My slow-running run through of all surviving Doctor Who episodes has gotten to the Ice Warriors story.

OpenAI released their web search engine - at least to paid subscribers. Looks to be integrated into their standard ChatGPT experience.

They promise that it’ll provide citation links so you can see why it says what it says and perhaps even, you know, risk clicking your way outside of the chatbot experience and onto the provider of the information their robot gulped up.