[Epstein] Hello madda / Hello fadda / Gotta syndrome / Called Havana!

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Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

SurgicalOntologist posted:

very true, I've been on all sides of that (student, technician, researcher) and basically no one takes it seriously and everyone is more or less from the same socio-economic background (not only university student, but more specifically freshman in psych 1)

IMO the bigger problem is the statistics. Psych and other fields rely on a statistical method where (to oversimplify) if your theory is wrong, there is still a 5% chance that the results will confirm it. That sounds fine, if 5% of studies are wrong, maybe it's unavoidable. But when you consider that researchers will discard negative results and keep trying until they confirm their theory, and journals will reject negative results and accept positive ones, especially if the results are "surprising", then it could be that those 5% of studies that are wrong are specifically the ones more likely to be published.

Imagine if every single psychology theory in the world is wrong. Every single experiment is based on a hypothesis that is incorrect. In this hypothetical, still 5% of those studies would (incorrectly) confirm their hypothesis. And those 5% would be the studies that get published, rather than the 95% of studies in which "insufficient evidence was found to confirm the hypothesis". We could very well be in this scenario where no one knows anything but still 5% of studies show a positive result only by chance, and those are the studies that people talk about.

imo the bigger problem is that academic psychology has no method to speak of at all. it doesn't even have a way of measuring the phenomena it purports to explain. where is behavior? what is behavior? it's whatever I define it to be, and it's where I can conveniently sample that. but that isn't a problem for psychology. its actually good, because at least since skinner, and especially since the cognitive revolution, academic psychology has been in the business of reifying individualism. if you aren't taking the individual as your basic unit of analysis for behavior, then outside of niche theoretical spaces like ecological psychology and perceptual control theory, you are by informal definition not doing psychology. no one's saying "it's wrong to research behavior that way", but no one in psychology will fund it, because it isn't, conceptually, psychology. it isn't sociology either. it isn't really any major academic field. but it is counter-terrorism. it is command and control. :nsa:

the big consequence of that is how it plays out over time. cognitive psychology in particular is basically multi-agent solipsism: only the individual is real. all the things between and comprising individuals? mere illusions. this affords nonsensical hypotheses, like sitting on wobbly chairs leading to romantic breakups, or maybe you just come right out and say "working memory isn't meant to be an objective model of reality, it is merely a 'productive' model" and let people run with it. suppose we simulate the oversimplified model where all the hypotheses are objectively wrong but 5% make the cut. that's where the lack of method really comes in: each paper past the finish line becomes a new node in the belief network, and each of those 5% of papers can be used to generate new nodes, and the 5% of those can be added to the first 5%, and so forth. phds are minted, careers are made. a few generations later, you have an entire belief network with all the trappings of peer review and statistics, which still affords infinite degrees of explanatory freedom, and if it was ever otherwise, no living person can remember that. go ahead. publish a critique of my stupid bullshit. it only makes my impact factor Higher.

the most ominous part of this thread to me isn't the who knows who, or anything technological. it's stuff like the paper on using fractional-order systems to control engineer belief. it hints the mic feels a need for such methods that has evolved from the first conceptual papers I read only a decade before that one was published, like this one on inhibiting adaptation. that adaptation paper's abstract has always stuck with me over the years. the applications beyond ct and c&c seemed immediately graspable to me. it's deeply disconcerting for me to imagine a world where the ruling class has the ability to scientifically monitor and engineer if not what we believe, then the topology of beliefs. that's like a whole new level of divide and conquer.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2021 20:59

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:45

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

SurgicalOntologist posted:

hey what's up we exchanged pms about ecological psychology like 10 years ago

of course, agree

yeah, thanks for turning me into the freaking comedian.

nut posted:

it's a very good post. The same individualism explains the entirety of modern medicine, which overwhelmingly places both the cause, or at least the onus, of disease on the individual and provides only solutions that can be sold to the individual. In biological levels of analysis (like gene > cell > organ > organism), when you transcend the individual (populations) and are talking about non-human animals, you are studying ecology. When the same applies to humans, you are largely excluded from being considered in the natural sciences anymore. Epidemiology should be an exception but the patterns and risk factors it finds will overwhelmingly be enacted at the level of the individual (blaming the poor for their "decision" to be unhealthy)

Sorry that's pretty off topic for this thread, to try and rescue it I learned that RAND Corp held a conference to determine the monetary worth of a human life.

it's only off topic if you think it's all just a wild coincidence that *deep breath* the topology of the anglo scientific belief network developed into a rhizome of the 'natural sciences' coupled to a social science sphere, which, also coincidentally, got shotgun blasted into a donut with a giant hole where material conditions should have been. as opposed to a merely historically coincident, material function of the post-ww2 social science funding environment, fed by the nascent mic responding to the soviets and chinese challenging western capital's unfettered ascent to global hegemony, ultimately leading to the present situation where scientists are forced to choose between the adopting the axiom of individualism, situating their theory in the mic machinery, or largely foregoing funding and institutional support for their research.

Leo Goldberger posted:

In 1954, still a graduate student but now in New York, I was employed as a research psychologist at Cornell Medical Center � New York Hospital, within a unit named the �Human Ecology Program,� nominally housed in the neurology department and headed by a most eminent professor of neurology, Dr. Harold G. Wolff, known for his pioneering work on headaches, pain, and psychosomatic disorders. (Dr. Wolff had served as editor-in-chief of the AMA�s Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry and, in 1960, became president of the American Neurological Association.)

My assignment was to participate in an interdisciplinary project studying the adaptation of 100 Chinese men and women to life in America. They represented a group of Chinese who had come to the USA on a temporary basis to pursue postgraduate work in a variety of fields. In consequence of the Communist take-over, our government decided to block the return of these men and women, most of whom were thus stranded in the USA without their families and faced with an uncertain future. I and the rest of the staff were investigating this �experiment in nature� � the stress of geographic dislocation and its adaptational consequences � in order to determine the �ecological aspects of disease,� in Dr. Wolff�s original phrasing. My role on the interdisciplinary team was to assess the Chinese by a fairly standard battery of personality and intelligence tests. The anthropologist and the sociologist interviewed them about cultural and kinship issues, while a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst plied their special types of probing questions. In return for their participation in our project, the Chinese received a complete physical � free of charge � something they very much appreciated. They were also motivated intrinsically by a desire to tell us about China and Chinese culture, in not about their own interrupted lives.

Little did I know then that my work with the Chinese had been designed by others for an entirely different end. Only in 1977, more than twenty years later, upon receiving a call from an investigative reporter who wished to interview me about my involvement with the Human Ecology Program, did I learn the truth. To my shocked surprise, I found out that the program I had been a part of had been totally financed by the CIA. The real aim of the Chinese project � and the reason for its generous funding, I now learned � was to ferret out potential agents for future assignments in China. (Incidentally, the Chinese project was duly replicated, using Hungarian Freedom Fighters of 1956, this time with the surreptitious aim of studying the characteristics of �defectors.�)

Subsequently it was revealed that only Dr. Wolff, and perhaps one or two of his staff and others high up in the university and hospital administration, knew of the behind-the-scenes role of the CIA. It seems that Dr. Wolff was a personal friend of Allan Dulles, then CIA Director. The lure of continuous, large-scale funding, which could be diverted to a variety of other and more traditional research projects under Dr. Wolff�s direction, must have been very attractive to this totally science-absorbed, emotionally detached, and ascetic workaholic. Of course, patriotic sentiment undoubtedly played a significant role given the temper of the times.

In 1955, in response to Wolff�s enthusiastic and grand vision of the �synergistic partnership between science and the CIA,� the Agency enlarged the CIA-funded study program into a research foundation (the money presumably coming from rich private donors and former patients, but actually from the CIA) which became known as the �Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology,� with Wolff as president. Through this CIA-controlled funding mechanism, Wolff extended his and his staff�s efforts on behalf of the Agency, efforts which now went far beyond Cornell. Wolff was expansive in his scientific dream, to say the least. For instance, he wrote the CIA that once he had figured out �how the human mind really worked,� he would tell the Agency �how a man be made to think, feel and behave according to the wishes of other men, and conversely, how a man can avoid being influenced in this manner.�

# ¿ Mar 16, 2021 12:23

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

i think this thread is a collection of useful factoids to break people out of docility. the problem with trying to explain it or its subject matter as a coherent thing is that it ... isn't.

while trying to provide a comprehensive explanation for assorted excesses and crimes of the ruling class by connecting all the dots to draw like a connectome of individuals is perhaps effective in evoking a diffuse sense of dread, it doesn't actually explain anything. why do these people all know each other, and why are they powerful? why are they all pedos and not, like, dogfuckers? liberalism has no explanation beyond asserting they do and they are, which isn't useful to anyone, but has been instilled in everyone. to properly explain, we need to step out of seeing the world as relations between individuals with arbitrary whims and wills, and into something like dialectical materialism, seeing the individuals and their ideas and preferences as products of material conditions.

then people stop listening anyway because you're a dangerous communist rather than a dangerous schizophrenic.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2021 18:05

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

nut posted:

tbf no one in this thread is discounting the possibilities of dogfuckers

they should be. dog fuckers don't have to form secret networks and maintain complex physical logistics and compartmentalized intelligence operations to gently caress dogs. they just get a dog and gently caress it.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2021 08:06

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Marzzle posted:

having done a bunch of psychedelics, there's nothing out there but poo poo that's already in your own head. don't be dumbasses epstien thread there are no machine elves or any of that supernatural poo poo

ask not what's inside your head, but what your head's inside of.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2021 16:59

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

everything is real and true and funny. :nsa:

i went looking up that head quote, and because this wasn't important to me ten years ago, i missed that james gibson developed his principles of ecological psychology based on work he did for the air force.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2021 17:37

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

# ¿ Apr 6, 2021 18:03

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Backweb posted:

My big question for all of this is "why?"

basically Capital is like a self-organized demon which eats entropy or complexity or whatever that we've summoned by meddling with productive forces beyond our comprehension and now its mind controlling like 80% of humanity to own ourselves, as a joke.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2021 19:47

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Danger posted:

this was all detailed in the late 2010s� Cyclonopedia.

drat this book sounded so right up my alley i picked it right up. i'm only around five pages in and already learned the word hyperstition, "a term loosely defined as fictional quantities that make themselves real," which led me to this incredible "Preemptive Glossary for a Techno-Sonic Control Society" that at a glance looks like a grab bag of concepts from a theory of capitalism as a cybernetic control system, with cites all over the place from l. ron hubbard and nick land to deleuze through baddeley, only with sound instead of science. hell yes. :nsa:

# ¿ Apr 13, 2021 10:40

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Bathtub Cheese posted:

poo poo, this thread is domestic gladio now

# ¿ Apr 14, 2021 20:22

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

well this got long and tbh i am just musing, but i think this is an interesting idea and i hope it's within the thread's scope.

Riot Bimbo posted:

It's so sloppy. This feels like something we only sort of have evidence for something fucky because of the internet. Pre-internet all these weird deaths and loose threads would've been memory holed by official outlets and the far more limited, restricted nature of information pre-internet.

Honestly think the fake news thing is a way to obfuscate reality specifically for this sort of poo poo. One can't like, take the internet away, without seeming like an out of character tyrant. Can't do poo poo like that without a heel turn, but herd people into a handful of outlets, control the ways they can interact, manually disperse unwanted groupings of people, like we don't talk about it anymore but we know the earliest known examples are the russian troll farms, were all about controlling discourse relevant to Russian interests.

This is the worst.

it doesn't have to be sloppy. it might be elegant, or it might be a bit of both, like experiencing a complex system decaying from inside it.

consider a first-order cybernetic system. for example, take the scene from the imitation game where cumberbatch's turing insists on letting the subs sink to preserve the program's secrecy: what all the characters realize is that, by estimating the maximum probability of detection from information leaked by acting on enigma information, relative to not doing so, and maintaining that difference in probability below a critical threshold, the program's control over allied behavior could remain mathematically indistinguishable from random noise, thus rendering their behavior unpredictable. simple enough. but instead of manually setting that threshold, we can fairly easily imagine a kind of complex system made out of first-order systems self regulating to that effect, thus expanding the idea to a second-order control system.

here, I think this passage from the macy's conferences on cybernetics is probably better than anything I can produce:

quote:

Ashby: Yes. It is a peculiar advantage of the ultrastable system that it has some ability to develop vicarious function; in fact, one can work out quite easily what it can stand and what it cannot. Suppose, for instance, its effects, its outputs to the environment, were the flexors and extensors of an arm. If they are crossed over, the organism has to do just the opposite of what it did before. This type of system can and will readapt to changes like that (1). The change-over will reverse the action and will probably send a reversed effect to the essential variables. Whereas before the change, the organism was acting like a thermostat, pulling its temperature always back to the optimum, after the change it will become like a thermostat with its parts reversed, so that it develops a runaway. But the very fact that it develops the runaway means that automatically the corrective feedback will throw the switches about in a random way. Such changes can stop when, and only when, the temperature gets back to the center again; in other words, it can stop only when the brain develops a pattern which holds the temperature stable.

The self-corrective power of this system can be shown most clearly by a comparison with the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot keeps the aircraft stable by acting on the ailerons, so that when the craft rolls a little to the right, it introduces a change which forces the aircraft to roll to the left. The automatic pilot has to be joined to the ailerons with some care because if it is joined to them the wrong way round, any small disturbance is self-aggravating, and the automatic pilot under such conditions will overturn the aircraft. A system with second-order feedback, however, will not do that. If joined on the wrong way, the circuit will be unstable and it will at first behave exactly as the wrongly connected automatic pilot does: it will start to increase the disturbance. But the very fact that it goes outside the normal limits will force changes in its network, random changes that can stop when, and only when, the roll is back to zero again. If a mechanism of this type were to be made into an automatic pilot and if the mechanic asked, �Which way shall I join it on to the ailerons?,� the answer would be, �It doesn�t matter; join it which way you like; the mechanism will sort itself out.�

Fremont-Smith: Don�t you have to make assumptions about how much time lag there is in the environment?

Ashby: Yes, very much so.

now, one explanation for the information leaks could then be the system require a certain amount of internal resistance, and part of the function served by the internet is acting like a massive feedback system towards maintaining that goldilocks resistance level; the system simply throws out small bits of random controlled information when it gets off kilter. or maybe it is just sloppy, in that the system's time-lag assumptions don't hold up on long timescales and information starts leaking. maybe it leaks information that's been inferentially sanitized and no longer registers as worth devoting energy to controlling. maybe all of the above in some system of its own.

much like movie turing ruthlessly lets the allied subs sink to inferentially sanitize what information necessarily does leak to the nazis when they act and thus makes it very difficult, in principle, for them to determine what controls the allies' behavior, inhibiting their ability to adapt, it would be very difficult for us to determine control and effective adaptations when this system potentially controls the maximum probability any individual signal or connection can be detected. but what really cracks my ping is this view doesn't require anyone to be in control. in fact, it's precisely in this way it would be superior in terms of control to the pre-internet regime. here, like a higher/simpler form of the imperialist regime which required first-order control by a ruling class and whose complexity was thus limited by that ruling class, the system controls itself. it can grow its control freely, and the old ruling class now behaves rather more like a semi-vestigial symbiotic parasite that eats waste/excess energy in capital's internal ecology--as simply another feedback mechanism--than like a system of controlling nodes. and somehow that feels worse.

anyway, thanks for coming to my wendy's

also, I just watched cold case hammarskjold on this thread's recommendation. goddamn. lmao. :captainpop:

mads br�gger bumbling into non-euclidean geometry and horrors from beyond the veil, expressing in adorable danish accent his growing but still fairly mild curiousity as to what that's all about now, very much does it for me.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 12:08

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

inferis posted:

I bought a book about conspiracy theories and the brain because I was worried about going crazy and in the preface it started talking about peasants having ludicrous conspiracies about their feudal masters collaborating to keep them down.

any chance you could post that preface? sounds interesting.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 21:01

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

inferis posted:

here it is

thank you, my bad. and it has leads! lovely.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 21:04

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Ham Cheeks posted:

If you had to sum up the CIA's true function(s) in a sentence or 2, what would you say?

first-order control.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2021 08:56

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Marzzle posted:

if the human brain is a deterministic system, you can use all these totally cool and real deterministic models to predict behavior and make the "right" choices! it's the "eugenics is real and good" for the era of big data

slopping together some half baked SVMs is the new phrenonogy and all they have to say is that the elites get to keep sitting pretty to get bigly funding and recogniton

true. on the other hand, if the human brain is a deterministic system, you can use all these totally cool and real deterministic models to control behavior. :nsa:

# ¿ Apr 27, 2021 20:25

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

# ¿ Apr 27, 2021 20:27

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

smarxist posted:

free will not existing in a chalk board full of equations way is essentially the same thing as it existing for the purposes of actually running a functioning society

maybe these math nerds should scale up into the immortal science and talk about the cumulative effects of inherited trauma/exploitation by bourgeois oppressors and how it predicts behaviors

unfortunately all the math nerds that scaled up into the immortal science didn't get funded by the air force and are now making financial algorithms for jp morgan.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2021 20:52

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

mdemone posted:

"Free will" is an incoherent concept that relies on an essentially dualist view of the world. You are always-already not really a unified "self" that makes a "decision", at all.

today, I am a fountain pen.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2021 07:00

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Riot Bimbo posted:

why are we talking about this

Xaris posted:

there's an extent that things can still be an op even if they aren't directly on the payroll of the cia/fbi/nsa/dhs/dod/mi5/mossad/etc to be an op. to that i mean that the entire academia (and to a lesser degree, primary ed) framework and structure has been largely curated and guided by the hand of intelligence and defense agencies/politicans/elite, over the last four/five decades, to turn it into essentially a factory to reproduce very useful neoliberal status-quo protecting idiots on an assembly line.

they get to the dirty work of being reactionary and dividing people using alienating and anti-solidarity linguistic signifiers and thought-framework without actually needing to be paid by the deep state, whether they realize it or not. it's pretty smart.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2021 09:53

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Happy Thread posted:

I think a lot of this is just emergent behavior. lovely stuff happens naturally when there are groups of people, such that it can just happen to line up with the interests of those who make deceptions and plots. Yeah, the secret programs do study sabotage. They do sabotage communities (including academics), they do study psychology from an ecological standpoint (remember earlier when we found out "Industrial and Organizational Psychology" is so thick with spies to seem like a field that grooms academics for learning how to sabotage and manipulate groups). They study how to make sociopaths (SynAnon Church, Kaczynski, etc). But people sometimes sabotage things on their own. Their own communities, cultures, studies, philosophies etc. without needing outside intervention. It happens by way of misunderstandings and abusive nature. If it wasn't a natural emergent behavior, the job of forcing it to happen would be much harder. Unfortunately it is. It seems to have enabled plenty of sabotage by rulers in the past too, throughout all of history as rulers took advantage of the upper hand to deceive others. The natural emergent shittiness of people has always been there to help with that, long before the invention of modern secret programs.

emergence is unpredictable, not uncontrollable. we can imagine a hypothetical three letter agency called the Communism Control Program, whose mission it is to "control" communism. it's just a dumb monitor, because that's all it has to be. it monitors the rate of communisms emerging, and whether that rate falls within some goldilocks interval. our ccp doesn't try to predict or force anything to happen. it doesn't need to. it also only has two outputs: 'boot' and 'fund'. whenever our ccp detects there's too much communism, it starts putting the boot down on human faces--randomly--until the value comes back into the goldilocks interval. if there's not enough communism, the ccp funds some podcasts or movements--also randomly--until the value comes back up. the more off the value gets, the harder it boots or funds. that's it.

by holding the value in this goldilocks interval, the larger system the ccp exists within, Capital, receives continuous immunization against new evolutions of threats to its stability from communism. the ccp in turn receives feedback from capital about how its handling of communism is affecting system stability and move the goldilocks interval for communism accordingly. we ensure that communism neither goes critical nor goes away. even though this ccp itself is basically a more complex thermostat with only very rudimentary intelligence, by "controlling" communism in this way, it nonetheless works to ensure system stability is never seriously threatened by communism, all while appearing to a rational outside actor looking at any set of events as if it's randomly funding and oppressing stuff.

in the real world, of course, gradually since the late 40s, we've grown a rich and complex ecosystem of thermostats filling different control niches at every conceivable scale, each adapted to control a particular threat, all coordinated around the organizing principle of maximum profit.

Zodium has issued a correction as of 09:31 on Apr 29, 2021

# ¿ Apr 29, 2021 08:59

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

SurgicalOntologist posted:

I don't know if I've been reading too much of this thread but I'm paranoid about an encounter I just had.
Context: I work at an early stage startup in sports analytics in Europe, we analyze video from sports matches. Not quite stealth mode but pretty much zero public profile.

We get contacted by a guy interested in doing a project with us... let me just put it in bullets

Responded to a (closed) student internship ad even though he's not a student.

Previously worked in cybersecurity, now interested in computer vision and looking for a way to get started.

Willing to work for free part-time.

He's Israeli, been in our city for 2 years.

Spent many years in cybersecurity for Israeli Intelligence Unit 8200, working on reverse engineering. Then worked for what looks like the biggest IT contractor for the IDF.

According to his CV, 2 years in an unnamed startup. During this time he gave 2 talks at security conferences, neither say an affiliation but found some slides where his bio slide says "Offensive Background. PhD candidate, mathematics. Algorithmic research for infosec".

Spent the 2 last years in this city as an independent consultant, reverse engineering in Android.

Answered my questions very briefly and like he was confused by all of them. Like "So you went part-time to start exploring computer vision, are you doing some hobby project, doing tutorials, coursework...what's your approach?" ... "uhh, yeah... some tutorials." Could barely tell me the name of a library he had tried using.

So, this is an op, right? Any suggestions for interacting with him or should I just disengage?

Yes, here I am bringing work-related cybersecurity issues to the Epstein thread. What have I come to?

first off: lmfao :captainpop:

second: either he's really a spy and acting on your correct guess will just get you owned insanely hard by him, or he's not a spy and you'll get owned insanely hard by yourself. its the bad, lose-lose kind of paranoia.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2021 09:03

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Jose posted:

Suck his dick

# ¿ Apr 29, 2021 10:45

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

nut posted:

Not expecting much, but I got a copy of that Bitten book about the origins of weaponized Lyme's Disease. I just finished a pretty non-thread-relevant book on infamous neuroscience Patient H.M. that I was really impressed with so i will ride this conspiratorial pop sci writer train until it disappoints me yet again

what's the h.m. book

# ¿ Apr 29, 2021 19:40

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

LIVE AMMO COSPLAY posted:

I love the 90s

# ¿ Apr 30, 2021 12:06

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

# ¿ May 3, 2021 09:00

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

this naked capitalism webinar got posted in another thread and while it's not really about that, there were parts of it hinting at both the scale and granularity of control the system affords Capital I liked.

Michael Hudson posted:

We had one meeting with the federal reserve at a later point and they said: Mr. Hudson, according to your analysis, Britain can�t pay any additional loans? And I said: that�s pretty obvious, I think that the pound is going to be devalued. They said: but we�re always going to lend Britain the money to pay, aren�t we? And I said: that�s right, if the federal reserve and the US government lends Britain the money to pay the interest to keep itself, then they can do it. And the fed guy said: then we can lend the Latin American governments if they�re friendly governments.

In other words: we will lend the dictators and the client oligarchies money to pay, but if they were to vote for somebody we don�t like, then we�ll call in all the loans, strangle the economy, block them from importing, devalue the currency, create a crisis, to say: that�s what you get for not voting for our guys.

...

Then I developed a whole balance of payments accounting format at Chase. I went to Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm. Before they were closed down for fraud, they were a major accounting firm. I said I want to do my analysis for the whole US of its balance of payments. I worked for a whole year putting the US balance of payments together. That�s when I found the entire deficit was all military.

So, they had their art department drop all the charts. One day my boss came into my office and said: we just got a phone call from Robert McNamara, and they had the defense department, the leader of the Vietnam war, the hawk. He was an idiot savant, very brilliant but didn�t know what to be brilliant about, and there was a tunnel vision, the power mad Irishman who went on to lead the world bank and corrupt it. Anyway, he said that Arthur Andersen would never get another government contract if they didn�t fire me and prevent this criticism of the analysis of the balance of payments from coming out.

So, I took it to New York University, where I got my PhD. I took it to the business school, and they immediately published it as a triple issue of the bullet and then that became a major to do at that point. That was in 1968-69 and it was obvious at that time that America was soon going to go off gold, which it did.

After that I became fairly well known because I had forecast it and I did explain how once countries go off gold, America went off gold.

Other foreign central banks said: what are we going to call our reserves in? The American government doesn�t want us to buy gold, the only thing we can buy is other government securities and the only government securities around are American treasury securities, because nobody else is running as big a deficit to push all of these IOUs into the world market.

it's a glimpse of both how debt and funding exercises multi-scale control, from the topology of geopolitics all the way down to the level of the individual human beings comprising it, to maintain system stability. check for threats to stability, fund/boot, repeat. and not to humanize mcnamara too much, but for some reason it reminded me of how he and people close to him reported being shocked that their families called them war criminals and thought they were deranged during the vietnam war. for all their individual intelligence they were just following the numbers produced by a basically "dumb" system, and that led them to behave inhumanly.

even if a particular control ultimately fails, it feathers the fall, helps the system discover vulnerabilities early and buys time to maintain stability in other ways.

# ¿ May 3, 2021 21:42

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

I confess that I used to be internet spaceship buddies with vilerat in eve. but it's not like that, we just did normal stuff. just hanging out with my online buddy who works for the american state department, teaching me neat stuff for our fake internet spy agency. like how to identify networks and control information. all while we work together on our fun hobby: a conspiracy grown out of that spy agency to replace beloved leader sesfan with our own intel people and seize power. wow, cool game!

# ¿ May 5, 2021 12:34

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Riot Bimbo posted:

Look, all I'm saying is that Frank Herbert was right

# ¿ May 6, 2021 08:35

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

LIVE AMMO COSPLAY posted:

Almost like there is a shadowy group that actively spreads disinfo about events like these, maybe even with government backing...

otoh, you don't need a hyper competent organization that can plan out 9/11 so far in advance a particular movie released in 1996 or old usenet posts can contain disinformation about it, when simply watching movies or whatever and acting on those sources, if and when that affords desirable outcomes, will automatically render the original source indistinguishable from disinfo to any later observer.

# ¿ May 10, 2021 23:19

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Riot Bimbo posted:

Acting is a profession that atbits highest level is entirely about the artificial cultivation of an image and identity that doesnt remotely map onto real life and like if you worship a public persona you ultimately worship a hollow and false God lol

The Atomic Man-Boy posted:

A common pattern you see in right-wing conspiracy theories is that they get close to the actual terrible things our elites do, but miss the conspiracy entirely because right-wingers are incapable of thinking materially and are driven by racism and phobias. Bill Gates isn�t a billionaire seeking to become a vaccine landlord at the expense of millions of third-world lives, he�s putting microchips in them. 5g isn�t the next stage in surveillance capitalism, it causes viruses. Barrack Obama�s parents weren�t employees of CIA cutouts active in areas the agency was committing genocide, he was the spawn of an African man and a white woman, and thus ineligible to be president. The net result is that reasonable people tune out information about these topics, as most peddlers of these conspiracies are some matter of idiot or bigot. This pattern is so constant that it�s hard not to see it as a tactic elites throw out as a red-herring to cover their tracks. Just watch the Qanon documentary to see an example of it in action.

come visit the cybernetics thread, we have beer and wiener and methods for modeling control of human behavior

# ¿ May 11, 2021 09:33

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

nut posted:

do u guys have beer's poems?

not yet!

# ¿ May 12, 2021 09:25

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Fried Watermelon posted:

Surely people must be getting some use out of these aside from navel gazing? Why else would there be such a concentrated effort to demonize them? Government only recently deciding that people can't protect themselves from "navel gazing"?

quote:

If the opposing force can be made less adaptive, more predictable, more consistent then it will be easier to contain or constrain their activity. Consequently, it may be important to mitigate the adaptivity of the opposing force in order to minimize the need for both adaptability and high performance. Thus, we turn the question on its head and ask, �How can we inhibit adaptation?�

# ¿ May 12, 2021 19:13

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Mola Yam posted:

lol didn't bezos briefly try to roll out the "lone genius in his garage" mythos a few years back

quote:

Jeff spent summers working at his maternal grandfather's ranch in Cotulla, Texas, fixing windmills, castrating cattle, laying pipes, and repairing pumps. Lawrence Preston "Pop" Gise had held jobs that a young boy couldn't help but find cool. Gise worked on space technology and missile defense systems at Darpa in the late 1950s; in 1964, Congress appointed him manager of the Atomic Energy Commission's Albuquerque operations office, where he supervised 26,000 employees in the AEC's western region, including the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore laboratories. He retired to his southwest Texas spread in 1968, and he doted on Jeff from the time his grandson was an infant. "Mr. Gise was a towering figure in Jeff's life," says Weinstein.

His grandfather sparked and indulged Jeff's fascination with educational games and toys, assisting him with the Heathkits and the other paraphernalia he constantly hauled home to the family garage. (Picture the scattered components of a robot; an open umbrella spine clad in aluminum foil for a solar cooking experiment; an ancient Hoover vacuum cleaner being transformed into a primitive hovercraft.)

Jackie Bezos's challenge as a parent was to stay a step ahead of, or at least next to, her prodigy. "I think single-handedly we kept many Radio Shacks in business," she jokes. During his late grade school years, Jeff became fixated on a device called an Infinity Cube, which uses a set of motorized mirrors to allow one to stare into "infinity." But at $20 it was too expensive to buy, she told him. Jeff figured out that the pieces of the cube could be bought cheaply, so he did - and built it himself. "The way the world is, you know, someone could tell you to press the Button," he said at the time. "You have to be able to think ... for yourself."

The story of Bezos and the Infinity Cube is documented in Turning on Bright Minds: A Parent Looks at Gifted Education in Texas. Written by Julie Ray and published locally in the Houston area in 1977 - and, incidentally, not available via Amazon.com - the book follows 12-year-old Jeff (renamed Tim) through a typical day in the Vanguard program at Houston's River Oaks Elementary School, a magnet school that was part of a voluntary integration effort in the city's public school system. Jeff endured a 40-mile round-trip commute each day to attend. The author describes him as "friendly but serious," even "courtly," and possessed of "general intellectual excellence," though, according to teachers, "not particularly gifted in leadership."

(Wired, 1999)

# ¿ May 21, 2021 13:23

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

drat that book ain't easy to find

# ¿ May 21, 2021 13:36

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

drake no: mind control drugs
drake yes: mind control theory

# ¿ May 21, 2021 14:11

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Reality Protester posted:

https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller/status/1395887790412423172

lol

lmao

# ¿ May 22, 2021 09:15

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

500excf type r posted:

Bold to presume that Spacey wasn't already in charge and that Usual Suspects wasn't him bragging about it publicly

# ¿ May 24, 2021 13:28

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Danish Military Intelligence allowed the US to spy on Angela Merkel, French, Norwegian and Swedish politicians through Danish internet cables (for google translating or w/e)

don't have an english source on this yet since it just dropped, but a consortium of nordic journalists discovered that danish military intelligence has been letting the NSA spy on other EU states using danish infrastructure. my country is an nsa asset. lol. lmao. lm fao.

# ¿ May 30, 2021 18:42

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Ace of Baes posted:

the limited hangout narratives and exposures, like bill Clinton's neighbors Netflix doc, are designed to be ran alongside the q/re disinfo to create two parallel narratives along partisan lines while also creating enough signifiers to ensure anyone trying to create an actual account of even the basics will be dismissed by either kind of partisan

For example, obviously there are celebrities involved with the international pedophile cabal, but the right wing focuses super heavily with a bunch of outlandish claims about specific celebs, this is part of the dershowitz/cernovich/falun gong/8chan etc right-wing/fed disinfo campaign, and as a result trying to talk to any lib about celebrity or music industry or Hollywood connections beyond maybe obvious ones like Weinstein will get you dismissed as a q person

# ¿ Jun 13, 2021 06:05

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:45

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

nut posted:

lol sorry I was more just referring to them coming into it by any means, not having to buy the "truck drop" story. As I mentioned before, I am too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion on tech, but I don't have meaningful faith in pretty much any tech that has to be constructed via governmental and corporate channels. Like AoB just said, throughout society, institutions of power have the critical hand in constructing both a good guy and bad guy narrative that act like magnets to suck up all the opinions and people around them. Seemingly little can exist let alone succeed outside of it.

reminds me of this tweet that I think encompasses even more than intended (the usual kantbot and friends warnings about them being crazy [if u follow this thread u will see logo has argued gamergate was an op] etc etc)
https://twitter.com/Logo_Daedalus/status/1389668025310326785?s=20

https://twitter.com/Logo_Daedalus/status/1389668435773243393

:shepface:

# ¿ Jun 13, 2021 16:27

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Epstein] Hello madda / Hello fadda / Gotta syndrome / Called Havana!

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