sliimeforlife

[sliimeforlife]

Not just Apple: Microsoft has been quietly lobbying to kill Right to Repair bills

Apple pioneered the use of dirty tricks and lobbying to kill Right to Repair legislation, but they’re not the only tech player who’s putting lobbying muscle into ensuring that you can’t decide who fixes your stuff (and when it is “unfixable” and must be sent to the landfill).

Rep. Jeff Morris told iFixit Repair Radio that national Right to Repair legislation was killed by Microsoft, in a piece of horse trading that saw Microsoft backing funding for STEM education in exchange for Right to Repair (and unrelated privacy rules) dying.

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/15/ssdd.html

[sliimeforlife]

[sliimeforlife]

[sliimeforlife]

“Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.”

— Sharon Olds, from “September 2001: New York City,” in Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)

[sliimeforlife]

[sliimeforlife]

[sliimeforlife]

“Don’t compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don’t drown in a sea of ‘what if’s’. Don’t clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes, where you made different decisions. (…) To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be (…) enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.”

— Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

[sliimeforlife]

— Kaspar, let’s pretend that this is a village. In this village live people who tell only the truth. Here is another village. The people here only tell lies. Two paths run from these villages to where you are standing and you are at the crossroads. A man comes along, and you want to know which village he comes from, the village of the truthtellers or the village of the liars. Now, in order to solve this problem, to solve it logically, you have one question, and only one. What is the question? … I admit, the question is thorny. If you ask the man whether he comes from the village of truth, and he does, then he will say, truthfully, yes. But if he comes from the village of lies, he will lie, and also answer yes! Yet, there exists one question, and only one, which will solve the problem. … If you can’t think of the question, then I shall tell you. Well, here is the question: if you came from the other village, would you answer ‘no’ if I were to ask you whether you came from the liars’ village? By means of a double negative the liar is forced to tell the truth. This construction forces him to reveal his identity, you see. That’s what I call logic via argument to the truth!

— Well, I know another question.

— You do? There is no other question, by the laws of logic.

— There isn’t? But I do know another question.

— Let us hear it, then!

— I should ask the man whether he was a tree-frog. The man from the truth village would say: No, I’m not a tree-frog, because he tells the truth. The man from the liars’ village would say: Yes, I’m a tree-frog, because he would tell a lie. So I know where he comes from.

— No, that’s not a proper question. That won’t do, I can’t accept it as a question. That’s no logic; logic is deduction, not description. What you’ve done is describe something, not deduce it.

(The Maid: But I understood his question.)

Understanding is secondary; the reasoning is the thing. In Logic and Mathematics we do not understand things, we reason and deduce! I cannot accept that question.

— From The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (dir. Werner Herzog, 1974)

[sliimeforlife]

HELL ON EARTH ∞ PALE MASTER

ON SALE TOMORROW

www.palemaster.bandcamp.com

[sliimeforlife]

“Forest shade, lake shade, poplar shade, highway shade, backyard shade, café shade, down-behind-the-high-school shade, cow shade, carport shade, blowing shade, dappled shade, shade darkened by rain above, shade under ships, shade along banks of snow, shade beneatht the one tree in a bright place, shade by the ice cream truck, shade in the new-car sales room, shade in halls of the palace as all the electric lights turn on, shade in a stairwell, shade in tea barrels, shade in books, shade of clouds running over a distant landscape, shade on bales in the barn, shade in the pantry, shade in the icehouse (the smell of shade), shade under runner blades, shade along branches, shade at night (a difficult research), shade on rungs of a ladder, shade on pats of butter sculpted to look like scallop shells, shade to holler from, shad in the chill of bamboo, shade at the core of an apple, confessional shade, shade of hair salons, shade in a joke, shade in the town hall, shade descending from legendary ancient hills, shade under the jaws of a dog with a bird in its mouth trotting along to the master’s voice, shade at the back of the choir, shade in pleats, shade clinging to arrows in the quiver, shade in scars.”

— Anne Carson, ‘Each Day Unexpected Salvation (John Cage)’, in Penguin Modern Poets 1: If I’m Scared We Can’t Win: Emily Berry / Anne Carson / Sophie Collins (London: Penguin, 2016), p. 74.

[sliimeforlife]

[sliimeforlife]

“I don’t know why I write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath. I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.”

—

Edouard Levé, from “Autoportrait”

(via endophoras)

[sliimeforlife]

Cioran on Nietzsche

“Well, I realised that he wasn’t a philosopher, but was more: a temperament. So, I read him now and then, but never systematically. But I really don’t read him anymore. I consider his letters his most authentic work, because in them he’s truthful, while in his other work he’s a prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he’s just a poor fellow, that he’s ill, exactly the opposite of everything he claimed. […] His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he’s lamentable, it’s very touching, like a character out of Chekhov.

I was attached to him in my youth, but not later on. He’s a great writer, though, a great stylist.”

[sliimeforlife]

Various Artists | Mono No Aware

[sliimeforlife]

“Shock and Awe” The Beginning of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq (CNN Live Coverage)

This is a recording of CNN’s coverage of the “Shock and Awe” campaign conducted at that time. Most tapes of this are only about ten minutes long. This is just over two hours. It covers from 8:19 PM to around 10:30 PM (Baghdad local time). The “Shock and Awe” campaign starts at 9:00 PM or about 40:30 . This video includes post-bombing statements from Secretary of the State Donald Rumsfeld, and Air Force General, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers among others. 1:17:22

It has been 15 years to the day. Since then, America lost over 4,000 soldiers in Iraq.

More importantly, however, Iraq lost hundreds of thousands of civilians over the ensuing decade. So many innocent people died that we literally cannot count it, because, in the words of General Thomas Franks, “We Don’t Do Body Counts.”

That said, estimates range from 460,000 to 2.4 million.

There were no weapons of mass destruction, that was a lie. The only WMDs Saddam had were the ones the US gave him.

Saddam was not working with al-Qaeda. That was also a lie. Saddam working with al-Qaeda would have been like Augusto Pinochet secretly backing the Sandinistas. There was no presence, period, of al-Qaeda or any affiliated group in Iraq before the US invasion of the country.

Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. This too was a lie, believed at the time because Americans were and are too fucking stupid to tell Arabs apart.

The Iraqis did not welcome the US as liberators. That this was in any way considered a possibility was not just a lie, it was probably a more damning indictment of the complete idiocy of the average American than the duplicity of American politicians.

The war did not secure any of our freedoms as well. As tens of thousands of full grown American adults voluntarily signed up to brutalize brown people on the other side of the world despite a complete lack of evidence that they had done anything to harm us, we at home were subject to an opaque, ever expanding security apparatus that included secret courts, secret no-fly lists, warrantless wiretaps, and effectively unrestricted mass surveillance. This structure has become effectively normalized, as there are now Americans reaching adulthood who have never experienced a world without it.

The US accomplished nothing more or less than the complete destruction of Iraqi society on a level not seen since the Mongols sacked Baghdad, leaving behind a corrupt and ineffectual government that could not repel the advances of the Islamic State, a terror group that the US had itself effectively created, even when Iraqi troops outnumbered the Salafists ten to one during engagements.

Luckily, the US learned its lesson, and never attempted to destabilize a secular Arab republic again.

[sliimeforlife]