I can never remember what the META algos are blocking to and from Canada these days, so I’m sharing this to further on to my friends over there in Evil Suxerburgville…
Always on. Must reply. Ooops.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/01/im-not-ignoring-your-message-im-overwhelmed-by-the-tyranny-of-being-reachable
Found somewhere off of social media (with no clear attribution!) —
Pre-emptive posting againt the probablity that a certain META platform will not allow this “news”-derived story from the Guardian UK.
“What” we see may be heavily culturally-driven. What do you see when you look at the image?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/05/optical-illusions-see-world-perception
… here’s a link that will help you see both:
https://imgur.com/a/Mp2MphF
… now you will probably see both every time you look.
Call it for what it is. No need to make associations to the Nazi regime, however tempting the assonance that “alligator” might suggest.
“Gulag” is just fine and probably closer to the reality of a place whose environment is threatening and discourages escape.
So once again, I fall victim to the greed of META — posted a link to a story about the Canadian archives and the tremendous difficulties they are facing presently, only to have be blocked. There was some weirdness associated with the blocking — it appeared long enough for a friend to comment, I saw her comments and was about to respond when it. Just. Disappeared. Along with some 7 hours of other posts — suggesting that my account might have been blocked. With META, who knows?
But the Internet, like water, refuses to be tamed by the likes of Suckerberg. SO without further ado, here’s a link to the article from one of my recent reading discoveries, The Walrus:
~~~
“Canada’s Archives Are in Trouble—and So Is Its History”
~~
So, I really hope that my friends who were able to see it, however briefly, will chime in on the matter from this link.
I’m counting on you, Lisa and Luciana!
Here’s two screenshots:
… and shortly after…
“Language is a virus” sang Laurie Anderson some years ago, riffing on William S. Burroughs’s “The Ticket That Exploded” and one wonders. How does it infect us and how do we spread it?
Does it lie dormant in our very DNA and only awaits the right circumstances to trigger, just waiting to explode into out consciousness? What would be its trigger(s)?
And then there’s the act of reading a book. Reading is staring at the hieroglyphics imprinted upon sheets of dead tree byproducts and hallucinating wildly — for hours on end! I thought this graphic below summed things up quite nicely:
[Click to see the article where I found this]
Now consider how we recruit/radicalize/train others to be able to self-hallucinate… and not just the “text”-based but things like music scores and EVERYTHING we see with our eyes…
Most of this has been triggered off of the reports of the hallucinating chatbots — given that they are based on LLMs or image databases, how does this happen?
And a happy end of June Thursday to you all!
[More on reading and hallucination: Two sources for the same paper]
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810017300314
“Uncharted features and dynamics of reading: Voices, characters, and crossing of experiences”
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5361686/
“Uncharted features and dynamics of reading: Voices, characters, and crossing of experiences”
A DISPERSAL ORDER has been issued by the Incident Commander on Alameda between Aliso and 2nd St. An UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY has been declared. Leave the area.
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5,129 Views
Sharing this here so others can find the news… FaceBook doesn’t like it when I link news stories from here in Montréal — so here from the Guardian’s reporting:
Trump suggests he’s not prepared to invoke Insurrection Act, saying he doesn’t think events in California are an ‘insurrection’
Asked if he’s prepared to invoke the Insurrection Act, Donald Trump told reporters in New Jersey: “It depends on whether or not there’s an insurrection.”
Asked if he thinks there is one, Trump replied: “No, no, but we have violent people and we’re not going to let them get away with it.”
In response to another journalist’s question, Trump said: “I think you’re going to see some very strong law and order.”
Tonight in Los Angeles — sharing this link so my friends can see this from outside of Canada, where I cannot post news stories.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/07/immigration-raids-los-angeles
The Trump administration will deploy the national guard to immigration protests in Los Angeles, border czar Tom Homan said on Saturday, as an immigration crackdown in the area erupted into mass protests with police in riot gear deploying teargas at bystanders.
“We’re already mobilizing. We’re gonna bring national guard in tonight and we’re gonna continue doing our job. This is about enforcing the law,” Homan said in an interview with Fox News.
#ViveLaInsurrectionDeLosAngeles #TheWholeWorldIsWatching
Countries A, B, C, (and others) have been in conflict for years now.
Country B invaded and seized land of Country K, who now been conducting a campaign of major initiatives for several years now. Country K carries out a highly asymmetrical attack against Country B that takes out over a third (about 2/5, actually) of B’s nuclear-capable air force, which had been used against K for some time. Country A and Country C have been duking it out with trade and not hardware, but the noises are being made constantly. Country A shares a close working relationship with Country B and has been repeatedly accused of helping B fight against K.
The press was gob-smacked, tho’ some of the lesser lights of the media pointed out that the idea has been around for several years.
The asymmetry of it all is what people need to be paying more attention to, and while a strategic issue has been raised (as it should be), we need to be focusing on other scenarios that benefit from such asymmetries.
Consider:
The Country C’s current regime has been slashing funding for agencies responsible for data and information gathering and analysis, counter-cyberwarfare, and meteorological data gathering and analysis and forecasting. So they miss the chatter taking place of an assault that takes advantage of the chaos of a government that is having issues passing budgets, cutting vital defensive services including the prediction and surveillance of their well-known summer storms. Given the increasing average severity of these storms, it is highly likely that any storm in the next season will be more than usually catastrophic.
But then if you no longer support the tracking and surveillance programs that the rest of the world is using, then you won’t know. But your enemies will and if they’ve been following along the past 15 years or so, they very well may have laid preparations. But you no longer have the intelligence-gathering capacity that you used to have because you’ve alienated all your previous allies.
Country K’s brilliant attack was some 18 months in the making…
Here’s a “Look! A squirrel!” moment to wash that previous away —
Unprocessed phone capture, near the Quartier des Spectacles, on a recent sojourn.
… and it would seem that the US (almost said “we”, but I hardly feel that way anymore) is headed for the wrong side of history. How that course could be changed is subject to debate, but the following offers some ideas.
“This is a summary of what citizens can do to dislodge an oppressive dictator. It focuses entirely on nonviolent action, because the state almost always has overwhelming superiority when it comes to the use of force. Violent opposition most often leads to prolonged stalemate or prolonged civil war.”
~~ from the text of the link below:
How to Get Rid of a Dictator
https://citizenshandbook.org/get_rid_of_a_dictator.html
I’m getting really tired of Suckerburg’s tiff with Canadian news sources… while I didn’t particularly notice while in Europe, now that I am here, it is a constant annoyance. I have taken to obfuscating the URLs, but this has meant that images, which are always more potent, were also unable to be displayed. So it looks like the blog will be getting a workout… today’s treat follows.
Take some time to drift through the images of Palestine before the nakkba of 1948. It reminds me of the stories of an earlier time further to the west, of Alfonso el Sabio.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2025/5/15/palestine-before-the-nakba-in-100-photos
Posting this here because of FailBook’s embargo on news item posts in to Canada —
[SCREEN CAPTURED for POSTERITY]
Guess I REALLY won’t be crossing over any time soon…
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/10/ice-speech-censorship-007886
He’s back and pissed as heck!
Was delighted to stumble across this in my RSS feed today — good to know there’s another super-hero out there defending the good against EEEevil.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/captain-canuck-trump-1.7505647
Red, white, and maple-leafed. #ElbowsUp eh?
We have met the enemy… it isn’t AI we need to fear.
https://theconversation.com/ai-isnt-what-we-should-be-worried-about-its-the-humans-controlling-it-251119
Facebook has some rules about sharing what it deems to be news sources, when posting from Canada.
In the interest of sharing information widely concerning the clampdown being experienced in the US by the current regime, I am sharing an URL from The Guardian UK concerning the recent denial of entry of a French researcher in to the US so that my friends on FB can access it freely…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-french-scientist-detained
.. et voilá!
