A movie I'm really psyched to rewatch soon is one of my favorites, Minority Report (despite my dislike of Tom Cruise), to see both the things I thought when I saw it as 'this is tech that basically already exists' (personally tailored ads) to tech we have now that's probably worse than that in terms of #surveillance and
This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17108 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXi…
Mary Edith Barnes became aware of the work of the Glaswegian psychiatrist and countercultural figure, Dr RD (Ronnie) Laing,
author of "The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness "(1960).
This led her to Kingsley Hall, a radical therapeutic community in Bow in East London.
Established in 1965 and headed up by Laing, it was an unconventional centre where mental-health professionals and those experiencing mental illness lived together. Drug-taking …
Saudi Arabia has executed almost 600 people over the past decade for drug-related offences,
-- three-quarters of whom were foreign nationals from countries including Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria and Egypt.
After a temporary moratorium on drug-related capital punishments between 2021 and 2022, the executions jumped to record levels, with 122 in 2024 and 118 so far this year up until the end of last month.
With little international scrutiny of what Amnesty International de…
If you’re asking if there are people like me, people who smoke pot, want multiple partner relationships, believe in communal living, want the world to be in harmony, take psychedelics, listen to underground music (Psytrance), are against war, and also consider themselves anarchists, the answer is yes. I exist, and I’m definitely not alone in this.
#Hippie
Axiomatizing Rumsfeld Ignorance
Jie Fan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17776 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17776
This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03225 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@a…
Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB
The pace and scale of Afghans returning from Iran are overwhelming already fragile support systems, a senior U.N. official warned Tuesday,
with tens of thousands of people crossing the border daily exhausted and traumatized, relying on humanitarian aid.
So far this year, more than 1.4 million people have returned or been forced to return to Afghanistan, including over 1 million from Iran.
Iran and Pakistan in 2023 launched separate campaigns to expel foreigners they said we…
Introducing Quantum Computing to High-School Curricula: A Global Perspective
Mar\'ia Gragera Garc\'es, Luis G\'omez Orzechowski, Juan Francisco Rodr\'iguez Hern\'andez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14809