"Cloud’s depiction of the mob harkens back to previous Kurosawa films such as Cure, which centered on violence committed by ordinary people under the influence of hypnosis. Whereas Cure derived potent horror from the dead-eyed, puppet-like movements of its slashers, Cloud repurposes the same devices for bleak comedy. There is something undeniably hilarious about a group of murderers who handle shotguns like gardening tools and affect the bored, attention-seeking nihilism of a 4chan board. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, the mob bickers over whether one of its members should be allowed to keep a mask on to preserve his anonymity as Yoshii sits bound and gagged in a nearby chair."

Cloud is a Techno-Thriller for the Age of Online Hustle Culture

The internet has robbed the world of much of its mystery and replaced it with the jaded cynicism of online grifters. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Clou...

#Japan #Movies #Cinema #Film #TechnoThriller #Kurosawa

RT @KenRoth In a recording published by Channel 12, Israel’s former military intel chief is heard saying that "50 Palestinians should die" for every Israeli victim of Oct 7. "There's no choice, they need a Nakba every now and then to feel the consequences," he says. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-16/ty-article/.premium/former-idf-general-calls-palestinian-death-toll-in-gaza-necessary-in-recording/00000198-b188-d5b5-a1dc-bfae17830000

"Lawyers and activists are building on this historical precedent by pushing for domestic jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute allegations of atrocities by Israel’s military in Gaza, the fruits of which have already led to tangible outcomes across several countries. Last month, Belgian authorities detained and questioned two Israeli soldiers on leave at a music festival in response to a legal complaint filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation and the Global Legal Action Network. The episode may have marked the first time national authorities detained Israeli soldiers on suspicion of crimes committed in Gaza, but these “traveling soldiers,” some of them dual nationals, have faced other consequences. In January, the Israeli foreign minister helped Yuval Vagdani, as a vacationing soldier, escape from Brazil after learning that a federal judge there had opened a war crimes investigation stemming from another Hind Rajab Foundation legal filing. (Vagdani has denied the allegations in the filing.) In addition to filing a complaint with the ICC against more than 1,000 members of Israel’s military, the Hind Rajab Foundation has filed complaints and arrest requests with the national authorities of at least 23 countries. In response to these activities and others, the Israeli government issued advisories for soldiers traveling to certain jurisdictions with legal resources and other advice. “They’re spooked,” said Romm. “National legal systems are coming online to possibly arrest and incarcerate these Israeli soldiers for what they’re doing to the Palestinians for the first time in history.” Though no complaint has resulted in a prosecution yet, these cases will likely continue and may even pick up speed."

The Intercept

An Unexpected Path to Hold War Criminals Accountable

It’s at the national courts, not the ICC or ICJ, where Palestinians have the best chance to see justice.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #WarCrimes #Genocide #ICC #ICJ #InternationalLaw #HumanRights

"The military is not just courting Silicon Valley tech companies. In the age of President Trump, it has successfully recruited them. Over the past two years, Silicon Valley’s leaders and investors — many of whom had once forsworn involvement in weapons and war — have plunged headfirst into the military industrial complex. Meta, Google and OpenAI, which once had language in their corporate policies banning the use of artificial intelligence in weapons, have removed such wording. OpenAI is creating anti-drone technology, while Meta is making virtual reality glasses to train soldiers for battle. At the same time, weapons and defense start-ups are taking off. Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, said in 2023 that it would invest $500 million in defense technology and other companies that would help America “move forward.” Y Combinator, the start-up incubator known for hatching companies like Airbnb and DoorDash, funded its first defense start-up in August 2024. Venture capital investment in defense-related companies surged 33 percent last year to $31 billion, according to McKinsey. The change is part of a major cultural shift in Silicon Valley. A decade ago, tech companies brandished mottos such as “connecting the world” and “do no evil” and pledged that their technology would not be used for military purposes. Working with the U.S. government was so unpopular that software and cloud computing contracts with the Department of Defense fueled tech employee protests. Now “the tides have turned,” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer and one of the new lieutenant colonels in Detachment 201, said at a tech conference in San Francisco in June. “There’s a much stronger patriotic underpinning than I think people give Silicon Valley credit for.” He is set to serve some reserve duty days with the Army each year."

The Militarization of Silicon Valley

In a major shift, Google, OpenAI, Meta and venture capitalists — many of whom had once forsworn involvement in war — have embraced the military...

#USA #Trump #Pentagon #DoD #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #BigTech #SiliconValley

"[I]ronically, Trump’s attacks on BRICS countries have only strengthened BRICS, and encouraged more and more countries to join the Global South-led organization. Trump has blatantly meddled in the internal affairs of Brazil, the “B” in BRICS. Trump is a close ally of Brazil’s far-right former leader, Jair Bolsonaro. To hurt its current left-wing president, Lula da Silva, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on the South American nation. This has resulted in Brazil deepening its already close ties with China. And President Lula is publicly calling for BRICS countries to create alternatives to the US dollar. Trump’s aggression is clearly backfiring. Another example of this is how the US president has treated India, which is the “I” in BRICS. For years, the US government has pursued a strategy of trying to ally with India against China, as part of an attempt to divide BRICS and isolate Beijing. In recent years, especially under right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India had gradually moved closer to the United States. But in his second term as president, Trump has attacked India, threatening it with 50% tariffs, one of the highest rates in the world. Trump apparently thinks that India has no choice but to go along with whatever the US wants. But the world is increasingly multipolar, and New Delhi does have other options. In response to Trump’s very aggressive tariffs, what did India do? It reached out to China with an olive branch. Now New Delhi and Beijing are improving their relations. So Trump is actually pushing India and China closer together. This is exactly what Washington has been trying to prevent for well over a decade."

Geopolitical Economy Report

Trump's tariffs backfire: India moves closer to China, strengthening BRICS unity - Geopolitical Economy Report

US government wants to ally with India in new cold war against China. Donald Trump tariffs backfired, improving relations, helping BRICS.

#Geopolitics #USA #Trump #Brazil #China #India #Tariffs #TradeWar #Protectionism

"A pro-regime student organizer under the Suharto dictatorship that held power from 1966 to 1998, styling itself as the “New Order,” the bespectacled Fadli now occupies the office of minister of culture and is one of Indonesia’s more polarizing figures. Known for his populist theatrics, far-right nationalism, and Sinophobia, Fadli has long flirted with historical mythmaking. Now, with the launch of his controversial project to “revise” Indonesia’s national history curriculum and state-supported narratives, he is attempting something far more dangerous. It amounts to the rejection of more than twenty-five years of democratic reforms and increased academic freedom, and a return of the Suharto dictatorship’s propaganda machine. The project comes as political analysts, civil society organizations, and activists are raising the alarm about the government’s increasingly repressive actions. Known for his populist theatrics, far-right nationalism, and Sinophobia, Fadli Zon has long flirted with historical mythmaking. Although Fadli has framed the initiative as a corrective effort to decolonize Indonesian historiography and purge it of alleged foreign distortions, it is, in fact, a thinly veiled crusade to rehabilitate the New Order legacy, demonize the Left, and entrench a narrow ethnonationalist and patriarchal vision of Indonesia’s past. In the process, it threatens to undo decades of hard-won efforts by progressive historians, civil society actors, and survivors of state violence to foster a more inclusive and democratic understanding of Indonesian history."

Indonesia’s Rulers Are Whitewashing the Crimes of Suharto

In the 1960s, the Indonesian dictator Suharto was responsible for one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest political massacres. Under the rule of...

#Indonesia #Suharto #Dictatorship

"After 22 months of war, childhood in Gaza hardly exists. There are about 1.1 million children in the territory, and nearly all require mental health or psychosocial support, according to research by the United Nations. Most of them have been out of school for nearly two years. After Israel’s 11-week blockade on food this year, all children younger than 5 are at risk of acute malnutrition, the U.N. said. Israel’s military operation, which began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has killed more than 18,000 Palestinians under the age of 18, according to the Gazan health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. About two-thirds of them did not reach their teenage years. A New York Times investigation last year found that since the start of the war, the Israeli military has significantly loosened safeguards meant to protect civilians, including children. “Normal markers of childhood are gone, replaced by hunger, fear and all-consuming trauma,” said James Elder, a spokesman for UNICEF who has regularly visited Gaza throughout the war. “This war is being waged as if childhood itself has no place in Gaza.” The Israeli military has said that it tries to minimize harm to all civilians, including children, and blamed Hamas militants for hiding among them, sometimes alongside their own families. Soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces have reported seeing children used as lookouts by Palestinian militant groups, which also kidnapped and killed children on Oct. 7, 2023. “Intentional harm to civilians, and especially to children, is strictly prohibited and completely contrary to both international law and the binding orders of the I.D.F.,” the military said in a statement."

The Trauma of Childhood in Gaza

Over the past two years, tens of thousands of children in the territory have been killed, wounded or orphaned. Childhood as they once knew it has c...

#Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #Starvation #HumanRights

"Initially, the AI’s designs seemed outlandish. “The outputs that the thing was giving us were really not comprehensible by people,” Adhikari said. “They were too complicated, and they looked like alien things or AI things. Just nothing that a human being would make, because it had no sense of symmetry, beauty, anything. It was just a mess.” The researchers figured out how to clean up the AI’s outputs to produce interpretable ideas. Even so, the researchers were befuddled by the AI’s design. “If my students had tried to give me this thing, I would have said, ‘No, no, that’s ridiculous,’” Adhikari said. But the design was clearly effective. It took months of effort to understand what the AI was doing(opens a new tab). It turned out that the machine had used a counterintuitive trick to achieve its goals. It added an additional three-kilometer-long ring between the main interferometer and the detector to circulate the light before it exited the interferometer’s arms. Adhikari’s team realized that the AI was probably using some esoteric theoretical principles that Russian physicists had identified decades ago to reduce quantum mechanical noise. No one had ever pursued those ideas experimentally. “It takes a lot to think this far outside of the accepted solution,” Adhikari said. “We really needed the AI.” If the AI’s insights had been available when LIGO was being built, “we would have had something like 10 or 15 percent better LIGO sensitivity all along,” he said. In a world of sub-proton precision, 10 to 15 percent is enormous."

WIRED

AI Is Designing Bizarre New Physics Experiments That Actually Work

Artificial intelligence software is designing novel experimental protocols that improve upon the work of human physicists, although the humans are ...

#AI #Physics #Science

"A Ukrainian intelligence officer says the Americans are being “unbelievably aggressive” in pushing Ukraine to forfeit more land. The Russian interest is clear enough, he says. “They want to maximise the package they will get in return—from sanctions relief, to the return of seized assets, to the re-opening of energy markets.” What, he says, is far less clear is why the Trump administration was pushing so forcefully to promote Russia’s interests. Despite the obvious headwinds, Mr Trump appears committed to his quick-fix peace. The Economist understands a three-way meeting between Mr Trump, Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky could come as early as the end of next week. Before that, on Monday, the Ukrainian leader is scheduled to arrive in Washington for his first visit since his humiliation in February. European leaders will join him in a show of support. But some of the ingredients appear ominously similar to his previous visit. Channelling the logic of Mr Putin, Mr Trump is already preparing to blame Ukraine if his plans blow up, Ukrainians fear. “Make a deal,” he advised Mr Zelensky, via Fox News. “Russia is a very big power. [You] are not.”" https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/08/17/fear-of-a-new-oval-office-fiasco-over-ukraine #Ukraine #Russia #Putin #USA #Trump #War

RT @FreedomofPress It shouldn't need to be said, but with this FCC it apparently does: The FCC has no business and no right to revoke licenses because it disagrees with how a station covers the news.

Fox News

Arizona senate president calls on FCC to revoke state's PBS license over 'viewpoint discrimination'

Arizona senate president Warren Petersen requested the FCC investigate the state's PBS station for alleged bias toward the Democratic candidate in ...

"Hace 10 años, Google enviaba un visitante por cada dos páginas rastreadas. Hace seis meses era uno por cada seis. Hoy envía un visitante por cada 18 páginas. Bastante injusto para los medios de comunicación. La IA rastrea los contenidos y los sintetiza para responder nuestras preguntas sin que pinchemos en la fuente original. Hace seis meses, OpenAI enviaba un visitante por cada 250 páginas digeridas; ahora son 1.500. Anthropic es la peor de todas: un visitante por cada 60.000. Los números nos dicen tres cosas. La primera es que los principales consumidores de noticias son bots y modelos de IA, no personas. La segunda, que las empresas de IA se están llevando la atención, los datos y los ingresos publicitarios de todos los demás. La tercera, menos autoevidente pero quizá la más importante, es que nosotros hacemos las noticias, pero ChatGPT las sintetiza para el lector. La gente confía en la IA para entender el mundo, pero la IA empeora y sus dueños mienten y manipulan gráficos para que parezca al revés."

El País

Las IA están empeorando

Sam Altman anunció que GPT-5 miente y manipula menos que los modelos anteriores, pero sus propias cifras indican que no es verdad

"The 10 largest US stocks by market cap are Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Broadcom, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. Together they account for (all figures from S&P Capital IQ): - 40 per cent of the value of the S&P 500. - 56 per cent of the S&P increase in value since the market bottomed on April 8. - 31 per cent of the growth in revenues for the index over the past 12 months. - 55 per cent of the growth in net income for the index over the past 12 months (despite falling net income over that period at Apple, Tesla and Berkshire). - 69 per cent of the growth in capital expenditure for the index over the past 12 months. It’s not just that these 10 companies are making all the market gains. They are also producing a whopping portion of the growth in corporate America."

Client Challenge

#USA #StockExchange #BigTech #Monopolies #Oligopolies

"A web that you don’t understand is one that’s not user-driven, or driven by user utility. It’s one where people don’t have agency over the technology they depend upon, and where changes aren’t contrived to address a specific user need. At the risk of sounding as conspiratorial as the author of the original Dead Internet Theory, I believe the emergence of this incomprehensibility was borne of deliberate decisions made by people at the very top of Big Tech. Furthermore, I believe these people are profoundly anti-person, and see people as resources to be tapped rather than collaborators within a vast, global digital ecosystem. In many respects, I think this phenomena is down to two things: first, many of the tech products we use were founded by people who were still in the throes of youth, and became billionaires and global tech icons before their brains were even fully developed. They’ve been insulated from people from a young age, never lived a normal life, and they’ve been told — repeatedly — that they are geniuses and visionaries. While I don’t think this explanation excuses any of their behavior, I also think it goes some way into explaining the scarcely-disguised antipathy these people show for their fellow humans. (...) The other factor behind this phenomenon is that many of the people running these companies are former management consultants spawned from hell (read: McKinsey) and then set loose on what amounts to “essential infrastructure” for the digital age. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, is a former McKinsey consultant. Sheryl Sandberg, the former Chief Operating Officer of Facebook was one, too. Management consultants have one job — it’s to recommend strategies to cowardly CEOs that they probably thought of themselves, but are too chicken to put their name behind themselves, that invariably screw over employees, consumers, and the planet."

How The Internet Died

Dissecting a tragedy of the commons

#DeadInternet #Commons #DigitalCommons #OpenWeb #SocialMedia #AISlop #AI

RT @BenjaminNorton So much for the ridiculous propaganda claiming crypto is a "'decentralized' alternative to Wall Street": BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, now holds more than $100 billion in crypto. BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF is the world's largest BTC holder.

Finbold

BlackRock now holds over $100 billion in crypto

BlackRock has crossed a new milestone in its digital asset strategy, with crypto holdings now at $103.98 billion as of August 14, 2025.

"The State Department released its annual reports on human rights around the world on Tuesday, and revealed an administration set on whitewashing the records of some of the world’s worst violators of human rights. The hollowed-out reports on roughly 200 countries and territories omit references to LGBTQ+ discrimination and curtail information on government abuses, including gender-based violence and government corruption. They no longer include sections focused on systemic racial or ethnic discrimination and violence, child abuse, or child sexual exploitation. The congressionally mandated human rights reports, which are used to guide U.S. decisions on diplomacy and aid, have been turned into wholly political documents that target countries with whom the Trump administration has clashed and soft-pedal abuses by the administration’s allies. Israel, and countries like El Salvador, South Sudan, and Eswatini, which have agreed to accept and in some cases imprison U.S. deportees as part of Trump’s growing global gulag, got a soft touch. South Africa, which has led the war crimes case against Israel at The Hague, received a more pointed report."

The Intercept

The Incredible Disappearing Human Rights Reports

The State Department’s new reports whitewash the records of some of the world’s most notorious nations and target Trump’s enemies.

#USA #StateDepartment #ElSalvador #SouthSudan #Israel #HumanRights

"Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding. And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful. One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel. Stephens, like Tan, has lately been speaking publicly about his faith in the context of Silicon Valley. He has hosted a Bible study reflecting on the teachings of René Girard, a French philosopher popular in certain libertarian-leaning tech circles; spoken at his church about the connection between Christianity and innovation; and written, in what seems a slightly contorted interpretation of the gospel, about how basic venture investing principles are an exemplar of divine forgiveness."

Vanity Fair

Christianity Was “Borderline Illegal” in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion

Believers like Garry Tan are flipping the script in the venture capital world, making faith matter just as much as the ability to turn a fortune. S...

#Religion #SiliconValley #Christianism #Christianity #Palantir #Anduril

Very well said. It all STARTED in 1948, that is, about 77 years ago... "The time has come. It is no longer possible to beat around the bush and avoid giving an answer. We can no longer hide, evade, mumble, mollify and obscure. Nor can we hang on to legal sophistry about the "question of intent" or to wait for the ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which may only be handed down once it's too late. It's already too late. That is why the time has come to call the horror by its name – and its full name is genocide, the extermination of a people. There is no other way to describe it. In front of our horrified eyes, Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. It did not begin now; it began in 1948. Now, however, sufficient evidence has accumulated to call the monstrous child in the Gaza Strip by its full name. This is a moment of despair, but it is also liberating. We no longer need to avoid the truth. On Monday, in the basement of a hotel in East Jerusalem, two important Israeli human rights groups announced that the die was cast. B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights stated that they had reached the conclusion that Israel was committing genocide." https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-07-30/ty-article-opinion/.premium/its-not-just-war-its-genocide-and-its-being-done-in-our-name/00000198-5c7c-d843-af99-de7d5dfd0000 #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #HumanRights

"We must call this out for what it is: pro-extinctionism. The biological transhumanism of Thiel and the digital eugenics of Altman, Faggella, Yudkowsky, and the others—all of these views aim to supplant the human species with some kind of successors, which would then proceed (on the most popular view) to plunder Earth’s remaining resources and launch itself into space to conquer the universe. This is overtly pro-extinctionist, and given that some of the most powerful people in one of the most powerful centers of society—Silicon Valley—accept it, we must conclude that pro-extinctionism is not a fringe ideology, but closer to the mainstream. Even worse, these pro-extinctionists promote their ideology by claiming that, in fact, they oppose human extinction. This relies on two linguistic tricks: first, many define “humanity” in an idiosyncratic way that diverges from the definition that most of us intuitively accept. We tend to equate humanity with Homo sapiens, our species, whereas these people define “humanity” as including whatever posthuman descendants we might have. Hence, as I’ve highlighted elsewhere, our species could die out next year without “human extinction” having happened—so long as we’re replaced by posthumans, then “humanity” will live on. When they talk about avoiding “human extinction,” they aren’t talking about the extinction of our species. To the contrary, our extinction wouldn’t matter one bit once posthumanity arrives."

Tech Policy Press

Digital Eugenics and the Extinction of Humanity | TechPolicy.Press

If we are to combat the AI industry’s push to build digital gods, we have to understand the ideology of the antihumanist project, writes Dr. Émi...

#Transhumanism #DigitalEugenics #HumanExtinction #ProExtinctionism

"What happens when you crush the spending power of the people and you give lots of money to big business? Big business collects this money — of course, it’s free money; why wouldn’t they take it? But they look outside the window of their skyscraper in Paris or Frankfurt, and all they see are impecunious masses. They’re not going to invest, because the many out there can’t afford to buy high value-added goods. But they have this money that has been printed and given to them, so what do they do? They go to the stock exchange and they buy back their own shares. Their share price goes through the roof, and their bonus is connected to their share price, so they are laughing all the way to the bank. They go and buy a new apartment, a new yacht, more Bitcoins, a work of art. Asset prices go up, while the many are still impecunious and there’s no investment. After fifteen years of that, it’s the end of Europe. It is the reason why Germany is now deindustrializing. It is deindustrializing because it did not invest anything in the last fifteen years. The managing directors and the members of the board of directors were doing splendidly, but they were not investing. While the Chinese were investing their heads off and Elon Musk was investing in Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and so on, Europe had zero net productive investment for something like sixteen or seventeen years. That is preposterous. The result is that now, Europe is dying. If people ask — and they should ask — why it is that fascism is having a second or third wind, it is because this is what happens when you have something like 1929."

Yanis Varoufakis on the Legacy of Greece’s Oxi Referendum

Ten years ago today, the people of Greece voted decisively in a referendum to reject an EU austerity program. Former Greek finance minister Yanis V...

#EU #Greece #Euro #EuroCrisis #OxiReferendum #Democracy #PublicDebt #Austerity

"A decisão pode também levar à remoção massiva de conteúdos, bastando uma simples notificação. Foi o que aconteceu na Europa. Só em 2024, foram 9,4 bilhões de justificativas de remoção reportadas. 87,5% dos conteúdos removidos eram totalmente legítimos, como apontou estudo da Universidade Vanderbilt. Em 2025 já são 9 bilhões de justificativas de remoções nos 6 primeiros meses do ano. No Brasil poderá ser pior. Há obrigação de remover todos os conteúdos iguais, o que não existe na lei europeia. E se o conteúdo estiver sendo postado para ser criticado, o que é legítimo, vai ser removido também? No regime anterior, se alguém reclamava de um conteúdo, ele ficava no ar até a decisão judicial. Era um regime de "na dúvida, pró-liberdade de expressão". Agora isso se inverte em três dos quatro regimes. O conteúdo será primeiro tirado do ar. Caberá a quem fez o post acionar o judiciário para colocá-lo de volta. O regime é "na dúvida, pró-remoção"."

Folha de S.Paulo

Opinião - Ronaldo Lemos: No Marco Civil, STF mirou nas big techs e acertou na internet inteira

Do Google ao Reclame Aqui, passando por fóruns e caixas de comentários dos jornais, todos estão abrangidos

#Brasil #STF #MarcoCivil #Censura