benjamin conner retweeted
“The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”
—J.G. Ballard
benjamin conner retweeted
My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will:
1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate.
2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority.
3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority.
This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.
An egocentric culture makes us oblivious to the life of nature and the delicate ecological balances in the environment, it makes us ignorant of our social responsibility, and disrespectful of age and ageing. We have not learned the lesson which is basic to all ancient and tribal cultures: that the personal self is a working fiction, and deep down we are coterminous with the social collective, the ancestors, and even the cosmos itself.
- David Tacey, Jung and the New Age (2001)
Neoliberal capitalism is that form that is utterly obsessed with ensuring as Margaret Thatcher so famously declared, "there is no alternative." In other words, it has given up on any effort to argue that the current economic order will prove capable of creating a world in which most human beings feel prosperous, safe, and free to spend a significant portion of their life pursuing those things they consider genuinely important. Rather, it is a system, in which even the very richest countries cannot guarantee access to basic needs such as housing, health and education. It works badly, but they want you to believe that no other system could possibly work.
-David Graeber
July 15, 2026...
"And it makes me think that we have to be really thoughtful about what the other policy processes that are going to secure us because ultimately a lot of critical infrastructure today is secured by the threat of FBI prosecuting them. It's not secured by the fact that the infrastructure is secure. It's secured by the fact that they're afraid that, you know, DoD or DOJ or State Department is going to sanction another country."
-Jay Gazlay
The Future of AI-Driven Cyber Defense youtu.be/mjCM4X8GFqc?si=P5jX… via @YouTube
benjamin conner retweeted
DARPA biohybrids aim to ultimately merge (or couple) man and machine.
Creating insects cyborgs was a first step.
A ground-breaking example, from 2014, involves the Manduca sexta month.
DARPA scientists rebuilt the entire tissue system of the moth during metamorphic development. During the late pupa stage, the team surgically inserted an electrode in the dorsal thorax of the moth, between its neck and abdomen. “The tissue develops around the implanted electrodes and secures their attachment to the insect’s body over the course of a few days,” explains team member Alexander Verderber. “The electrodes emerge as a part of the insect’s body in the final adult stage as a moth.” By “taking advantage of the rebuilding of the insect’s entire tissue system during metamorphic development,” says Verderber, the scientists were able to create a steerable cyborg, part insect, part machine.
This was ten years ago. Imagine what DARPA is working on now...
benjamin conner retweeted
i love how engineering schools fully Dispense with the artifice that the humanities have about the fact that the American university system is a branch of the pentagon
benjamin conner retweeted
Breaking: Donald Trump was "an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the mid-to-late 1990s,” according to a report issued today by Dems on the House Judiciary Committee. The report includes one new rape allegation against Trump, and calls for a special investigation of the Trump administration's cover-up of Epstein's crimes.
benjamin conner retweeted
That's at One Eyed Jacks, the brothel and casino across the border in Canada. Of course Trump didn't resemble his 80-year old self 35 years ago, so it wasn't an intentional call-out. The associate universe never misses.
October 16, 2025...
"Capital is the software, Labour is the hardware. But the biologically alive labour, human or animal, that drives the Capital system forward is not its necessary component. As we have seen over the recent decades, the accelerating automation of Labour is threatening to make it independent of any living intercession. This is the apocalyptic vision of accelerationism of Nick Land, where a fully automated, autonomous, artificial Labour force replaces the biological Labour. Capital might reach a point where it does not need life to supply it with Labour but will life survive without Capital?"
Does Capital Dream of Artificial Labour?
arxiv.org/html/2510.16042v1
Neoliberal capitalism is that form that is utterly obsessed with ensuring as Margaret Thatcher so famously declared, "there is no alternative." In other words, it has given up on any effort to argue that the current economic order will prove capable of creating a world in which most human beings feel prosperous, safe, and free to spend a significant portion of their life pursuing those things they consider genuinely important. Rather, it is a system, in which even the very richest countries cannot guarantee access to basic needs such as housing, health and education. It works badly, but they want you to believe that no other system could possibly work.
-David Graeber
"Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved--that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure."
-Stanley Kubrick
benjamin conner retweeted
Love that our oligarchs get to talk like poorly written anime villains while the rest of us get yelled at for suggesting the system that keeps them in power isn't all that great.
May 17, 2015...
"...and over the course of that conversation, it dawned on me that what he was telling me was that the United States had since the era of the Vietnam War War, had deliberately been setting itself up as a tax haven."
-Nicholas Shaxson
Full Circle & Nicholas Shaxson: Treasure Islands, tax havens and more youtu.be/9X3ae0cfqNU?si=Tf_2… via @YouTube
benjamin conner retweeted
An evergreen passage from James Hillman.
ALT Today we need heroes of descent, not masters of denial, mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to ageing, who show soul without irony or embarrassment. Mentors, not cheerleaders; mentors, not boosters or Babbitts. The legendary heroes of the ancient world-Ulysses, Aeneas, Psyche, Persephone, Orpheus, Dionysos and even Hercules-all descended into hell to learn other values than those that rule the daily business of sunlit life. They came back with a darker eye that can see in a dark time. — James Hillman, Kinds of Power
August 18, 1980...
You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flame begins to catch
The wind will blow it higher
Peter Gabriel - Biko youtu.be/luVpsM3YAgw?si=EiaC… via @YouTube
