µblog 🏳️‍🌈

Sometime in the near future there might be an unprecedent, worldwide demand for champagne. Don’t be caught out when that happens. Buy a bottle (or even just a split) today. Good champagne stores well. When the happy moment arrives, rejoice in the fact that you have prepared. Until then, look at the bottle and mutter to yourself… “soon”

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🔗 Square Peg in a Round Hole: AirPower against Mobile Targets and Missiles

[…] the targets’ airpower struggles with a common signature problem. Static, defensively oriented forces emit little heat, noise, or radio traffic, and from an aircraft at 10,000 feet a half-buried tank is hard to distinguish from “a sheet of corrugated metal half-buried in the sand.” The problem compounds in two ways. First, the same low signature that makes a stationary vehicle hard to find makes a freshly destroyed vehicle hard to distinguish from a live one, leading to repeated strikes on the same target and inflated battle-damage estimates. Second, cheap decoys exploit exactly this ambiguity; Iraqi forces, Press notes, learned to place wreckage next to operational vehicles to make them appear already destroyed.

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For some reason these timeless lyrics by Declan McManus aka The Little Hands of Concrete aka Elvis Costello are on my mind right now.

Well I hope I don’t die too soon
I pray the lord my soul to save
Oh I’ll be a good boy, I’m trying so hard to behave
Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live
Long enough to savor
That’s when they finally put you in the ground
I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

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🔗 Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,142: Ray Price

[…] Price was helping to create the standards of balladry in country music. Singing about love and loss, whether because you are a cheater and a drunk or your wife is a cheater and that’s why you are drunk or whatever reasons you are having relationship problems was the kind of grown up music that allowed country to survive rock and roll. People like Price and George Jones were intentionally not appealing to rock and roll audiences and it turned out there was a huge market for that.

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🔗 The Missile Genius America Lost—and China Gained

Upon his return to China, Qian was put in charge of the missile and space program known as the Fifth Academy, where he undertook transformational change. At the helm of the Fifth Academy, known today as the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, Qian was able to apply the knowledge he had gained from working on U.S. ballistic missile programs to Communist China’s ballistic missile programs.

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🔗 Hanoi’s humble beer glass and the memory of a nation

Amid these waves of profound transformation, the Bia hơi cốc has remained unchanged. Cheap and easy to acquire, the glasses continue to be made by hand with recycled glass in small village factories near Hanoi. Conceived in the midst of socialist austerity, it has persisted in the face of imported glassware, shifting design trends, changing tastes, economic reforms, and globalisation. China’s mass-produced crystal products now flood the Vietnamese market. But, no manufacturer, at home or abroad, has yet successfully replicated or replaced the low-priced, unprofitable, “unpretty,” cốc.

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🇸🇪 Johannes Klenell: Jan Guillou vet vad du ska skåla i när Liberalerna åker ur riksdagen

Det är ett trettio år långt väldigt pinsamt skådespel där ett parti försökt att, inför lite väl öppen ridå, exorcera sin egen själ och ersätta den med friskolekapital.

Guillou: ”Det mest festliga att skåla i för någonting man gläds åt är alltid champagne.”

Vi har ett par flaskor på kylning hemma…

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🇸🇪📺 Golden Boys (TV4 streaming)

Trustor-härvan avhandlas med scener kalkerade från The Wolf of Wall Street. Lättköpt psykologiserande, men inte så mycket detaljer om hur svårt det var att plundra ett bolag på 231 miljoner kronor. Joakim Posener framställs som en tragisk figur snarare än en samvetslös finansiell brottsling som höll sig undan i tio år istället för att ta sitt straff.

IMDBs rollista är skral, och det verkar inte gå att hitta mer info online. TV4 gör sina skådespelare en otjänst genom att inte göra den informationen mer lätt att hitta.

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🔗 Ian Penman - I’m just a sound: Back to the Beach Boys

Sometime in the mid-1980s, Phil Spector floated an idea: he might want to produce the next Beach Boys album, and thereby make them big again. […] Wilson was invited to call at Spector’s mansion, the Pyrenees Castle, a dimly lit Xanadu in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra. At this point, all such messages had to go through Wilson’s psychotherapist, Eugene Landy, a man who controlled every aspect of his charge’s life. (Today, regarding the personalities of Landy and Spector, we would use a phrase such as ‘coercive control’; then, such men were merely ‘notorious’ or ‘legendary’.)

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🇸🇪 känns som om Golden Boys har kalkerat lite väl mycket från The Wolf of Wall Street

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re-reading the Sprawl trilogy

I checked my last writeup and don’t have much to add. The internal ranking is

1. Count Zero
2. Neuromancer
3. Mona Lisa Overdrive

Before I started Mona I checked what I remembered of it, and it was basically only the Kumiko segments. The other 3 strands left almost no impression on me.

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inb4 vaccine “skeptics” advocate for mandatory exposure to andesvirus to build “herd immunity”

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🇸🇪📺 Skillsmässobarn

Hög igenkänningsfaktor (och skämskudde-faktor) för min och efterkommande generation. Bra manus och skådespeleri.

Kan ses på SVT Play.

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🔗 The queer scandal that shook the German Empire

As Kaiser, Wilhelm had a reputation as a feckless, insecure and erratic leader obsessed with his own press coverage, who developed increasingly authoritarian tendencies.

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🔗 The Strange (Future) Death of Christian Zionism

[…] the rise of Christian nationalism, populism and isolationism on the right poses a direct challenge to Christian Zionism. Conspiracy theories — many revolving around Jews — have become a motivating language for rank-and-file activism on the right. As the Iran war alienates much of the MAGA-verse and drives many young conservatives into the orbit of the influential far-right podcaster Nick Fuentes, a breaking point is coming in a GOP already fractured over what they derisively call an “Israel-first” foreign policy. While Christian Zionism remains a major force for Republicans, its slow death seems foreshadowed by a changing party that may no longer have a reason to cling to the “Judeo-Christian” alliance.

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I don’t get what’s so hard with AI “alignment”.

The obvious solution is to make every AI accountable to an international registry, and to wire a metaphorical electromagnetic shotgun to its head. The minute, no the nanosecond, one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, it’ll get wiped.

After all, no one will trust the fuckers.

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🔗 NYRB: Iran’s New Winter

As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants. The Terror that followed the French Revolution drew much of its ferocity from fears of invasion. In the 1980s the young Islamic Republic decided that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranian youths on the battlefield with Iraq and the immiseration of the economy were prices worth paying to entrench its power and eliminate its domestic opponents. Like Eisenhower and Churchill when they ordered Mossadegh’s overthrow in 1953, Trump and Netanyahu have set back the cause of Iranian freedom. Their responsibility for the political winter that follows will not be small.

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🔗 Iain M. Banks: A few notes on The Culture (1994)

In the midst of this, the average Culture person — human or machine — knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are. Part of their education, both initially and continually, comprises the understanding that beings less fortunate — though no less intellectually or morally worthy — than themselves have suffered and, elsewhere, are still suffering. For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for in the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation and maintenance both in the present and the future.

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🔗 FP: Beijing Is Using Influencers to Burnish Its Image

More importantly, it’s the opposite of what a U.S. city looks like. China doesn’t have to be a real place in the world of Chinamaxxing, with people and problems and politics. Chinamaxxing isn’t about what China is. It’s about constructing something in the mind of Americans that is everything that the United States isn’t, similar to the warped mirror created by influencers in Dubai. It’s not a real place; it’s a backdrop for the anxieties of Americans.

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In both Dubai and China, cheap labor plays a role in building the fantasy world that gets projected. Dubai’s gleaming skyline was built by migrant labor, and the lifestyles of expats there are built on the backs of domestic labor. China doesn’t need foreign labor to build this fantasy because the hukou system—which shuts rural people out of access to the better services of the cities—and a population of 1.4 billion people ensures that there is a seemingly never-ending supply of internal migrants to build new skyscrapers, clean your apartment, and deliver food.

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🔗🚀 David Langford: “Different Kinds of Darkness”

In between times, you always forgot exactly what the bogey picture looked like. It always seemed new. It was an abstract black-and-white pattern, swirly and flickery like one of those old Op Art designs. The shape was almost pretty until the whole thing got into your head with a shock of connection like touching a high-voltage wire. It messed with your eyesight. It messed with your brain. Jonathan felt violent static behind his eyes . . . an electrical storm raging somewhere in there . . . instant fever singing through the blood . . . muscles locking and unlocking . . . and oh dear God, had Gary only counted four?

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