@Itchy Yes, I do know what it was, thanks

@Itchy Yes, I was specifically thinking about that with the Eye of Sauron

I saw an article headlined ‪"We can again be the country we were after 9/11: We flew the flag, helped our neighbors, opened our hearts, and supported our government."

Are you kidding? We had a government that immediately took away rights and turned the Eye of Sauron inward. It came up with the ominous word "homeland" and stood up a disastrous Department of Homeland Security which is today stomping people on the head, kidnapping people by the thousands, trying to secretly deport planeloads of children in the night, renditioning people to foreign prisons and war zones. I don't want to be that fucking country. I want to be the country we were BEFORE 9-11, before a reactionary extremist trend took hold among conservatives and turned them all into engines of hate and fear. Before the Federalist Society successfully took over the SCOTUS, which was the cornerstone of literally all the massive corruption and criminality happening in government today. Good grief. Some people really remember the post 9-11 history differently.

Political violence in U.S. in the past several years, a sampling.

MAGA has its martyr

@jawarajabbi It was a real demonstration of how he IS the problem

I listened to Tim Miller's podcast with The Economist journalist James Bennet. At one point Tim asked the perennial question of if a liberal president (he posed what if Mamdani) had done anything like what Trump does, would all the businesses and institutions just cave? Bennet claims "nobody knows." Bullshit. This is how the mainstream media pretends to not see evidence.

There's an essential difference between liberals and what used to be conservatives (now a violent cult). Whereas liberals will attend protest marches when they're mad, the right is now a terrorist organization tightly controlled by an extremist media ecosystem. If a liberal president did anything Trump is doing, they would erupt in massive violent attacks, assassinations, and otherwise lawless mass violence in order to overthrow that president.

@wendynather Well tbh in retirement I'm trying to forget a lot and there are some very amusing things that I wouldn't be able to share...but I still have thoughts and tend to see everything in a "how can I weaponize this" frame

The #hummingbirds are swarming the feeders again on this cool morning as they pass through on fall migration. Getting juiced up for a long day of flight!

"Imagine an AI system analyzing the social media history of a deployed soldier and his spouse. Within seconds, it identifies a vulnerability to jealousy and violence. At negligible cost, it generates a deepfake video of marital infidelity and delivers it to the soldier’s device. An hour later, the soldier — an experienced warfighter — is psychologically neutralized, driven to a catastrophic personal act. This chilling scenario captures the 21st century’s newest battlefield: the human mind."

I included an almost identical scenario in a wide-ranging strategic #intelligence assessment of threat applications of #DeepFake #AI technology when that tech was still in early development ~10 years ago. I'm often intrigued by the length of time between some of my futures intelligence assessments and when they either occur in the real world or become widespread in the public conversation.

Anyway, this is a good article about cognitive warfare. And I wish more people understood that for example, in the case of Russia, we have been at war for many years...it's just that only one side knows it's in a war. #disinformation https://warontherocks.com/2025/09/the-dialectic-of-deception-john-boyd-and-the-cognitive-battlefield/

@Jestbill @infopowerbroker This is great, thanks for posting

Finished #audiobook Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. A book about technology, the surveillance state and its corporate vampires, ethics, and consequences. I liked it. #bookstodon

@infopowerbroker That works. I didn't know about it, thanks.

I'm not clicking on CNN links anymore due to the new popup that forces you to accept all cookies or you can't continue to the site. There's no options at all. You either say yes to everything or you don't read the story.