Tag: collapse

Spooked by Trade Wars, Trump Officials Hoard Supplies: ‘It Would Be Stupid Not To!’

Some Trump administration officials are stockpiling toilet paper and food before Trump’s tariffs cause prices to skyrocketSpooked by Trade Wars, Trump Officials Hoard Supplies: ‘It Would Be Stupid Not To!’

Donald Trump’s trade wars with China and other nations are widely expected to cause sharp economic pain, but some experts have warned consumers not to hoard supplies and goods before prices skyrocket, arguing that mass stockpiling could backfire spectacularly.

Well, many Americans aren’t listening to that advice, according to survey data this year, instead preparing for the possibility of store shelves being bare amid a Trump-inflicted recession. Funnily enough, this includes a number of government officials and staffers working directly for the man who launched these massive new trade wars, all on the grounds of bad tariff math and the flimsy premise that he would bring economic “liberation” to America and make the country “wealthy again.”

Two Trump administration officials and a Trump aide tell Rolling Stone that they have done some stockpiling of their own in recent weeks or months, and that they know others working in Republican politics — inside and outside of the administration — who are doing the same. One of the Trump officials says they have already run to Target to bulk-buy toilet paper, some types of food, and other household supplies.

LINK: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-officials-hoarding-supplies-trade-war-tariffs-1235329235/

 

Dignity

I read this when it came out in 2011, while we were still thinking about Occupy and 2008. Here we are in 2025, and it is still relevant. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor.

Dignity

A packet of hand-scrawled letters found in a stranger’s backpack tells of self-sufficient communities growing from the ruins of California’s housing collapse and the global recession. In unfinished Mojave Desert housing tracts and foreclosure ghost towns on the raw edges of the chaotic cities of the West, people have gathered to grow their own food, school their own children and learn how to live without the poisons of gossip, greed, television, mobile phones and the Internet. Encouraged by an enigmatic wanderer known only as “B,” the communities thrive as more families and workers are discarded by an indifferent system. But this quiet revolution and its simple rituals cannot stay unnoticed for long, because the teachings of “B” threaten an entire structure of power and wealth dependent upon people toiling their lives away to buy things they don’t need.

“But to understand the social mood as embodied by a group like Occupy, it may help to look at literature that captures its zeitgeist. One of the books that seems to have become a standard bearer for the Occupy movement is Ken Layne’s ‘Dignity.’ In a book that can only be described as a series of modern-day letters on the gospel of communal simplicity, you can see what kind of world some of the Occupiers might envision: communities occupying vacant suburban or exurban subdivisions, farming the land themselves, bartering with doctors and the like, and shunning modern technology.” — Minyanville.com

LINK: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11356422-dignity

‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State

LINK: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.D08.wM9J.LUKIOA-Md2ip&smid=url-share

“… President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).

What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.

“This is what we were always scared of,” said Kevin Bankston, a longtime civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on A.I. governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights organization. “The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law.”

Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security. This month House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from such federal agencies as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data…”

And if you can’t get to the NYT article due to the paywall, here’s a PDF of the NYT article.

Opinion Elon Musk’s Legacy DOGE’s Construction of a Surveillance State - The N

 

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares

To understand the deepening divide between AI boosters and doomers, it’s necessary to unpack their common origins in a bundle of ideologies known as TESCREAL.

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares

LINK: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/

Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades.

Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades. Many also WANT this to happen: they WANT the biological world to be replaced by a new digital world. They WANT "posthumans" to take the place of humans. A 🧵:

— Dr. Émile P. Torres (@xriskology.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T19:58:32.783Z

The Sunday Read: ‘The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber’

RIP Uncle Ted
RIP Uncle Ted

Episode Description
Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure.

Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.

Link: https://pca.st/07odumi7

2073

2073

2073 is a 2024 British science fiction docudrama film directed by Asif Kapadia. Set in a dystopian future, the film is inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette La Jetée, which follows a time traveller who risks his life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity.

Torrents: https://www.1377x.to/torrent/6305616/2073-2024-1080p-AMZN-WEB-DL-DDP5-1-H-264-FLUX/