davel

Paywall bypass: https://web.archive.org/web/20251019175231/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/business/media/epoch-times-pentagon-press-rules.html

BoingBoing on Wednesday: Mainstream media quit Pentagon rather than sign pledge

Update: By end of day, a few more signed up; this post originally identified only one, OANN. The new Pentagon press corps appears to be The Federalist, the Epoch Times, OANN, a Turkish newspaper and a blogger from Korea.

Power is a ghoul. Three women, loads of lies and the destruction of Libya

Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power were the three principal advocates of war against Libya in 2011, setting the North African nation on a free fall ever since. Demonstrations broke out in some Libyan cities against the government of late Muammar Gaddafi in February 2011, in what became known as the “Arab Spring” that engulfed the region. However, Libya’s promised spring turned into a destructive autumn during which Gaddafi was murdered on 20 October, 2011, and Libya was left anguishing in lawlessness, courtesy of the three women.

In marketing the war within the ranks of the Obama administration, Power played the history card to create fear of failure and inaction by President Obama. She exaggerated events in Libya, even comparing it to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which nearly one million people were killed. Invoking the Rwandan experience was designed to provoke the strongest reaction by Obama, a Democrat himself, as was Bill Clinton under whose watch the Rwandan mass killing unfolded. The world later discovered that the Clinton administration knew what was going on in Rwanda, but chose to ignore it. Apparently, Power, by comparing Libya to Rwanda, wanted to warn President Obama not to ignore Libya and be accused of lying, which he did anyway in the Libyan case.

Obama, five years later in a 2016 interview, admitted that intervening in Libya was his “worst” mistake, blaming British and French leaders instead of his own advisors. None of the three advisors has ever been held accountable to answer serious questions about the Libyan fiasco. Instead, Power later served as US ambassador to the UN before joining one of the US’ top universities – Harvard, no less. Rice is a researcher at the American University in Washington, while Clinton went on to run for president, losing to Donald Trump in 2016.

The Palestinian liberation struggle is a fundamental class and anti-colonial issue. First-time guest to the podcast, Professor Omar Zahzah, talks with Steve about the active collaboration of Silicon Valley tech giants with the US and Israeli governments to censor and suppress anti-Zionist narratives.

“What these companies are doing is digitally amplifying a physical process of settler colonial dispossession.”

Omar goes beyond labeling digital censorship as simple political bias. He argues that Silicon Valley’s actions are a direct extension of imperialist goals in Palestine: the erasure of a people, their narrative, and their history. Big Tech is not a referee – not even a biased one. It is an active combatant.

Omar provides a sharp critique of how the language of safety and anti-racism is co-opted and weaponized. Online platforms use terms like “harassment” and “hate speech” to silence criticism.

In their discussion, Omar and Steve apply Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony to the digital sphere. They analyze how Big Tech platforms shape our “common sense,” not just through outright censorship, but through algorithmic curation, shadow-banning, and overwhelming activists with trolls and bots, waging a “digital war of attrition” that drains energy and shifts perceptions. They also suggest the potential TikTok ban is not just a US-China trade issue but a symptom of a crisis of hegemony.

Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, organizer of Lebanese Palestinian descent, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University. Omar has covered digital repression in relation to Palestine as a freelance journalist since May 2021, with work appearing in such outlets as Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, CounterPunch, and more. Omar holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA.

His recently published book is Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle

Previous related videos:

• What is German: A Simple Answer
• Guilt Pride: A German Vanity Project Conquering the World
• German Elections: Division and Contingency

The US and China are the world's two most powerful countries, but they have very different visions for the global order. Compare the speeches delivered at the UN General Assembly by Donald Trump and Chinese Premier Li Qiang. The United States wants a unipolar system based on unilateralism, aggression, and hegemony, whereas China wants a multipolar system based on multilateralism, peaceful development, and sovereign equality, centered in the United Nations. Ben Norton explains.

Aside from Alphabet’s own forays into AI, they’re also selling pickaxes to most other AI prospectors.

It’s a story deSouza likes to tell in numbers. In a conversation with this editor, he notes several times that nine out of the top 10 AI labs use Google’s infrastructure. He also says that nearly all generative AI unicorns run on Google Cloud, that 60% of all GenAI startups worldwide have chosen Google as their cloud provider, and that the company has lined up $58 billion in new revenue commitments over the next two years, which represents more than double its current annual run rate.

Asked what percentage of Google Cloud’s revenue comes from AI companies, he offers instead that “AI is resetting the cloud market, and Google Cloud is leading the way, especially with startups.”

The strategy extends beyond simple customer acquisition. Google offers AI startups $350,000 in cloud credits, access to its technical teams, and go-to-market support through its marketplace. Google Cloud also provides what deSouza describes as a “no compromise” AI stack — from chips to models to applications — with an “open ethos” that gives customers choice at every layer.

The approach reflects both opportunity and necessity. In a market where companies can go “from being a startup to being a multibillion-dollar company in a very short period of time,” as deSouza puts it, capturing future unicorns before they mature could prove more valuable than fighting over today’s giants.

“Companies love the fact that they can get access to our AI stack, they can get access to our teams to understand where our technologies are going,” deSouza says during our interview. “They also love that they’re getting access to enterprise-grade Google class infrastructure.”

Google’s infrastructure play got even more ambitious recently, with reporting revealing the company’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering to expand its custom AI chip business. According to The Information, Google has struck deals to place its tensor processing units (TPUs) in other cloud providers’ data centers for the first time, including an agreement with London-based Fluidstack that includes up to $3.2 billion in financial backing for a New York facility.

Competing directly with AI companies while simultaneously providing them infrastructure requires … finesse. Google Cloud provides TPU chips to OpenAI and hosts Anthropic’s Claude model through its Vertex AI platform, even as its own Gemini models compete head-to-head with both. (Google Cloud’s parent company, Alphabet, also owns a 14% stake in Anthropic, per New York Times court documents obtained earlier this year, though when asked directly about Google’s financial relationship with Anthropic, deSouza calls the relationship a “multi-layered partnership,” then quickly redirects me to Google Cloud’s model marketplace, noting that customers can access various foundation models.)

It’s hard to overstate how much different NSPM-7 is from the over 200 executive orders Trump has frantically signed since coming back into office.

NSPM-7 directs a new national strategy to “disrupt” any individual or groups “that foment political violence,” including “before they result in violent political acts.”

In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report.

The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indica” (indicators) of violence:

• anti-Americanism,
• anti-capitalism,
• anti-Christianity,
• support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
• extremism on migration,
• extremism on race,
• extremism on gender
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality

In 1876, Peter Guthrie Tait set out to measure what he called the “beknottedness” of knots.

Tait had an idea for how to determine if two knots are different. First, lay a knot flat on a table and find a spot where the string crosses over itself. Cut the string, swap the positions of the strands, and glue everything back together. This is called a crossing change. If you do this enough times, you’ll be left with an unknotted circle. Tait’s beknottedness is the minimum number of crossing changes that this process requires. Today, it’s known as a knot’s “unknotting number.”

If two knots have different unknotting numbers, then they must be different. But Tait found that his unknotting numbers generated more questions than they answered.

If Tait missed something, so did every mathematician who followed him. Over the past 150 years, many knot theorists have been baffled by the unknotting number. They know it can provide a powerful description of a knot. “It’s the most fundamental [measure] of all, arguably,” said Susan Hermiller (opens a new tab) of the University of Nebraska. But it’s often impossibly hard to compute a knot’s unknotting number, and it’s not always clear how that number corresponds to the knot’s complexity.

To untangle this mystery, mathematicians in the early 20th century devised a straightforward conjecture about how the unknotting number changes when you combine knots. If they could prove it, they would have a way to compute the unknotting number for any knot — giving mathematicians a simple, concrete way to measure knot complexity.

Researchers searched for nearly a century, finding little evidence either for or against the conjecture.

Then, in a paper posted in June, Hermiller and her longtime collaborator Mark Brittenham (opens a new tab) uncovered a pair of knots that, when combined, form a knot that is easier to untie than the conjecture predicts. In doing so, they disproved the conjecture (opens a new tab) — and used their counterexample to find infinitely many other pairs of knots that also disprove it.

The result demonstrates that “the unknotting number is chaotic and unpredictable and really exciting to study,” she added. The paper is “like waving a flag that says, we don’t understand this.”

I discovered it by accident today, but it’s been there for a year already. The context, as usual, depends on where you last clicked/tabbed/etc. the focus to.

Relatedly, to keep track of hotkeys I used to use Cheatsheet and later KeyCue, but now there’s an open source alternative, KeyClu. There’s also Karabiner Elements for keyboard customization.