Mental health alert.

https://t.co/wdSAT3Eq7U

Johnny Harfstrong

Originally shared by God Emperor Lionel Lauer

Find out how Sean Spencer might screw up your name!

I got “Lionhearted Laughlin”.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/spicerize-my-name-how-white-house-press-secretary-sean-spicer-would-say-your-name-20170216-gue6bh.html

Political murder at Kuala Lumpur Airport. Kim Jong-un’s exiled older half brother assassinated.

Kim Jong-nam had told airport workers that someone had attacked him “from behind” and sprayed him in the face with an unknown liquid. He died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.

“He told the receptionist at the departure hall that someone had grabbed his face from behind and splashed some liquid on him,” said Selangor state’s criminal investigation chief, Fadzil Ahmat, according to Malaysia’s The Star newspaper.

“He asked for help and was immediately sent to the airport’s clinic. At this point, he was experiencing headache and was on the verge of passing out. At the clinic, the victim experienced a mild seizure. He was put into an ambulance and was being taken to the Putrajaya Hospital when he was pronounced dead.” 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/15/kim-jong-nam-assassinated-south-korea-us-officials?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Oh yeah. Russia is the source of all your troubles. Please tell me more about how you didn’t fuck up your own election.

Grow Rich – Help Others

This has been my objection to so many big names and Silicon Valley luminaries expressing concern about Artificial Intelligence. They are usually focusing on the question of sentience and the prospect machines becoming autonomous and ultimately overthrowing the human race and becoming our rulers.

This is science fiction. Literally.

What’s not being discussed as seriously is the machine learning revolution that is going on under our noses which is rapidly pointing to the elimination of paid work, both skilled and unskilled and the effect that will have on the bargaining power of workers relative to the owners of the means of production.

For many progressives the idea of Universal Basic Income is being touted as a solution to this problem. But few are discussing the mechanisms that will be needed in order to make it happen (increased taxation on the incomes of people who are getting very good at hiding their incomes) and are skirting completely around the politics that would make that a reality. If workers have lost their economic value in a system which concerns itself with economic value above all other things, where is the political force going to come from? Sheer strength of numbers are surely not enough to enact a change to the detriment of the rich (just ask the other six billion inhabitants of this planet what the numbers have done for them).

This looming prospect—the end of paid work—raises some very old questions. It’s not as though these eventualities haven’t been predicted for a long time, it’s just that their arrival is now no longer in the far future. That future is now and we live in that future.

Society is faced, quite simply, with a choice, a very old choice, between Socialism and Barbarism.

Communism is free time and nothing else. 

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/ai-threat-isnt-skynet-end-middle-class/

I must confess I understood it as just a fancy way to say “where”. I had no idea it meant “why”.

As in Romeo, Romeo. Why did I fall for Romeo? WTF? ZOMG.

Originally shared by David Cameron Staples

“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

And I die a little inside. Because no matter how good the production, how good the acting, how clever the ad it’s used in, it means they don’t understand what they’re saying.

It should be: “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”

“Wherefore” didn’t mean “where”, it means “why”. She’s not asking where Romeo is, she’s asking of an uncaring universe why, of all the people in the world she could fall in love with, it had to be him, the son of her father’s greatest enemy.

And if you think that’s just, like, some English professor’s opinion, man, then be aware that the Norwegian word for “why” (amongst cognates in many other Germanic languages) is hvorfor.