A hyperinflation of apologies

Tyranny is always and everywhere the same, while freedom is always various. The well and truly enslaved are dependable; we know what they will say and think and do. The free are quirky. Tyrannies may be overt and violent or covert and insidious, but they all require the same thing, a subject population in which the power of the word is dulled and, thus, the power of thought occluded and the power of deed brought low.
Underground Grammarian 

Inside Australia’s Secret Rich List

by Luke Stacey | Dec 26, 2020 | Business, Featured, Secret Rich List Featured

Have Australia’s wealthiest old families bought off the political process? Despite myriad attempts over the years to repeal the cosy “grandfathering” exemption, the billionaires are still permitted – like no other Australians – to keep their companies “dark”. Today Michael West Media unveils the first in a series of investigations by Luke Stacy and Stephanie Tran involving more than 5,000 corporate searches to find the people and the labyrinthine structures behind the Secret Rich List. Luke Stacey and Michael West report.

Five days later, FireEye published details about attacks using malware which it called SUNBURST; it said this malware had been used to hit both private and public entities, by corrupting the Orion network management software, a product of SolarWinds. 

Alleged SolarWinds attackers offer stolen Microsoft, Cisco source code for sale

 

Exclusive

Political leadership

Mathias Cormann confirmed as a frontrunner for OECD post following candidate cull

• January 14, 2021
• by Bevan Shields

Mathias Cormann: The ex-Belgian running Australia this week - BBC ... Mathias Cormann only began learning English aged 23 ... opportunity," he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014. Mathias Cormann: A tale of two lives 2 May 2014 — For the first two decades of his life, Mathias Cormann didn't speak a word of ... May 2, 2014 — 12.04pm ... " He's incredibly good at getting across the detail of his brief. In Geneva, Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz is on trial for allegedly masterminding a “corruption pact” to secure lucrative rights to the Simandou iron ore mine in Guinea, one of the world’s poorest countries. It’s unusual for such a case to make it to criminal court, and Steinmetz’s business associates in Europe and the United States are also facing charges for paving the way to bribe a wife of Guinea’s former president. “The Simandou case is of enormous importance, as it is an extremely rare occurrence of company officials being held to account for classic bribery methods,” says journalist Daniel Balint-Kurti, who spent years investigating the scheme. “Skilled practitioners of the legal, financial and PR arts are central to enabling corrupt deals.” Longtime ICIJ readers will be familiar with Steinmetz's ties to controversial mining operations — businesses linked to the tycoon were featured in our Swiss Leaks and Panama Papers investigations. Reporter Will Fitzgibbon gives you a tour of the offshore “illusion” Swiss prosecutors say the defendants devised to pay the bribes, including a guest appearance by Mossack Fonseca and other details revealed in the Panama Papers. DEUTSCHE BANK PAYS UP - AGAIN To resolve an investigation into a foreign bribery scheme, the German bank agreed to pay $130 million and avoid criminal charges by entering a deferred prosecution agreement with U.S. authorities. It’s the latest penalty the bank has faced for alleged financial misconduct. LESSONS FROM CONFIDENTIAL CLIENTS The smallest stories to come out of FinCEN Files captured some of the biggest data lessons. Researcher Delphine Reuter explains how her team handled the small but complex dataset at the heart of the investigation.

 

 

We wouldn’t be able to control superintelligent machines Max-Planck-Gesellschaft 

 A hyperinflation of apologies.  Perhaps seigniorage-maximizing apologies are better instead?

Rare Sighting of a White Moose in the Swedish Woods MyModernMet 

Dog Domestication May Have Begun Because Paleo Humans Couldn’t Stomach the Original Paleo Diet Scientific American

Michael Apted: TV documentary pioneer and film-maker dies aged 79 BBC

COLLUSION:  U Alabama under investigation for possible ties to Wuhan lab. “The U.S. Department of Education has requested information from the University of Alabama regarding alleged undisclosed ties between the university and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. . . ‘The WIV, owned by the Chinese government’s Academy of Sciences, includes a maximum biocontainment laboratory (“MCL”) that may be closely linked to the origin and/or spread of the Chinese COVID-19 virus.’”

 

Tech Crunch The 6 browser extentions will protect your privacy online: “The internet is not a private place. Ads try to learn as much about you to sell your information to the highest bidder. Emails know when you open them and which links you click. And some of the biggest internet snoops, like Facebook and Amazon, follow you from site to site as you browse the web. But it doesn’t have to be like that. We’ve tried and tested six browser extensions that will immediately improve your privacy online by blocking most of the invisible ads and trackers. These extensions won’t block every kind of snooping, but they will vastly reduce your exposure to most of the efforts to track your internet activity. You might not care that advertisers collect your data to learn your tastes and interests to serve you targeted ads. But you might care that these ad giants can see which medical conditions you’re looking up and what private purchases you’re making. By blocking these hidden trackers from loading, websites can’t collect as much information about you. Plus by dropping the unnecessary bulk, some websites will load faster. The tradeoff is that some websites might not load properly or refuse to let you in if you don’t let them track you. You can toggle the extensions on and off as needed, or you could ask yourself if the website was that good to begin with and could you not just find what you were looking for somewhere else?…” 

Chip, block, Stoicism.

 

“It seems likely that figuring out the principles & protocols of governance for this mediation layer will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, a challenge much like figuring out the principles underlying, say, the US constitution.”  Link here.

 

Substack review of Stubborn Attachments

 

Kieran Healy on what happened.  Recommended, the best take so far and also a good application of spontaneous order theory

 

 How Israel did it.  By doing it.

 

Mengerian monkey evolution of money?

 

“Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs. Seasonal flu, HIV, and Nipah.“