Eugenics was rejected after the Holocaust. Now it goes by a new name: transhumanism. John Gray explains Transhuman
Financial crime regulator AUSTRAC has taken enforcement action against Bell Financial Group, extending its fight against money laundering beyond the big banks and into the stockbroking industry.
AUSTRAC has ordered an external audit into all three of Bell Financial’s, entities saying it has “reasonable grounds” to suspect breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing rules. It is the first such request for an external audit of a broker, AUSTRAC confirmed
AUSTRAC to probe Bell Potter over compliance concerns
CIA collecting bulk data on Americans without oversight, senators say Ars Technica
Israel Is Dangerously Close to Legitimising the Use of Pegasus on Its Citizens The Wire
Holocaust Survivor Lists Digitized for the First Time - UMass Amherst
UMass Amherst: “Hundreds of pages with the names of Holocaust survivors relocated to Displaced Persons Camps in Austria and Germany have now been reprinted and digitized. The extensive lists have never been available together, and the original volumes exist in only a few libraries worldwide. Thanks to a collaboration of the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center in the UMass Amherst Libraries and Schoen Books of South Deerfield, Massachusetts, they are now available on the open web, enabling families of survivors, genealogists and researchers to have access to the vital information they contain. The volumes were originally published in 1945 by the U. S. Government as a way to help survivors, the Sharit Ha-Platah or “the surviving remnant,” reach family members around the world. Ken Schoen, of Schoen Books, discovered the five bound volumes buried in a library and was able to purchase them for his select publishing program of reprints. Schoen’s passion for “books with a past looking for a future” is the reason he dedicated time and effort to the project. Located in the old firehouse in downtown South Deerfield, Schoen Books has specialized collecting and selling in out-of-print scholarly books concerning the Holocaust for the past 30 years. Most of Schoen’s family was able to escape from Nazi Germany, and Schoen grew up in a neighborhood with many survivor families. Digitizing the five volumes was an extraordinary commitment, due to their fragility. The digitized searchableversion is now in Credo, SCUA’s digital repository. For historical background to the book, listen to Professor Avinoam Patt discussing the work of Rabbi Klausner in an interview with the Museum of Jewish Heritage. For more information go to www.schoenbooks.com and click on reprints.”
Australians have been warned that hackers can access their devices without requiring them to click on a link.Hackers have developed more sophisticated ways of accessing consumer devices such as TVs, computers, phones and smartwatches.Speaking to 2GB this morning, cyber security expert Robert Potter said hackers were primarily targeting large businesses.
With all that’s going on in the world — a pandemic, political divide, racial divides, etc. — it’s not easy to be a TV host. How do you navigate the precarious landscape, while adding to important conversations?
Washington Post Magazine contributor Anna Peele spoke to Seth Meyers, Andy Cohen, Ziwe, Keke Palmer and Padma Lakshmi for “How Do You Host Television in 2022?”
It’s interesting stuff in a Q&A form.
Ziwe, who hosts a show on Showtime, said, “All I try to do is ask interesting questions and present a strong POV that you, as an audience member, can agree with or disagree with. Both are OK. But I’m not going to be the guiding light in helping you live and determine your life, because I’m not equipped to do that. I can barely do that for myself.”
There are plenty of behind-the-curtain thoughts from the hosts, so czech it out.
“How Do You Host Television in 2022?”
- The Washington Post’s Ariana Eunjung Cha with “Chris Crouch was anti-vaccine. Now his pregnant wife had covid, and he faced a terrible choice.”
There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID
Scientific American: “Sometime in the next few weeks, the official death toll for the two-year COVID pandemic in the U.S. will reach one million. Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has continued to have the most COVID infections and deaths per country, by far, and it has the highest per capita death rate of any wealthy nation. This is an unfathomable number of people dead, yet, mass media are downplaying it.
This is despite an empathetic New York Times headline in May 2020 of “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” and using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased. As Luppe B. Luppen noted on Twitter, the newspaper’s more recent headline was the cruel and callous “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.” The Times is not alone; several large mainstream publications, in complicity with politicians of both major political parties, have been beating a death knell of a drum for getting “back to normal” for months. The effect is the manufactured consent to normalize mass death and suffering—to subtly suggest to Americans that they want to move on. News media are helping to shape public opinion in order for business to return to the very circumstances that have created this ongoing crisis.
A return to normal will allow profits to be reaped by people working relatively safely from their homes (the target audience of many news organizations’ advertisers) at the expense of people working or studying in person who are more vulnerable. A few weeks ago, David Leonhardt, the writer of the Times’ newsletter “The Morning,” asked Michael Barbaro, the host of the company’s podcast “The Daily”: “If [COVID] is starting to look like a regular respiratory virus, is it rational [emphasis by the Times] to treat it like something completely different— to disrupt all our lives in all these big and consequential ways[?]” I was dismayed. That rhetorical move is a familiar one to me: Two white men frame what they think is rational, deeming any questioning of their stand as irrational…”
Public Blockchains Are the New National Economies of the Metaverse
Wired: “When we speak of an economy, we usually refer to a country or a region where interrelated activities of production, consumption, and trade happen. When we speak of blockchains, we speak of decentralized computer networks. On the surface, these two seem unrelated.
But with on-chain activities growing at warp speed, the ecosystems of layer 1 public blockchains (the foundational blockchain protocols where decentralized databases and computer programs are run) are starting to look more and more similar to national economies—except the nation in this case is not a physical territory but a decentralized digital network. The trustless and programmable nature of public blockchains have made it possible to implement new “fiscal” and “monetary” policy tools in the blockchain economies, which in many cases have advantages over the traditional economic policy tools of national governments. In addition, the proof-of-stake mechanism adopted by second-generation public blockchains introduces a de facto “universal basic capital income” for their network “citizens.”
This could be a major innovation in how economic systems distribute values among participants, with broader income-distribution implications for years to come as blockchain economies grow. (Disclosure: I hold cryptocurrency and have previously advised crypto funds.) Public blockchains allow anyone to deploy decentralized applications (DApps) on top, which users can interact with. Currently, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and non-fungible token assets (NFTs) are the two main economic activities on layer 1 blockchains and associated layer 2 chains. (Layer 2 chains are secondary blockchain networks that rely on the underlying layer 1 for security, but typically offer faster and cheaper transactions.) Both activities have grown tremendously in the past couple of years. At the end of November 2021, gross total value locked from DeFi in the top 10 layer 1 blockchain platforms exceeded $250 billion, a year-over-year growth of 1,400 percent. And according to NFTGo.io, the market cap of NFT projects on Ethereum alone reached over $7 billion in November, increasing over 14,500 percent from a year before…”
My podcast with Rabbi Zohar Atkins
Here is the link. We talked about time management, whether books are overrated, Leo Strauss and whether a lot of it isn’t just garbage, why the important thinkers will be religious thinkers, whether contributions to method outlast contributions of thesis, how to “stay in the game,” philosophy more generally, the role of overrated vs. underrated in CWT, whether God exists, and of course Judaism. And Islam. And more!
Note this:
Read more from Zohar at his Torah newsletter Etz Hasadeh or his philosophy newsletter What is Called Thinking.
Here is Zohar on Twitter.
THE STORY BEHIND THE APPLE ‘1984’ AD THAT LAUNCHED THE SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL CRAZE:
The genesis of the commercial did not begin with the computer company. The advertising firm Chiat/Day had a germ of an idea; with the year 1984 looming, they wanted to cut a commercial that personified George Orwell’s novel of the same name/year. The issue was they did not have a client for their idea, but unlike the monolithic agencies in New York, Chiat/Day was headquartered in Los Angeles and as a result of that proximity to the studio system, they were used to pitching and auditions.
The agency was rebuffed by a number of companies, but their idea in search of a product was seen as a perfect fit by Apple head Steve Jobs. For one, he had a new product that would be unrolled in January of the coming year – the MacIntosh personal computer. Another fit for his company was that the biggest competitor in the computing sector was IBM, a market leader so big there was not any competition. Jobs viewed the company as the nefarious Big Brother, and his emerging alternate system could be positioned as the rebellious force.
Jobs wanted a big splash for his new computer, and so, a budget became no problem. Pegged at an already eye-widening budget for its time, the initial outlay of $750,000 swelled to $900,000, and it makes sense that this would be a one-minute production to rival Hollywood standards. Considering the dystopian nature of the material, a motion picture director was tabbed for the shoot. Ridley Scott had recently released his future-noir sci-fi thriller “Blade Runner,” and was hired to deliver the message of an iconoclastic product. His vision was clear and distinct, as we see the storyboards from the conception are very close to the finished product.
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The entire Apple corporate board hated the commercial. One member called for the Chiat/Day agency to be fired, and the board decided not to run the commercial during the Super Bowl, telling the ad team to sell off their time slots. A full minute had been purchased in the game’s third quarter, and a second slot for an edited, 30-second version was to run late in the game. But the agency’s CEO Jay Chiat took a defiant position.