Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla's Original Sin

Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.

Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist. He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.

• Malaysia Sun: US seizes Scott Ritter's passport
• Al Bawaba: US confiscates former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter passport
• RT: ‘It was about sticking it to the Russians’ – Scott Ritter on US seizure of his passport
• Daily Beast: Moscow Throws Putin Fanboy Scott Ritter Under the Bus

Ryan Grim @ The Intercept, 2020: Joe Biden, Five Years Before Invasion, Said the Only Way of Disarming Iraq Is “Taking Saddam Down”

Biden told Ritter that no matter how thorough the inspections, the only way to eliminate the threat was to remove Saddam Hussein. […] “You and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam is at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program relative to weapons of mass destruction. […]

Hussein, it turned out, did not have an active WMD program.

During questioning, Biden mocked Ritter as “ol’ Scotty boy” and suggested that his demands — that the international community compel Iraq to cooperate with inspectors — if met, would give Ritter the unilateral authority to start a war in Iraq. Biden argued that such decisions belonged to higher-level officials. “I respectfully suggest they have a responsibility slightly above your pay grade, to decide whether or not to take the nation to war,” Biden said. “That’s a real tough decision. That’s why they get paid the big bucks. That’s why they get the limos and you don’t. I mean this sincerely, I’m not trying to be flip.”

http://archive.today/2024.05.30-203844/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia-weapons.html

The global War on Terror was based on a mistake.

Quintupling down are we? Never change, The Atlantic.

ETA: Not sure if there’s a paywall, so just in case: https://archive.ph/68sf0

Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Interior Department, accused US President Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict.

“He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,” she said, noting that ancestors of hers were killed by “state-sponsored violence.”

“I think the president has to know that there are people in his administration who think this is disastrous,” Call said of the war overall and US support for it. “Not just for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Jews, for Americans, for his election prospects.”

In case of paywall: http://archive.today/M5OFY

Key federal agencies have resumed discussions with social media companies over removing disinformation on their sites as the November presidential election nears, a stark reversal after the Biden administration for months froze communications with social platforms amid a pending First Amendment case in the Supreme Court, a top senator said Monday.

Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters in a briefing at RSA Conference that agencies restarted talks with social media companies as the Supreme Court heard arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a case that first began in the Fifth Circuit appellate court last July. The case was fueled by allegations that federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were coercing platforms to remove content related to vaccine safety and 2020 presidential election results.

Foreign adversaries have been found deploying fake social media personas that have engaged with or provoked real-life users in an attempt to assess U.S. domestic issues and learn what political themes divide voters.

The U.S. has been putting its foot down in diplomacy talks on election interference, telling major economic adversaries like China to not intervene in election processes come November. Two weeks ago in Shanghai and Beijing, cyberspace and digital policy ambassador Nathaniel Fick and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken gave a stern warning to Chinese officials about election dynamics.

“The secretary … delivered a very clear message that we view interference in our domestic democratic process as dangerous and unacceptable,” Fick said in a separate RSA briefing with reporters Monday. “Diplomacy is most important when it is most challenging, which is why the discussions with the Chinese at this moment matter a lot,” he said.

Sounds like no more rubles or Xi bucks. Back to sharing one toothbrush no iphone 😂

On how Lenin’s theory of imperialism was a conjunctural one to the period rather than a general/universal one, and how to conjuncturaly theorize on later periods, up to the present.