technocrit

... so-called electoral democracy created Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump and fascism. Electoral democracy, as I have repeatedly argued, is a front for capitalism. Corporate goons select your candidates and howl with laughter as you vote for one or the other of the two handpicked psychopaths who lie to you with all the conviction of a battery powered parrot.

Traffic collisions in the city of Los Angeles killed 290 people last year, and more than 150 fatal collisions involved pedestrians, according to Los Angeles Police Department data. It's also 60 more people than died by homicide last year.

That means the city is far from the goal it set more than a decade ago of reaching zero such deaths by 2025.

Cait Conley, a Special Operations combat veteran and former national security adviser under former President Joe Biden, is running in the crowded Democratic primary to challenge incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in New York’s 17th Congressional District. Her candidate financial disclosures show that she earned more than $80,000 between January 2024 and July 2025 from two companies, Primer and Hidden Level.

Both companies partner with far-right billionaire Peter Thiel’s surveillance tech firm Palantir to help government agencies use AI. Both are military contractors; Hidden Level holds an active contract with the Department of War, and Primer’s most recent one was paid out last year. Primer has also praised President Donald Trump’s AI policy and advertises on its website that it “helps” the Department of Homeland Security with data and intelligence work and that “Primer’s AI platforms support DHS missions,” but it does not appear to have an active deal with the department in a federal contracting database.

Congressional Democratic leaders are asking ICE to agree to reforms, promising to vote for $11 billion in funding for the agency if it does so. ICE has every reason to concede to the demands — then ignore them once the funding bill passes.

If you are to believe the glossy marketing campaigns about ‘quantum computing’, then we are on the cusp of a computing revolution, yet back in the real world things look a lot less dire. At least if you’re worried about quantum computers (QCs) breaking every single conventional encryption algorithm in use today, because at this point they cannot even factor 21 yet without cheating.

In the article by [Craig Gidney] the basic problem is explained, which comes down to simple exponentials. Specifically the number of quantum gates required to perform factoring increases exponentially, allowing QCs to factor 15 in 2001 with a total of 21 two-qubit entangling gates. Extrapolating from the used circuit, factoring 21 would require 2,405 gates, or 115 times more.

underlying article: https://algassert.com/post/2500

The resolution by Leandra Blades, a retired L.A. county law enforcement officer, advocates for the district to cooperate with and affirm "its support for local law enforcement officers and federal immigration officers."

A powerful book reveals the corrupt deals and human exploitation behind the global scramble for strategic metals.

Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than [the 66] in the first year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.

I added that "66" for biden. It's fairly obvious disinformation to hide his numbers. It obscures the ongoing decline under both "parties".

Last Saturday around 6pm, Regan Cole-Graham, a mother of two and pregnant with her third, was out on a bike ride with her husband and two young boys. A driver hit her from behind and killed her, and her unborn baby died at the hospital despite an emergency c-section. This wasn’t an accident. In 2017, L.A. installed bike lanes on Pershing Drive, exactly where she was hit, and removed them after backlash by the neighborhood council, and a lawsuit by Keep LA Moving.

If the bike lanes the city had installed in 2017 had remained in place, Regan likely would be alive today.

....

This is a black or white issue. Anyone running for Mayor or city council that doesn’t talk about this issue and come with political will to redesign our streets is part of the problem. I plan on devoting every fiber of my being to defeating NIMBYism and political cowards. Enough is enough.

Latest batch of documents show researchers consulting the financier and sex offender on publications, visas and more.

Noam Chomsky’s life and work cannot be understood without taking into account his militarily-funded linguistics research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)...

... [W]hen confronted by journalists about his involvement with Epstein, Chomsky ... explained his behaviour by saying (a) that Epstein had ‘served his sentence, which wiped the slate clean’ and (b) that ‘far worse criminals’ were associated with MIT. When speaking to the Harvard Crimson, Chomsky was still more forthright, pointing out that MIT’s donors included the ‘worst criminals’ and that he’d met all sorts of people in his lifetime including ‘major war criminals’ and didn’t regret having met any of them.

"Hosting the Games is already accelerating policing, displacement, inequality, and exploitation in some of our city’s lowest-income communities — and, now, it’s being coordinated hand-in-glove with Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security," says Chris Tyler, SAJE's communications director. "At this point, these intersecting harms will not be reduced in any meaningful way unless we cancel."

LA has limited options to get out of hosting — but LA does have options, says the report's author Neil deMause, editor of Torched-recommended Field of Schemes. (Torched is cited several times, and I was interviewed for the report.) "The IOC has the hammer of the contract, but it also very much does not want to see the 2028 Olympics caught up in legal wrangling, so there’s at least the potential to try to make some demands in terms of limiting LA’s potential liability." However, says deMause: "LA28 finances are so opaque that we may not know until 2028, if then, who’s really on the hook for what."

Which is why the report outlines steps that LA can take, right now, which seem even more urgent in light of recent developments.