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  1. Last 7 days
  2. Apr 2025
  3. Feb 2025
    1. The expansion of the opioid supply was facilitated by the privatization of poppy fields. The US relies on imports of narcotic raw material, mainly from Turkey and India, to produce legal opioids. Johnson & Johnson, one of the certified importers, sought to change the regulations to allow for more imports from Australia, which would give them a competitive advantage. In the 1990s, Johnson & Johnson lobbied to undermine the "80-20" rule, which stipulated that at least 80% of the narcotic raw material imported into the US had to come from Turkey and India.
    1. After their stay in Britain, Dikko and his entourage sailed to Jeddah to perform the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. This trip was facilitated by the British government, which arranged for visas and entry permits. The pilgrimage was a private spiritual undertaking for Dikko, separate from his British adventures.

      maybe his original goal- Britain a stopping point, have his power validated by the big imperial powers of the time

    2. These trips were facilitated by British colonizers, who saw them as part of a broader project of exhibiting British metropolitan civilization to allegedly impressionable African colonial subjects. Dikko, a wealthy Muslim king and colonial intermediary, paid for the trips but received permission and extensive logistical support from British colonial and metropolitan authorities.

      shown what they want him to see

    3. British newspapers and publications reported on Dikko's itinerary, often featuring photos of him and his entourage. The Illustrated London News published a picture of the male members of the group, while The Leeds Mercury displayed a photo of the two women in the delegation. Dikko and his group visited the Wembley British Empire Exhibition, where they saw a replica of the famous clay walls of Kano city, a gate fashioned in Nigeria, and a Nigerian Pavilion designed to resemble an emir's palace compound. The pavilion housed seventy African men, women, and children living in mud and straw huts, cooking their own meals, and conducting daily affairs. Dikko's presence at the exhibition was meant to authenticate the display, but he and his party became part of the exhibition, with some colonial correspondents referring to them as a "naturalistic attraction." Despite the racial undertones of the exhibition, Dikko seemed to enjoy the experience, marveling at the accurate depiction of a Hausa village setting. Dikko's visit to Britain was part of a larger practice of imperial courtship and patronage, where colonial intermediaries were cultivated and feted with contrived hospitality. The trips to Britain represented attempts to dazzle Dikko and his entourage, giving them a glimpse into the might and modernity of the empire. For Dikko, the trips carried prestige and enhanced his mediatory repertoire, enabling him to carve out a position of exclusive local knowledge and expertise on British metropolitan society among his peers and subjects.

      British publicity and dazzling colonial subjects, theatrical displays

    1. Private militias have provided criminal groups with greater mobility and fighting power, enabling them to engage in large-scale violence and seek control of criminal markets and territories beyond their home towns. The Mexican case highlights the need for democratic elites to reform authoritarian judicial and security institutions and to punish state agents who protected organized crime, in order to prevent the intertwining of democratic politics and the criminal underworld.
    1. The Zetas' business model was based on imposing protection fees on businesses, including illegal activities such as drug trafficking, and licit businesses such as farming and shopkeeping. Those who refused to pay were killed or threatened with violence. This led to a culture of fear and intimidation, where businesses were forced to pay protection fees to avoid violence. The violence in Mexico was further fueled by the struggle between powerful groups for control of drug protection rackets and the pursuit of aggressive counternarcotics policing. This led to a cycle of violence, where struggles between rival groups sparked aggressive policing, and aggressive policing generated increasing struggles between rival groups.
    2. New organizations emerged, armed with high-caliber weapons and prepacked political creeds and religious messages. The Familia Michoacana, a Sinaloa-linked group, tossed the heads of five Zetas into a Michoacán bar, declaring that they did not kill for money, but for divine justice. The conflict continued to spread throughout Mexico, with cartels fighting each other, and soldiers and police often caught in the middle.
  4. Jan 2025
    1. Crack was a global business, with cocaine coming from South America and being distributed through international networks. However, it was disproportionately low-income African Americans who sold and used crack at the local level. The drug was cheap, accessible, and offered a quick escape from the hardships of daily life.
    1. making everyone who was stoned a part of an "illegal nation." Government authorities and parents saw illegal drug use as a dangerous practice, and many antidrug advocates made little effort to differentiate between illegal drugs. The criminalization of LSD made its use both more dangerous and more a clear sign of cultural rebellion. Just by using LSD or marijuana, an individual was declaring themselves an opponent of the status quo willing to go to jail in pursuit of a favorite form of altered consciousness.
    1. The media played a significant role in shaping public perception by emphasizing the dangers of drugs, affecting both public and medical views on LSD and its users. Psychedelic experts, who also used the drug, faced a dilemma between their professional roles and political pressures. By the late 1960s, the credibility of psychedelic psychiatry was questioned, and therapists were seen as unqualified to address LSD abuse.
  5. Dec 2024
    1. The use of stimulants during World War II led to addiction problems among soldiers on all sides. In Japan, the problem was particularly severe, and the country experienced its first drug epidemic. Many soldiers and factory workers who had become hooked on the drug during the war continued to consume it into the postwar years.

      left countries with high rates of addiction

    1. media portrayed Chinese and Korean individuals as suppliers of the drug, allowing the Japanese to cast themselves as victims of "pollution" by those they had wronged. This depiction implicitly absolved guilt for imperial opium operations on the Asian mainland. By 1954, 58.1% of suspects arrested for violating the Ban on Stimulant Drugs showed signs of hiropon addiction, and an estimated 1.5 million Japanese were stimulants users.

      mass incarceration was lokey successful, Koreans specifically discriminated against

  6. Nov 2024
    1. These arrests often involved Asian and African men selling to white girls, reflecting Britain's racial and colonial relationships. The interwar years saw a shift in drug use, from medical or iatrogenic addiction to hedonistic drug use.
    2. During World War II, there was a significant increase in the number of Chinese sailors coming to Britain, many of whom were opium smokers. This led to concerns about the spread of opium smoking, and there were attempts to set up a clinic to treat Chinese sailors.
    1. why did the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration after that were so gangho about trading with China why did they not start the new Cold War against China in the 1990s in the year 2000 in 2004 2005 200 8 why was it only around 2014 that this establishment decided to unleash the war against China

      for - key insight - key question - why did US foreign policy against China switch only in 2014? - Yanis Varoufakis

    2. for - Yanis Varoufakis - talk - in China - Geopolitics and the US dollar - adjacency - geopolitics - China and US - why did the US start a Cold War with China around 2014? - US switched from surplus to deficit country - Henry Kissinger's role - US needs to be hegemonic - to manage the deficit - and keep everyone exporting goods to the US

      Summary - (see below)

      adjacency - between - Yanis Varoufakis - China US cold war - the importance of the years 2014 - 2015 - Henry Kissinger - surplus economy to deficit economy - techno feudalism - cloud capital - cloudist - adjacency relationship - Yanis Varoufakis gives an insightful talk to Chinese officials about - the reason behind the US cold war with China, - how it is independent of which political party is in power, - eliminates many other reasons put forth - how's this single reason drives so much of geopolitics and US hegemony - why its continuation will destroy any chance of the global collaboration not required to prevent climate change disaster for our entire civilization - a strategy to change direction towards re-establishing healthy relationships between nation states that includes activating the social democrats within the United States - The key observation that explains the cold war with China, - An observation from a Henry Kissinger colleague replying to a solicitation for answers to a question Kissinger posed for his team - Kissinger realized that during his role in the US government, the US would soon switch from a country with a net surplus to ones with a net deficit, and this had existential consequences - No country has ever have a long term deficit and survived - Kissinger was fishing for solutions from his team - One team member suggested tripling the deficit but becoming the main currency for global trade - This is the plan that was adopted - The US went from a surplus country to a deficit around 2014-2015 - It forced the US to be hegemonic and control the entire global currency for trade - China threatens this with a new digital superhighway

    1. “I anticipated some time ago that in [the] event of our securing Federal control of the sale and distribution of morphine and cocaine, the fiends would turn to Indian hemp, and for that reason incorporated that drug in the proposed act for the control of the interstate traffic in narcotics.”

      when other drugs were prohibited so they had to turn to this

    1. Mexico, with its own history of demonizing intoxicants and imposing laws to curb their distribution and abuse, was already in compliance with the Hague Convention's mandates and had created domestic laws that were harsher and more far-reaching than what was required by international law.

      already prohibited or heavily disliked, even alcohol

    2. The United States, driven by domestic and foreign policy considerations, led the movement to codify international standards. The US experience in the Philippines and the lessons learned from the Chinese opium story led to the conclusion that only a system that restricted both supply and demand could be effective. The Hague Convention's Article 13 allowed the US to exert pressure on Latin American countries to adhere to international drug control standards, which ironically became a tool of imperialism.
    1. This led to the emergence of a larger hemispheric network that linked Andean coca peasants to chemists, smugglers, and users in the United States and elsewhere. By the 1960s, agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics reported on recipes for coca paste, cocaine sulfates, and crude cocaine, which were refined in labs in Havana and later Colombia.
  7. Oct 2024
    1. To understand how SAIDs work

      Little confused... this is telling me about how "SAIDs" work... I thought I already learned that... the #1 below seems very CESR related... are SAIDs and CESR tightly coupled? or are they independent concepts? Making an ID with an eye toward how it will be serialized seems... unnecessarily coupled.

  8. Sep 2024
    1. nobody told it what to do that's that's the kind of really amazing and frightening thing about these situations when Facebook gave uh the algorithm the uh uh aim of increased user engagement the managers of Facebook did not anticipate that it will do it by spreading hatefield conspiracy theories this is something the algorithm discovered by itself the same with the capture puzzle and this is the big problem we are facing with AI

      for - AI - progress trap - example - Facebook AI algorithm - target - increase user engagement - by spreading hateful conspiracy theories - AI did this autonomously - no morality - Yuval Noah Harari story

    1. My long term vision for Falcon is to make a web application platform which trivializes server deployment. Ideally, a web application can fully describe all its components: HTTP servers, databases, periodic jobs, background jobs, remote management, etc. Currently, it is not uncommon for all these facets to be handled independently in platform specific ways. This can make it difficult to set up new instances as well as make changes to underlying infrastructure. I hope Falcon can address some of these issues in a platform agnostic way.
  9. Aug 2024
    1. two decades ago, the influential environmentalist Herbert Girardet (1999) was still posing the relationship between the two as a potential ‘contradiction in terms’. What happened? Why does everyone think cities can save the planet, and why now?

      for - question - sustainable cities - how did the contradiction of sustainability and cities posed by Herbert Girardet in 1999 get resolved?

  10. May 2024
    1. how exactly has Europe managed to avoid an American style opioid crisis surprisingly it 00:06:18 turns out we can thank authentic Afghan heroin for the relative lack of deaths

      for - question - how EU avoided synthetic opiod crisis until now?

      question - how did EU avoid synthetic opiod crisis until now? - answer - authentic Afghan Heroin - but with the crackdown on poppy in Afghanistan, EU drug users are primed to start using synthetic opiods

  11. idp2p.github.io idp2p.github.io
  12. Apr 2024
  13. Sep 2023
    1. Why did the chicken cross the road?

      To get to his zettelkasten on the other side!

      But when he got there, he realized he had forgotten the slip of paper with his perfect evergreen note. So the chicken crossed the road once again to retrieve it. But almost as if it were a jokerzettel, on the way back, a gust of wind blew the slip right out of the chicken's beak!

      The chicken tried to catch the runaway slip, but it kept evading him. He chased that slip all over the farm--through the pig sty, over fences, around the grain silo.

      Finally, exhausted but triumphant, the chicken caught the slip and carefully filed it away.

      Moral of the story: Don't count your slips before they're indexed!

  14. May 2023
  15. Apr 2023
  16. Feb 2023
    1. Approaching this project, I felt committed to writing a story that could stand on its own; a story that achieved the same things I want ANY of my stories to achieve; a story to which the response might be not, “I see what you did there”, but: “I loved this!”

      "I see what you did there" as a genre of writing is interesting for its cleverness, but many authors will prefer readers to love their work instead of admiring their cleverness in one part.

  17. Jan 2023
  18. Dec 2022
  19. Nov 2022
  20. Oct 2022