ATACMS (pronounced “attack ’ems”).

The ballistic missiles are known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems,
or ATACMS (pronounced “attack ’ems”).

Ukraine’s military used American-made ATACMS missiles to strike into Russia for the first time on Tuesday, according to senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

Two days earlier, the Biden administration had authorized Ukraine to use the U.S.-supplied ballistic missiles for attacks inside Russia for the first time, in a major policy shift.

The ballistic missiles are known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS (pronounced “attack ’ems”).

Where the six went ...

Ukraine deployed ATACMS missiles to strike a military facility in the western Bryansk region, Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement on Telegram. It was the first known attack following the decision by President Joe Biden’s administration to approve Kyiv’s limited use of the weapons to hit targets inside Russia, two months before Donald Trump takes over promising to quickly end the war.

The inevitable blowback on Biden's decision to possibly invoke war with Russia.

Meanwhile, Putin signed a decree allowing Russia to fire nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack on its soil that threatens its sovereignty, including by drones. Russia will view aggression against itself or its allies by a non-nuclear state backed by a nuclear power as a joint attack, the document posted online said. That follows a pledge Putin made in September to revise the doctrine.

The revised doctrine ...

“Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is proposed to be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation,” Putin said in televised comments to Russia’s Security Council on Wednesday.

Let's think about this. Question, Is Ukraine under the Russian Sphere of influence as the last time I checked, Ukraine's not part of Queens. As much as yours truly detests Putin, the start point for this ongoing disaster centeres on the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO, a red line issue Putin considers to be sacrosanct due to the proximity of Ukraine to Moscow, something recognized by the US to be a valid concern back in the 80's and 90's. 

Factoid one ...

Kissinger confirms US verbal promise to Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastward

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger admitted that the US promised the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO to the East, but only verbally.

 

According to the politician, there were no official commitments stipulated in the written agreements, it was a personal promise of the then head of the State Department, James Baker.

 

“I know it's true, but it's never been written down. So we are right in saying that there was no official commitment," Kissinger said.

Earlier, the former US Secretary of State stated that European countries are against Ukraine joining NATO. The politician added that the opponents of Ukraine's entry into the alliance explained that this "issue requires careful study".

Factoid two ...

Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence.

In crises over Berlin in 1948 and 1961, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague in 1968, U.S. forces in Europe stayed in their barracks.

We saw the Elbe as Moscow’s red line, and they saw it as ours.

While Reagan sent weapons to anti-Communist rebels in Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, to the heroic Poles of Gdansk he sent only mimeograph machines.

That Cold War caution and prudence may be at an end.

It is.

Does Biden & company have a clue about what they have done?
Seems not after reading quotes from people who obviously do.

Carl Von Clausewitz

“No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.”

“Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult”

“War is merely the continuation of politics by other means”

“...the side that feels the lesser urge for peace will naturally get the better bargain.”

Sun Tzu

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

“To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.”

“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”

“One mark of a great soldier is that he fight on his own terms or fights not at all.”

Musashi

“You can only fight the way you practice”

“If you do not control the enemy, the enemy will control you”

“Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.”

“To become the enemy, see yourself as the enemy of the enemy”

Lastly ...

Orwell

“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. 

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred,
comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well,
others will do their thinking for them.”

Lest we forget ...

In the end, as per Orwell's first quote, the  MIC rules because the Ukraine tragedy, like Vietnam, like Iraq and like Afghanistan, is all about the money. Always has been, always will be.

Glimpses ...

Of B&W

Channeling the 50s

Angle 1

Mirror, Mirror

A cloud beckons

4/C Variant

The Procuress

The Procuress

Artist Johannes Vermeer

Year 1656

Medium Oil on canvas

Movement Dutch Golden Age painting

Dimensions 143 cm × 130 cm (56 in × 51 in)

Location Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Love the slyness of Vermeer in his wonderful painting, The Procuress, depicting lust and an ongoing business transaction with delicious irony and consummate taste. Awesome to a fault, complete with a possible self portrait (the man on the left) of an artist for the ages. :)

Htrae

Quote1 Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness!
Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World! 

Back in 2017, yours truly did a piece, you guessed it, titled Bizarro World, describing The Donald's first administration through the eyes of a different reality driven by rage, incompetence and an astounding lack of understanding the art of governance in every way, shape or fashion. Now, fast forward to 2024 and channel Groundhog Day through the lens of Htrae, the alternative DC universe indirectly depicting the 2nd coming of Trump but this time, one sees the gloves are off when one has the intestinal fortitude to analyze the "quality" of his incoming cabinet coming to us on
January 21st, 2025.

Lest we forget ...

To be continued ...

Wind ...

Existence is ...

To yours truly, there are sounds most profound, the kinds one never gets tired of like those of the ocean or a stream but for me, the sound of wind moving through trees is the one. Primal, invisible save for the motion of objects the wind moves through, resides in the memory of the mind forever. 

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act,

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, a set of actions defined by John Boyd's OODA loop. shows, in depth, the steps every organism takes in order to survive also applies to better understanding how the limits of knowledge, driven by uncertainty, incompleteness and entropy, depict a reality we will never fully understand.  To see why, the animation depicting one example of chaos beckons. :) 

An animation of a double-rod pendulum at an intermediate energy showing chaotic behavior.
Starting the pendulum from a slightly different initial condition would result in a vastly different trajectory. The double-rod pendulum is one of the simplest dynamical systems with chaotic solutions.

Interesting enough, OODA, when examined closely, relates to the act of creation without question.

Cause I'm a million miles away

And at the same time, I'm right here in your picture frame. Jimi Hendrix | Voodoo Chile

1. The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler: The creative act is the joining together of two or more seemingly dissimilar ideas that generate a heretofore unexpected result. i.e. Chemistry - H20 consists of 2 Hydrogen + 1 Oxygen atoms, both explosive yet, when combined, becomes water. 
2. The joke: Henny Youngman - Take my wife, Please. :)
3. Creativity starts with curiosity, the start point to the asking of a question:
   Why is this the way it is?
4. Question everything - Einstein
5. Creation & destruction is part of the creative process as everything has a cost thanks to the two laws of thermodynamics.
6. The ability to see relationships is key as everything is connected because reality is a Quantum space and entanglement stitches it together.
7. The creative act is always visual. Think Stevie Wonder and Songs in the Keys of life.
8. Play is indispensable. What if ... is the real deal here. A sense of wonderment is key.
9. Creativity takes courage as new ideas disrupt the "natural" order of things.
10. Creativity is problem-solving. It matters not the discipline used save that said discipline shapes how the creative act is produced.
11. The act itself is ineffable and cannot be explained. Like quantum, creativity just happens. It cannot be forced, only acted upon when the idea shows up. The finished act can be explained after the fact without question.
12. Practice makes better. Beginners mind and intuition rule.
13. Attention to details.
14. Passion is a prerequisite to create anything of value.
15. The creative act is selfish. One does not create for others, only for oneself.
16. The size of the problem solved dictates the significance of the creative act. i.e. Mixing anchovies with pineapples on a pizza is a creative act. The size or importance of the problem solved, not so much while Einstein's Theory of relativity proving that Newton was wrong at universal scale, is.
17. Creativity, like tech and existence, has no morality. It simply is.
18. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Stewart Brand/Whole Earth Catalog. :)
19. AI is but a tool, the issue now becomes, does the tool become the master? A good question to ask is it not?
20. Being first to come up with a new idea is essential. Darwin & Wallace relates as Wallace was two weeks later than Darwin in explaining why evolution matters.
21. The Act of Creation, whenever possible, runs counter to the limits of knowledge as needs warrant.

Circularity

 Characteristics of great art

1. Clarity.
2. Simplicity. It's easy to be complex, simplicity is hard. Einstein: Keep it simple, not simpler.
3. Good artists create, great artists steal. - Picasso
4. Great art always involves the process of discovery.
5. Timeless. Bach, like fine wine, never ages.
6. No spin. 
7. Details, details, details.
8. As stated before, great art applies to all disciplines.
9. Connections to differing disciplines apply.
10. Less is more. Dizzy Gillespie
11. Great artists are never afraid to make mistakes.
12. Doggedness. It takes thousands of hours to become good at something. 

TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order
by Pierre Dos Utt (1949)

Connections example ...

Kanji characters for shodō (書道)

Kind of Blue is considered to be the greatest jazz album of all time even though
Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth is right up there on the pantheon of the greatest of all time IMHO. This is not about KOB per se but rather about Bill Evans' liner notes and why his writing is just as profound as the album itself because it's all about improv and it's role in the creative process.

To whit.

There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.

This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.

Details example ... 

There was a problem with the orbit of Mercury. Seems it was off by 1/100th of a degree thanks to Newtonian mechanics, an error Einstein knew had to be corrected if we are to better understand how the universe works at deep level. To that end, General Relativity and the notion of space time came to be or in John Wheeler's words, Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

A notion of Einstein's Special Relativity ... Vue style :)

Remember, walking is controlled falling. 

Blurring the lines ...

Did a little mixing of Vue 3D images with real footage depicting a fall for the ages thanks to, unfortunately, a drought for the ages, courtesy Climate Change. :)

"A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma"

John Aster lives here ...

This pix indirectly relates to the fact the net's becoming an ad infested surveillance platform as said connected utility of the world is too important for the power elite and governments to allow it to remain free for all to use without being spied upon or censored as needs warrant.

Media ecologist Andrey Mir argues that the internet has transformed from a tool of liberation to a mechanism of social control. Mir traces this shift across successive web eras — from the 1990s and 2000s, when the internet granted individuals unprecedented access to information and self-expression, to the heightened regulation we see today. Rather than seeking to “fix” this evolution, Mir suggests individuals must decide whether to resist or adapt to a digitally regulated world.

Twenty years ago, the internet was a medium liberating people from state control. Now, the internet is increasingly seen as a threat triggering calls to restore state control over online behavior. The latest twist in this trend is the growing demand to criminally prosecute both users and platforms for unacceptable speech or behavior. How did we get here? 

Web 1.0: The global library with free access

The earliest version of the web, Web 1.0, granted people far greater individual access to information. This alone challenged the old order in which elites controlled the mechanisms of “manufacturing consent” through news media, education, and entertainment. 

Uncontrolled flows of information undermined the elites’ monopoly over knowledge. But information alone was not the key. It was not the content but the very mode of access — the medium — that began to undermine authority. A close analogy: After the printing press made the Bible affordable to the masses, it wasn’t the verses of the Bible that triggered the Protestant Reformation, but rather the ability of a layman to read the Bible independently of a priest’s choice, find inconsistencies, and question the Church’s authority. The affordability of access to the Bible made it clear, for the first time, that the Church’s perspective is just that: a view. 

Web 5.0

The idea of Web 5.0 paints a future where platforms operate not only as businesses but also as proxies for the state, employing their power over users on behalf of governments in exchange for the license to keep doing business. The combination of censorship, algorithmic control, and the criminalization of online behavior will only grow more sophisticated as digital platforms continue to evolve and converge with the state. Both political elites and corporations seek greater control; the growing digital platformization of users/citizens will provide more opportunities to gain it.

Web 6.0

In the near future, AI rules as cheaply generated misinformation runs riot, kept under the control by the deep state, where "truth" becomes an entity residing in  "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma"

Charles Thatcher is a typical citizen in a future hyper-capitalist society. He is the property of Ackerman Brothers Securities Corporation and in this society, every commodity, even air, is sold on the market. The population is kept under control with horrific punishments delivered by a corrupt, profit-driven police service.

Sound familiar?

A Dumpster Fire ...

A Dumpster Fire for the ages looms now that Agent Orange is on track for a second term as POTUS thanks to a feckless democratic party not knowing how to elect anyone to office as important as the presidency. With this being said, core competency is required whereby people possessing suitable skill sets are placed in relevant positions of power able to run a country in competent fashion under the leadership of the president, something FDR knew at deep level (Eleanor anyone? :)), a concept not understood by the incoming disaster known at The Donald. 

His first term was termed The Clown Show. The second will be The Dumpster Fire. Yours truly will not list the names of incompetents intended to populate his administration save for the fact Musk, in an unofficial position of co-efficiency expert, reminds one of The Man Who Came to Dinner as it seems Musk is channeling this sharp comedy by hanging out at Mar-a-Lago to the extent even Trump & Co think it to be a little weird.

Theatrical release poster featuring
Davis, Sheridan, Durante and Wooley

Guest who does not want to go home? Reports say, post Donald Trump victory in U.S election,
  Elon Musk hasn't left Mar-a-Lago

According to DailyBeast, Elon Musk has been dining with Donald Trump and his family while also participating in discussions with world leaders and influencing staffing decisions for the upcoming administration.

DailyBeast reported that in spite of not holding an official position, Elon Musk's presence has raised eyebrows among Donald Trump's transition team while Elon Musk is being perceived as the ‘guest who wouldn’t leave’.

Elon Musk joined President-elect Donald Trump and his family for a victory “squad” photo in the wake of his election win, but Melania was noticeably missing. @KaiTrumpGolfs/X

Sheridan Whiteside lives. :)

Revolver Maps is no more ...

NYC yet again

Sadly, the revolving globe showing people from varying countries checking out BRT is no more. It crapped out three times prior in losing viewer counts but now the company maintaining the app is gone. Next up is Pageviews tallying how many hits this "huge" blog has gotten over the years. Seems over a million to date, something but a pittance compared to so many other entities out there but I'll take it. Thanks yet again to you my loyal readers. It means a lot. :)

Best

Robert E.

Bethlehem Steel @ Nite

Random Shots ... Fall 24

Off in the distance ...

Moving toward the Middle

Exit

Intersect

The Observer ...

Channeling Bach

Iridescence

2 way street

The "press"

Faisal Bashir/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images

Yours truly's take on the "press" is somewhat biased due to the fact I worked as one of the lead artists at Satellite News Channel, the 24/7 precursor to Turner, CNBC and CNN. News back then required in depth expertise and resources to cover a story including a film crew to go on location, a reporter to describe the event in question and a team of artists, writers and video editors to do the necessary edit prior  to airing the news item as soon as possible. Now, we either have gossip in the guise of covering just one story for one hour discussed by "pundits" rather than describing what happened at that particular moment in time without spin or ... delivering "safe" commentary on ongoing humanitarian disasters like Gaza, Lebanon or Ukraine. If one actually reads articles by the Washington Post or the NYTimes, self censorship and timidity come to mind, especially when dealing with the rather questionable Trump campaign where Agent Orange showed the world just how truly unfit he is for office in ways boggling the mind.

More to the point, Donald Trump ran the single worst campaign I have ever seen, and possibly the worst in American history. He constantly insulted huge swaths of voters. He outsourced his ground game to Elon Musk, who by all accounts wasted much of the money. He held a huge rally in direct echo of the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden that might have been even more racist than the original. He was visibly decompensating on stage several times. He spent the last week of the campaign pretending to fellate a microphone and whipping up a completely incomprehensible panic about some porn star’s squirrel.

And that was in addition to the fact that he has been convicted of 34 felonies, held legally liable for sexual abuse, and attempted to overthrow the government.

None of it mattered. Trump won, and he won by a lot. Why?

Again, I’d look skeptically at any pat explanations. But the information environment—the combination of traditional journalism, social media, party propaganda, and so on—is preposterously biased and inadequate. Trump brushed aside any of about a thousand scandals that would have sunk any previous politician. Democrats need to take a long, hard look at what their information strategy should be, and more importantly, how their messaging can be reliably and consistently put in front of voters.

Factoid: Dems don't know how to campaign, period.  As per James Caravelle, It's the economy, stupid along with immigration and women's rights, not Trump. In essence, the voters's concerns were not being listened to, that's why Trump won.

Another question to ask as to why coverage was so timid and biased relates to who owns the media as the coverage on Trump was pretty consistent because the power elite, who own the media, are in the business of making money and fear mongering and Trump do just that along with the additional bon bon ... facts don's matter, do they?

In the very, very old days, TV was simple. There were three channels, you sat on your couch, and you watched whatever they showed you.

That’s all different now, and much more complicated. Also more complicated: Figuring out which media or tech conglomerate owns the rights to the shows and movies you want to watch. We write about this stuff for a living, and we still get confused about it.

Which is why we’ve produced the map below, which sketches out the relative size, power, and relationships between the companies that make, own, and distribute the stuff we watch at home, on our phones, and even sometimes in a theater.

We’ve been making this one for four years. And each time we’ve created a new edition, we’ve promised that the map would continue changing, and it certainly has this time around.

Any questions?

4 Studies

3 Body Problem

Cloud Reveal

Alignment

Moonrise

Uncertainty ...

The Excession - Channeling Ian Banks ...

The Excession ... is a perfect black-body sphere that appears to be older than the Universe

The Uncertainty Principle,  a concept created by Werner Heisenberg, describes how reality works at deep level as  It's everywhere. With this being said, the uncertainty principle also applies to AI because we don't know how it works due to software having to write software in order for said tech to react to the real world in real time. Removing all restrictions to something as mysterious and powerful as this is folly but this is exactly what Trump intends to do when becoming POTUS in 2025.

"We will repeal Joe Biden's dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI innovation and imposes radical left-wing ideas on the development of this technology," Trump stated in his campaign platform. "In its place, Republicans support AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing."

Through an executive order, the Biden administration passed its existing AI regulations in October 2023 using a national defense act from 1950 as justification, meaning in the eyes of his opponents they were already on tenuous legal ground. That's not really relevant now, though, since all Trump has to do is pass a counter-order to negate it.

The tech-bro-slash-accelerationist and conservative critique of the Biden AI order is mostly directed at two of its provisions, in Wired's analysis.

Trump’s election to a second term would dramatically reshape—and possibly cripple—efforts to protect Americans from the many dangers of poorly designed artificial intelligence, including misinformation, discrimination, and the poisoning of algorithms used in technology like autonomous vehicles.

One lays out new requirements for how tech companies test and conduct risk assessments of their AI models, a practice known as "red-teaming." Under the Biden provision, companies developing large AI models are required to share all red-team test results to the federal government for review, assessing for things like how vulnerable the AIs are to being hacked. Critics paint this process as needlessly slowing down the pace of AI development and forcing companies to disclose their trade secrets.

The other provision of note requires the National Institute of Standards and Technology to author guidance on, among other things, ensuring AI models are free of biases that could discriminate against certain groups based on factors like race or gender. That's the part that Trump and his ilk see as imposing "radical left-wing ideas."

It's impossible to separate the conversation from Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and X-formerly-Twitter. He has criticized large AI models like ChatGPT for being "woke," and launched his own AI startup and chatbot, a venture couched in the techno-optimist rhetoric of "understanding the universe." Indeed, Musk sued OpenAI earlier this year purportedly for the "benefit of humanity," because the now Microsoft-backed start up departed from its initial non-profit aims.

Those point to an ulterior motive. As a huge donor to the Trump campaign, for which he's earned a spot in the incoming president's inner circle, Musk stands to gain a whole lot from Trump's relaxed regulations, which could allow his AI ventures to gain ground on his big tech competitors that had a years-long head start.

Remember, its all about the money ...

A Simple Matter of Refraction

Note: Said images are NOT AI generated as both pix were created in Vue.