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#pmc

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‘Omg, did PubMed go dark?’ Blackout stokes fears about database’s future
nature.com/articles/d41586-025

A brief outage has focused attention on scientists’ reliance on the US-government-funded website.

Comment: a fundamental and vitally important biomedical resource, the importance of which cannot be understated.

www.nature.com‘Omg, did PubMed go dark?’ Blackout stokes fears about database’s futureA brief outage has focused attention on scientists’ reliance on the US-government-funded website.
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The main problem is that any scientist in the world who is starting research on an healthcare related topic starts by looking for reference literature via #Pubmed.
Even if the paper is not hosted on #PMC you'll get the abstract, possibly some figures, citations and the authors.

Ummmm... From #wikipedia:

The #WagnerGroup (Russian: #ГруппаВагнера, romanized: Gruppa Vagnera), officially known as PMC Wagner (ЧВК «Вагнер»), is a #Russian state-funded private military company (#PMC) controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir #Putin, and since then by Pavel Prigozhin. The Wagner Group has used infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces. Evidence suggests that Wagner has been used as a proxy by the Russian government, allowing it to have plausible deniability for military operations abroad, and hiding the true casualties of Russia's foreign interventions.

"The group emerged during the war in #Donbas, where it helped Russian separatist forces in #Ukraine from 2014 to 2015. Wagner played a significant role in the later full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, for which it recruited Russian prison #inmates for frontline combat. By the end of 2022, its strength in Ukraine had grown from 1,000 to between 20,000 and 50,000. It was reportedly Russia's main assault force in the Battle of Bakhmut. Wagner has also supported regimes friendly with Russia, including in the civil wars in #Syria, #Libya, the #CentralAfricanRepublic, and #Mali. In Africa, it has offered regimes security in exchange for the transfer of diamond and gold mining contracts to Russian companies. Wagner operatives have been accused of #WarCrimes including #murder, #torture, #rape and #robbery of #civilians, as well as #torturing and killing accused #Deserters.

[...]

"Early in 2020, #ErikPrince, founder of the #Blackwater private military company, sought to provide military services to the Wagner Group in its operations in Libya and #Mozambique, according to The Intercept. By March 2021, Wagner PMCs were reportedly also deployed in #Zimbabwe, #Angola, #Guinea, #GuineaBissau, and possibly the #DemocraticRepublicOfCongo."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_G
#ErikPrinceColonialism #PutinsArmy #CorporateColonialism #Oligarchy

en.wikipedia.orgWagner Group - Wikipedia
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Another major development in Gaza today is that an American mercenary outfit is now operating in Gaza in areas that the IOF wishes to continue controlling. This group is likely staffed by Americans.

The US based mercenaries were seen driving white trucks and being guided by IOF soldiers to where they will be stationed.

#Gaza#OSINT#IOF

“With nearly 70% of its teaching staff on precarious contracts, Oxford is one of the worst offenders, but this is an issue that extends across UK higher education.”

#RebeccaAbrams, 2024

theguardian.com/education/2024

Not just the UK either. I know people who have been on similar gig contracts at NZ universities, and I've read worse stories about the US. Another product of the PMC (Professional-Managerial Class)

The Guardian · Academics win claim against Oxford University over ‘sham contracts’By Sally Weale

The article I linked in my recent posts on news bias at the BBC are yet another symptom of the Professional-Managerial Class. Which the late David Graeber excoriated in his article on the way they're wrecking academia;

davidgraeber.org/papers/anthro

The idea that "management" is a particular set of skills - transferable from retail stores, to newsrooms, to airlines, to governments - is a dangerous nonsense. One that is rapidly driving human societies towards a cliff.

(1/?)

David GraeberAnthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class - David GraeberMany of the internal changes within anthropology as a discipline—particularly the “postmodern turn” of the 1980s—can only be understood in the context of broader changes in the class composition of the societies in which university departments exist, and, in particular, the role of the university in the reproduction of a professional-managerial class that has come […]

Once again, I have to say, I absolutely love Catherine Liu’s book, VIRTUE HOARDERS: THE CASE AGAINST THE PROFESSIONAL MANAGERIAL CLASS.

I am rereading it again and it makes even more sense this time. I realize that I have been a member of the PMC (on a lower rung for sure) for years and have, at times, fallen for its wiles. I think it’s fair to say this is the class that lost the 2024 election, and predictably so.
#PMC #socialism #politics #culture #liberals #virtue

The things that I work on have not changed much for December Adventure so its going to be the same things that I usually work on, but now they are going to be shared :) The projects I work on currently are around Scheme/Guile, Guix and XMPP.

An intro since its the first post and I haven't announced my project really:
I have worked for about a year on my Networks of Consent XMPP app built on top of Spritely with Gnunet as transport and with Permacomputing Principles. Majority of work on this is writing standards (XEPs) to make XMPP work on top of a different model than it currently has. (Distributed, content-addressed, object capability based, Multicast, Pull not push architecture as some examples). Last few months development has picked up by a lot so that is a big part of what I am working on now.

Last few days I finished a XEP draft of how OCapN would work on top of XMPP. You can find it here
codeberg.org/Applesauce/Guile_
Next steps would be writing the code so that Semantic XMPP, Framing and ERIS can be started to be added on top. Together with documenting the differences with current XMPP standards of course.

Codeberg.orgGuile_XMPP/Documentation/XEPs/OCapN.md at mainGuile_XMPP - XMPP library using Spritely and written in Guile
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Along these lines ...

"[Catherine Liu and Olúfémi Táíwò] explain, for instance, why the Democratic party in the US (and many social democratic parties in Europe) is increasingly a club for the rich and educated, while many working-class voters have abandoned it. They illuminate, too, our culture’s obsession with the minutiae of symbolic representation and the policing of language but disregard for real material inequalities."

#KenanMalik, 2024

theguardian.com/commentisfree/

The Guardian · Cosplaying social justice is the new elitist way of elbowing out the working classBy Kenan Malik

Hamadine Driss Ag Mohamed, son of #Abeibara’s village chief, told AP that Malian soldiers and fighters from the Russian mercenary group #Wagner had killed 46 civilians.

“The Malian and Wagner soldiers executed old men and shepherds and stole everything they found in the camps such as money and valuable jewelry”.

#Mali #FAMa #Sahel #HumanRights #Russia #PMC

apnews.com/article/mali-violen

AP News · Mali's army and Russian mercenaries accused of killing dozens of civilians in Kidal regionBy ASSOCIATED PRESS