Links and Notes for March 18th, 2022

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Video Games

Economy & Finance

Nickel Can’t Find a Price by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“But just as in nickel the point is that, when your required margin goes up 1,000% overnight, you have an immediate cash need that you might not be able to meet by saying “well but all our oil in the ground has also become more valuable.” In some economic sense that’s correct, but you need the money today, and the oil is in the ground. And so the risk is that you won’t be able to meet margin calls, that you might be forced to buy back futures and push the price up even higher, that this will become a vicious cycle, that the futures price will become disconnected from economic fundamentals, that some market participants with good underlying businesses will go bankrupt, that the market will stop working.”

Only regulation helps here. It’s supremely unhelpful to blow established players out of a market by producing an extremely ephemeral, wholly artificial, and unsustainable bubble. Sure, absolutely, fuck the established players (they probably deserve it for one reason or another), but what would replace them is probably even more criminal, and definitely more amateur. Chaos does no-one any good. Regular people will suffer while the elites jostle for supremacy.

“Ask central banks to step in and pay your margin requirements for you. The major central banks essentially cannot run out of money, so this solves the problem completely. And if the diagnosis is correct — that the economic fundamentals are fine, but weird technical margin-call issues might blow up otherwise healthy companies — then the risk to the central banks is minimal; they will just fix the market and get their money bank.”

“In abstract theory it would also be bad for Russia, because a country that is in default will have a tough time borrowing in international debt markets. But of course the sanctions did that already, and Russia can’t really borrow any more dollars from its international bondholders, so defaulting on the debt would not change its position much. A default would be bad for bondholders and not particularly bad for Russia.”

“Lunch Ladies” Are Tired of Being Underpaid and Overlooked by Nora De La Cour (Jacobin)

“Because, in Heather Hillenbrand’s words, “it’s more heating than cooking,” school districts and their contractors are able to reduce the hours of a de-skilled cafeteria workforce down to a low enough weekly number that many, like Hillenbrand, do not qualify for health insurance.”

Mission accomplished.

Public Policy & Politics

Ted Rall 3-18-22

The Only Thing That Can Save Ukraine is Secession by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“Volodymyr Zelensky has been transformed by the sexiest cult of personality since the last half-fuckable Kennedy got popped and a strange new “antiwar” movement has hit the streets across the globe demanding peace through crippling sanctions and omnicidal thermonuclear no-fly-zones.”

“[…] anyone who so much as even suggests that maybe just maybe twenty years of NATO harassment may have played a role in provoking this mess is declared a heretic and burned at the stake while the Ukrainian National Anthem drowns out your screams.”

“What’s going on in Ukraine is undeniably despicable. Even if it was provoked by American imperialism, Vladimir Putin is still a baby-killing savage engaged in a grotesque regime change campaign that rivals anything that NATO has pulled in the Middle East.”

“Innocent people are dying, civilian infrastructure is being bombarded, and an entire population is being held hostage by the kind of conquest anti-imperialists like me have devoted our lives to speak out against. It’s just a little disgusting to be joined by the same cable chickenhawks who have either ignored or cheered on identical acts of savagery for decades and not just in the Middle East either. The thing that sickens me most about America’s imperial double-standard is that it has totally trivialized the plight of the people who allegedly inspired Putin’s rage. Everybody gives a fuck about Ukraine but there are zero fucks left to be given for the people of the Donbas.”

“These poverty-stricken people have spent the better part of a decade under siege, cowering in their basements as crooks like Zelensky have given Neo-Nazi mercenaries like the Azov Battalion the green light to pepper them with indiscriminate shelling that includes the use of cluster munitions. All for the unforgivable sin of seceding from a nation they were never asked to be made a part of in the first place.”

“The only solution to this evil is a system of pan-secession where popular autonomy is placed above state power as a fundamental human right.Novorossiya has as much right to independence from Ukraine as Ukraine has to independence from Russia and there exists zero reason why this sovereignty should even be completely territorial in nature.”

“People say secession is anarchy. I say exactly. What has the state ever done but pit impoverished neighbors against one another when they could peacefully coexist without it? Fuck NATO and fuck Putin. The only thing that can save Ukraine is secession. I’ll proudly salute the blue and yellow flag so long as it stands tall with a thousand others.”

Shadows Within Shadows by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“More likely, that dollar number and the weaponry talk are fantasies intended to propitiate the roughly thirty percent of Americans whom, pollsters report, are avid for an apocalyptic nuclear showdown with Russia.”

“America’s gift of javelin missiles by former president Trump, has reportedly taken a heavy toll on Russian tanks and helicopters, confounding their advance. That is hardly the whole story. The Russians have surrounded the hardiest units of Ukraine’s army in the contested Donbass region. These include the alleged neo-Nazi Azov brigades dug-in around Luhansk and Donetsk for eight years, and busy all that time shelling the Russian-speaking population there with American-supplied munitions. Those Azov brigades now face the choice of surrender or annihilation. They have no contact with whatever remains of Ukrainian military command.”

John Podhoretz, You Suck by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“In a just world he’d be wedged naked in an innertube and dropped in the Bering Strait just for allowing himself to think he gets to decide who is and isn’t American, much less publishing the idea.”

“The post-invasion ingratitude of Iraqis was one thing, but the mass rejection of their ideas in 2016 by a red-state lumpenproletariat that had been ordered for years on Fox to revere their giant brains was a betrayal neocons would never forget.”

“True, they’d botched every actual policy initiative they’d ever tried, and defamed the last party they’d advised to the point where 60 million of its voters fled to a game show host who was trying to lose, but they were at least willing to ram their tongues all the way up the right places.”

“Podhoretz wants the world to believe that being “American” means using force to “defend and protect our liberties, at home and abroad.” He would have you believe that “hip liberals” like me hate America because we’re reluctant to use force to expand our “benevolent hegemony” around the world.”

“The neocons’ resurgence is one of the great inside plays of all time. A microscopic group of verbose pinheads with zero popular support and an unbroken record of spectacular failure regaining influence this quickly is nothing to sneeze at. But watch: disbelief in “live and let live” politics means they won’t stop with opposing Putin in Ukraine or tweeting the odd accusation of treason. They’ll push for regime change in Moscow and sooner or later seek a more permanent solution to “ingratitude” at home, probably by tearing out the chunks of the constitution they missed the last time.”

“Apart from certainty that they belong at the seat of power in a unipolar world, these people have no beliefs, or none they wouldn’t be willing to shed in a heartbeat in order to maintain influence. This makes them repulsive, but hardier than mold. If you didn’t like the first movie, brace yourself. The sequel is here.”

The History Behind Putin’s War in Ukraine by Anatol Lieven (Jacobin)

“In 2014, it was obvious from funding — including by institutions that are rather comically in America called nongovernmental institutions even though they’re funded by Congress like the National Endowment for Democracy [NED] — to the Ukrainian opposition made clear the West’s desire to overthrow the then-elected government of Ukraine, President [Viktor] Yanukovych. [The NED has deleted the records of its grants to Ukraine on its website; they’re archived here.]”

“You will not be able to create anything but the most grotesque, ridiculous, obvious puppet authority in Kiev. If that’s what Putin wants, it will lack all legitimacy. It will be totally incapable of running a stable state. It will face continual protests and resistance, which will have to be put down by ruthless means. And it will necessitate the permanent presence of a Russian army to keep it in place, just like the Soviet Union or America in Afghanistan.”

“So, I have this horrible feeling that if they can’t get a peace agreement, which allows them to claim a measure of success, that they will feel that they have no choice but to go on, irrespective of the destruction and the civilian casualties. My own view is we should all seek a negotiated solution now because it may be that in ten years, twenty years, we will get basically the same solution that we could have gotten today. The difference of course, will be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Ukrainian lives.”

“I haven’t noticed that any of these people calling for no-fly zones are going to be flying US or NATO planes themselves. As far as I can see there are no pilots among them. As I’ve said again several times in recent days, chicken hawks don’t fly, they squat on the ground at a very safe distance and squawk loudly.”

“Now I’m very afraid that a good many people in the American security establishment do want to use this to destroy Russia as a state. That condemns us to endless warfare against Russia, with everything that would mean for the world economy. It condemns Ukraine to endless war with horrible suffering for the Ukrainian people. But also, a program of sanctions, which is openly aimed at what many Russians would see as not just getting rid of Putin but destroying the Russian state, could have the completely opposite result.”

“[…] similar sanctions aimed at regime change in Cuba, in Iraq, in Venezuela, in Iran, in North Korea have all failed. All of them, without exception. And so all one can say is, look, it could be different in the case of Russia, but there are no historical grounds to believe this.”

“If China would step in and broker a reasonable compromise, this will be an excellent thing, because I don’t trust the United States to do so, to be honest, given the strength of the anti-Russian agendas here and the desire of some people actually to turn this into a permanent war to destroy Russia. So, I think it would be an excellent thing if the Chinese stepped in, but I also know that America would do everything in its power to block a Chinese-brokered agreement.”

Joint Russia-China Statement Articulates United Opposition to Western Alliance (Scheer Post)

Robert Scheer introduces the document,

“[…] today’s joint statement is an historic, carefully considered articulation of the major shift underway from the de facto unipolar world that has existed since the fall of the Soviet Union and which was the eventual manifestation of post-FDR imperialist US foreign policy through the Cold War. Whatever the reader’s own historical and political framework, understanding the goals and rationales of these powerful nations on this small planet is essential.”

The following are citations from the joint statement.

“Certain States’ attempts to impose their own ”democratic standards“ on other countries, to monopolize the right to assess the level of compliance with democratic criteria, to draw dividing lines based on the grounds of ideology, including by establishing exclusive blocs and alliances of convenience, prove to be nothing but flouting of democracy and go against the spirit and true values of democracy.”

I wonder who they’re referring to?

“They oppose the abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights, and any attempts to incite divisions and confrontation in the world.”

“The sides are gravely concerned about serious international security challenges and believe that the fates of all nations are interconnected. No State can or should ensure its own security separately from the security of the rest of the world and at the expense of the security of other States.”

Three weeks later, Russia invades Ukraine. Where you at with that now, Russia? Making exceptions to the rule for yourself … just like America does?

“Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose colour revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”

“The sides believe that certain States, military and political alliances and coalitions seek to obtain, directly or indirectly, unilateral military advantages to the detriment of the security of others, including by employing unfair competition practices, intensify geopolitical rivalry, fuel antagonism and confrontation, and seriously undermine the international security order and global strategic stability. The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches,”

“The sides welcome the Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapons States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races and believe that all nuclear-weapons States should abandon the cold war mentality and zero-sum games, reduce the role of nuclear weapons in their national security policies, withdraw nuclear weapons deployed abroad, eliminate the unrestricted development of global anti-ballistic missile defense (ABM) system, and take effective steps to reduce the risks of nuclear wars and any armed conflicts between countries with military nuclear capabilities.”

Poor Sergey Lavrov … did he write this thing without Putin?

“Russia and China are deeply concerned about the politicization of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and call on all of its members to strengthen solidarity and cooperation and protect the tradition of consensual decision-making. Russia and China insist that the United States, as the sole State Party to the Convention that has not yet completed the process of eliminating chemical weapons, accelerate the elimination of its stockpiles of chemical weapons.”

I can confirm that they’re still destroying mustard-gas weapons from WWII. I know someone who’s working in that program. They’re way behind schedule, but getting there.

“The sides call for the establishment of a new kind of relationships between world powers on the basis of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation. They reaffirm that the new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ”forbidden“ areas of cooperation, strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.”

Waltzing Toward Armageddon with the Merchants of Death by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“The dollar will plummet in value. Treasury bonds, used to fund America’s massive debt, will become largely worthless. The financial sanctions used to cripple Russia will be, I expect, the mechanism that slays us, if we don’t first immolate ourselves in thermonuclear war.”

“The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler. The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing on Saturday an additional $200 million in military assistance.”

“The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. The crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine are more than matched by the crimes committed by Washington in the Middle East over the last two decades, including the act of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act of aggression.”

“The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter. No diplomacy. No attempt to address the legitimate grievances of our adversaries. No check on rampant militarism. No capacity to see the world from another perspective. No ability to comprehend reality outside the confines of the binary rubric of good and evil. No understanding of the debacles they orchestrated for decades. No capacity for pity or remorse.”

“Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate. China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor, and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die.”

“The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods. And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation.”

Solidarity With Ukraine Doesn’t Mean Calling for More War by Pavlos Roufos (Jacobin)

“The official fairy tales about the need to “denazify” the country, or stop the supposed genocide of a constructed “Russian other” within its borders, would be farcical if not accompanied by such violence.”

This is an ignorant formulation. Ukraine is shelling its own people. Ukraine does have Nazis. Neither justifies an invasion. The U.S. and Germany have Nazis, too. The U.S. is brutal to its minorities. Can’t Invade, though. Nothing justifies invasion. We all got together and decided that after WWII. We all signed a piece of paper. Any transgression is a war crime. No exceptions. Looking at you, Putin, but also looking at you Bush Senior and Junior. Obama. Trump? Didn’t invade, but did step up drone bombings. Those are acts of war, right? Better add that to GWB’s and Obama’s lists, as well.

“Until now, however, the most obvious escalation along similar lines came in an ecstatic speech by the president of European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, a member of Malta’s Nationalist Party. Opening the session on the prospect of fast-tracking Ukrainian EU membership — after a self-congratulatory rundown of the measures already taken, ranging from banning “Kremlin propaganda tools” and boycotting Russian participation in sport events all the way to economic sanctions and the provision of military equipment — Metsola promised that “Europe stands ready to go further still.””

The EU is absolutely lunatic. Thank God for the Irish. See Clare Daley of Ireland coming in hot and Mick Wallace coming in hot.

“After hinting that such noble goals should be shared and widely echoed by “social media and tech conglomerates,” lest they be seen as complicit in Putin’s war, she concluded by urging a massive increase in European military spending, signaling that “investment in our defense must match our rhetoric.” The ease with which her rhetoric became ours was, to say the least, disturbing.”

“Starting from UK foreign secretary Elizabeth Truss’s declaration that “the purpose of sanctions is to debilitate the Russian economy,” French finance minister Bruno Le Maire took matters further by proclaiming that “we are going to wage a total economic and financial war on Russia” with the aim of causing “the collapse of the Russian economy.” Leftish Belgian politician Conner Rousseau took to Instagram to celebrate the prospect of the Russian economy being “strangled to death.””

“Such pressure represents a huge step into unchartered territory. As a former adviser of the US Treasury put it, “We are, with Russia, heading toward an Iran scenario but over the course of several days with a G-20 economy and a major exporter of fossil fuels.” Worse than that, as Dominik Leusder explained, “there is a reason sanctions of this severity have never been levied against a major world power in the nuclear age: they are profoundly dangerous.””

“Nonetheless, mounting calls for including energy supplies in the sanctions package continued. Otherwise, the Wall Street Journal argued, it is hard to conceive a “complete collapse of Russia’s economy.””

“Sanctions’ effectiveness also has to do with them being accompanied by clear (and realistic) demands, as well as a well-defined timeline for their implementation — and withdrawal. The absence of such a framework can be well perceived (and it has on numerous occasions) as an indication that those imposing them will continue even if the immediate trigger for their implementation is gone. Seeking the withdrawal of the Russian army from Ukraine is different from aiming at the “complete collapse of the Russian economy.””

“Such ambiguities are all too present in current sanctions. Given their obvious failure to preemptively deter against territorial expansion, what exactly is the aim at this moment? Punishment? Pressure on Putin’s entourage? The devastation of living conditions in Russia to the point of causing an uprising? A closer look at each of these notions may dispel some myths.”

“[…] the equally discreditable EU Association Agreement of 2012. While “offering” Ukraine a meagre €610 million (as Adam Tooze notes, “there were Ukrainian oligarchs with personal fortunes larger than this”), this demanded massive public spending cuts, a 40 percent increase in gas bills, and the imposition of trade sanctions with Russia whose impact was optimistically calculated at a massive $3 billion per annum.”

“Triggered by geopolitical considerations, and thus indifferent to the fact that Ukraine’s economic capacity for “program compliance” was close to zero, the IMF brokered a deal (with EU, US, and Japanese participation) promising more than $17 billion over two years. The problem was not only that such loans came with heavy strings attached, in the form of sharp public-spending reductions and a series of privatizations that further decimated what remained of the welfare state;”

The IMF’s favorite kind of policies, delivering the most value for their top-of-the-food-chain sponsors to hollow yet another country, all the while claiming to be trying to save it. Sure buddy, fool me twice…

“Our solidarity and practical assistance toward people from Ukraine must remain invariant. Yet it is also possible that support for Russia’s internal enemy will bring a faster end to this war than plans to impoverish them.”

Is the West Laissez-Faire About Economic Warfare? by Esfandyar Batmanghelidj (War on the Rocks)

“Keynes was commenting on the negotiations that would lead to the Versailles Treaty. Against a backdrop of hunger and despair, the victors of World War I condemned Germany to further sanctions. The treaty’s proponents believed that to prevent a future war, the German economy, a “vast fabric built upon iron, coal, and transport,” needed to be “destroyed.” But Keynes understood that with Germany in a state of perpetual crisis, the European economy would never recover. Tearing up Germany’s fabric would keep Europe on the path to another great war.”

“[…] the consequences of such economic disorganization tend to persist even after wars end, whether because of deliberate acts, such as the economic punishment imposed on Germany or now being meted out to Russia, or because of the entropic tendency of economic systems.”

“Nicholas Mulder’s The Economic Weapon, published in January 2022, tells the story of the development of sanctions as a tool of modern warfare. Mulder chronicles the political, legal, and institutional innovations that enabled states to begin using blockades, embargoes, and export controls during peacetime to change the behavior of targeted states.”

“Mulder draws on the speeches, letters, and reports of prominent sanctionists to make clear that the economic deprivation of civilian populations was an intended aim of peacetime sanctions. President Woodrow Wilson, a key proponent, boasted about the power of sanctions to affect ordinary people, describing the measures as “something more tremendous than war” because of their ability to bring “a nation to its senses just as suffocation removes from the individual all inclinations to fight.””

Woodrow Wilson was truly a monster. Hell, most 20th-century American presidents have been monsters. Truman dropped the bomb. Nixon and Johnson had the Vietnam war. Bush Senior had his Gulf War. His son had the next one. Bill Clinton imprisoned America. And so on and so forth.

“As Western brands flee the country and as Western banks cut ties, Russian officials, who have characterized Western sanctions as an “economic war,” will no doubt be questioning the benefits of participation in a liberal economic order. Chinese officials will be watching closely.”

Their participation in “our” economy was only ever allowed as subordinates, as vassals.

“For now, no such renegotiation appears to be forthcoming and the global attitude towards economic war continues to be decidedly laissez-faire. Western states that painstakingly rebuilt a liberal economic order after World War II are increasingly dependent on an economic weapon that fundamentally undermines that order.”

“Russia will not be the only country impacted by the sanctions placed upon it. Vulnerable populations around the world will see their economic welfare eroded as basic foodstuffs and goods become more expensive.”

All places that no-one who matters cares about. Hell, as long as the top 10% in Europe and the U.S. remain largely unaffected, they’ll just keep going. They. Don’t. Care. They’ll ride the wave of volatility to make even more money and do even better. Until their servants stop showing up.

“There has been a lot of speculation that the Russia sanctions, which are the first to target a major player in global financial markets, will accelerate efforts among key economies to reduce dependence on the dollar as the reserve currency of choice.”

“As Mulder concludes in his book, the future of liberal internationalism is dimming. The unabated use of the economic weapon is “stitching animosity into the fabric of international affairs and human exchange.” That fabric is built upon iron, coal, and transport. It can blanket us in peace or shroud us in war.”

The animosity was always there. And no-one dares to state the obvious: that the U.S., with its global empire, shocking arrogance, self-delusion, and ruthlessness, is largely to blame.

White House plans major escalation of NATO’s proxy war with Russia by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“This series of meetings was preceded by clear signals by the White House that, despite statements from Ukraine that it is pursuing negotiations with Russia, the United States has no interest in finding a diplomatic solution to the war.

“On Thursday, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “From where I sit, diplomacy obviously requires both sides engaging in good faith to de-escalate.” He added, “The actions that we’re seeing Russia take … are in total contrast to any serious diplomatic effort to end the war.”

“Following these statements, Biden seemed to do everything he could to personally antagonize Russian President Vladimir Putin, referring to him as a “thug,” a “dictator” and a “war criminal.””

Two of those are true, but none of it is helpful, diplomatically. It probably doesn’t matter because Putin can’t possibly respect either one of their opinions. Putin is just as much a dictator as Biden; he’s an elected president. Sure, the system that elected him seems biased to have elected him, but you can say the same thing about the U.S. electoral system. Remember Bernie Sanders?

Still, those kind of statements coming from a country that just approved nearly a trillion dollars of military budget for just one year carries a force that will likely continue this war.

Also, Antony Blinken is a complete asshole. So is his boss. You can’t trust a thing either one of them says. Doesn’t make Putin any better, just to be clear.

Here’s why Putin won’t use nukes in Ukraine — Pass it on. by Robert X. Cringely

“Most of the fallout of a Kiev attack, in fact, would land in Russia. The cities of Bryansk (427,000 population), Kaluuga (338,000), Kursk (409,000), Orel (324,000), and Tula (468,000) would all be hit, not by weapon strikes, but by fallout. That’s just under two million people exposed in those five cities, not counting folks in the countryside between.

“Two million is approximately the population of Kiev, or was before a lot of those people fled west.”

First of all, Kiev has 3M residents (or did before many fled), something you can just look up in Wikipedia. Don’t bother though, when you’re on a roll. That roll being how Putin would never use nukes because it would make no sense. Cool, bro. Thanks. No-one is legitimately worried about logical people rationally using nuclear weapons because they wouldn’t use them in the first place because duh. If a nuke slips on the Russian side, I’m much more worried about the insanely exaggerated retaliation by NATO. The U.S. has been anything but proportionate in its response to perceived attack, or even insult.

Also, if Putin rationally decides to use nuclear weapons because he feels cornered and that Russia’s continued existence is at risk, why would he attack Kiev? Why wouldn’t he use the last-ditch nukes to attack targets of his actual enemies, like Berlin or Paris? Or Washington? If you’re going to let all hell break loose, then you’re going to go all in—because nuclear war is like cricket: there’s only one inning. Everybody’s going to get fallout. The only reason Russia would use their nukes is because, if they’re going to go down, they’re going to take down as much as they can with them—and let the future sort it out. It’s what I would do if I saw the U.S. riding on the back of Europe to break up my country and take away all of my things.

It’s honestly unclear why Cringely would wake up from his slumber and write about world politics so naively when he could just write about technology, which he generally does well. That whole article was absolutely infantile, absolutely puerile, bottom-of-the-barrel jingoism and war-hawk onanism.

Journalism & Media

”The End, at Least Temporarily, of Privately Owned Ukrainian [TV] Outlets” by Eugene Volokh (Reason)

“Reuters reported yesterday:”

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has signed a decree that combines all national TV channels into one platform, citing the importance of a “unified information policy” under martial law, his office said in a statement on Sunday.”

“Deadline (Bruce Haring) wrote:”

“The move means the end, at least temporarily, of privately owned Ukrainian media outlets in that country. Zelensky claimed the measure is needed to combat alleged Russian misinformation and “tell the truth about the war.””

So, basically what Russia has done…and what Europe and America have done. I’m having trouble telling the pigs apart. Which one’s Snowball? Which one’s Napoleon?

I notice that Volokh—who, before the conflict, posted very interesting material from the world of law, but has been posting translated Ukrainian protest-song lyrics for the last few weeks—must have had a twinge of obligation to report that Zelenskyy’s government may not be the angel-walking-on-rose-petals we’d like it to be (for our purposes) and posted this news…but didn’t comment on it. He’s usually quite voluble. But at least he posted it. I don’t even want to know how the blue/yellow press contingent will spin this to be positive vs. Russia’s treatment of its media. That Europe and U.S. bans go unmentioned is unsurprising.

The Stormy Daniels You Haven’t Heard Before by Alexis Grenell (The Nation)

“So for me, I try to start with the script and say to myself, if there’s no sex, absolutely no hardcore sex in there, is the story still cohesive? Does it make sense? Is the continuity good? Is there something weird in the background that your wife’s gonna be like, “Oh, my God, the dishes need to be done.” So it’s all about this whole picture with no sex. So the story needs to be cohesive, it needs to be engaging, and it needs to be funny, if it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be not cheesy. And then the flip side of that is, if I take out all the dialogue and your husband is fast-forwarding to just the sex, is it still hot?”

“No one knows that more than that female performer. So I let them pick because the best way to get the hottest, sexiest, most connected, dirtiest scene is for the woman in the scene to feel like she looks her best.”

“SD: There’s so many points that I want to hit on. The [Avenatti] trial had nothing to do with [rape]. It was theft. It was embezzlement, it was wire fraud, it was a forgery. [My sexual history] was still allowed to be brought in because of what I do and who I am.”

“I really got to know these women on a personal level because I was directing at least once a month for 10 years. And so I saw these girls come in, do everything right, get a degree in nursing, leave the business—but then a year or two years later, they’d come back because they got fired over and over and over because they got recognized at work.”

“You don’t want us to do porn, but you won’t let us do anything else.”

“When every story about me broke, it was “porn star Stormy Daniels, real name X,” and they printed my real name everywhere. Every time you see Whoopi Goldberg’s name, or Nicolas Cage or Bruno Mars, they don’t put their real name in parentheses behind it.”

“But they never paused to think that maybe that’s the name I wanted. And you just outed my family. I guarantee you wouldn’t misgender me, so why would you use a dead name? And they thought they were doing the right thing because they’re on their big high feminist fucking #MeToo horse and they never even stopped to do the most basic feminist thing, which is ask the woman in the center of the storm what she wants to be called. And nobody did it.”

“And, you know, I still can’t believe I do it. I know that I spoke at the Oxford Union. It’s on YouTube, but I don’t remember anything I said. I’m speaking at Cambridge in two weeks and I still haven’t written my speech, because if I write it then I have to deal with the fact that it’s really happening and I might not get on the plane.”

“Think about a 2-year-old child. Like, they know what guns are. Every other part of human existence is portrayed in media and entertainment: death, birth, marriage, war, birthdays, all of these things! But a child doesn’t know how they were made. And so there’s this big hush-hush and cover-up.”

Science & Nature

Painkillers That Don’t Kill by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin (Nautilus)

“Woolf and colleagues at Harvard Medical School are convinced they are finally just a few years away from identifying powerful precision painkillers that could not only safely replace opiates, but effectively target distinct pain types. Their end game is to eliminate chronic pain all together.”

“Once these drug candidates have been fully evaluated—the scientists believe that this will take two or three years—they’ll be submitted to the FDA for new drug designation, at which point hungry pharmaceutical companies will hopefully scoop them up and shepherd them through the multi-year phases of clinical trials, which for pain and anesthesia drugs routinely cost more than $100 million.18 (For the drug companies, it should be worth it: In 2021, the market for pain drugs was worth $31 billion, with projections of $39 billion in sales by 2029.)19”

So, the fervent hope is that we will cure pain, but only for a price. This system is evil. Getting rid of the system that slaves people to wages would prevent much more pain from ever even happening, but we’re wedded to that, too. Instead of coming up with medication to block pain, we should come up with a society that has less pain in it by design.

Microsoft announces progress on a completely new type of qubit by John Timmer (Ars Technica)

“On their own, the Majorana zero modes aren’t usable as qubits. But Nayak said that it’s possible to link them to a nearby quantum dot. (Quantum dots are pieces of a material sized so that they’re smaller than the wavelength of an electron in that material.) He described a U-shaped wire with Majorana zero modes at each end and those ends in proximity to a quantum dot.”

“Optimization was used to increase a measure called the topological gap. Nayak said that as long as temperatures stay below the energy of the topological gap and control frequencies are lower than that energy, the quantum information should be stable. A larger gap also means that the device can be made smaller and operations can be performed more quickly.”

Why Werner Herzog thinks human space colonization “will inevitably fail” by Sam Machkovech (Ars Technica)

““We know the next planet outside of our solar system is at least 5,000 years away,” he tells Ars. “It’s very hard to do that, and [whatever is there is] probably uninhabitable. And we know that on Mars, there’s permanent radiation that will force us underground in little bunkers. We know that we have no breathing or water [on the surface], and Elon Musk once suggested exploding nuclear bombs at the poles to melt the ice and then, of course, with gigantic systems of pipelines, bring it somewhere to a city.” He pauses. “Good luck with that,” he says.”

“[Science fiction] is beautiful because it is storytelling. This is poetry. It’s sheer fantasy. That we can depart into poetry, into realms of science fiction and invented worlds. It’s wonderful. It’s so good for cinema. But when it comes to attempt this in reality, to move a million people to another planet, that’s utopia, and it will inevitably come to its end.”

“It is a utopia, and you do not need to be a scientist or expert researcher [to understand what will pass]. You just sit back, twiddle your thumbs, enjoy your beer, and wait until it fails. [Space colonization] will fail. It is inevitable. You cannot travel to the next [Alpha Centauri exoplanet] that is 200,000 years away. Period. Good luck.”

“Rudolph paraphrases Walkowicz’s film-ending pitch: “There is already a cross-generational spaceship operating right now—and we’re already on it. Earth is a luxuriously furnished, wonderfully self-rejuvenating place, so we’d better treat it well.””

Legally, Russia can’t just take its Space Station and go home by Eric Berger (Ars Technica)

“In reality, during the coming years, we are more likely to see food riots in Moscow than we are to see a new Russian Space Station or a deep space scientific exploration mission. Some of this will be due to financial concerns, and some of it will come because of a loss of access to technology from the West.”

Eric Berger is really a jingoistic piece of shit. Given his history of getting a 100% boner for everything to do with the U.S. military and having shat on Russia’s space program for years, it’s hard not to read this in an exultant tone. That a stalwart of the space age is being repressed back to the stone age for spite is a tragedy for humanity, not something to be celebrated, you utter twat. Not only will humanity lose Russia’s participation in space because of the reaction to the invasion, but the reaction will literally lead to people starving. Berger doesn’t give one fuck.

Art & Literature

Eulogy to Karl Marx by Friedrich Engels (Jacobin)

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion,”

“And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultrademocratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Why we stopped making Einsteins by Erik Hoel (The Intrinsic Perspective)

“Parents in many cities are obsessive about getting their kids into competitive exam high schools, but when you adjust for differences in ability, attending them makes no difference. The kids who just missed the cut score and the kids who just beat it have very similar underlying ability and so it should not surprise us in the least that they have very similar outcomes, despite going to very different schools. (The perception that these schools matter is based on exactly the same bad logic that Harvard benefits from.) Similarly, highly sought-after government schools in Kenya make no difference. Winning the lottery to choose your middle school in China? Makes no difference.”

“Tutoring, one-on-one instruction, dramatically improves student’s abilities and scores. In education research this effect is sometimes called “Bloom’s 2-sigma problem” because in the 1980s the researcher Benjamin Bloom found that tutored students . . performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods—that is, “the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class.””

“The same sort of idyllic learning situation was true for Russell’s famous compatriot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was privately tutored at home until he was 14. Name a genius and find a tutor: the governesses1 of John von Neumann taught him languages, and he had other later tutors as well. Even in the cases where the children weren’t entirely homeschooled, up until the latter half of the 20th century aristocratic tutors were a casual and constant supplement to traditional education.”

“Ada Lovelace, inventor of the first algorithm, was tutored as a youth by Mary Somerville, another early female scientist (indeed, the term “scientist” was coined specifically to refer to Somerville in a gender-neutral way, rather than the previously-used “man of science”).”

“Certainly though, it appears that would-be-genius children had extremely abnormal amounts of one-on-one time with intellectually-inclined adults, who often introduced them to advanced topics far beyond their age. Once you begin looking, tutors pop up like mushrooms around historical geniuses.”

My dad taught me a lot of concepts. He was legendary in our family for a long-winded and largely wasted analysis of the working of a gyroscope. Well, it was wasted on my sister and mother, who tortured him endlessly for it. I’m no genius, but it’s not for lack of trying to impart knowledge on his part.

“Yet, for such a start-up the problem is obvious: tutoring highlights economic privilege. And as Tocqueville pointed out, the rejection of aristocracy is a foundation of the American ethos. It’s telling I felt uncomfortable writing this essay, despite being confident it’s true. So, even if costs were reachable for the upper-middle class, would such a system be allowed to exist?”

Are you fucking kidding? You live in one of the most unequal countries in the world. It not only would be encouraged, it is actively encouraged.

“Beautiful older dresses, hand-stitched rugs, even kitchen appliances used to be sturdier and last longer.”

In Europe, hand-made and quality items can still be had. They are not uncommon. It is America that has truly remained divorced from its even recent past.

“Governesses seem like an ignored part of this historical story—they often aren’t explicitly referred to as tutors but acted precisely as such, especially for the earliest portions of education, like learning languages.”

My mom was a governess in England. She taught those children French. She taught me several languages as well (Italian, German, and French).

Technology

Don’t Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone by Ian Bogost (The Atlantic)

“The Western Electric model 500 was the most popular telephone model of the 20th century, issued by Bell System and its subsidiaries from 1950 until the breakup of the Bell monopoly in 1984. It’s the phone you think of when you think of telephones, and its silhouetted handset shape remains the universal icon for “phone”—even on your iPhone’s telephone app. Like its predecessors and successors in the Bell System, the 500 was designed by Henry Dreyfuss, the mid-century industrial designer also responsible for the Honeywell T87 thermostat, the J-3 Hudson locomotive, and the Polaroid SX-70—all icons of their eras and well beyond.”

How our free plan stays free by Avery Pennarun (Tailscale)

“For Tailscale specifically, we have several pricing tiers: individuals use us for things like Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Minecraft, and Synology NAS appliances. Dev teams use Tailscale with Gitpod or Codespaces, or to share their running Docker containers, or to ssh into prod clusters. And bigger IT teams use us as a drop-in, incrementally deployable, bottleneck removing, more secure, SSO and 2FA-enabled, company-wide replacement for their legacy VPNs. Three different use cases, different buyers, different needs, different benefits. Same tech underneath.”

“In capitalism we call this a win/win deal. You get free stuff. You enjoy it. You tell your boss. Your boss gives us money (eventually). And nobody’s personal information got misplaced along the way. You did pay us − by talking about us.”

“We do receive metadata about which of your private nodes connect to which other private nodes. This is unavoidable because the job of our coordination service is to help your nodes find each other in the first place. Other than providing the service, this metadata has no value to us − it’s not like we can sell you ads based on your internal IP addresses of your own boring private servers. We never see any information about your public Internet or browsing activity.”

Programming

Data ownership in a distributed system by Oren Eini (RavenDB Blog)

“Note that in the real world it is often easier to just ignore such race conditions since they are rare and “sorry” is usually good enough, but if we are talking about building a distributed system architecture, race conditions is something that happens yesterday, today and tomorrow, but not necessarily in that order. Dealing with them properly can be a huge hassle, or negligible cost, depending on how you setup your system. I find that proper data ownership rules can be a huge help here.”

An Introduction To Type Programming In TypeScript by Zhenghao

“Type programming is a niche and underdiscussed topic in the TypeScript community, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that − because ultimately adding types is just a means to an end, the end being writing more dependable web applications in JavaScript. Therefore, to me it is totally understandable that people don’t often take the time to “properly” study the type language as they would for JavaScript or other programming languages.”