Links and Notes for April 1st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Art, Literature, & History
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

COVID-19 cuts a swath through official Washington by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“In other words, the rapid spread of COVID-19 through official Washington is the byproduct of a systematic campaign, spearheaded by the White House, to mislead the American public into believing that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. However, principled epidemiologists and public health officials warn that the Omicron BA.2 subvariant, now dominant in the US, is even more transmissible and dangerous than the Omicron BA.1 subvariant that ripped through the country this winter.”

“In a campaign led by the White House, states are systematically working to cover up the pandemic. Last week, New Hampshire redefined what counts as a COVID-19 hospitalization so drastically that it would amount to counting “only 4 percent of COVID-19 patients,” according to one report.”

“This raises another question. If the US political elite miscalculates so grotesquely about the dangers of COVID-19, even to themselves, what reason is there to believe that they will proceed any more rationally and cautiously in relation to the mounting danger of war with Russia over Ukraine? Such a war would involve the use of nuclear weapons, threatening the survival of humanity.”

Shanghai lockdown extended indefinitely as COVID-19 cases continue to climb by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Many in the population who have supported elimination complained that the somewhat laissez-faire approach in Shanghai until late March contributed to the avoidable onerous outbreak. After criticizing the Chinese government’s policy, even the New York Times had to admit that the support for Zero-COVID remains high in China.”

“In contradistinction to the unscientific measures employed in the US and much of the rest of the world, the Chinese authorities have shifted from a mitigation strategy in Shanghai to implementing the strictest standards to eliminate COVID-19 and preserve life and livelihood. The sudden shift and resoluteness have been met with savage attacks in the Western press against the Zero-COVID policy, decrying its impact on the global markets.”

The global markets that concern the West are, of course, those that affect the ability of the West’s elite to purchase their superfluous luxury gadgets and inexpensive clothing. That’s why they’re against China’s Zero-COVID policy. The global markets that don’t concern the West at all are grain and foodstuffs markets that supply a large amount of food to developing countries. Those are the markets endangered or already flattened by the West’s lust for escalation in Ukraine, but they haven’t shown a single indication that they care at all about the damage they’re causing about their utter inability to compromise for the greater good. The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems like it was just a good excuse for the West to go on a revenge-driven spree, while being able to justify it with “Look at what you made me do.”

How we got herd immunity wrong by David Robertson (Stat News)

“Soon after this, some came to interpret the term as a do-nothing, “let it rip” strategy that would result in a huge number of avoidable deaths. In response, policy quickly shifted to efforts to prevent all infections rather than targeting interventions at those at highest risk while accepting that a certain degree of viral transmission was unavoidable. Herd immunity in the absence of a vaccine soon became a dirty word. By May of 2020, a leading official in the World Health Organization announced that “humans are not herds” and that the term can lead to a “very brutal arithmetic.””

“When experts — and the public — began to realize that neither previous infection nor vaccination produces lasting immunity against infection with SARS-CoV-2, many became pessimistic about the very possibility of herd immunity and the term once again became seen as irrelevant to Covid-19.”

“This was essentially what Sweden did and, though mistakes were also made there, it navigated the pandemic with its children attending school in person and with substantially lower per-capita mortality from both Covid-19 and all causes than the European Union, the U.K., and the U.S.”

I feel that this egregiously muddles the chronology. Over which time range? How long did they even have different policies? Are there other factors e.g. a great health-care system that outweighed policy? Which variants? This paragraph invalidates the author’s credibility for me. It’s too lazy and makes me doubt his other conclusions.

Economy & Finance

Russia’s Economic Outlook Is Getting Bleaker by the Day by Russ and Pam Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“There is growing evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and growing atrocities against Ukrainian civilians are not just delivering long-term damage to Russia’s reputation around the world but to its economy at home as sanctions begin to take a heavy toll.”

But,

“The Yale School of Management, which has been keeping a running tally of the names of businesses suspending or ending business ties to Russia, noted today that “Over 600 companies have announced they are voluntarily curtailing operations in Russia to some degree beyond what is required by international sanctions….”

“Not among that group are subsidiaries of Koch Industries, whose Chairman and CEO is the heavy-handed billionaire meddler in U.S. politics, Charles Koch. It plans to keep its Russian glass plants operating. See our detailed report here.

“If you would like to send a message to Koch Industries and Charles Koch by avoiding buying the products they sell in the U.S., here’s a partial list:”

So, NATO and the west have managed to completely cripple the Russian economy, plunging its people into a coming world of poverty, just like we did 30 years ago. Then, here’s how you can’t help make it even worse. What the hell is wrong with people?

Meanwhile: The Fed’s Golf Gaffe by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“I was in Detroit yesterday, interviewing former employees of a storied Michigan retail company. The firm had been profitable, until it was bought by an $11 billion private equity fund, one that decided to loot the firm’s real estate holdings before mass-firing its workers and sending it into bankruptcy in the first weeks of the pandemic.”

The End of Dollar Hegemony by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch)

“And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States grabbed Russia’s reserves having grabbed Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and Venezuela’s foreign reserves and those of other countries. And all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia.”

Is that a bin Laden move? Get the U.S. to undermine a pillar of its hegemony by provoking an overzealous and self-righteous reaction? How else to kill such a powerful beast other than to get it it to kill itself? Like running an elephant into a ravine.

“[…] the International Monetary Fund has operated, basically, as an arm of the Defense Department. It’s been bailing out dictatorships, bailing out Ukraine, lending money to countries whose client oligarchies America wants to support, and not lending any money to countries that America doesn’t want to support, like Venezuela. So, its job is basically to promote neoliberal policies, and to insist that other countries balance their payments by undergoing a class war against labor.”

“The central aim of the World Bank is to prevent other countries from growing their own food. That is the prime directive. It will only make loans for countries to earn foreign currency and it has insisted ever since about 1950 that countries that borrow from it must shift their agriculture to plantation export crops to grow tropical crops that cannot be grown in the United States for environmental and weather reasons.”

“[…] it insisted on foreign-owned agribusiness in large plantation agriculture. And what that means is that countries that have borrowed for agricultural loans have not been loans to produce their own food. It’s been to compete with each other producing tropical export crops while being increasingly dependent on the United States for their food supplies, and for their grain.”

That’s also how so many countries ended up dependent on Russia’s food exports.

“If the way you have dollar hegemony is to have other countries deposit your money in your banks and handle their oil trade with each other by financing it in dollars, but all of a sudden you grab all their dollars and you don’t let them use US banks to pay for their oil and their trade with each other, then they’re going to shift to a different system. And that’s exactly what has ended the dollar hegemony,”

“So, the American war in Ukraine is really a war against Germany. Russia is not the enemy. Germany and Europe are the enemy and the United States made it very clear. This is a war to lock in our allies so they cannot trade with Russia. They cannot buy Russian oil. They must be dependent on American oil for which they will have to pay three or four times as much. They will have to be dependent on American liquefied natural gas for fertilizer. If they don’t buy American gas for fertilizer, and we don’t let them buy from Russia, then they cannot put fertilizer on the land and the crop yield will fall by about 50% without fertilizer.”

“And so, the effect of this war has been to lock the NATO countries into dependency on the United States because the great fear of the United States in the last few years is that as America is de-industrializing, these countries are looking to the part of the world that’s growing, China, Central Asia, Russia, South Asia.”

“And so, they’re desperate. How are they going to pay the higher prices unless they borrow even more money from US banks? And of course, that’s another arm of US policy. The US banks hope to make a killing in making loans at rising interest rates to third world countries.”

“So, the stock market has been soaring in the last few days. They say this, the world famine, the world crisis is a bonanza for Wall Street. The oil company stocks are going way up, the military, industrial stocks, Boeing Raytheon way up, the bank stocks. This is America’s great power grab, and it realizes, when it can create a crisis and tell the Global South or poor countries your money or your life. This is how most of the great property grabs and conquests have been made throughout history.”

So the U.S. will think it’s won because of this short-term and superficial surge, this overt subjugation. Long-term, the cons of being a U.S. vassal/colony now outweigh the benefits. And countries will head for the exits.

“The United States is opposing any attempt at trying to prevent global warming because you can imagine what would happen if other countries go to solar energy and renewable energy. That will reduce their dependency on the US oil industry. If you look at American policy, it is being run basically by the oil industry to establish dependence of other countries on oil. Then obviously the last thing the United States is ever going to do is prevent global warming.”

The SEC Is Coming for SPACs by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“On one level it is hard to object to this. It is weird to have two ways of going public, one of which (a SPAC) allows you to exaggerate and one of which (an IPO) does not. And when you put it like that it does seem like the not-exaggerating approach is preferable to the exaggerating one.”

“[…] there is something nice about SPACs being a way for companies to go public earlier. SPACs can be a way for public markets to provide venture-type capital to young ambitious companies, particularly green-tech companies. That is risky and certainly opens the door to fraud, but it is a bit sad to get rid of it entirely.”

Yeah, but literally everything is a scam now. Most SPACs are dead in the water.

“Doesn’t it feel like the dystopian future we deserve? Like in a decade everyone will make their living by steering colorful blob-like creatures around to acquire coins in a virtual world, but ownership of the colorful blob-like virtual creatures will be concentrated among a hereditary elite of people who, like, bought Dogecoin in 2014, and in order to scrape together enough to live on you will need to indenture yourself to a member of that elite, steering their blob-like virtual creatures around to earn coins for them and getting a few crumbs for yourself. And you’ll work 16-hour days in the Smooth Love Potions mines just to feed your children, but every once in a while in a rare free moment you will stop and ask yourself “wait why do our overlords want all these Smooth Love Potions anyway?” Meanwhile the overlords will form a leisure class and devote themselves to philosophy and philanthropy. They’ll keep busy collecting non-fungible-token art and putting their names on virtual library buildings in the metaverse and writing manifestos about how cryptocurrency enhances human freedom and levels the playing field for everyone.”

I’m highlighting this again because it’s still a work of art.

Stock Splits Are Good Now by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“In theory, this shouldn’t happen. A split doesn’t affect a company’s business fundamentals, and investors averse to a stock’s high price tag can simply buy fractional shares instead. Yet splits are causing day traders to pile in, fueling rallies in these companies’ shares. “We simply cannot fundamentally explain how a stock split can add nearly 1.5 times the market cap of General Motors or one full Volkswagen’s worth of market cap to Tesla almost instantly,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a note to clients. But let’s try. (Not “fundamentally” but whatever. ) While the stock market doesn’t really trade in round lots anymore, the options market does: If you want to buy listed call options, you have to buy them in contracts of 100 shares.”

“I used to think that this didn’t matter, because options trading is either (1) for professionals, who can afford $5,500 a throw, or (2) for retail weirdos, who can’t be the driving force of corporate finance. But I do think that an important lesson of last year’s GameStop Corp. meme-stock situation is that retail options weirdos are in fact the driving force of corporate finance, or, at least, that retail options trading is a key part of being a meme stock.”

“Tesla Inc. is in some ways the original meme stock, and Redditors were pushing the gamma-squeeze perpetual-motion theory of Tesla at least as far back as early 2020. The stock is up about 580% since then. And now Tesla’s stock is very expensive, so its options are presumably out of reach for some Redditors; splitting the stock will allow more retail traders to YOLO more options, which will create more Reddit-y retail enthusiasm, which should be good for the stock.”

“the “non-fundamental” things about a stock are not just unpredictable noise; they are real facts about the stock market, investors can try to anticipate them, and companies can try to control them. You can build a corporate finance strategy around memes. If splitting your stock makes your stock go up then you should split your stock, not because that will maximize your long-term free cash flow but because it will maximize your stock price. Those are different things!”

“For instance your explanation might be along the lines of: “Well, see, my wife befriended my boss’s wife, and my wife invested some money in my boss’s wife’s family’s business, but then when my boss’s wife found out that my boss was cheating on her and that my wife and I both knew about it, she got mad at my wife and forced her to take back her investment with enormous profits, and that’s what that $26 million is.” This strikes me as basically a good answer? It has flaws ($26 million is not $35 million?), but honestly the fact that it is confusing is helpful. It does a nice job of deflecting from the issue. At the start of that sentence, your listeners are thinking about all the money that got stolen; by the end of it they are like “wait who cheated on whom with whom now?””

Public Policy & Politics

Violetta’s Scars: How Russophobia Became the Wokest Form of Racism by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“[…] exist in their own little world inside of our little world. I have vivid memories of standing behind these young DIY debutantes in the lunch line and closing my eyes while I secretly listened to them speak to each other in that mysteriously beautiful language. The words seemed to float to the ground like leaves dancing from the branches of a birch tree.”

“The Russian people have always carried their tragic history with them like crosses without ever lowering their chins. I found all of this to be fascinating, but my other classmates didn’t seem to share my fascination with these people and instead treated them like lepers.”

“At a certain point it became disturbingly clear to me that they had no idea why they despised these total strangers and perhaps even more frightening, they didn’t even seem to want to know why.”

“Russians are consistently presented as the enemy, a race of duplicitous villains who hate America and freedom for no other reason than because they do, because evil defines their national character without meaning. Growing up, I watched Sylvester Stallone and the Brat Pack murder scores of these people like they weren’t even human, just soulless props to highlight the blood-spattered glory of American exceptionalism with their primitive inferiority. Their slaughter was comedy.”

“I had to grow up a little before I could realize that at the end of the day Russians were just people like anyone else and that their leaders were just tyrants with more reasonable excuses for their tyranny than ours. As Mikhail Bakunin, one of the greatest minds in Russian history, once observed, people aren’t much happier to be beaten just because you call the stick you beat them with ‘the people’s stick.’”

“Sanctions are a form of economic terrorism designed to torture the already desperate into affecting [sic] American-approved regime change. These actions are every bit as evil and indiscriminate as Putin’s cluster bombs and I fear that they and the Russophobic propaganda barrage that goes with them are only the beginning of something far more sadistic.”

“As Japan embraced imperialism in a gruesome attempt to defend their own rich culture from western expansion in the Pacific during the 1930s, everyone from Tinseltown to Dr. Seuss jumped on the bandwagon to demonize the Japanese people themselves as being senseless Oriental savages killing for amusement while the American government upped the ante with crippling sanctions that eventually resulted in a full-blown embargo that provoked the attacks on Pearl Harbor.”

“America doesn’t care about these people. To our evil empire, they are just cannon fodder to excuse our own war crimes to come. Imperialism thrives on racism and we all need to fight the racism of Russophobia before it gives our own Putins in power the license they seek for atrocity.”

NYT Painted Matt Gaetz as a Child Sex Trafficker. One Year Later, He Has Not Been Charged. by Glenn Greenwald (SubStack)

“Only in the seventh paragraph — well below the headline casting him as a pedophile and sex trafficker — did the Times bother to note: “No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.” Exactly one year after publication of that reputation-destroying article, this remains true: while the DOJ may one day formally accuse him, Gaetz has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a single crime which The New York Times stapled onto his forehead.”

“[…] the only component of this story that has thus far been confirmed — a full year after the NYT first trumpeted it — is the part of Gaetz’s denial where he insisted that all this arose from an extortion attempt.”

“[…] it is common that a person who is the subject of a criminal investigation never ends up being charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes due to a lack of evidence to support an indictment or guilty verdict. Leaks thus have the effect, and often the intent, of destroying someone’s reputation, convicting them of repellent crimes in the court of public opinion that will never be brought in a court of law, thus relieving the state of the requirement to prove the crime and depriving the accused the opportunity to exonerate themselves.”

”Regime Change” Doesn’t Work, You Morons by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Zelensky only just said, “We are looking for peace, really. Without delay.” He’s repeatedly asked for help in negotiations and expressed a willingness to embrace a future of Ukrainian “neutrality.” There’s obviously ambivalence among American pundits and politicians toward any settlement that might be seen as rewarding Putin for his aggression, but the question is if that’s our call to make, or that of the Ukrainians bearing the punishment.”

“The plot is always the same. Our diplomats speak loftily of self-determination, civil liberties, and democracy. Then the local population does something daft, like attempting to nationalize their own oil or copper reserves or voting for a nationalist or socialist, at which point the CIA is forced to intervene and install a responsible leader like the Shah, Pinochet, or Suharto. If the new U.S-friendly leader hangs on, he or she over time becomes increasingly dependent on arms, “security advisors,” and World Bank/I.M.F. loans, mass-disappearing dissidents into fingernail factories or wiping them out with death squads, while also often raiding the treasury as a carrying charge for services rendered. This results in more domestic fury, leading to more calls for “aid,” until the by-now-hated U.S.-allied figure is steamrolled by a nationalist/communist/fundamentalist movement 1,000 times more hostile to the U.S. than anything that existed previously.”

“[…] bushy-tailed products of the Kennedy School and the Hoover Institute somehow cruising straight from top schools into positions of authority at places like the State Department and the NSC despite knowing less about the world than the average Survivor contestant or Men’s Health editor.”

“[…] if we succeed in deposing Putin over Ukraine, what evidence is there that we won’t end up with someone even worse than Putin in the Kremlin in very short order, like we did last time? Who thinks we wouldn’t screw this up on a grand scale, given that we already botched it once? Any replacement for Putin the U.S. would find acceptable would have to evince a range of views putting him or her directly at odds with most of the population, like for instance a tolerance for NATO expansion. The seeds of reaction would be there from the jump. That’s in the lucky case we don’t provoke civilization-ending nuclear war en route to helping install a new Russian leader.”

NATO Notes by Victor Grossman (CounterPunch)

“Both mass media and social media are flooding us with heart-breaking depictions of death, sorrow and destruction in Ukraine. When they are truthful I cannot object. But nor can I overcome my inherent leaning toward occasional skepticism and suspicion; last week a video on Germany’s public TV channel ZDF showed a Russian tank lumbering through Ukraine – and carrying a big red Soviet flag with hammer and sickle – so obviously outdated. It’s hard to believe this was a mistake.”

Hunger Stalks Central Asia as the Ukraine War Unfolds by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“He also addressed the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on Kazakhstan during his speech and pointed to the spikes in food prices and currency volatility as some of the worrying economic consequences being faced by the country as a fallout of this conflict.”

Neither NATO nor Russia cares about this suffering. They care about their individual agendas more. No-one has the moral high ground. Both sides in this conflict know that continuing in this vein will cause a tremendous amount of suffering in other countries, but they’re convinced that the goals are worth—and also convinced that their own countries will be largely unaffected. Or they realize that the brunt of the effects will be borne by those who are not themselves, not the elites or anyone the elites know.

“Tokayev’s remarks are not novel. Other heads of governments in Central Asia have similarly expressed the need for their governments to enter the food production arena, since both the COVID-19 lockdown and the current Russian war in Ukraine have demonstrated the enormous vulnerabilities in the global food chain, exacerbated by the privatization of food production.”

“Russia and Ukraine produce and “supply 30 percent of wheat and 20 percent of maize to global markets,” according to the WFP report, and these two countries also account for three-quarters of the world’s sunflower supply and one-third of the world’s barley supply.”

“The International Fund for Agricultural Development President Gilbert F. Houngbo warned that the continuation of the Russia-Ukraine war “will be catastrophic for the entire world, particularly for people already struggling to feed their families,” according to a UN report. “This area of the Black Sea plays a major role in the global food system, exporting at least 12 percent of the food calories traded in the world,” Houngbo said”

Neither Russia nor NATO cares. They’re both so caught up in themselves that they don’t care what the impact of the anti-diplomatic intolerance for one another.

“Economist Khojimahmad Umarov said during the CABAR meeting that if Tajikistan had access to mineral and organic fertilizers and if it improved its agricultural knowledge, yields could rise to 90 hundred kilograms per hectare. But agriculture has been neglected, and countries like Tajikistan have been encouraged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to import food and export cotton and aluminum.”

“At the start of the war in Ukraine, the poorest households in the Kyrgyz Republic—the second-poorest country in Central Asia after Tajikistan—spent 65 percent of their income on food; the current inflation will be catastrophic for them. The Kyrgyz Republic’s Cabinet of Ministers, led by Akylbek Japarov, held an emergency meeting with food processing companies in Bishkek to discuss how to increase food production and prevent increased levels of starvation in the country.”

Biden’s Reckless Words Underscore the Dangers of the U.S.’s Use of Ukraine As a War Proxy by Glenn Greenwald (Scheer Post)

“The only acceptable modes of expression in U.S. discourse were to pronounce that the Russian invasion was unjustified, and, using parlance which the 2011 version of Chris Hayes correctly dismissed as adolescent, that Putin is a “bad guy.” Those denunciation rituals, no matter how cathartic and applause-inducing, supplied no useful information about what actions the U.S. should or should not take when it came to this increasingly dangerous conflict.”

“That was the purpose of so severely restricting discourse to those simple moral claims: to allow policymakers in Washington free rein to do whatever they wanted in the name of stopping Putin without being questioned. Indeed, as so often happens when war breaks out, anyone questioning U.S. political leaders instantly had their patriotism and loyalty impugned (unless one was complaining that the U.S. should become more involved in the conflict than it already was, a form of pro-war “dissent” that is always permissible in American discourse).”

“Most taboo of all was any discussion of of the U.S. in Ukraine beginning in 2014 up to the invasion: from micro-managing Ukrainian politics, to arming its military, to placing military advisers and intelligence officers on the ground to train its soldiers how to fight (something Biden announced he was considering last November) — all of which amounted to a form of de facto NATO expansion without the formal membership.”

“As a result of the media’s embracing of moral righteousness in lieu of debating these crucial geopolitical questions, the U.S. government has consistently and aggressively escalated its participation in this war with barely any questioning let alone opposition. U.S. officials are boastfully leading the effort to collapse the Russian economy. Along with its NATO allies, the U.S. has flooded Ukraine with billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry,”

“The U.S. is, by definition, waging a proxy war against Russia, using Ukrainians as their instrument, with the goal of not ending the war but prolonging it. So obvious is this fact about U.S. objectives that even The New York Times last Sunday explicitly reported that the the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire””

“[…] if any pathology defines the last five years of U.S. mainstream discourse, it is that any claim that undercuts the interests of U.S. liberal elites — no matter how true — is dismissed as “Russian disinformation.””

“[…] the DNC propaganda arm Media Matters now lists as “pro-Russian propaganda” the indisputable fact that the U.S. is not defending Ukraine but rather exploiting and sacrificing it to fight a proxy war with Moscow. The more true a claim is, the more likely it is to receive this designation in U.S. establishment discourse.”

“It takes little to no effort to recognize the current emergence of the dynamic about which Adam Smith so fervently warned 244 years ago in Wealth of Nations:”

“In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.”

It never ceases to amaze me that nothing ever changes. We are limited apes with limited horizons. Those of us who strain against those bonds are left in a society run by and for those who do not.

“As recently as 2018, 2/3 of Democrats believed that Russia hacked into voting machines and altered the 2016 vote count to help Trump win. This cultivation of extreme anti-Russian animus in Washington has been made even more dangerous by the virtual prohibition on dialogue with Russian officials, which during Russiagate was deemed inherently suspect if not criminal.”

“A Russian president who, validly or not, feels threatened by NATO expansion in the region and driven by questions of his legacy, on the other side of a U.S. president with a long record of hawkishness and war fever which is now hobbled by the carelessness and infirmities of old age, is a remarkably volatile combination.”

“Hovering above all of these grave dangers is the question of why? What interests does the U.S. have in Ukraine that are sufficiently vital or substantial to justify trifling with risks of this magnitude? Why did the U.S. not do more to try to diplomatically avert this horrific war, instead seemingly opting for the opposite: namely, discouraging Ukrainian President Zelensky from pursuing such talks on the alleged grounds of futility and rewarding Russian aggression, and not even exploring whether a vow of non-NATO-membership for Ukraine would suffice?”

“These are precisely the questions that a healthy nation discusses and examines before jumping head-first into a major war. But these were precisely the questions declared to be unpatriotic, proof of one’s status as a traitor or pro-Russia propagandist, as the hallmark of being pro-Putin. These are the standard tactics used to squash dissent or questioning when war breaks out.”

Beats per Minute, Centimeters per Inch by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“Second, don’t listen to the experts either. For the most part, they are only resorting to old-fashioned Kremlinology, which is itself a variety of divination, as for example when they try to read secret meanings from the expression on Defense Minister Shoïgu’s face when Putin says Russia will make use of any defensive measures necessary, “… в том числе и ядерные / including atomic weapons”. The heart is a dark forest, and the face is seldom a true window of it, and if that’s all we’ve got, we might as well just admit our ignorance.”

“In general I am also sympathetic to the school of international-relations theory that goes by the generic description of “realism”, as represented most prominently by John Mearsheimer, which, as I understand it, seeks to describe how states behave in morally neutral terms, as we might describe the Brownian motion of particles. Russia, the realists will tell you, is not exceptionally evil, or at least its evil has nothing to do with understanding its motions, and to dwell on its evil is to depart from the search for the real material causes of its present actions as but one of many empires in world history — in the ignorance of which causes we will of course remain poorly positioned to figure out how to stop these actions, and to do so without escalation. The Zelensky cult, by contrast, the ersatz Ukrainian patriotism that has taken the West by storm, floats on pure moralism, a conviction about the good uncoupled from any concern about the real.”

“[…] her resistance to some of the dogmas concerning gender identity that have taken over a number of institutions in the West, and the acceptance or rejection of which now function as a shibboleth of belonging to one or the other of the poles of our inane culture-war quagmire.”

“With the harsh US-led sanctions regime, Russia too, he wished to suggest, is being “cancelled”. Honestly, if this is what is on Putin’s mind right now, I have to presume that the world is a good deal more stable than I imagined it to be just a week or two ago: stupid as all hell, but stable.”

“I don’t want to say anything in outright opposition to representative government, but it does indeed seem to me peculiar that we have decided to conduct our politics in such a way that the people who like to make decisions about which books should be banned from Texas public schools and so on are the very same people who decide what kind of weapons we should install in Estonia. Most of these people, it seems to me, are equipped with minds much more naturally suited to thinking about the former sort of problem, and there is perhaps no greater threat to world peace than to require them, especially under pressure from media chatter and various interest groups, to stretch their repertoire so as to include international relations.”

“Already in the early 1990s, I mean, there was a counternarrative forming in the East and about the East, promoted both by the Western far-left and by average people from the Eastern Bloc who were unsurprisingly alarmed to see their countries crumble overnight, according to which the core rationale of Atlanticism was not defense but aggression. I do not hold this view, but I also do not think you are being a serious analyst if you do not make any effort to work your way into the mind of someone who does hold it.”

“It was pure geopolitical maneuvering, the subsumption of a good portion of the Balkans, which had always been more or less vassalized by one empire or the other —usually Russian or Ottoman—, into the protected space of the Pax Americana.”

“In 2014, on a visit to Pristina, I went to the Museum of the History of Kosovo. It was mostly just a shrine to Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, with various knick-knacks on display that had been left behind from their visits there some years earlier. Just a few kilometers away, in Serbian-controlled Mitrovica, there were enormous murals on the sides of apartment blocs depicting the likenesses of Putin and Slobodan Milošević.”

“That an arts collective from Ljubljana should present itself as a sort of deterritorialized microstate at a moment of significant geopolitical realignment is, I think, something that remains worthy of analysis.”

“The autarkic aspiration is as unrealistic as the junk products of global culture are undesirable. When the desire for autarky can generally only find its expression through these junk forms, you can be sure that the tension will not resolve itself anytime soon.”

China rejects EU calls to cut ties with Russia over Ukraine war by Alex Lantier (WSWS)

“Another item in the EU-China summit was China’s freezing of trade with Lithuania, a former Soviet Baltic republic, after Lithuania opened formal trade representation for Taiwan in its capital, Vilnius. Chinese officials have said they view this as a European threat to repudiate the “One China” policy and encourage Taiwan to declare itself a fully independent state. Sections of the European foreign policy establishment have advocated using this policy to encourage parts of mainland China like Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia or Tibet also to declare independence, dividing China.”

Wait, so when Russia supports Luhansk and Donetsk as breakaway regions of Ukraine, Europe can’t countenance such a thing. But, when Taiwan, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, or Tibet want to break away, they’re 100% in support. And there’s a single guiding principle here? A moral thread that runs through this all? Disgusting.

“These conflicts underlie Xi’s refusal to cut off ties with Moscow, for now at least. As US officials demand regime change in Russia, Putin’s ouster, and Russia’s return of regions such as Crimea to Ukraine, it is increasingly clear that the NATO powers aim to break up and crush Russia and China. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bluntly said Washington aims “to destroy, break, exterminate, strangle the Russian economy and Russia as a whole.””

“Mallaby speculated Washington could seize the trillions of dollars China has earned over decades of exporting goods to US and European markets, just like it is threatening to seize Russian dollar reserves that Moscow earned exporting oil and gas to world markets.

“He wrote, “Beijing’s $3 trillion-plus stockpile of foreign-currency assets looks less potent. If Russia’s reserves could be frozen, so could China’s.”

They’re absolutely power-mad. They’re literally just talking about stealing country’s foreign reserves and they think that there will be no downside, that China will just capitulate and heel like a dog.

War Is the Crime. Its Perpetrators Seldom Face Justice. by Thomas Knapp (Antiwar.com)

“Biden’s call for Vladimir Putin to face trial –presumably in the International Criminal Court – is a combination of political grandstanding and gross hypocrisy. His own government refuses to recognize that court and threatens to sanction its judges and prosecutors if they investigate US war crimes”

“By that standard, Vladimir Putin is a war criminal for his order to invade Ukraine. The Bucha massacre, if perpetrated by Russian troops, is just a subsidiary crime.

“So is Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s predecessor, who oversaw Ukraine’s war of aggression against two seceded republics in the Donbas region along the Ukraine-Russia border.

“Zelenskyy himself, as well as Biden, are guilty of continuing wars of aggression initiated by their predecessors – Zelenskyy in the Donbas; Biden in, among other places, Syria.

“Harry Truman never faced trial for two of the largest terror attacks in history (the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima). George W. Bush and Barack Obama will probably never pay for their war crimes. Ditto Putin and Zelenskyy.”

NATO intensifies anti-Russia war drive by Andre Damon (WSWS)

““There was support for countries to supply new and heavier equipment to Ukraine, so that they can respond to these new threats from Russia,” UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told reporters.

“She continued, “We agreed to help Ukrainian forces move from their Soviet-era equipment to NATO standard equipment, on a bilateral basis.”

“Truss declared a “new era” of European relations with Russia, stating, “The age of engagement with Russia is over.” Instead, she proclaimed “a new approach to security in Europe based on resilience, defense and deterrence.””

I weep at how many people read her statements and take them at their word.

“On Thursday, the United States succeeded in its effort to remove Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council. The last time a country was removed from the body was when Libya was taken off in 2011. Shortly afterwards, Islamist terrorists funded by the United States murdered its president, prompting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to joke, “We came, we saw, he died.””

““We have seen that China is unwilling to condemn Russia’s aggression, and Beijing has joined Moscow in questioning the right of nations to choose their own path,” Stoltenberg said Thursday. “This is a serious challenge to us all.””

That is literally the opposite of the official statements of China and Russia. Their joint statement from last December was that we should not have a unipolar world, that nations should be able to choose their own path. Stoltenberg and NATO only recognize a nations’ rights to “choose their own path” when those nations align themselves as vassals to NATO and the U.S. Any other expression of individuality is not allowed and is actively repressed.

“In the past week, it has become clear that sections of the US and European political establishment have shifted and expanded their goals in the proxy conflict with Russia over Ukraine. Instead of merely being content with bleeding Russia dry over the course of months or years, they are eyeing not only a decisive tactical but even a strategic victory.”

Roaming Charges: News From Never-Neverland by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“hat needs to be done? Nothing less than a revolution in the way the world’s economy functions and the fuels that drive it. What can be done? Not much. What will be done? Almost nothing. That’s my read on the latest (and reportedly the final) consensus report from the IPCC, a document reads less like the Book of Revelations than an after-bombing damage assessment. The bottom-line is that the 1.5C warming goal set by the panel in 2015 is obsolete. It’s unattainable. Defunct. Moreover, it’s always been unattainable. The international plans to slow global warming from Kyoto to Paris would not have been able to keep the climate below that threshold, even had they been fully-implemented. Needless to say, they haven’t been fully implemented. Far from it.”

“[…] the average annual greenhouse gas emissions over the last 10 years were the highest in … human history. In 2019, carbon emissions were about 54% higher than in 1990. Sixty percent of all historical emissions were produced in the lifetime of the average American, who is 38.”

Our response to admonitions that we’re driving insanely, recklessly fast has been to drive even faster. I love us.

“Even the IPCC has come to realize that any goals, even the most ambitious, set by treaties are not binding. There’s no mechanism to enforce them. No penalties for not meeting them. Especially for the biggest culprits, who enjoy carbon impunity. As long as there is coal, gas and oil to burned, and the plants to burn them, they will be burned. And there’s still lots of fossil fuel in reserve and a vast infrastructure for consuming it.”

Oh, there are penalties, all right. But we will all pay them. The culprits will probably pay the least. This is the perfect world we’ve built with all of our ingenuity. The piper will be paid, just not by the ones who were able to enjoy his music.

“They are lying.” You can’t get much blunter than that from the Secretary General of the UN….”

Secretary General of the UN António Guterres

“Wind and solar generated 10% of global electricity for the first time in 2021, but needs to be 50% at least by 2030 to make any headway against climate change.”

“A single Tesla battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. At this rate, over the next thirty years we will need to mine more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the last 70,000 years.”

“The Pentagon Budget in 2001 was $287 billion. Now it’s $773 billion and rising.”

“Haig sadistically contended that high casualty rates were the surest sign of strategic success on the battlefield and his two major offensives during the war yielded some of the highest in history: 275,000 dead, wounded or captured at Passchendaele and 420,000 dead, wounded or captured at the Somme. Neither battle netted the British more than a few meaningless acres of territory.”

“The Minneapolis cops who shot Amir Locke during a no-knock raid will not be charged. In sum: Police can break into your apartment while you’re sleeping and within a few seconds of entering shoot you while you’re on the couch without any legal consequences…even when you’re not the person they were looking for. But we are not, I repeat NOT, living in a police state.”

“Wind turbines take a ghastly toll on birds, killing around a million a year, including a recent case of one wind power company being held liable for killing 150 eagles. But that’s nothing next to the toll exacted by high-rise buildings which are responsible for an estimated BILLION bird deaths a year in the US alone.”

Unanswered questions about the Kramatorsk missile strike by David North (WSWS)

“The Ukrainian regime has a carte blanche to do whatever it wants, because the media will immediately, and without any investigation, blame the Russians.

“The release of photos of a missile part with the handwritten Russian-language message, “for the children,” is a strong indication that the attack on the station was staged for propaganda purposes. It is all but unbelievable that the Russian military would place such a provocative and self-incriminating message, in the midst of the furor over the Bucha incident, on a missile that it planned to fire into a crowd of innocent civilians. What rational purpose would this serve? And who cannot believe that the discovery of this missile part, with the perfectly legible inscription, is too much of a coincidence?”

This reminds me of the unburned passport that they found in the ruins of the World Trade Center (was it Mohammed Atta’s?)

Journalism & Media

Six years of Chris Hedges’ On Contact program erased by YouTube by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalin’s airbrushing of nonpersons such as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of our collective memory. It removes the efforts to examine our reality in ways the ruling class does not appreciate. The goal is to foster historical amnesia. If we don’t know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present.””

Meet the Censored: Chris Hedges by Chris Hedges (TK News)

“[…] an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to figures covering structural problems in American society, and those quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation.”

“As Hedges points out in the wide-ranging, unnerving interview below, the speech-control one-two he’s just experienced — first herded out of the mainstream for ideological offenses into a shrinking space of “allowable” dissent, then forced to watch as that space is demonized out of existence — is part of an effective pattern. “It’s how this works,” he sighs. He points to the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6th, 2017, ostensibly intended to make a case for Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which actually spent much of its time complaining about RT, especially its coverage of real but unflattering domestic issues.”

“You can find Chris’s work on Substack now at the Chris Hedges Report, and some of the On Contact shows that were re-posted by independent accounts remain up. The launch of the new site has gone very well, but he warns that no place in media is safe now. “They’ll shut down Substack, I absolutely know. Either that, or they’ll create a way that sites like yours and mine won’t be on it,” he says.”

“I was watching a 2015 speech by John Mearsheimer the other night. It seemed prescient. He says, “The idea that the United States could take a military alliance that was a mortal enemy of the Soviet Union and march it up to Russia’s doorstep… The Russians have no intention of letting Georgia and Ukraine become part of the West. They’ll wreck both those countries first.””

“I don’t believe that Putin would’ve invaded the Ukraine, if we had honored our commitments with the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to expand NATO. The whole expansion of NATO, which never made any geopolitical sense, was about enriching the arms industry. It became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza. That’s what drove it.”

“In the end, of course, Russia pulled the trigger, and they’re guilty, but they were baited to a degree. But you can’t even say that within this media landscape, even though that’s a historical fact. That’s not an opinion. But it doesn’t fit with the kind of euphoria. After 20 years of committing egregious war crimes all over the Middle East, we’ve suddenly anointed ourselves once again as the saviors of the world, and we love it. And a lot of it has nothing to do with Ukraine, but about our own self-adulation.”

“So, RT was targeted for that reason. And let’s be clear. This was also a very cynical move on the part of the Russian government. They wanted to give prominence to voices like mine, because I’m a critic of the American empire, the American system. That’s why I was there. And if I was in Russia, I would probably be out of a job, like the rest of the Russian journalists.”

“They can’t take any responsibility. They’re incapable of any kind of self-criticism, or understanding that their policies of neoliberalism, of austerity, of rampant militarism, are a deep betrayal. Because remember, the lies that the Democratic party told to the working class in this country were far more egregious, and inflicted far more damage, than any lie Trump told.”

“So, the response is to control the information, to seek broader and deeper forms of censorship, as most despotic regimes do, because they don’t understand it’s them that’s the problem. They think it’s the message.”

On Being Disappeared by Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report)

“Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Žižek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff.”

“What an enormous cultural loss. This is tragic collateral damage. They destroy what they do not understand, what does not contribute to their personal bottom line, indeed fights to diminish it.”

“I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t.”

“I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow.”

“Are we a more informed and better society because of this censorship? Is this a world we want to inhabit where those who know everything about us and about whom we know nothing can instantly erase us? If this happens to me, it can happen to you, to any critic anywhere who challenges the dominant narrative.”

“Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.”

“This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalin’s airbrushing of nonpersons such as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of our collective memory. It removes the efforts to examine our reality in ways the ruling class does not appreciate. The goal is to foster historical amnesia. If we don’t know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present.”

““The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen,” Hannah Arendt warned. “What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?”

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

“The deplatformiong of voices like mine, already blocked by commercial media and marginalized with algorithms, is coupled with the pernicious campaign to funnel people back into the arms of the establishment media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.”

“It is perhaps telling that our greatest investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, who exposed the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at My Lai and the torture at Abu Ghraib, has trouble publishing in the United States. I would direct you to the interview I did with Sy about the decayed state of the American media, but it no longer exists on YouTube.”

If you’re lucky enough to live in a country that doesn’t block web sites (Switzerland toyed with the idea, but ended up deciding against becoming totalitarian), then you can still watch the interview on RT: A quest for truth with investigative reporter Seymour Hersh by Chris Hedges (RT: On Contact)

Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them. by Glenn Greenwald (SubStack)

“With this power matrix in place, what mattered was no longer the pain and anger of people whose towns had their industries stripped by the Clintons’ NAFTA robbery, or who worked at low-wage jobs with no benefits due to the 2008 financial crisis caused by Clintonite finance geniuses, or who were drowning in student debt with no job prospects after that crisis, or who suffered from PTSD, drug and alcohol addiction and shabby to no health care after fighting in the Clintons’ wars. Now, such ordinary people were not the victims but the perpetrators. Their anger toward elites was not valid or righteous but dangerous, abusive and toxic. The real victims were multi-millionaire hosts of MSNBC programs and U.S. Senators and New York Times columnists who were abused and brutalized by those people’s angry tweets”

“According to this elite-protecting script, this crisis of online abuse and trauma did not materialize out of nowhere. It was triggered by, and was the fault of, anyone who voiced criticism of those elites. By speaking ill of these media and political figures, such critics were “targeting” them and signaling that they should be attacked.”

“We have now endured almost a full decade of elites from the most prestigious schools, who work inside the most powerful media corporations, lecturing everyone that they are in fact the real victims, and that the most pressing national crisis is the ways they are criticized.”

“It is almost impossible to envision a single individual in whom power, privilege and elite prerogative reside more abundantly than Taylor Lorenz. Using the metrics of elite liberal culture, the word “privilege” was practically invented for her: a rich straight white woman from a wealthy family raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and educated in actual Swiss boarding schools who now writes about people’s lives, often casually destroying those lives, on the front pages of the most powerful East Coast newspapers on the planet. And yet, in the eyes of her fellow media and political elites, there is virtually no person more victimized, more deserving of your sympathy and attention, more vulnerable, marginalized and abused than she.”

“In other words, Lorenz — like all employees of large media corporations or powerful establishment politicians in Washington and London — is and always should be completely free to continue to publish articles or social media posts that destroy the reputations of powerless people, often with outright lies. But you must never criticize her because she suffers from PTSD and other trauma as a result of the mean tweets that are unleashed by her critics.”

BANNING Joe Rogan? w/ Freddie deBoer, Taylor Lorenz, & Evan Greer by Bad Faith (YouTube)

At 27:00, Brianna says that Parler was becoming popular after Trump moved to it. Parler was surging in popularity throughout 2020. By the time of the election in 2020, it was the most popular app in both the iOS and Android stores. People wanted the app, perhaps because they were annoyed by how strongly Twitter was censoring and labeling its users’ content, perhaps because of Trump, most likely a combination. But the fact remains that the chronology was that the app was enormously popular long before Jan. 6, 2021, which was the reason cited for banning it.

God, Taylor Lorenz is a pill, and she dominates the conversation, while providing little information. Evan Greer was quite good, while Freddie was silent. When Freddie did speak up, he was more provincial than I expected him to be. He said that Americans were particularly anti-authoritarian (“because fuck you, that’s why”) was completely ignorant of how the rest of the world works. There are plenty of people with exactly that attitude in other countries (e.g. the DACH region). Evan Greer was quite brilliant in his sign-off, where he said that it was a complete distraction to talk about Joe Rogan’s influence on vaccinations when U.S. government policy—e.q. holding back the Walter Reed and other vaccines from development or distribution; enforcing IP rights on all others—has led to a vastly larger number of unvaccinated people than anything else.

Lorentz said: “I spend a lot of time on TikTok” and she noted that, from the comments on TikTok videos, people absolutely seem to believe everything that they see. They don’t doubt anything. The Internet is truth.

Brianna Gray was quite good as well.

“It’s not hard for me to imagine Trump having won in 2020, where the valence of vaccine-hesitancy would be completely reversed. It’s hard not to think of this issue as nearly purely ideological.”

I must admit that DeBoer is much more eloquent in print than in an interview. Lorenz was better than I expected, but I feel that she’s lying about what her activities online are. They discussed Wordle, where Lorenz admitted she’s terrible at it because she’s “basically dyslexic”. This is a journalist at the NYT. I feel that she’s lying deliberately to drum up sympathy. Brianna also admitted that she couldn’t do Wordle, either. Lorenz told Brianna to get on TikTok because “it needs more smart people” (which Brianna is) because “it’s chaos; it’s basically being run by nine-year-olds.”

And yet, that’s where people get their information. God help us all. Just kidding; she won’t. She doesn’t care about us at all.

If you’re interested in more information about Taylor Lorentz’s activities online, check out the following video:

Content Cop − Taylor Lorenz (Midwest Edition) by BostWiki (YouTube)

The video is about 75 minutes long and it’s quite damning, to be honest. She seems to be quite a sociopath.

I think Twitter thinks we like using it 😕 by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“ I think the reason Twitter’s communication is so bad about this kind of stuff is because everything Twitter does comes from a wildly misinformed place of perceived user enthusiasm. And they’re actually one of the few major platforms that still operates this way. Facebook is basically a nation state now that treats its users with the same level of affection The Matrix treats its meat tubes. The only thing their communications team emphasizes in updates are abstractions — connection, local networks, value, etc. And Instagram is basically a mall, with most of their announcements and features focused on the financial impact for the platforms’ many business and influencers. But Twitter, the company, still seems to think that their website is a website used by people who enjoy it. Which is bizarre! It’s 2022. People don’t enjoy websites anymore because there’s only 5 left and they all realized that it’s more profitable to piss people off. And this is especially true for Twitter!”

Art, Literature, & History

A few things to know before stealing my 914 by Norman Garrett (Hagerty)

“Depress the clutch as you would in any car, and pull the knob from its secure location out of first gear. Now you will become adrift in the zone known to early Porsche owners as “Neverland” and your quest will be to find second gear. Prepare yourself for a ten-second-or-so adventure. Do not go straight forward with the shift knob, as you will only find Reverse waiting there to mock you with a shriek of high-speed gear teeth machining themselves into round cylinders. Should you hear this noise, retreat immediately to the only easy spot to find in this transmission: neutral. This is a safe place, no real damage can occur here, but alas, no forward motion will happen either. From this harbor of peace, you can re-attempt to find second, but you may just want to go for any “port in a storm”, given that the traffic behind you is now cheering you on in your quest with vigorous horn-honks of support and encouragement. Most 914 owners at this point pull over to the side of the road and feign answering a cell phone call to a) avoid further humiliation; b) allow traffic to pass; and c) gather the courage for another first gear start. You may choose to do likewise.”

Your Feelings Are No Excuse: Emotions may explain why people overreact, but they don’t justify it. by Margaret Atwood (The Atlantic)

“I was never told to stay in my lane by Christopher Hitchens, I hasten to add. He, too, did not know what his lane was, and wouldn’t have stayed in it if he did. We had at least that in common: a failure to recognize lanes. It goes with a disrespect for the fences around the corrals where the sacred cows are kept, though they keep changing the cows, I notice. Hitch would have noticed that too.”

“At least he didn’t accuse me of hurting his feelings, nor did I accuse him of hurting mine. Having feelings was not a thing back then. We would not have admitted to owning such marshmallow-like appendages, and if we did have any feelings, we’d have considered them irrelevant as arguments. Feelings are real—people do have them, I have observed—and they can certainly be plausible explanations for all kinds of behavior. But they are not excuses or justifications. If they were, men who murder their wives because they’re feeling cranky that day would never get convicted.”

“You can’t exist as a writer for very long without learning that something you write is going to upset someone, sometime, somewhere. Whether you end up with a bullet in your neck will depend on many factors—there are lots of bullets, and some necks are thicker than others—but let us pause to remember that the most important meaning of freedom of expression is not that you can say anything you like without any consequences whatsoever but that the bullet should not be your government’s, and it should not be fired into your neck for an expression of political views that don’t coincide with theirs.”

“We didn’t consider the factual truth of any given matter to be dispensable—or worse, to be some scoundrelly piece of propaganda cooked up by the opposing party. We both believed in a healthy society’s need for public debate, with testable evidence presented.”

“In recent years, people have confused beliefs with truths. From this confusion have come ideologies and dogmas—the characteristic of a dogma being that it’s proposed as an absolute truth and cannot be disputed, and if you try disputing it, you’ll be burned as a heretic.”

“For the good of the universe, certain people must be silenced or eliminated. If you’re my age, you’ve heard this before.”

“It is this dream of a moderate democratic center that Ukraine has been defending, and that defense has had a broad effect.”

It is here that I must note with regret that even Atwood is failing to vet her picture of Ukraine. I agree that a country with a moderate democratic center would be worth defending, but Ukraine is, unfortunately, no such thing. The country that she’s describing as such has responded to the invasion of its territorial integrity by conscripting every male from 18 to 60 into the military and by folding all media organizations into a single, state-run entity—to ensure that the proper message is delivered. This is not what we’re looking for, people. Of course they don’t deserve to be invaded. Of course they have a right to defend themselves. They are not a moderate, Scandinavian-style democracy. They are a corruption-riddled state, lurching from one kleptocratic strongman to another—much as Russia and the U.S. do.

The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize by Sunil Khilnani (The New Yorker)

“In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots. The actions of a few European empires have invited harsh scrutiny, too—Belgium’s conduct in Congo, France’s in Algeria, and Portugal’s in Angola and Mozambique. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine.”

“We misunderstand the end of empire, Elkins says, because the old liberal imperial historiography focussed more on high policy—the stratagems of what Gallagher and his cohort termed the “official mind”—than on the acts of get-it-done enforcers in the field.”

“Add to its longevity an unrivalled global footprint, and the British Empire’s baneful legacy may well have been deeper and more diffuse than that of any other modern state. Was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism? It’s a question that Elkins’s new book implicitly poses.”

“In “Imperial Reckoning,” Elkins moved deftly between oral and archival histories to describe a British strategy of detention, beatings, starvation, torture, forced hard labor, rape, and castration, designed to break the resistance of a people, the Kikuyu, who, having been dispossessed by the British and then, during the Second World War, enlisted to fight for them, had plenty of reason to resist.”

“A 1937 order conferred on him the right to make whatever regulations “appear to him in his unfettered discretion to be necessary or expedient for securing the public safety, the defense of Palestine, the maintenance of public order and the suppression of mutiny, rebellion and riot, and for maintaining supplies and services essential to the life of the community.””

How does that differ from martial law, in the end?

“For her, all such efforts were bound to be impotent because she is convinced of liberal imperialism’s ability to absorb and neutralize criticism—something that more brittle ideologies like Nazi Lebensraum could not do. Britain’s colonial subjects protested, questions were raised in Parliament, inquiries were commissioned, reports were printed and shelved, and, in the end, repressive capacities emerged with tempered strength.”

This is what we see in what we can call the American Empire (the amalgam of monopolist and globe-girdling corporations and the U.S. nation-state) today: the blog quickly coopts every attempt to subvert its rule.

“The story of the British Empire in the twentieth century is also a story of forced retraction. Unfortunately, the forensic skill that Elkins applies to empire’s incarnadine claws is less in evidence when it comes to the nationalist tactics that, decade by decade, helped loosen their grip. As Lee Kuan Yew, who worked to throw off the British in Singapore, famously noted, one way for the weaker to defy the more powerful was to become a poisonous shrimp: “they sting.””

“Colonized peoples in Africa and elsewhere wrote off nonviolence less quickly. Regardless of how incremental or indirect the progress could seem in the moment, empire’s financial or reputational costs could still be ratcheted up beyond what was supportable.”

“Weeks after the Devlin report arraigned the colonial government for running a “police state,” representatives of Ghana cited that stark conclusion in the U.N., as momentum gathered for a landmark resolution: a formal call for an end to colonial rule. In the next five years, the British withdrew from eleven colonies, Nyasaland among them.”

“The ungainly truth is that liberal thought has been a resource for repression and resistance alike, and theories of imperial power impatient with this ambiguity may not withstand the scrutiny they deserve.”

Again, we’re seeing it today in full force, as the ostensibly liberal Democratic party screams for war abroad, while ignoring a tremendous amount of injustice and suffering at home. It could also be argued that they are not liberal, in any real sense of the word, that they wrap themselves in liberal words in order to deceive others into supporting them, much as the British did.

At least she finishes up strong(ly) with,

“I’ll propose something simpler. Don’t panic. Think carefully. Write clearly. Act in good faith. Repeat.”

Sound advice.

Technology

The difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum by Dare Obasanjo (Twitter)

“The difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme while Ethereum is a platform for pyramid schemes and tech people really like platforms.”

Working with Claire: an unauthorized guide by Elad Gil

“I dislike being caught last-minute with people working hard on something we could have gotten ahead of—please help anticipate big work efforts and let’s be in front of them together. Similarly, I want us to be ruthless in priorities while we are resource-constrained. I need you all sane…and me too.”

“You feel safe when you discuss with me: Ideas usually get better”

Get a more profound understanding of how I function as a leader, boss, and human being. by Niklaus Gerber

“I’m not very good at your job: You’re the expert. My job is to provide you with the necessary context, ask questions, and help you achieve better results. It’s not about overruling you.
You let me know if you can’t do your job: One of my primary responsibilities is to make sure you are successful. It may very well be that I am not 100% there for you. Please let me know if you feel that you will need more support from me.
You feel safe when you discuss with me: Ideas usually get better when you look at them from all angles. Even though I sometimes will give you the feeling that I know everything better, it is generally more about working with you to find the best possible solution.”

“Trust is the default mode of working: Trust in a relationship is the foundation for that relationship’s success. Without trust between individuals or on a team, mediocrity and failure are the most likely results. I believe that we will not be able to succeed if we can’t trust each other. My default mode of working will always be that I trust you and that you trust me.”

“I start with an assumption of positive intent for everyone involved: So far, this worked well for me.”

“Empathy: Understanding our customers is incredibly important for developing the best products and services. Compassion for our colleagues is helping us to be a strong team.”

“Self-reflection: Self-reflection is an essential part of our development. Without it, you miss many opportunities.”

“No politics: No cc-ing of me to put pressure on the person you are writing to. Only escalate a conflict once you failed to resolve it yourself.”

“Work in iterations: If you want my input rather ask me several times in the process instead of coming up with the final end product. E.g., start with an outline of your idea, then bring it to 60%, then finalize it – and do problem-solving with me at these stages.”

“When I feel that I cannot contribute to a meeting or that the meeting is poorly prepared, I will mention this to the moderator and ask the person whether I am required, and then I will leave. I expect the meeting to be run efficiently, respectful of everyone’s time and contributions.”

JFC, though. On the spectrum much? Who does this kind of thing? I can’t imagine anyone I work with acting like this instead of just saying something like an empathic human being.

How to work with me by David Bauer

“Context-awareness. Nothing that we do happens in a vacuum. In fact, making the right decisions is foremost about understanding the context we’re operating in. This can be anything from interpersonal to organisation-wide, from understanding customer needs to market forces and policy constraints.”

“Always start with the assumption that we are arguing because we all want to solve the same issue, with the best intentions in mind. Always try to truly understand a position before arguing against it. Ask questions. Repeat back what you understood to be their point.”

“Don’t be overconfident. Say how (un)certain you are when you make a statement. Ask others: How sure are you?”

“Reflect: Are the people having this discussion the right people to have this discussion. Is someone missing?”

“Know when to end a discussion. Sometimes a decision needs to be made. Sometimes additional information needs to be gathered to continue the discussion. Always end a discussion with everyone knowing what will happen next.”

Programming

Understanding Layout Algorithms by Josh Comeau

“Flow is all about creating document-style layouts, and I have yet to see word-processing software that allows elements to overlap.”

God, the kids these days say the silliest things or have such limited exposure before they’re willing to go out on a limb. Falls into the category of “technically true”. He’s never seen word-processing software that lets elements overlap, but he’s apparently only ever used super-weak-ass word-processing software—probably cloud versions of formerly powerful editors. Microsoft Word, for example, easily allows elements to overlap.

“The Flow layout algorithm is treating this image as if it was a character in a paragraph, and adding a bit of space below to ensure it isn’t uncomfortably close to the characters on the (theoretical) next line of text. So it’s not margin, or padding, or border… it’s the bit of intrinsic space that Flow layout applies to inline elements, the space typically manipulated with the line-height CSS property!”

“There are a lot of layout algorithms in CSS, and they all have their own quirks and hidden mechanisms. When we focus on CSS properties, we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. We never learn about really important concepts like stacking contexts or containing blocks or cascade origins!”

Tweaking In The Browser by Ahmad Shadeed

This is an interesting article, but he forgets to consider why someone might be designing directly in CSS: they don’t know how to use any design tools. It’s all well and good that he is extremely well-versed in Figma and feels much faster in that. But if you’re terrible at actual design tools, then you’re not slower in CSS/HTML. You might very well be much slower than Shadeed, but that’s not going to change until you learn a design tool like Figma.

Another reason why people design in the browser is that it used to be much harder to reproduce the output of a design tool in CSS. It made less sense to design something that could never be represented anyway, so you just built it directly in HTML/CSS, where your design was limited by the ability of the tool—but it was going to be anyway because you can’t release a Figma file as your UI.

His point is well-taken, though, that if you do know a design tool, then you should use that to design your interface without limiting your vision by how well or efficiently it can be represented in the solution space (the browser). That’s always a good idea. Come up with the solution or design first, then figure out how to implement it. If it’s too hard to implement or would be too inefficient or unmaintainable, then return to the design with this information in hand and see whether the design can be adjusted without compromising its vision.

It’s always a bad idea to come up with solutions based on what’s possible rather than what’s desirable. You limit the possibility of finding something really interesting and new and better rather than just building what’s already been built many times before.