Links and Notes for April 8th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

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

“In the face of a new upsurge, the Biden administration is abandoning all measures to slow the spread of the pandemic. On April 7, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began allowing people actively infected with COVID-19 to fly—while “recommending” that they don’t!—and told state and local health departments they could stop reporting cases in which COVID-infected people were intending to fly.”

“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.”

“These were supposedly to be passed in a separate bill, which has now stalled in the Senate, put on the shelf while senators and congressmen take a two-week Easter recess. In the meantime, working people face charges of up to $125 for a PCR test and thousands of dollars for antiviral drugs, let alone hospitalization, if they contract COVID-19.”

“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.”

Economy & Finance

Commodity market turbulence heightens financial instability by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“One of the most extreme examples is in the European natural gas market. Buyers and sellers must now provide around $77 as collateral for each megawatt hour of gas they want to trade. A year ago, the amount required was around $4.50.

“The margin required for a four-month contract in Brent crude oil has risen to almost $12 a barrel, more than double what it was a year ago.”

“It noted that inventories of aluminium, copper, zinc and nickel, four of the main commodities traded on the London Metal Exchange, had dropped by as much as 70 percent over the past years.

“Rising power prices have caused major companies such as Glencore and Trafigura to cut back production at loss-making zinc and aluminium.”

The Dollar Devours the Euro by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch)

“Russia’s preemptive defense of the two Eastern Ukrainian provinces and its subsequent military destruction of the Ukrainian army, navy and air force over the past two months has been used as the excuse to start imposing the U.S.-designed sanctions program that we are seeing unfolding today. Western Europe has dutifully gone along whole-hog. Instead of buying Russian gas, oil and food grains, it will buy these from the United States, along with sharply increased arms imports.”

First of all, Mr. Hudson, using the term “preemptive defense” is not acceptable. That’s a nonsense term that’s beneath you. Second of all, is it really true that Europe is going to buy all of that stuff from the States?

“Europe was to earn the foreign exchange to pay for this rising import trade by a combination of exporting more industrial manufactures to Russia and capital investment in developing the Russian economy, e.g. by German auto companies and financial investment. This bilateral trade and investment is now stopped – and will remain stopped for many, many years, given NATO’s confiscation of Russia’s foreign reserves kept in euros and British sterling, and the Europe’s Russophobia being fanned by U.S. propaganda media.”

“All three of these trade dynamics will strengthen the dollar vis-à-vis the euro. The question is, how will Europe balance its international payments with the United States? What does it have to export that the U.S. economy will accept as its own protectionist interests gain influence, now that global free trade is dying quickly?”

“The full-blown version as the New Cold War turning into the opening salvo of World War III triggered by the “Ukraine War” is likely to last at least a decade, perhaps two, as the U.S. extends the fight between neoliberalism and socialism to encompass a worldwide conflict. Apart from the U.S. economic conquest of Europe, its strategists are seeking to lock in African, South American and Asian countries along similar lines to what has been planned for Europe.”

“The first U.S. demand will be that these countries boycott Russia, China and their emerging trade and currency self-help alliance. “Why should we give you SDRs or extend new dollar loans to you, if you are simply going to spend these in Russia, China and other countries that we have declared to be enemies,” the U.S. officials will ask.”

“I would not be surprised to see some African country become the “next Ukraine,” with U.S. proxy troops (there are still plenty of Wahabi advocates and mercenaries) fighting against the armies and populations of countries seeking to feed themselves with grain from Russian farms, and power their economies with oil or gas from Russian wells – not to speak of participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative that was, after all, the trigger to America’s launching of its new war for global neoliberal hegemony.”

“[…] in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has just won election on what is basically an anti-EU and anti-U.S. worldview, starting with paying for Russian gas in roubles. How many other countries will break ranks – and how long will it take?”

“The real problem is that by the time it understands what is going on, the global fracture will already have enabled Russia, China and Eurasia to create a real non-neoliberal New World Order that does not need NATO countries and has lost trust and hope for mutual economic gains with them. The military battlefield will be littered with economic corpses.”

The Scoop: Inside Fast’s Rapid Collapse by Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer)

“Hi, this is Gergely with a free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. If you’re not a full subscriber yet, you missed the deep-dive inside Amazon’s engineering culture, one on remote compensation strategies, another on how to retain software engineers, and a few others. Subscribe to get this newsletter every week. It’s the #1 technology newsletter on Substack.”

Time was when people just had blogs. Now they have side-hustles. Ugh.

“The Fast story should be a warning sign that a well-funded scaleup could be closer to bankruptcy than it seems.”

No shit. All of these startups are bullshit factories. Its pets.com v2.

“Most engineers joining didn’t know much about why the one-click checkout industry has the potential of billions. What they did know is Fast offered at or above base salaries of Big Tech, directors shared an enthusiastic story of the company being a rocketship, and they were granted equity which seemed like a golden ticket to retirement.”

All of these smart people couldn’t see an obvious scam through their greed. Idiots. They’re probably all crypto-fans, too. It’s so tiring to constantly hear about people who are ostensibly smart but completely lack wisdom. What’s the point?

““I remember this spreadsheet about the equity upside like yesterday. It was the reason why I left me previous company, where I enjoyed working and had a good package. The millions in gains looked so real − especially that Bolt’s valuation was just under $11B. It seemed realistic that Fast could get to a $12B valuation.”

Greedy idiot.

“[…] every small business needed custom engineering work to be done, making integration slow. Several engineers mentioned how they did not understand how spending lots of engineering effort for each small client resulting in little revenue would result in building a company that could be worth $12B one day.”

This sounds like a very common problem for startups. I know of two companies that are/were in the same situation. One is trying to dig out of it (by hiring senior engineers to come help clean things up) and the other was acquired by a larger firm with a more stable code and produce base into which the uncontrolled growth of the startup would be absorbed.

“Mitchell joined in December 2021, and his first announcement was a company-wide hiring freeze. This was communicated as a “hiring slow-down” and was effective from early January. Signed offers would be honored, but no new offers were given out.”

This is sounding more and more like a company I was looking at during my job search. I didn’t get an offer in a timely fashion because there was a hiring freeze. Maybe dodged a bullet there.

“People liked the culture, and how employee happiness was a priority. There are people who are frustrated and disappointed with company leadership, and how the bust came out of nowhere.”

Idiots. Of course they liked that part. They didn’t think about how the company was supposed to make money.

“Especially when joining at senior levels − Staff engineer or above, Director or above − it should be a red flag if people don’t share these numbers with you, at least verbally. If you get pushback, you can always use the Fast story as reasoning on why you want to know these numbers.”

I guess of course you should do this but also it’s sad that you have to weed out scammers to find out if the job is going to be around for more than a year. I’m glad I managed to avoid this whole shitshow.

“Prepare for this scenario as well. What will you gain if you only get paid the base salary? Will you still come out better for the experience, thanks to learning, a career boost, or by not wondering “what if…?””

What a luxury question. He’s saying to ask yourself: what if you were to only be paid $220,000 per year? He’s asking people to consider what they would do in the event of such an unalloyed tragedy. Disgusting.

“$279K in annual compensation difference between Nvidia and Stitch Fix ($510K and $231K respectively) and $834K difference in outstanding stock for the next 3 years.”

“$162K in annual compensation difference between Apple and Robinhood ($420K and $258K respectively) and $485K difference in outstanding stock for the next 3 years.””

Madness. There are real people doing real work making less than a 10th of that.

Beanstalk Farms stablecoin project loses $182 million to exploit (Web3 is going just great)

“All my magic beans gone. An attacker successfully used a flash loan attack to exploit a flaw in Beanstalk Farms’ stablecoin protocol, which allowed them to make off with 24,830 ETH (almost $76 million). The attacker then donated $250,000 to Ukraine before moving the remaining funds to Tornado Cash to tumble.”

Gahhhh, it’s so hard to take any of this seriously. It sounds like a video game. But…that’s a lot of money. That’s a huge bank heist, actually. The attackers stole $76M in minutes, probably seconds. Completely untraceable. There was a “stablecoin”, which, in the end, lent no stability. It dropped to 0, breaking the tether, at the first sign of panic. This is all so stupid.

The Macro EndGame by Alfonso Peccatiello (The Macro Compass)

“Deleveraging: politically unviable. If creating credit is the equivalent of printing money, deleveraging = destroying money. An extremely painful process that inflicts large losses to 2 generations of people that have lived and prospered through the wealth illusion effect. The establishment is never going to volunteer for this political hara-kiri.”

I received a link to this article from a friend and must admit that what is contained within in largely uncontroversial, perhaps until the final 10%, where the Bitcoin sales pitch comes in. That macro-level problem the author describes exists and is more-or-less well-known. The problem with it isn’t that it works for no-one, but that it seems to work quite well for a privileged and largely self-selected elite, especially in the short- to medium-term. It screws everyone else, but at the same time, lulls them into complacence with illusory and ephemeral gains.

In that sense, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, instead of offering a way out of this morass, are actually just the next iteration of the same system, a scam designed to fool the 99.9% into sacrificing the health and happiness they could easily have, giving the productivity and wealth in the world, for a chance at a mirage that dangles always out of reach, for all but the one or two lucky winners it takes to keep the hope of the scam alive.

Yes, the financialization of the economy and the funneling of money upward is a scam, but replacing it with another scam, run by most of the same people that benefit from the existing one—with a few new winners thrown into the mix, to improve marketability—does no-one who’s not already doing well any good.

Public Policy & Politics

Noam Chomsky: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history” by George Eaton (New Statesman)

““Putin is as concerned with democracy as we are. If it’s possible to break out of the propaganda bubble for a few minutes, the US has a long record of undermining and destroying democracy. Do I have to run through it? Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, on and on… But we are supposed to now honour and admire Washington’s enormous commitment to sovereignty and democracy. What happened in history doesn’t matter. That’s for other people.”

“[…] it would be even more progress to have moral outrage about other horrible atrocities… In Afghanistan, literally millions of people are facing imminent starvation. Why? There’s food in the markets. But people who have little money have to watch their children starve because they can’t go to the market to buy food. Why? Because the United States, with the backing of Britain, has kept Afghanistan’s funds in New York banks and will not release them.””

““Because of Trump’s fanaticism, the worshipful base of the Republican Party barely regards climate change as a serious problem. That’s a death warrant to the species.””

The Democrats also do worse than nothing. The policies are nearly identical; the words are more soothing. After fifteen months of the Biden administration we are, as under Obama, farther than ever from addressing climate change. Focusing on Trump and his followers in the GOP is a distraction, but it probably doesn’t matter what we focus on—the latest IPCC report is the most dire yet.

The Biden Administration Fed the Press Dubious Intelligence About Russia by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“If you read between the lines, it certainly seems like US officials are admitting they’re simply making things up — or “sowing disinformation,” in the parlance of our time — and feeding it to the press, confident reporters will uncritically pass on whatever they tell them.”

“Yet “senior current former US intelligence officials” told veteran national security reporter James Risen a very different story: that the CIA had, contrary to claims at the time from Biden and UK prime minister Boris Johnson, determined Putin hadn’t made a decision to invade in December and January, and that he only decided to do so in February — notably, after Washington had rebuffed his negotiation demands around NATO expansion and other security issues.”

“Obviously, we have no way of knowing whether there’s any more truth to that than to the polar-opposite claims we were hearing throughout December and January. All of these are simply assertions from anonymous officials for which we’ve stubbornly been denied any real substantiation.”

“[…] it’s yet another stark case of the double standard around “misinformation” and “disinformation,” which Western governments and their proxies in the tech sector have ramped up censorship powers to combat, dramatically escalating their powers of information control over the course of this war.”

“[…] for some reason Western government officials and mainstream press outlets are entirely exempt from this panic around misinformation, even though the falsehoods and questionable claims they might peddle are vastly more consequential and far-reaching than those of random social media users and small, web-based news outlets.”

Kyiv Independent Deep Dive: The West’s In-Kind Answer to Putin’s Propaganda by Alan Macleod (Mint Press News)

“Commenting on the split, journalist Mark Ames remarked that, “​​Ukraine’s western-backed civil society (along with the hardline Ukrainian diaspora) loathed Zelensky right up to the invasion, suspecting him of being insufficiently nationalist.” Ames’ Moscow-based newspaper, The eXile, was closed down by Vladimir Putin in 2008. His analysis seems to have been proven correct by the Independent’s editor-in-chief, Olga Rudenko, who wrote in the pages of The New York Times that, “Mr. Zelensky, the showman and performer, has been unmasked by reality. And it has revealed him to be dispiritingly mediocre.””

“What “reform” could allude to here is the massive course of economic “shock therapy” in which the government conducted a firesale of state-owned businesses and assets, in the process dismantling its welfare state and removing barriers to Western corporations’ operations in the country. This process has helped to keep Ukraine the poorest country in Europe, although both the domestic and international billionaire classes have benefited enormously.”

“Isn’t it incredible how Western all those Eastern Europeans sound in talking about freedom, democracy, free enterprise, environmental concerns. And they didn’t get those ideas from their own media or from textbooks in their own countries; they got them mainly from international broadcasters like Voice of America, the BBC, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe.””

“Despite Russia being the chief belligerent in this war and some Russian sources spreading false information, we must still be skeptical of claims made by the other side. In war, the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus noted, truth is always the first casualty.”

“There is already a serious problem in modern discourse with the term “independent media,” a phrase commonly used to refer to any media outlet, no matter how big an empire it is, that is not owned or funded by the state”

“That The Kyiv Independent does not even acknowledge its foreign funding and presents itself as reader-supported is especially troubling.”

Fabricating Putin Quotes and Banning Paraplegic Athletes To Undermine Russia by Rick Sterling (Antiwar.com)

“Mobilizing a population to vilify and hate a targeted enemy is a tactic that leaders have used since before the dawn of human history, and it is being used to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin in the current conflict.”

There’s always at least—if not more than—a kernel of truth to it, but the vilification gets meretricious immediately. People quickly buy absolutely everything: hook, line, and sinker. Heaping extra shit on Putin is like doing the same to Hillary Clinton with adenochrome or pedophilia pizza restaurants. The woman is bad enough with just the stuff she’s actually proud of having done; you don’t have to make shit up. Focus. Hell, she actually did some good stuff as well. Can’t take that away from her (e.g. the health-care plan she’d proposed in the 90s was better than what we have now). The bad far outweighs the good, in my opinion. The exact same with Putin.

“If such actions are justified, why was there no such banning of US athletes, musicians or writers after the US invasion of Iraq? Moreover, why are so few people outraged by the bombing and killing of 370,000 Yemeni people? Why are so few people outraged as thousands of Afghans starve because the United States is seizing Afghanistan’s national assets which were in western banks?”

“This has required trashing some long held western traditions. By banning all Russian athletes from international competition, the International Olympic Committee and different athletic federations have violated the Olympic Charter which prohibits discrimination on the basis of nationality.”

“On April 6, one of the best informed military analysts, Scott Ritter @realScottRitter, was suspended from Twitter. Why? Because he suggested that the victims of Bucha may have been murdered not by Russians, but rather by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and the US and UK may also be culpable.”

“The latest sensational accusations are regarding dead civilians in Bucha, north of Kiev. Again, there is much contrary evidence. The Russian soldiers left Bucha on March 31, the mayor of Bucha announced the town liberated with no mention of atrocities on March 31, the Azov battalion entered Bucha on April 1, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry published video of “Russian” atrocities on April 3.”

“It is well known that Biden is unpopular. Biden’s latest approval rating is under 42%. It is less well known in the West that Putin is popular in Russia. Since the intervention in Ukraine his approval rating has increased to over 80%.”

Can this possibly be true? We’re told very different things about the Russian opinion of their war. However, we have to understand that we’re steeped in propaganda. So are Russians. We’re only ever going to hear from Russian dissidents here. It’s entirely possible that they are so supportive of Putin. Look at Bush’s approval ratings after he flattened Afghanistan in 2001 (92% if I recall correctly). About 69% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq. Those are polls with unknown accuracy, but it would be hard to argue that they misrepresented the overall sentiment there, at the time. I don’t have any reason to believe that Russia is vastly different here. They’re probably just as brainwashed a populace with just as bad polling as the U.S.

“In contrast, the western military-industrial-media complex is fueling the war with propaganda, censorship, banning, demonization and more weapons. It appears they do not want a resolution to the conflict. Just as they supported NATO pushing up against Russia, knowing that it risked provoking Russia to the point of retaliation, they seem to be pushing for a protracted bloody conflict in Ukraine, knowing that it risks global conflagration. Yet they persist, while crying crocodile tears.”

Who Wins, Who Loses Gen. Milley’s Long War? by Patrick Buchanan (Antiwar.com)

“This crisis in Ukraine is calling forth the larger question: For whom and for what should the United States go to war with a nation with a larger nuclear arsenal than our own, but which does not directly threaten us?”

“President Volodymyr Zelensky’s willingness to negotiate with Putin after the proven atrocities and to accept temporary occupation of part of Ukraine suggests that he knows that, from here on out, Ukraine, which has won the first battles, could steadily lose the longer war.”

“Putin’s Russia is a second loser in this war.

“The initial invasion failed to capture Kiev or Kharkiv. The Russian army around Kiev has departed and, reportedly, many thousands of Russian troops have been killed, wounded, captured or gone missing.

“The Russian economy is suffering from severe sanctions.

“Yet over 80% of the Russian people still support Putin and his war. And Russia’s renewed drive into the Donbas and to take the Black Sea coast of Ukraine from Crimea to Odessa is not yet lost.”

There’s that 80% again. If true, then that is the anticipated effect of economic sanctions: it makes a country pull together. The purported goal of causing an uprising is just that: words that the elite make with their mouths so that they get widespread support for economic warfare that devastates the poor in the target country, while hardly inconveniencing their elites. The elites applying the sanctions, though, they make out like bandits as their business interests rush in to fill the gap left by their sanctions.

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

“These actions make clear that US allegations earlier this week of Russian war crimes in the suburbs of Kiev were a propaganda barrage aimed at destroying any prospect of a negotiated settlement and preparing public consciousness for an intensification of NATO involvement.”

““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.””

Yeah, it would be, had they said that. Fuck you, Stoltenberg, you outrageous warmonger.

“Unlike their judicial systems, when it comes to war, Western nations dispense with the need for investigations and evidence and pronounce guilt based on political motives: Russia is guilty. Case closed.”

Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post)

“Last Wednesday, all Russian forces left Bucha, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

“This was confirmed on Thursday by a smiling Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, in a video on the Bucha City Council official Facebook page. The translated post accompanying the video says:”

“March 31 – the day of the liberation of Bucha. This was announced by Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk. This day will go down in the glorious history of Bucha and the entire Bucha community as a day of liberation by the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the Russian occupiers.”

“All of the Russian troops are gone and yet there is no mention of a massacre. The beaming Fedoruk says it is a “glorious day” in the history of Bucha, which would hardly be the case if hundreds of dead civilians littered the streets around Fedoruk.”

“As pointed out in a piece by Jason Michael McCann on Standpoint Zero, The New York Times was in Bucha on Saturday and did not report a massacre. Instead, the Times said the withdrawal was completed on Saturday, two days after the mayor said it was, and that the Russians left “behind them dead soldiers and burned vehicles, according to witnesses, Ukrainian officials, satellite images and military analysts.””

“The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online [Ukrainian language] site Left Bank announced that:”

“‘Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.’”

“The Russian military has by now completely left the city, so this sounds for all the world like reprisals.”

“Only the day before [Friday], Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ She informed residents that the arrival of the Azov battalion did not mean that liberation was complete (but it was, the Russians had fully withdrawn), and that a ‘complete sweep’ had to be performed.””

Liberals Are Adopting an Old Soviet Tactic: Painting Opponents as Mentally Ill by Jonathan Cook (Mint Press News)

“The medicalization of dissent was not unique to the Soviet Union, of course. It is a feature of authoritarian and repressive states. An ideological consensus is cultivated in the population by portraying opponents as traitors whose behavior is proof of a mental disturbance or insanity. Publicizing dissent, and the reasons for it, through criminal trials risks dangerously challenging dominant social assumptions inculcated by propaganda. Instead, the dissenter can quietly be detained for his or her own good without their political ideology getting an airing.”

The Bucha atrocity allegations: A pretext for escalating NATO’s war against Russia by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“The actual facts, however, do not prove the conclusion. Russian troops withdrew from Bucha right after the Kremlin promised to dramatically reduce its forces in the direction of Kiev in peace negotiations last Tuesday. For days, no significant civilian casualties were reported. On Saturday, Ukrainian forces—including members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion—entered the town, and a torrent of reports were unleashed in the Western press about alleged atrocities.”

“The images shown widely only indicate that bodies were found, but not who killed whom, when and under what circumstances. While video evidence has emerged of Ukrainian forces executing and torturing unarmed people, no similar evidence has emerged for Russian troops.”

“Given the systematic use by the United States of false allegations of atrocities to justify wars all over the world, and absent clear and convincing evidence, there is no reason to view the claims of a massacre in Bucha as anything other than war propaganda, aimed at enraging the population to justify military escalation.”

“Atrocity allegations are a critical element of US war propaganda. Every aggressive war ever launched by the United States was built upon allegations of atrocities by the targets of US military intervention. In every case, whether the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Syria, or Libya, the script is the same: the government targeted by the US has murdered civilians and threatens to kill more unless the US intervenes.”

“In addition to escalating the US-NATO conflict against Russia, US officials are using the anti-Russia war hysteria in the liberal upper middle class to promote a massive military buildup whose ultimate target is China no less than Russia. On Tuesday, the White House announced a new agreement by the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) partnership to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons targeting China.”

“Atrocity propaganda is one of the most important weapons of modern warfare. The enemy is alleged to have committed bestial crimes, which are either totally invented or greatly exaggerated, to then seek their total destruction. This is the pattern now being followed by the broad campaign about Russian war crimes in Bucha.

“As yet, although there is neither reliable information nor any independent investigation, the Ukrainian government and NATO are using the alleged massacre of civilians to burn all bridges leading to a ceasefire and to promulgate the continuation of the war until the complete subjugation of Russia.”

Remember the Iraqi Republican Guard was throwing babies out of incubators in Baghdad hospitals? No? That was an important allegation that garnered support in the U.S. Congress.

Why would they lie? Why not? There is literally no downside. If you get caught, you can just claim that you were fooled like everyone else, carried away on a tide of righteous indignation. You can hardly be blamed for a surfeit of empathy with victims, can you?

Have you seen how much effort people put into Halloween displays in the U.S.? Where they strew what look for all the world like real corpses around their yard? That’s how easy it is to make something look like a crime scene, especially when no-one’s going to really investigate. Just take some blurry photos of what look like bodies and make up some horrific stories. It works. The lever is enormous.

The worst part is that it bleeds the veracity of real tragedies because no-one knows what to believe anymore. Luckily, most people would rather be fooled into war a hundred times rather than doubt one atrocity and have to acknowledge their error afterward.

Again, that’s because you don’t have to apologize for supporting needless and heedless war based on lies—it’s actually good for your career and social standing—whereas you will be taken to task and ostracized for failing to have taken a tragedy seriously the minute someone mentioned it.

Unless it’s a tragedy that your “side” doesn’t want to be acknowledged (I’m thinking here of Palestine or Yemen or Afghanistan). If you focus on the official enemies and targets and believe every detail of every story, without proof, you will go far. So, focus laser-like on Uighurs and Ukrainians and people in Shanghai, but ignore everything else. Your country thanks you for your service.

“Let us recall the “Račak massacre,” which was instrumentalised by NATO to justify its war against Yugoslavia in violation of international law. On 15 and 16 January 1999, 40 bodies were found near the village of Račak, and presented by the Western media as evidence of an alleged Serb genocide of Kosovo Albanians. Later, it turned out that the evidence had been manipulated. The actual events have not been clarified to this day, as important documents remain under lock and key.”

“The double standards of this campaign break all bounds. Journalists, who for decades have defended every war crime committed by the USA and NATO and downplayed the historical crimes of the Nazis, are discovering a new dimension of war crimes in Bucha.”

German press seizes upon claims of Russian atrocities to demand military escalation by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Reinhard Veser comments that the Ukrainians were “in a struggle for existence in which they have no other option but to fight back with all their might. The West must provide them with the means to do so.””

That would be with all our might, then, no? By definition?

“The reactionary, nationalist regime of Vladimir Putin, which represents the interests of the Russian oligarchs, has nothing to oppose this. It vacillates between offers of negotiations with the imperialist powers, nuclear sabre-rattling and brutal military actions that play into the hands of imperialist propaganda.”

Putin is Being Written Off as an Ineffectual Monster, but a Russian Defeat is Far From Guaranteed by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“Putin grossly misjudged almost everything to do with his Ukraine invasion, but the signs are growing that Nato powers are also being lured into wishful thinking as they start to divide up the lion’s skin though the lion is still breathing. Shambolic the performance of the Russian army may have been so far, but it will not necessarily stay that way. In past wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western governments have had a self-destructive willingness to believe their own propaganda about a beaten enemy being on the run.”

“The British government in particular assumes that the war can only go one way, arguing that a peace deal today would be premature, letting Putin off the hook and requiring Ukraine to make concessions avoidable if it wins more military successes, which ministers consider inevitable. A senior British government source is quoted as saying: “We think Ukraine needs to be in the strongest possible position militarily before those talks can take place.” He said that Putin should be allowed no easy exit from Ukraine and Boris Johnson insists that sanctions should be intensified until Russian troops leave Ukraine including Crimea.”

Jesus Christ, they’re mental infants.

“Ignoring the fact that a long war might doom Ukraine to Iraqi and Afghan levels of death and devastation, this assumes that the military pendulum is predictable and only swings one way, an assumption that is contradicted by half the wars in history.”

“[…] he tends to be written off as a mad but ineffectual monster going down to inevitable defeat. Possibly this is exactly what will happen, but those who are most energetic in demonising Putin, paradoxically assume that in defeat he will behave with calm restraint when it comes to using chemical or nuclear weapons.”

“I feel frustrated with those who condemn war atrocities, but then use them as a reason to go on fighting a war that will inevitably produce even more such atrocities. If saying that “war is an atrocity” is to be any more than a platitude, then the only way to end the killing is to end the conflict.”

“Worrying again is an almost light-hearted belief that Putin would never use tactical nuclear or chemical weapons in this conflict. Where this confidence comes from is a mystery to me. The Economist says sternly that “the best deterrence is for Nato to stand up to Mr Putin’s veiled threat, and make clear that a nuclear or chemical atrocity would lead to Russia’s utter isolation.” Now that will really have them quaking in the Kremlin.”

The video Conversation with Noam Chomsky by The Origins Podcast / Lawrence M. Krauss (Vimeo) starts off with Chomsky citing Chas Freeman on Ukraine: “The Unites States is willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian”. It’s good to hear Chomsky citing Freeman as a source. I’d read several interviews with Freeman and found him to be remarkably cogent, well-informed and experienced. I’d only seen him on the GrayZone, Scheer Post, and AntiWar.com before (oft-cited by Ray McGovern), so it’s nice to see that he’s just blacklisted for the regular reasons. The stamp of approval from Chomsky means a lot.

Chomsky focuses laser-like on the U.S.‘s role in prolonging this war, as well as the rank hypocrisy of the West in general, but of the U.S. in particular. He addresses how Putin’s actions have handed Europe back to the U.S. on a silver platter.

When the interviewer points out that, once Russia has invaded, there was no other choice but to “help Ukrainians”. Chomsky responds that “helping Ukrainians” would be to seek a swift, diplomatic settlement that involves making Ukraine neutral (as Mexico is neutral). The interviewer was trying to suggest that there was nothing for it but to redouble (or triple) arming efforts in Ukraine. Chomsky puts the kibosh on that immediately.

Chomsky goes on to point out that U.S. propaganda is at least as appalling and overwhelmingly believed as that of Russia. He goes on to point out that the highest echelons of media is very much behind increased military escalation, as is the military-industrial complex, which is celebrating. As are the fossil-fuel companies, which are delighted that “tree-huggers” once again take a back seat to climate-change legislation.

In addition to Chas Freeman, he mentions Anatol Lyevin, as a “sane voice” on this topic. I noted an excellent interview with him in Links and Notes for March 18th, 2022. Chomsky’s a real ray of sunshine: “In a nuclear war, the lucky ones will be the ones who die quickly.”.

At about 32:00, Chomsky says that the only solution is a diplomatic settlement “which gives Putin a face-saving exit to survive, as George W. Bush survives, as Joe Biden survives, as Hillary Clinton survives […]”

Noam Chomsky is brilliant here, very much on point and very much focusing on the important issues, not being distracted.

Give War A Chance by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“We were told right away that 9/11 meant so much more than a policing problem, that instead of a few nut-jobs slipping through the net, bin Laden’s Twin Tower attacks heralded an inevitable, and desirable, Final Battle between new and old worlds. We’re going through something similar now. The pundit excitement over the final clash between “Democracy and Autocracy” perhaps being at hand reminds me exactly of the open praying for signs of the Apocalypse I once heard among the Rapture-ready flock of pastor John Hagee in San Antonio.

“We saw a ton of this thinking after 9/11. World-domination advocates who’d been laughed out of meetings for years were taken seriously overnight. Rigid with jingoistic fervor, they were suddenly in print and on air everywhere, bursting with “plans for everyone,” as Iggy Pop put it. Such people always rush to the front of the debate in these moments and they’re always listened to, until about ten years later, when it quietly becomes okay to reflect on a question we probably should have pondered in the moment, i.e. “Hey, are these people crazy?””

“Everyone remembers what came next. People like Kagan, co-author Bill Kristol, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Frum insisted that what could have been dealt with as a localized problem instead required a massive open-ended global militarization project, with accompanying Totaler Krieg.”

No, Matt. Only a paltry handful of people remembers what happened next.

“Clearly, we were told, the reason 9/11 had taken place was that we had not been vigilant enough in eliminating ancient cultures by force and replacing them everywhere with “freedom.””

You’re being sarcastic, Matt, but that’s how most people see it, completely irony-free.

“This was the same xenophobe insanity that had led people like William Westmoreland to explain that “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as the Westerner” while we were dumping poison and CBUs and napalm and 7,662,000 tons of explosives all over Indochina, part of our effort to “bomb them back into the Stone Age,” as Air Force General Curtis LeMay once put it. As Chris Hedges wrote recently, the basically racist notion that foreigners are savages and only understand force is a consistent feature of pre-war propaganda.”

Huh, so the Russians don’t only understand force? Lunacy.

“Analysts and think-tankers have already moved past Ukraine in their minds, to a future reorganization of Earth.”

Oh, Earth is going to get reorganized all right. Whether it likes it or not.

“The fact that Putin’s own instructively catastrophic misread of how easy foreign conquest would be is sitting before all of these people makes all this even more amazing.”

Well, Putin was wrong, whereas Europe and the U.S. can’t lose. They never have…right? Right?

“For most of the nineties living in Russia, I found myself gaining an appreciation for America. I thought: “As messed up as our country is, at least you can’t openly pay bribes in court, and people aren’t often boiled alive when hot water pipes burst under sidewalks.” Then I went home not long after 9/11 and, watching George Bush, soon found myself missing Russia, thinking: “At least Boris Yeltsin was too busy drinking and stealing to try to conquer the planet.” Now the worst of both worlds are on a collision course. People like Igor Strelkov are shouting the Russian equivalent of “Bring it On” to the free-worlders, and armchair warriors like Robert Kagan are shouting their own provocations back. God save us from people who dream big, without the brains to match.”

Ignatio Cassis of Switzerland got his clock cleaned by the Russian embassy in Geneva for saying something stupid along the lines of “The Russian attack is the first on the European continent since 1945”, which is just ignorant bullshit. 1999 Yugoslavia anyone? When NATO attacked a Russian ally and obliterated it into several countries, releasing a stream of refugees westward? Most of my neighbors were part of that wave.

It’s the same with pronouncements of Russian war atrocities being the “worst the world has ever seen”. It is only possible to say something like that when you’re a child, incapable of remembering any history. Are these people stupid? Can’t they read the news without losing their minds? Or are they so deep into the narrative, looking out for number one, and up their own asses that they don’t care? The cynic in me says … yes.

Exploding food and energy prices in Germany: “It’s a disaster” by Various Reporters (WSWS)

“She also disagrees with the media’s statements that Putin is the sole cause of the war. “Putin has been warning long enough and says he wants to negotiate. But if he is ignored, if he is not heard, then that is the consequence now. The fact that others are now interfering is also no good. I’m not a fan of the US anyway, they interfere everywhere.””

“Referring to the Bundeswehr (armed forces), which is currently being massively rearmed, she says, “We should stay out of it.” Things were already bad enough now, she added. “I’m also sorry for people in Ukraine, but this is a bigger political thing and needs to be solved through negotiations.””

Mearsheimer: Russia Sees ‘Existential Threat,’ Must Win by Ray McGovern (Antiwar.com)

“Speaking at an April 7 webinar, Mearsheimer was, true to form, “offensively realistic”. He explained: (1) the root cause lies in the April 2008 NATO summit Declaration that Ukraine (and Georgia) “will become members of NATO”; and (2) that Russia sees this as an “existential threat” and therefore “must win” this one.

“For President Joe Biden and the Democrats, even though Ukraine poses zero strategic threat to the U.S., a Russian “win” would be, politically, a “devastating defeat”, says Mearsheimer. […]

“Compromise? The kind of give and take needed to cobble together some kind of compromise has become equally impossible with the years-long demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. One cannot compromise, of course, with the devil – even if this means that others (in this case, the militarily outmatched Ukrainians) have to shed more blood – of course, not US/NATO blood so far. But this may come; there are always unintended consequences from what historian Barbara Tuchman called the March of Folly toward war.”

“Noting that US academics and policy makers don’t believe NATO’s designs on Ukraine represent an existential threat to Russia, Mearsheimer is as blunt as his courteous mien permits. “What people in Washington believe is irrelevant. What matters is what Russia believes.” He rejects the “mainstream” view that Putin’s Russia is motivated by expansionist aims, and asks the savants in Washington to put concrete evidence behind their claims.”

“Those in Washington who thought Russia could be crushed misunderstood Russians and underestimated the capabilities, determination and sang froid of their Government.”

Obliterating any people or nation has proved impossible. Even were it a worthy goal—it’s not—there is no way the U.S. will achieve any of its stated goals. It never does. It doesn’t care about those goals. Democracy? Don’t care. Free markets? Don’t care. There is always an elite focused laser-like on getting as much filthy lucre for themselves and their friends as they possibly can. Just like in Russia. Just like in most countries, with rare exceptions. Those rare exceptions are not powerful and remain largely uninvolved while the big dogs fight it out. That Russia does it is less my concern. That the largest empire the world has ever seen—and one to which I am still forced to pay taxes, lest I get arrested the next time I visit my family—does it is more of my concern.

CIA Admits Feeding Americans False Info About Ukraine by Ron Paul (Antiwar.com)

“Readers will recall the shocking headlines that Russia was prepared to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, that China would be providing military equipment to Russia, that Russian President Putin was being fed misinformation by his advisors, and more.

“All of these were churned out by the CIA to be repeated in the American media even though they were known to be false. It was all about, as one intelligence officer said in the article, “trying to get inside Putin’s head.””

LIVE: Michael Tracey on US military buildup in Poland & Poland's secret war in Ukraine by MintPressNews
/ Mnar Adley (YouTube)

“Independent journalist Michael Tracey just returned from a trip to Poland where he reported on a massive US military buildup in Poland, the largest since WWII. Mnar & Michael will discuss the war in Ukraine, media propaganda and where the conflict is headed.”

This is a great interview with Tracy, who’s actually on the ground in the region.

They talk about people calling for #closethesky—imposition of a no-fly-zone. Tracey points out that people there are kind of for it, but they’re mostly too busy with surviving to really know much about what policy decisions make sense. They’re for it because that seems to be what you should be for. He points out that Wolodimir Zelenskyy became president on the back of an extremely slick media campaign and canny PR ability—and that that’s what he’s using now.

Basically, people everywhere are uninformed. They might also be incapable of being informed, but that doesn’t really matter. The point is that they don’t know what’s really going on and have no idea what would be the most appropriate policy overall. They think only for themselves, which is expected—and, therefore, acceptable, because we will never be able to hope for anything else among the vast majority. They think of themselves, they’re uninformed, they’re utterly unpracticed in thinking about these kinds of issues—where you have to balance pros and cons and choose the overall-optimal but individually suboptimal solution—, they pretty much just believe what they hear, and then they quickly believe that their opinion is amazing and must be not only heard but their espoused policy must be put into immediate action with alacrity.

I have friends who admit that they’re not paying attention, that they don’t have time for it, but they probably don’t make the conclusion that they should just stay out of it. Instead, they probably slide quickly from having a half-hearted opinion to fervent support of whatever policy seems to be the most societally acceptable and safest.

Pink Floyd, but not Roger Waters, is swept up by pro-war propaganda by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“In an exchange of letters with a 19-year-old Pink Floyd fan named Alina Mitrofanova on March 9, Waters wrote, “I regret that Western governments are fueling the fire that will destroy your beautiful country by pouring arms into Ukraine, instead of engaging in the diplomacy that will be necessary to stop the slaughter.”

““Sadly, however,” Waters continued, “many world leaders are gangsters and my disgust for political gangsters did not start last week with Putin. I was disgusted by the gangsters Bush and Blair when they invaded Iraq in 2003, I was and still am disgusted by the gangster government of Israel’s invasion of Palestine in 1967 and its subsequent apartheid occupation of that land which has now been going on for over fifty years. I was disgusted by the gangsters Obama and Clinton ordering NATO’s illegal bombings of both Libya and Serbia. I am disgusted by the wholesale destruction of Syria initiated, as it was, in 2011 by outside interference in the cause of regime change. I was disgusted by the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when the gangster Shimon Peres connived with the Christian Phalangist Militias in the murder of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in the south of that country.””

Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to Russia by Pjotr Sauer (The Guardian)

“Eleven Ukrainian political parties have been suspended because of their links with Russia, according to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

“The country’s national security and defence council took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity. Most of the parties affected were small, but one of them, the Opposition Platform for Life, has 44 seats in the 450-seat Ukrainian parliament.”

Cool. A bastion of democracy, that country. Declared martial law, banned political parties and…

“The political move comes as Zelenskiy aims to further assert his influence over the country’s media sphere. On Sunday, the Ukrainian leader signed a decree that aims to unite all national TV channels into one platform, citing the importance of a “unified information policy” under martial law.”

…banned all oppositional media—excuse me, “unite[d them] into one platform.”

Twitter Wars—My Personal Experience in Twitter’s Ongoing Assault on Free Speech by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“The available evidence that could be extracted from the images from Bucha showed bodies that by appearance appeared to have been killed within 24-36 hours of their discovery—meaning that they were killed after the Russians withdrew from Bucha. The exact time of death, however, could only be determined after a thorough forensic medical examination.

“Many of the bodies had white cloth strips tied to their upper arm, a visual designation which indicated either loyalty to Russia or that the persons did not pose a threat to Russians. The bodies that lacked this white cloth often had their hands tied behind their backs with white cloth that appeared similar to that which marked the arms of the other bodies.

“Near to many of the bodies were the green cardboard box adorned with a white star which contained Russian military dry rations that had been distributed to the civilian population of Bucha by Russian troops as part of their humanitarian operations.

“In short, the evidence suggested that the bodies were of civilians friendly to, or sympathetic with, Russia. It would take a leap of faith to conclude that Russian troops gunned these unfortunate souls down in cold blood, as alleged by the Ukrainian government.”

Fresh Hell: The best dispatches from our grim new reality by Jason Arias (The Baffler)

“a new report indicates that the city’s recently relaunched anti-crime unit, expressly designed to “proactively suppress violent major crimes and illegal gun possession through precision policing,” has done anything but. The most common charge in the hundreds of arrests the anti-gun unit has been for possession of a “forged instrument” like a fake ID or stolen credit card. This doddering display of costly imbecility will, nevertheless, be mangled by Mayor Eric Adams into a self-apparent justification for shoveling even more cash into the open maw of the NYPD.”

“Meanwhile, in the torrid pages of the Wall Street Journal, thought leaders find themselves preoccupied with other concerns: if the Biden Administration were to cancel even a little bit of student debt, would enough members of the working poor, willing to sacrifice their life in an imperial misadventure for the sake of a free education, still volunteer for the military? God knows we simply must keep this in mind as the defense establishment and its parasitic coterie of think tankers gin up support for direct military engagement with China.”

White House says “nothing will dissuade” US from arming Ukraine by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“The intensification of the war occurs against the backdrop of the militarization of Eastern Europe. Finland is “highly likely” to join NATO, the country’s Minister of European Affairs Tytti Tuppurainen said in an interview on Friday, just days after Finland’s prime minister said the country would consider joining NATO in a matter of weeks.”

Maybe Finland is “highly likely” to apply for membership, but they can’t just “join”. Each new member has to be approved by all other members, unanimously. Finland has an 1,300+km border with Russia and no military to speak of. Who the hell in their right minds would want to defend that? Would the U.S. really commit to defending that border, too? Have we all lost our fucking minds? Are these people living in a comic-book world? I think that’s really the problem: the mind-virus of superhero movies has completely destroyed an entire generation’s ability to reason about reality. So Finland’s hot, young, female prime minister wants to join NATO. What the actual fuck. Didn’t we say we wanted to elect women because they were more reasonable leaders? This is a joke.

“[…] the Biden administration, having totally dismantled the infrastructure to track the COVID-19 pandemic in order to create a climate of “normalcy” has no idea how widespread the pandemic is in the US.

“Prices are soaring, real wages are plummeting, and there is increasingly open talk of an imminent recession. Under these conditions, the Biden administration sees war as a desperate means to enforce “national unity” in the face of a growing movement of the working class not only in the United States, but internationally.”

US, EU sacrificing Ukraine to 'weaken Russia': fmr. NATO adviser by Aaron Maté / The Grayzone (YouTube)

“As the Russia-Ukraine war enters a new phase, former Swiss intelligence officer, senior United Nations official, and NATO advisor Jacques Baud analyzes the conflict and argues that the US and its allies are exploiting Ukraine in a longstanding campaign to bleed its Russian neighbor. ”

The citation above is the video description from the link. The text below is a citation from about 25:00,

“Jacques Baud: This physical war that we witness now is part of a broader war that was started years ago against Russia. I think, in fact, Ukraine is just … nobody is interested in Ukraine, I think. The target, the aim, the objective is to weaken Russia. And, once if would be done with Russia, they will do the same with China. And you can already see, we have seen—the Ukrainian situation has overshadowed everything else, but—you could see a very similar scenario happening with Taiwan. The Chinese are aware of that. That’s the reason why they don’t want to give up their relationship with Russia. The name of the game is weakening Russia.”

At around 31:00, he discusses his role when he worked with NATO, which was to help Ukraine figure out how to make its military more popular, not now, but several years ago. Apparently, they had a recruiting problem and needed marketing to encourage recruitment.

At 36:00, Aaron asks him about Bucha, to which he responds,

“There are two things in that. The first is that, the indication we have, on both incidents, to me, indicates that the Russians were not responsible for that. But, in fact, we dont’ know. I think that’s what we have to say. I mean, if we are honest? We don’t know what happened. The indications we have, all the elements we have, tends to point at Ukrainian responsibility. But, we don’t know. What disturbs me in the whole thing is, not such much that we don’t know—because in war, there are always such situations, there are always situations where you don’t know exactly who is the real responsible [party]—what disturbs me is that Western leaders started making decisions without knowing what is going on, and what happened. And that’s something that disturbs me quite deeply.”

Excellent interview and analysis.

American Commissars by Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report)

“Censorship is the last resort of desperate and unpopular regimes. It magically appears to make a crisis go away. It comforts the powerful with the narrative they want to hear, one fed back to them by courtiers in the media, government agencies, think tanks and academia. The problem of Donald Trump is solved by censoring Donald Trump. The problem of left-wing critics, such as myself, is solved by censoring us. The result is a world of make-believe.”

Journalism & Media

CNN+ is worth 0.143 of a Quibi by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“CNN is currently owned by WarnerMedia, which, on Friday became Warner Bros. Discovery, after it merged with Discovery. That means, right now, Discovery channels like HGTV and TLC are part of the same company as HBO and CNN and, also, the entire Warner Bros. movie studio. Making matters more confusing, HBO has the HBO Max streaming platform and Discovery has Discovery+, which will be combining at some point in the future. But CNN+, which launched on March 29th, does not appear to be part of that platform merge.”

“The platforms want to Netflix-ify social platforms, converting them into heavily-surveilled hyper-addictive brand-safe nipple-free shopping malls. The Web3 people want to turn the internet into a decentralized network of casinos run by pseudonyms techno-barons, where every online interaction requires micropayments. Neither option sounds very good!”

Twitter’s Chickens Come Home to Roost by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Even that person would never have been willing to publicly say something as gross as, “For democracy to survive, it needs more censorship”! A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility, because the whole idea of a free press depended upon the absolute right to be an unpopular pain in the ass.”

“I’m guessing this latest news is arousing special horror because the current version of Twitter is the professional journalist’s idea of Utopia: a place where Donald Trump doesn’t exist, everyone with unorthodox thoughts is warning-labeled (“age-restricted” content seems to be a popular recent scam), and the Current Thing is constantly hyped to the moronic max. The site used to be fun, funny, and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious Thought-Starbucks.”

“It’s become increasingly clear over the last six years that these people want it both ways. They don’t want to break up the surveillance capitalism model, or come up with a transparent, consistent, legalistic, fair framework for dealing with troublesome online speech. No, they actually want tech companies to remain giant black-box monopolies with opaque moderation systems, so they can direct the speech-policing power of those companies to desired political ends.”

“Even when I pointed out that it wasn’t just right-wingers and Russians vanishing, but also Palestinian activists and police brutality sites and a growing number of small independent news outlets, most of my colleagues didn’t care. Because they were so sure they’d never be targeted, the credentialed media were mostly all for the most aggressive possible conception of “content moderation.””

“[…] remember that you didn’t mind when other unaccountable tycoons started down this road. You cheered it on, in fact, and backlash from someone with different political opinions and real money was 100% predictable. This is the system you asked for. Buy the ticket, take the ride, you goofs!”

America’s Sexual Red Scare by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“[…] criticized new campus prohibitions against relationships between professors and graduate students, and argued that the logic behind some new campus enforcement policies were politically regressive, re-imposing an old-school paternalism that cast women back in roles as helpless victims in constant need of saving. “If this is feminism,” she wrote, “it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama.””

“Perhaps you’re wondering how an essay falls under the purview of Title IX, the federal statute meant to address gender discrimination and funding for women’s sports? I was wondering that myself… The answer, in brief, is that the culture of sexual paranoia I’d been writing about isn’t confined to the sexual sphere. It’s fundamentally altering the intellectual climate in higher education as a whole, to the point where ideas are construed as threats —writing an essay became “creating a chilling environment,” according to my accusers — and freedoms most of us used to take for granted are being whittled away or disappearing altogether.”

“The transcripts of interviews conducted by Ludlow’s campus inquisitors, along with the mountain of emails and other materials introduced as evidence, painted a picture of a bureaucracy of pre-determined guilt, casual institutional cruelty, and ingrained sexual terror so extreme that the whole concept of viewing sex as anything but predatory appeared to have become taboo in the eyes of officialdom.”

“[…] campus culture has moved on and now the metaphors veer toward the extractive rather than additive—sex takes something away from you, at least if you’re a woman: your safety, your choices, your future. It’s contaminating: you can catch trauma, which, like a virus, never goes away.”

“The piece went on to note, with the faintest hint of annoyance, that Kipnis “launches provocations with the frequency of a tennis ball machine.” It struck me reading this that reviewers are starting to forget what a healthy mind full of things to say and unafraid of blowback sounds like.”

“The question is why such provocations have become a bad thing, and how it came to happen that sexual angst has started to become the province of the left-liberal mainstream, when not long ago it seemed wholly owned by the religious right.”

“To say that self-protection could be pragmatic is seen as being on the side of the abuse. It’s not allowed to be pragmatic because that’s to acquiesce to the whole thing. So it just seems to me like until men decide to change or until there’s enough social pressure on men to change, maybe not get raped in the meantime. If you say that, you’re seen as the enemy.”

“There’s a way in which the kinds of versions of feminism that have prevailed on campus are the ones that somehow require the most patriarchal supervision from the institution, on the one hand. On the other, they also seem to be weirdly feminine and passive in their responses. They say men are all-powerful sexual creeps, and women are passive.”

“But there is also an intellectual rigidity that’s driving it as well. It just makes these people seem pretty boring to me. Their writing is boring. Their ideas are boring, because there isn’t this intellectual play, or ambivalence, or ability to see contradiction. It’s got to be black and white.”

“So on one hand, there’s this flight from the gender binary, but on the other hand this investment in the punitive binary — innocent or guilty. It’s interesting.”

Science & Nature

An upset to the standard model by Claudio Campagnari & Martijn Mulders (Science)

“Their measured W boson mass is in direct contention with the SM because it is heavier than the SM prediction by seven standard deviations. This could be a signature for new interactions or new particles that are either too massive to be produced or too hard to detect at existing accelerators. Nonetheless, such yet-to-be-known particles and physical interactions could alter the relationships between the various observables through hidden interactions with the W boson and cause the observed deviation from SM predictions.”

“The surprisingly high value of the W boson mass reported by the CDF Collaboration directly challenges a fundamental element at the heart of the SM, where both experimental observables and theoretical predictions were thought to have been firmly established and well understood. The finding of the CDF Collaboration offers an exciting new perspective on the present understanding of the most basic structures of matter and forces in the universe.”

Art & Literature

Half in the Bag: Moonfall by Red Letter Media (YouTube)

In discussing Moonfall, it was interesting that, for the first time since I’ve been watching them, they were interested in who’d produced a film. That is, they noticed that the film had been produced by Chinese people instead of Hollywood. Additionally, they noticed that Kaspersky was featured prominently. They seemed extra negative about it, relative to how they seemed to feel about it when Hollywood does it. Product placement that affects the story is terrible. Showing a Macbook or Kaspersky running in the background of a computer is not that bad, honestly.

They also pronounce the end of disaster films because no-one went to see this film (in the West). Well, maybe this is what disaster movies produced by Hollywood looked like in the rest of the world for a long time? Schlock?

Jerusalem PR Firm, 33 AD by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)

Mr. Fish: Jerusalem PR Firm, 33 AD

Against Resistentialism by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“Like smirking youths who laugh at the pious churchgoing of their grandparents, we make light of the long and venerable tradition that found it meaningful to post a “world-crier” (praeco mundi) on a tower in each city and town of any significant size, who bellowed out all the names of things, in alphabetical order, from dawn to dusk each day, so that the world might go on.”

I know he’s fucking with us, but this would be awesome. Here in Switzerland, we’d have four of them, one for each official language.

“And as for what is often called “deep history”, the long period before human speech evolved, perhaps there was something —something that in our abased age we have trouble detecting— that was, so to speak, “doing the talking”? No classical lexist would ever deny this possibility, and the idea that that tradition held the world to come out of nothing at the precise moment Giacomo mounted the tower and cried Abacus! is a pure fabrication, mockingly attributed to lexism by fools who do not want to take it seriously, and so invent excuses to ensure they won’t have to.”

This is so good, just a slap in the face of the irony-free official Internet. Layers upon layers of taking the piss.

Philosophy & Sociology

Slavoj Zizek vs Vivek Chibber: What Is Ideology? by Jacobin (YouTube)

This was an absolutely brilliant discussion between two excellent thinkers and speakers. Slavoj Žižek looks to have cleaned himself up quite a bit since I’d seen him last. I think he’s finally getting out the house again. Good for him! I’m so glad he made it through the pandemic relatively safe and sound. He trots out several of his standard stories—a favorite is the one about Bohr’s Horseshoe—but I heard the following for the first time:

“When people ask me whether I’m against the death penalty, I say ‘of course, but let’s abolish it only after we’ve killed a few of the people that really deserve it first’.“”

Of course he doesn’t mean it—or maybe he does—but at the very least, he acknowledges with this statement that it’s not so easy to retain the moral high ground.

Is virtue signalling a vice? by Tadeg Quillien (Aeon)

“Communication is difficult because individuals have incentives to lie. Employers are looking for certain qualities (intelligence, conscientiousness, ambition) in their employees. They could ask the people they interview if they are intelligent and conscientious, but why wouldn’t the job candidates simply lie? Instead, employers select their employees on the basis of signals that are difficult to fake, such as university degrees.”

“So, in principle, even if nothing you had learnt was relevant to the job you want, completing the degree still sends a valuable signal to potential employers: you are the kind of person for whom this high-effort achievement is easy enough. Because it sends a valuable signal, it is in your interest to get a degree, and in the employer’s interest to hire you on its basis.”

“Dishonesty is a major problem in the moral domain. People want to appear good, because it wins them friends and social status. Our moral sense evolved because people who convince others of their moral qualities reap such social benefits. But what prevents someone from pretending to be a good person, reaping all the social benefits, and not following through?”

“Psychology experiments have demonstrated that common knowledge is a powerful determinant of social behaviour: people are much more likely to coordinate on a joint action when everyone knows that everyone knows that working together will generate good outcomes.”

But this behavior applies equally when the consensus is wrong or detrimental. They do it because they think it’s a good outcome, but they’re wildly misled or just don’t care whether it’s actually a good outcome for the espoused reasons, but because it’s a good outcome for them, personally.

“Viewing morality as a coordination game suggests that public opinion can undergo rapid shifts, as society coordinates on new moral norms. And this is indeed what we observe: public opinion on a variety of subjects – such as racism and gay rights – has shifted dramatically in a progressive direction over the past few decades (sometimes within a few weeks).”

But it’s also shifted on support for state violence and censorship. Support for those are way up, but wrapped in patriotism or self-righteousness holier-than-thou-ism.

Let Us Now Praise Courageous Men and Women by Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report)

“The financial distress afflicting workers, trapped in debt peonage and preyed upon by banks, credit card companies, student loan companies, privatized utilities, the gig economy, a for-profit healthcare system that has resulted in a third of all worldwide COVID-19 deaths — although we are less than 5% of the world’s population — and employers who pay meager wages and do not provide benefits is getting steadily worse, especially with rising inflation.”

That is another devastating fact to add to the fact that the U.S. has ¼ of the world’s prisoners: it also has 1/3 of COVID deaths. And yet, the country trumpets its exceptionalism and demands that everyone listen to it on every topic. It’s fine that they do that. It’s worked so far and made a handful of people tremendously wealthy. But why do people still listen? Do they really believe that their fealty will be rewarded? That they will somehow benefit from a tenuous proximity to elite power? Fake it ‘til you make it?

“The ruling class, through self-help gurus such as Oprah, “prosperity gospel” preachers and the entertainment industry, has effectively privatized hope. They peddle the fantasy that reality is never an impediment to what we desire. If we believe in ourselves, if we work hard, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, we can have anything we want. The privatization of hope is pernicious and self-defeating. When we fail to achieve our goals, when our dreams are unattainable, we are taught it is not due to economic, social, or political injustice, but faults within us. History has demonstrated that the only power citizens have is through the collective, without that collective we are shorn like sheep. This is a truth the ruling class spends a lot of time obscuring.”

Technology

Industrial Control System Malware Discovered by Bruce Schneider

“The Department of Energy, CISA, the FBI, and the NSA jointly issued an advisory describing a sophisticated piece of malware called Pipedream that’s designed to attack a wide range of industrial control systems. This is clearly from a government, but no attribution is given. There’s also no indication of how the malware was discovered. It seems not to have been used yet.”

Ah, Bruce: I’m going to give him a “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” on this one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him report that a particular piece of malware was being run by the U.S. or Israel—even though those two countries are acknowledged as the busiest little cyber-beavers around. When the same agencies report that a particular piece of malware is Chinese or Russian—he duly repeats it without ever questioning the source.

However when the CIA is conspicuously absent from the list of agencies, he doesn’t even think to wonder whether it might be them. Just saying, he leaves it open for us to guess whether it’s Iranian or Chinese or Russian or North Korean—but never whether it could be home-grown, right in his backyard.

Programming

Remix: The Yang to React’s Yin by Kent C. Dodds

“While React has always given us a nice way to manage state, it can’t hide the fact that much of the state we’re managing is actually a cache and suffers from the problems of caching.”

“For data fetching, you have to know what data to fetch, and often that’s a challenging problem because we like to co-locate our data fetching with the code that requires the data (reduces bugs/mistakes/data overfetching a great deal by doing things this way). This has the unfortunate side-effect of not being able to fetch data until the components have rendered.”

“With the power of layout nested routes and loaders (getting data) and actions (mutating data), you can decouple the data fetching from the components, but still benefit a lot from colocation. The fetching code might not be inside the component in this case, but because of the nature of nested layout routes, it’s pretty darn close. With these features, we go from “I have to render to know data requirements” to “I know data requirements from the URL.””

“To really take your app to the next level, you’ll want to server render your app. And the best way to do that is to use Remix. Remix finishes the bridge across the network boundary for you in such a way that you don’t even have to think about it. You take all your data fetching and data mutation code and move it to be exported functions from conventional “Remix route modules” and all of a sudden all of that code stays on the server and Remix handles the entire network chasm for you […]”

Stacked Diffs Versus Pull Requests by Jackson Gabbard

“The big “aha!” idea here is that units of code review are individual commits and that those commits can stack arbitrarily, because they’re all on one branch. You can have 17 local commits all stacked ahead of master and life is peachy. Each one of them can have a proper, unique commit message (i.e. title, description, test plan, etc.). Each of them can be a unit out for code review. Most importantly, each one of them can have a single thesis. This matters *so* much more than most engineering teams realize.”

This sounds fine. It corresponds to how I like to work. Each commit is a unit of work. Kind of. I tend to work with groups of commits. I suppose you could have each individual commit out for review, but what about a piece of work that is “simple” but whose story is still told better as four commits instead? A common case is two commits: one that includes the test showing the error; another to fix the error. Such a practice is bad for bisecting, but super-good for someone to review: they can verify that the test was actually failing before the fix was applied—all without changing any code. It’s diametrically opposed to bisecting, but it’s useful. I’ve never really used bisecting so much anyway.

What about “cleanup” commits, like formatting, typos, minor refactoring, renaming, etc. that are unlikely to be associated with an issue? I suppose you submit each of these individually for review? Man, I miss face-to-face, “live” reviews.

“[…] you might create a branch to house the many units of code review the overall change will require. In this model, a branch is just a utility for organising many units of code review, not something forced on you *as* the mechanism of code review.”

“In this model, every commit must pass lint. It must pass unit tests. It must build. Every commit should have a test plan. A description. A meaningful title. Every. Single. Commit. This level of discipline means the code quality bar is fundamentally higher than the Pull Request world […]”

“By contrast, if you only worked from master, you only have to do a git pull –rebase and you get to skip the cascading rebases, every time. You get to do just the work that you care about. All the branch jumping falls away without any cost. Might seem minor, but if you do the math on how often you have to do this, it adds up.”

“You can’t intelligently squash merge the aspects of the various commits in the Pull Request that are actually related. The tool doesn’t work that way so people don’t work or think that way. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen the last two or three commits to a PR titled with “Addresses feedback” or “tweaks” and nothing else. Those commits tend to be among the sloppiest and least coherent.”

That’s the problem with using the web UI: no useful interactive rebase. And the other problem is undisciplined developers. Every commit counts, even in PRs. Don’t assume you get to squash merge. In fact: don’t ever squash merge in the web UI. Do it locally instead, with interactive rebase, so you can be intelligent about it—and tell a coherent story to your reviewers.

“Every single commit that hits a codebase means more shit to trawl through trying to fix a production bug while your system is melting. Every merge commit. Every junk mid-PR commit that still doesn’t build but kinda gets your change closer to working. Every time you smashed two or three extra things into the PR because it was too much bother to create a separate PR. These things add up. These things make a codebase harder to wrangle, month after month, engineer after engineer.”

Again, the problem here is discipline and reliance on a bad tool (that weak-ass web UI).

“The default behaviour is to be able to create a unit of code review for any change, no matter how minor. This means that you can get the dozens of uninteresting changes that come along with any significant work approved effortlessly. The changes that are actually controversial can be easily separated from the hum-drum, iterative code that we all write every day.”

“With Stacked Diffs, the queue is obvious — it’s a stack of commits ahead of master. You put new work on the end of the queue. Work that is ready to land gets bumped to the front of the queue and landed onto master. It’s a much, much simpler mental model than a tangle of dependent branches and much more flexible than moving every change into the clean room of a new branch.”

Well, you do have to worry about inter-commit dependencies. E.g. if you want to juggle the order or want B without A. It’s not always as simple as they make it sound. I’ve had to unsnarl local commits before if the queue gets too long. It works, but it’s not perfect. I like working the way this author describes—I’ve used PRs for some things, but stacked commits for a lot of stuff—but I know that it’s trickier than they make it out to be. That may be because I’ve never had real tool support for stacked commits, but I kind of doubt it. Just reviewing locally, cleaning up, and pushing to master covers all the bases.

Oh nice! I didn’t realize that @nodejs comes with import assertions since 17.5 by Stefan Judis (Twitter)

👏 You can finally import JSON files using `import`.

import packageJSON from "./package.json" assert { type: "json" };

14 Linting Rules To Help You Write Asynchronous Code in JavaScript by Maxim Orlov

“Luckily we have linters to catch some of our bugs before we push them to production. The following is a compiled list of linting rules to specifically help you with writing asynchronous code in JavaScript and Node.js.

“Even if you end up not using the rules in your project, reading their descriptions will lead to a better understanding of async code and improve your developer skills.”

Microservices by KRAZAM (YouTube)

This is a pretty funny video of what it kind of feels like when you’re working within a running system that has scaled up and out and benefitted from success that has accreted layers and layers of requirements on the original design. I’m reminded of V’ger from the first Star Trek movie,

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (V'Ger movie clip) (YouTube)

Spoiler alert: a spaceship of nearly unimaginable proportions entered the solar system, and turns out to be the Voyager spacecraft, returned home after centuries of evolving and growing and grafting pieces onto itself in order to satisfy its mission.

Everyone has JavaScript, right? by Stuart Langridge (KRYOGENIX)

This is a pretty good list of reasons why JavaScript might not be working as expected on a given client. It’s an argument for why Progressive enhancement is still important by Jake Archibald.

I had no idea that TypeScript has anchored types.

This works just fine! Note the typeof bar as the type. That is really, really nice. I’ve only ever seen the feature in Eiffel, where the type would be expressed as like bar.

const bar: number = 1;

class A 
{
  doSomething(arg: number): typeof bar
  {
    return 5
  }
}

This feature was available for public, non-class members (as shown above). However, in the most recent release of TypeScript, you can’t reference the types of instance variables because you can’t access private members for typing.

Anchored types on files in TypeScript 4.62

The article Announcing TypeScript 4.7 Beta by Daniel Rosenwasser (MSDN Blogs) announces that the upcoming release will allow referencing private members for the purpose of typing. See below.

class Container {
    #data = "hello!";

    get data(): typeof this.#data {
        return this.#data;
    }

    set data(value: typeof this.#data) {
        this.#data = value;
    }
}

EdenSCM

FaceBook built its own source-control manager. It’s basically made for extremely large repositories. Where Microsoft improved Git with the Git VFS, FaceBook built another system with a strong nod in the direction of Mercurial’s UI, but also with a server component (à la Perforce).

“EdenSCM is comprised [sic] of three main components:”

• The eden CLI: The client-side command line interface for users to interact with EdenSCM.
• Mononoke: The server-side part of EdenSCM.
• EdenFS: A virtual filesystem for efficiently checking out large repositories.

“EdenFS speeds up operations in large repositories by only populating working directory files on demand, as they are accessed. This makes operations like checkout much faster, in exchange for a small performance hit when first accessing new files. This is quite beneficial in large repositories where developers often only work with a small subset of the repository at a time.”

“EdenSCM is the primary source control system used at Facebook, and is used for Facebook’s main monorepo code base.”

Honestly? Good for them. We should never get complacent with the current system (e.g. Git, which seems to have won the SCM wars). I’ve written before about Fossil, which is the rebase-less system developed by the team/developer of SqlLite. As noted above, Microsoft extended Git. I’ve read very good things about Phabricator. See the article Stacked Diffs Versus Pull Requests for a description of how the system tries to escape from the “tyranny of branches”, which is kind of how I like to work, even without explicit support. I think Phabricator also needs a server component. I’ve used Perforce a lot in the past, which also has a server component. There are a ton of others; the Comparison of version-control software (Wikipedia) provides a good overview.

The smallest Docker image to serve static websites by Florin Lipan

“The 186KB we’re left with correspond to the size of the thttpd static binary and the static files that were copied over, which in my case was just one file containing the text hello world. Note that the alpine step of the multi-stage build is actually quite large in size (~130MB), but it can be reused across builds and doesn’t get pushed to the registry.”

WebP is such a goated format by sandy

“Some further reading led me to some pleasant discoveries, such as lossy and lossless compression, transparency with an alpha channel, metadata, animation (!) support, and a wide adoption by major browsers and graphics software over the past decade or so.

“This is truly some state-of-the-art stuff. Even as claiming an average of 45% reduction in file size with wild PNGs found on the web and a 28% reduction compared to PNGs that are recompressed with pngcrush and PNGOUT.”

Announcing .NET 7 Preview 3 by Jon Douglas (MSDN Blogs)

“The main advantage of Native AOT is in startup time, memory usage, accessing to restricted platforms (no JIT allowed), and smaller size on disk. Applications start running the moment the operating system pages in them into memory. The data structures are optimized for running AOT generated code, not for compiling new code at runtime. This is similar to how languages like Go, Swift, and Rust compile. Native AOT is best suited for environments where startup time matters the most. Targeting Native AOT has stricter requirements than general .NET Core/5+ applications and libraries. Native AOT forbids emitting new code at runtime (e.g. Reflection.Emit), and loading new .NET assemblies at runtime (eg. plug-in models).”

CSS Parent Selector by Ahmad Shadeed

“Have you ever thought about a CSS selector where you check if a specific element exists within a parent? For example, if a card component has a thumbnail, we need to add display: flex to it. This hasn’t been possible in CSS but now we will have a new selector, the CSS :has which will help us to select the parent of a specific element and many other things.

“In this article, I will explain the problem that :has solves, how it works, where and how we can use it with some use-cases and examples, and most importantly how we can use it today.”

CSS :has( ) A Parent Selector Now by Matthias Ott

“The :has pseudo-class takes a relative selector list and will then represent an element if at least one other element matches the selectors in the list.”

This works for any selector. The two articles above show many examples, but Shadeed, as usual, knocks it out of the park with a ton of ideas. This feature, once it lands in all browsers, will obviate the need for a ton of little JavaScripts. So many content-level dependencies can will be able to be resolved automatically (e.g. enabling/disabling/highlighting/showing/hiding dependent/related elements)

The weirdly obscure art of Streamed HTML by Taylor Hunt (DEV)

“Not all sites have my API bottlenecking issue, but many have its cousins: database queries and reading files. Showing pieces of a page as data sources finish is useful for almost any dynamic site. For example…”

• Showing the header before potentially-slow main content
• Showing main content before sidebars, related posts, comments, and other non-critical information
• Streaming paginated or batched queries as they progress instead of big expensive database queries

“Even with no <body> to show, you can stream the <head>. That lets browsers download and parse styles, scripts, and other assets while waiting for the rest of the HTML.”

“Marko streams HTML with its <await> tag. I was pleasantly surprised at how easily it could optimize browser rendering, with all the control I wanted over HTTP, HTML, and JavaScript.”

Thinking on ways to solve DIALOG by Adam Argyle (YouTube)

This is a really good video about extending the newly available DIALOG behavior and element. One interesting thing is that, instead of using display: none, he uses inert, opacity: 0, and pointer-events: none, which I’d never heard of before.

Taking .NET MAUI for a spin by Jon Skeet

“Let’s start off with the good: two weeks ago, this application didn’t exist at all. I literally started it on April 5th, and I used it to control almost every aspect of the A/V on April 10th. That’s despite me never having used either MAUI or Xamarin.Forms before, hardly doing any mobile development before, MAUI not being fully released yet, and all of the development only taking place in spare time. (I don’t know exactly how long I spent in those five days, but it can’t have been more than 8-12 hours.)

“Despite being fully functional (and genuinely useful), the app required relatively little code to implement, and will be easy to maintain. Most of the time, debugging worked well through either the emulator or my physical device, allowing UI changes to be made without restarting (this was variable) and regular debugger operations (stepping through code) worked far better than it feels they have any right to given the multiple layers involved.”

Why I avoid async/await by Cory (Medium)

“Every time you want to write a then or a catch in your promise flow, first make sure you return the promise instead, then go to the outermost promise (if you’ve followed the rule to this point, that should be only one level up) and add your then or catch there. As long as you are returning, your value will bubble out to the outermost promise. That’s where you should do your thenning.

“Keep in mind that you don’t have to return a Promise to use then. Once you are in the context of a promise, any returned value will bubble through it. Promise, number, string, function, object, whatever.”

How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code by Freakingrectangle

“The test goes like this:”

• I show a commented line of code that will call some function and return an output.
• The candidate reads the code and predicts the output
• I uncomment the line and run the program so they can see the answer.
• If the answer is different than their prediction, they go back and explain why.

“I give the candidate 20 minutes to get as far as they can. ”

The whole procedure, as described, is really useful! I will definitely be trying this at the next opportunity.

Is C# getting slower? by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

This is nice video (~17:00) about whether some of the higher-level code in C# is optimized enough for everyday use. Nick shows how to write an optimized version and then use BenchmarkDotNet to generate actual numbers.

I also learned about SharpLab.IO, an online code-lowerer that allow you to examine the lowered version of any piece of C# code, as lowered to a plethora of different targets and languages. You choose an input language, a lowering target (i.e. the representation you’d like to see), and an output language (e.g. C# or IL).

I also learned about the .NET Source Browser, which provides you with super-fast access to the entirety of the .NET code base, including internal functions—everything that’s open source. This is very helpful to learn how .NET developers write highly optimized code.