Links and Notes for April 15th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Video Games

COVID-19

Even mild COVID-19 can cause your brain to shrink by Sanjay Mishra (National Geographic)

“There is evidence of neurologic injury [after COVID-19] that is persistent,” says Ayush Batra, a neurologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “We are seeing biological and biochemical evidence of it, we are seeing radiographic evidence of it, and most importantly, the patients are complaining of their symptoms. It is affecting their quality of life and day-to-day functioning.”

“We need to move away from quantifying the impact of the disease only in terms of deaths and severe cases,” says the University of Oxford’s Douaud, “as evidence from studies on long COVID, and our study, show that even mild infection can be damaging.”

Economy & Finance

The US Dollar May Be the Next Casualty of the Ukraine War by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“Any significant shift away from the dollar isn’t going to come overnight, but there was movement in this direction even before the war began. Last month, the IMF released a working paper noting that the last twenty years have seen a “gradual movement away from the dollar” among the world’s central banks, with their share of reserves in US dollars dropping from 71 percent in 1999 to 59 percent by 2021, and shifting to “nontraditional reserve currencies” — specifically, a quarter to the Chinese yuan, and three-quarters to the currencies of an assortment of smaller economies, including the Australian and Canadian dollars, and the Korean won. Meanwhile, both China and Russia have long worked to “de-dollarize” their economies and insulate themselves from US power, with limited and halting success.”

AkuDreams NFT project earns $34 million that its team will never be able to withdraw (Web3 is going just great)

“AkuDreams were not so lucky with the second issue. A bug in the code failed to account for users minting multiple NFTs in a single transaction, which made it so that the claimProjectFunds function that would allow the team to withdraw their earnings can never successfully execute. This means that the team can never withdraw the 11,539 ETH ($34 million) earned from the NFT sales—it is stuck there forever.”

It pains me to even put this into “Economy & Finance”, but that is who we are now.

Will Elon Musk Buy More Twitter? by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“There is a vein of crypto libertarianism that imagines that you can have money that is immune from the claims of society, but that’s only really true if the rest of your life is immune from the claims of society. If you live alone on a faraway island and have a lot of weapons then sure right maybe the authorities can’t seize your Bitcoins. (Though you also can’t use your Bitcoins to, like, order pizza delivery.) But if they can toss you in jail until you cough up your Bitcoins, then the Bitcoins aren’t doing that much for you.”

Sure Elon Musk Might Buy Twitter by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

““every major tech company, Google, [Meta], et al. is on the phone with their antitrust lawyers asking if they can buy Twitter and get it approved. And Twitter is on the phone with their lawyers asking which can be their white knight.””

“Other than the money, though, there is not much about Twitter that would prevent a takeover. It does not have dual-class stock that would keep its founders in control, and the founders are no longer in charge and don’t even own that much stock. It is not in a heavily regulated industry, and there’s no particular antitrust problem with Musk acquiring it. “World’s richest person acquires the main venue for public communication” does seem like the sort of thing that ought to raise regulatory concerns, but in our actually existing system I’m not sure what those concerns would be.”

“Musk is not even gesturing in the direction of minimal compliance with securities laws at this point. This doesn’t have much to do with whether or not his bid will succeed, and I do not expect that the Securities and Exchange Commission can or will do much about it. But it is annoying!”

“A fourth possibility is that he sells down to exactly 69,420,000 shares and goes back to filing a 13G and smirking.”

“I don’t know what Twitter does in any of those situations. There is no particularly good outcome for Twitter here. It can sell to Musk and become (more of) a vehicle for his whims and trolling. It can find some other imperfect buyer and try to cobble a desperation deal together. Or it can (maybe) fend off Musk, stay independent, watch its stock drop, alienate one of its most high-profile users, and get second-guessed by shareholders for years. Twitter is in play, but that is only really fun for Musk.”

There’s a Reason Doing Taxes Sucks So Much by David Sirota (Jacobin)

“[…] Sweden, Denmark, and more than thirty other countries offer many residents so-called “return-free” filing, where the government does the tax preparation itself. Though the systems vary, the basic process is this: tax authorities use employers’ filings to calculate levies that are owed, then send taxpayers their forms already filled out and let them decide whether to sign and pay or do the calculations on their own.”

Public Policy & Politics

Testimony Reveals Zelensky’s Secret Police Plot to ‘Liquidate’ Opposition Figure Anatoly Shariy by Dan Cohen (Mint Press News)

“But Zelensky’s carefully-crafted campaign image of a political outsider dedicated to stamping out rampant corruption – copy-pasted from his hit television series, “Servant of the People” – turned out to be a farce. Zelensky cut deals with oligarchs and stacked his cabinet with the same figures he spent his campaign criticizing.”

This sounds exactly like Trump.

Western Dissent from US/NATO Policy on Ukraine is Small, Yet the Censorship Campaign is Extreme by Glenn Greenwald (SubStack)

“Their crime, like the crime of so many other banished accounts, was not disinformation but skepticism about the US/NATO propaganda campaign. Put another way, it is not “disinformation” but rather viewpoint-error that is targeted for silencing. One can spread as many lies and as much disinformation as one wants provided that it is designed to advance the NATO agenda in Ukraine (just as one is free to spread disinformation provided that its purpose is to strengthen the Democratic Party, which wields its majoritarian power in Washington to demand greater censorship and commands the support of most of Silicon Valley).”

“No matter one’s views on Russia, Ukraine, the U.S. and the war, it should be deeply alarming to watch such a concerted, united campaign on the part of the most powerful public and private entities to stomp out any and all dissent, while so aggressively demonizing what little manages to slip by.”

Meet the New, Resource-Based Global Reserve Currency by Pepe Escobar (Strategic Culture Foundation)

“Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in China, after meeting several counterparts from across Eurasia, could not have outlined it better: “A new reality is being formed: the unipolar world is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past, a multipolar one is taking shape. It’s an objective process. It’s unstoppable. In this reality, more than one power will “rule” – it will be necessary to negotiate between all the key states that today have a decisive influence on the world economy and politics. At the same time, realizing their special situation, these countries ensure compliance with the basic principles of the UN Charter, including the fundamental one – the sovereign equality of states. No one on this Earth should be seen as a minor player. Everyone is equal and sovereign.””

Russia’s Success in Syria’s Civil War Doesn’t Mean Much for Its Chances in Vast, United Ukraine by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“Air forces the world over tend to be dishonest about their ability to distinguish civilian from military targets. But investigation on the ground after airstrikes has invariably shown that civilian and military personnel were in the same place or one can be easily mistaken for the other. This happens naturally but also as a result of deliberate choice with jihadis in northern Syria sometimes occupying one floor of a five-storey building while floors above and below them are occupied by the normal residents.”

“Contrast this with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, which stumbled from the beginning. Its troops failed to achieve their objectives, though the precise nature of these is still unclear. Too few Russian troops advanced on too many fronts to enjoy a battle-winning superiority in numbers and were forced to retreat after suffering heavy losses.”

He literally admits that he doesn’t know the objectives but leads with the claim that those unknown objectives went unmet.

The Pimps of War by Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report)

“The same cabal of war mongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.”

“Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad.”

“They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony.”

“I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are lavishly funded by the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks for their repeated idiocy. They rotate in and out of power, parked in places like The Council on Foreign Relations or The Brookings Institute, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as the Bush White House.”

Together We Are Tito!: A Call for a New Non-Aligned Movement by Nicky Reid (Exile In Happy Valley)

“[…] the only hope for peace that these people have if they are even to remain a singular people has always been a precarious balancing act of neutrality governed by decentralized regional autonomy. Western observers, in their infinite wisdom, present this fate as some form of capitulation to their ghoulish Eastern adversaries but monsters like Putin only advocate such a fate because the crumbling post-Soviet Kremlin is simply too goddamn poor to afford the puppet states of yesteryear.”

“The truth is that there is nothing stronger than a people united only by the common dream of retaining their indigenous diversity while minding their own goddamn business and we could all benefit from embracing these values.”

“Tito still played the strongman and had the final say but each region was given room to forge their own path just like each factory was given room to forge their own direct democracy and it was this very degree of radical independence that encouraged a land long plagued by war to work together because no one held enough power to go it alone.”

“Tito formed an alliance in 1961 with four other eccentric gadflies who had grown sick upon death of the endless imperial pissing matches of the Cold War, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamel Abdul Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sukarno of Indonesia. Together they formed the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization that celebrated strength through neutrality, diversity, and autonomy.”

“None of these men were saints by any measure but they had all been burned by capitalists and communists alike and united to forge a third way that rejected the omnicidal nuclear duel of the Cold War while refusing to pick a side in a battle between two mobs of despotic pricks. Instead, they embraced values like mutual non-aggression and peaceful coexistence, what essentially amounted to minding your own goddamn business.”

“Then once the Federation was in ruins, the victorious American imperialists came in with the National Endowment for Democracy and heavily invested in ethnic nationalist candidates for local elections who blamed the shared plight of the Balkans on different tribes of victims rather than the banks who robbed them all blind. Civil war and genocide followed shortly behind.”

“Both Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement failed because they failed to recognize that the greatest evil of the Cold War was not the United Sates or the Soviet Union, communism or capitalism, but the centralization of power itself that only constant global warfare renders possible.”

“But the failures of the Non-Aligned Movement cannot be blamed on banks alone. As ballsy and brazen as leaders like Marshal Tito and Colonel Nasser may have been, they failed miserably to practice what they preached on the world stage at home which is what made their regimes susceptible to the tantalizing vices of the World Bank to begin with.”

“[…] it doesn’t change what Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement represented at their peak, a united front of poor nations defined by their total rejection of imperialism and the endless wars it thrives on, and with the bodies stacking up in Ukraine over another duel between oligarchs with the privilege of profiting from the bloodshed,”

“We need a movement that stands against the very premise of the superstate, one that recognizes that any state the size of America, China, the European Union, or Russia is an existential threat to sovereignty everywhere unless they can be regulated by their own people in the form of decentralized confederations that grant every republic with the basic human right of secession.”

“This is the kind of Non-Aligned Movement the world needs today. One where the Uyghurs needn’t rely on the Americans and Ryukyu needn’t rely on China and the Donbas needn’t rely on Russia and Ukraine needn’t rely on NATO because we should all rely on each other against the real fucking enemy, the oligarchs of the global elite who cloak themselves in the flags of international order.”

Books Become Games by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“It struck me moreover that, in this peculiar historical moment, it may be that Patricia Lopez has figured out something that I have not. She is the one who is really carrying ideas into the future. She is the visionary author; I am the sentimental fantasist who is still pretending it’s 1642 or thereabouts. Even though I wrote a whole book about the internet, that same internet remains the book’s great blind-spot, for I am still trying to pretend it does not exist.”

“In the end Lopez and I are just trying to scrape by in this world, but, well, the cheese has moved, and while she has mastered the aforementioned subtle art, I’m still writing as if books were distillations of long, slow learning. Foolish me.”

“[…] the work of book-writing involves actual writing only in an initial phase, while subsequently the work becomes wrapped up in book-pumping, in technologically mediated promotions, branding of the self, bullet-pointing, after-the-fact elevator-pitching, and gaming of all possible metrics in the hope of going viral. In short, books, today, are a satellite of social media, operating according to the same logic, within the same empty economy of buzz and inevitable forgetting.”

“First, there is the respect outlined in Chapter 2, the one excerpted in WIRED Magazine, whereby the internet reveals itself to be continuous with countless other networked systems throughout living nature. This is the “natural internet”.”

“Second, there is the “unnatural internet”, with which we are most familiar through the algorithmic structures of social media, which distort and pervert everything that is filtered through them in the aim of maximum extraction of attention as the resource on which our new economy runs.”

“[…] social media are a deliberation-themed video game in literally the same respect that GTA is a car-chase-themed video game.”

“To conceptualize reality as a whole on the model of the technologies that have so enraptured us in our own age, as books enraptured our ancestors, is not so much to offer an account of metaphysical reality as a whole, as it is to contribute to the validation of a particular form of social reality: namely, the model of reality in which gamified structures have jumped across the screen, from Donkey Kong or Twitter or whatever it is you were playing, and now shape everything we do, from dating to car-sharing to working in an Amazon warehouse.”

“The rise of the video game as the single most powerful metaphor for human existence, indeed, comes in tandem with the rapid, severe infantilization of nearly all domains of culture, from movies to pop music to undergraduate humanities education, and with the equally precipitous fandom-ization of politics.”

“The gamification of our social life, which was honed and perfected on social media before it jumped the fence to affectivity, labor, and who knows what’s next, forces us to sacrifice free play to strategic play, and the leisurely flight of the imagination to narrow problem-solving.”

“On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. The dupes of the new ideology, underlain by the metaphor of the game, think they’re giving us life in an arcade —a child’s dream!— but what we’re really getting is life in a global warehouse, monitored and metricized, forced at every turn to devise strategies that maximize engagement with whatever it is we’re putting out there… all in the name of scraping by.”

The “hustle”.

Former NATO Military Analyst Blows the Whistle on West’s Ukraine Invasion Narrative by Jacques Baud (Scheer Post)

“In fact, these republics did not seek to separate from Ukraine, but to have a statute of autonomy guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language. Because the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the overthrow of President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 which made Russian an official language. A bit as if putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages ​​in Switzerland.”

That’s funny because, as a fellow Swiss, I’ve used the same analogy in discussions with colleagues.

“It is essential to recall here that the Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) Agreements provided for neither the separation nor the independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. Those who have read the Accords (they are very, very, very few) will find that it is written in full that the status of the republics was to be negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the republics, for an internal solution in Ukraine […]”

“So the West supports and continues to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilian populations since 2014 : rape, torture and massacres. But while the Swiss government has been very quick to impose sanctions against Russia, it has not adopted any against Ukraine, which has been slaughtering its own population since 2014. In fact, those who defend the rights of the men in Ukraine have long condemned the actions of these groups, but have not been followed by our governments. Because, in reality, we are not trying to help Ukraine, but to fight Russia.”

“On February 17, President Joe Biden announces that Russia will attack Ukraine in the coming days. How does he know? Mystery… But since the 16th [of February 2022], the artillery shelling of the populations of Donbass has increased dramatically, as shown by the daily reports of OSCE observers. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacts and intervenes. We will say later that this is Russian disinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries purposely glossed over the massacre of the people of Donbass, knowing that it would provoke Russian intervention.”

“The Ukrainian artillery bombardments on the populations of Donbass continued and, on February 23, the two Republics requested military aid from Russia. On the 24th, Vladimir Putin invokes Article 51 of the United Nations Charter which provides for mutual military assistance within the framework of a defensive alliance. In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately obscure the fact that the war actually started on February 16th.”

Is any of this true? I’d heard Russia had done something like that, but had dismissed it as the typical flimflammery in which a country engages when it invades another. That is, it wants to make what it is doing totally legal. I figured that Putin’s invocation of RTP (Right To Protect) was just as cynical as when the U.S. does it. It would take a lot of evidence for me
to be convinced otherwise.

“At this stage, the Russian forces are slowly tightening the noose, but are no longer under time pressure. Their objective of demilitarization is practically achieved and the residual Ukrainian forces no longer have an operational and strategic command structure.”

Similar to what Ritter is saying. Unsure what their sources are. I’m pretty sure Ritter’s are not Russian, since I don’t think he reads Russian. I’m not so sure about Jacques. He’s Swiss, so there’s a good chance that he reads several languages.

“The “slowdown” that our “experts” attribute to poor logistics is only the consequence of having achieved the objectives set. Russia does not seem to want to engage in an occupation of the whole Ukrainian territory. In fact, it seems rather that Russia is trying to limit its advance to the country’s linguistic border.”

That looks very much to be the case. Even the conflict maps published by very NATO-biased sources like American or Swiss newspapers show exactly that. I just saw one in an actual physical newspaper and am too lazy to scan it in. Oh, what the hell, here is one I found on Die Lage in der Ukraine – die Übersicht (SRF) and another from liveuamap, which seems quite comprehensive.

SRF Map of Ukraine on April 25th, 2022

LiveUAMap Map of Ukraine on April 25th, 2022

“In my role as chief of doctrine for peacekeeping operations at the UN, I worked on the issue of the protection of civilians. We then saw that violence against civilians took place in very specific contexts. Especially when weapons abound and there are no command structures. Now, these command structures are the essence of armies: their function is to channel the use of force according to an objective. By arming citizens in a haphazard fashion as is currently the case, the EU turns them into combatants, with the attendant consequences: potential targets. Moreover, without command, without operational goals, the distribution of arms inevitably leads to settling of scores, banditry and actions that are more deadly than effective.”

“We show compassion for the Ukrainian people and the two million refugees . It’s good. But if we had had a modicum of compassion for the same number of refugees from the Ukrainian populations of Donbass massacred by their own government and who have been accumulating in Russia for eight years, none of this would probably have happened.”

“Eventually, the price will be high, but Vladimir Putin will likely achieve the goals he set for himself. Its ties with Beijing have solidified. China emerges as a mediator of the conflict, while Switzerland enters the list of enemies of Russia. The Americans must ask Venezuela and Iran for oil to get out of the energy impasse in which they have gotten themselves: Juan Guaido leaves the scene definitively and the United States must pitifully reverse the sanctions imposed on their enemies.”

Again, these statements need to be corroborated because I hadn’t heard that America was “asking” Venezuela and Iran for oil. It is true that China is benefitting. Also Turkey, which was in charge of ceasefire negotiations, at first. It’s barely in NATO anymore, at this point.

“[…] therefore, we recognize that Russia is a democracy since we consider that the Russian people are responsible for the war. If not, then why are we trying to punish an entire population for the fault of one? Remember that collective punishment is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions…”

Clever.

“Jacques Baud is a former Colonel of the General Staff, former member of Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist in Eastern European countries. He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He was the head of doctrine for United Nations peace operations. A United Nations expert for the rule of law and security institutions, he designed and led the first multidimensional United Nations intelligence service in Sudan. He worked for the African Union and was responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms at NATO for 5 years. He was engaged in talks with top Russian military and intelligence officials right after the fall of the USSR. Within NATO, he followed the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, then participated in programs of assistance to Ukraine.”

Yeah, I bet he reads Russian and Ukrainian.

Will the Real Volodymyr Zelensky Please Stand Up? by Nicky Reid (Exile In Happy Valley)

“Neoliberalism has a brand-new rock star, and his name is Volodymyr Zelensky. You can’t turn on the news in any given country west of the Danube without stumbling over some starry-eyed career war apologist creaming their knickers like a boomer teeny bopper at the height of Beatlemania over their new idol’s latest hit and Volodymyr Zelensky plays all the hits. Ever since the first bombs dropped on Ukraine, that nation’s embattled young heartthrob of a president has been on a world tour begging Western leaders to sack up and bail him out of the war they used him to provoke, and he always plays masterfully to his fickle audience’s insecurities.”

“Both NATO and the wilier oligarchs who stood to profit from their occupation of the country had a lot riding on Ukraine’s future as a glorified stick to jam in Putin’s eye and the very thugs they used to hijack the nation were threatening to fuck it all up. They needed a ringer. A human air freshener to hang on the rearview mirror of this wreck. Not a reformer, just someone who smells like one and who better than a man who literally plays one on TV.”

“So, what the hell was going on here? Why was the man who seemed to represent all the evils that Zelensky was allegedly running against bankrolling his meteoric rise to power? Poroshenko’s people claimed to have the answer when they accused Zelensky’s Kvartal 95 production company of receiving $41 million from Privatbank, the same bank Kolomoisky had looted. The accusation was unfounded but seemed to be corroborated when the Pandora Papers revealed that the same people behind this company had set up a network of illegal offshore companies in countries like Belize and Cyprus back in 2012, the same year Kvartal entered into a production deal with Igor Kolomoisky’s 1+1 Group. But by the time these papers had leaked it was 2021 and Zelensky had already been elected president with 73% of the vote, making his longshot presidential campaign the most successful in Ukrainian history.”

“Zelensky backed down. It had been made crystal clear to him that even if his nation’s fascist usurpers had next to zero representation in parliament, they still controlled the battlefield and any attempt to legislate this fact would only bring that battlefield to Kiev. President or not, these forces answered to a higher power.”

“It’s this cataclysmic dichotomy that seems to define Zelensky. On the one hand, the man is a corrupt stooge in the pocket of Ukraine’s most notorious gangster. On the other, he seems to suffer from downright inspiring flourishes of the delusion that he really is the leader Kolomoisky hired him to play.”

“Whoever the fuck Volodymyr Zelensky is, he’s walking a dangerous tightrope without a net. As he becomes increasingly disgusted by NATO’s failure to protect the nation they actively pushed into provoking their Russian invaders and he begins to openly toy with the notion of embracing neutrality, Zelensky is surrounded by fanatics with long knives who view such common sense as outright blasphemy”

“I hope that the real Volodymyr Zelensky does stand up and come to his senses by embracing the neutrality that we should all embrace. I also hope he looks out for those Grassy Knolls.”

Towards the Abyss by Volodymyr Ischchenko (New Left Review)

In the following article, the CPU refers to the Communist Party of Ukraine.

“Then there were the far-right groups—Svoboda, Right Sector, the Azov movement—which, unlike the NGOs, were organized as political militants, with a well-articulated ideology based on radical interpretations of Ukrainian nationalism, with relatively strong local party cells and mobilizations on the streets. Thanks to the violent radicalization of Euromaidan, and then to the war in Donbas, these far-right parties were armed and could pose a violent threat to the government. When the Ukrainian state weakened and lost its monopoly over violence, the right-wing groups entered this space.”

“In 2012, the CPU won 13 per cent of the vote, so it was a considerable part of Ukrainian politics. In 2014, they didn’t get into parliament, thanks to the loss of Crimea and the Donbas, which were their electoral strongholds. And the next year, they were suspended.”

“The Minsk agreements specified a ceasefire, Ukrainian recognition of local elections in the separatist-controlled areas, the transfer of control over the border to the Ukrainian government, and a special autonomy status for Donbas within Ukraine, including the possibility of institutionalizing the separatist armed forces.”

“Although in the end it appeared to be Putin who put an end to the Minsk Accords by recognizing the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in February 2022, there had been multiple statements from Ukrainian top officials, prominent politicians and those in professional ‘civil society’ saying that implementing Minsk would be a disaster for Ukraine, that Ukrainian society would never accept the ‘capitulation’, it would mean civil war.”

“So, if before 2014, ‘pro-Russian’ meant a large political camp supporting Ukraine’s integration into Russia-led international organizations such as the Eurasian Union—or even joining the Union State with Russia and Belarus—after this camp collapsed in 2014, the ‘pro-Russian’ label was inflated and often used to stigmatize positions such as support for Ukraine’s non-aligned status and pragmatic cooperation with both West and East, as well as scepticism about Euromaidan outcomes, opposition to decommunization or restrictions on the use of the Russian language in Ukraine’s public sphere.

“So, a wide range of political positions supported by a large minority, sometimes even by the majority, of Ukrainians—sovereigntist, state-developmentalist, illiberal, left-wing—were blended together and labelled ‘pro-Russian narratives’ because they challenged the dominant pro-Western, neoliberal and nationalist discourses in Ukraine’s civil society.”

“Similarly with ‘decommunization’. Once the government had defined what this actually meant, polls showed that Ukrainians were not very interested in renaming the streets and cities or banning the Communist Party. At the same time, they were not ready to defend the Communist Party, because they did not see it as particularly relevant to their politics. But they were not supporters of decommunization either; they were passively against it, though not actively resisting it. The legitimacy of this agenda within the activist civil-society public was much higher than within Ukrainian society at large.”

“It very soon became clear that not only was Zelensky’s party not a real party, that this populist leader never had a populist movement behind him, but that he didn’t even have a real team that was capable of proceeding with any consistent policies. His first government lasted for about half a year. He then fired his chief of staff and there was continual turnover in ministerial positions. The lack of a serious team meant that Zelensky quite quickly fell into the same trap as Poroshenko, prey to the most powerful agents in Ukrainian politics:”

“By the start of the war, it was not yet clear that he had actually managed to build that ‘vertical of power’. It was beginning to look more and more of a mess; and quite dangerous. From Putin’s perspective, if Ukraine is in a mess, run by a weak and incompetent president, then isn’t this a good time to achieve his goals?”

“[…] neither Poroshenko nor Zelensky had ever seriously campaigned to increase the popularity of the Accords as much as they actually campaigned for the no less controversial and unpopular land market reform or various nationalist initiatives. Finally, France and Germany were not that active in pushing Ukraine to do more about the Accords and the Obama and Trump administrations certainly did not support the agreement as they could have.”

“It is hard to be sure about this. National-liberal civil society welcomed sanctions against Medvedchuk, whom they saw as a ‘pro-Russian fifth column’—this was a move for which they waited for many years. A more realistic explanation is that Zelensky targeted the leader of a rival party, which was rapidly gaining popularity at the end of 2020 on the back of a wave of disenchantment with Zelensky among voters in the southeastern regions, who had massively supported him in 2019 but no longer saw any substantial difference between him and Poroshenko.”

“By the start of 2022, they had blocked most of the main opposition media, including one of Ukraine’s most popular websites, Strana.ua, and the most popular political blogger, Anatoly Shariy, who sought asylum in the EU. Zelensky was creating a lot of enemies for himself with these erratic sanctions, which were legally quite dubious, and the Ukrainian oligarchs began to get worried.”

“Putin, like other post-Soviet Caesarist leaders, has ruled through a combination of repression, balance and passive consent legitimated by a narrative of restoring stability after the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s. But he has not offered any attractive developmental project. Russia’s invasion should be analyzed precisely in this context: lacking sufficient soft power of attraction, the Russian ruling clique has ultimately decided to rely on the hard power of violence, starting from coercive diplomacy in the beginning of 2021, then abandoning diplomacy for military coercion in 2022.”

“So why did Washington not prevent the invasion? If they knew that an invasion was coming, why did they do nothing except leak Putin’s plans to the media? One strategy would have been to start serious negotiations with Putin, to agree that Ukraine would not become a member of nato, because they never had any desire to invite it to join—nor do they have any desire to fight for it, as we see now. Another, opposite strategy would be to send a massive supply of weapons to Ukraine before the war started, sufficient to have changed the calculations on Putin’s side. But they didn’t do either of those things—and that looks sort of strange, and of course very tragic for Ukraine.”

“In a recent interview in the Economist, Zelensky said, interestingly, that it’s more important to save Ukrainian lives than to save territory. That could be interpreted as thinking that he may be forced to go for this compromise.”

“In the case of a prolonged war that would turn Ukraine into a Syria or Afghanistan in Europe, there would be a strong likelihood that radical nationalists would begin to occupy leading positions in the resistance, with obvious political consequences. The Ukraine in which I was born, and where I lived most of my life, is lost now, forever—however this war ends.”

“Support for the war in Russia is reported to be 60–70 per cent or more. There is a separate discussion about the extent to which we can believe Russian polls, but we don’t have any other systematic evidence, and it’s plausible.”

It’s plausible. Their media is nearly at least as restricted as European or U.S. media, which guarantees that most people have a single, official opinion. In Russia, that opinion is likely to be support for the war—as the government wants. Just like there must at least 80% support among the peoples of Europe and the U.S. for destroying Russia for its insolence. There was 69% support in the U.S. for invading Iraq in 2002. It’s definitely plausible that Russian support the invasion of Ukraine.

The first casualty of War is Truth (Live w/Scott Ritter) by The Duran (YouTube)

This is a very worthwhile analysis from a military standpoint by Scott Ritter. He’s mostly the one talking. There’s a British guy named “Alexander Mercouris” who I don’t really know. He didn’t contribute much, other than to cheer Ritter on.

Jeremy Corbyn & Richard Burgon speak out in support of Julian Assange in the UK Parliament (Rumble)

This is a five-minute video. Corbyn’s speech is first, and quite good.

Thralldom and Its Uses by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“Russia means business in its historic sphere of influence. It’s none of our business, and we’re only making it worse for the Ukrainian people by pretending it’s our business with the false promise of our support. The only thing that matters to us about Ukraine just now is that we’re standing in the way of useful negotiations to end the conflict there and egging on various other countries in Europe to aggravate the situation.”

People Just Want to Feel Good About War Again by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“It’s also worth saying that it is of course not 100% Ukraine’s decision how much of their territory and their people to surrender to Russia because that’s not how the world works. Russia has had and will continue to have something to say about how much territory Ukraine keeps and how many people it loses. Is that fair? No. But that’s life. Russia possesses a large and advanced military, as well as the world’s largest nuclear armament. Those facts have consequences, no matter what American pundits think is fair. Sometimes the world is like that.”

“I think that living as part of the hegemon has led many Americans to chafe at the idea that there are any obstacles to implementing their will at all, that the world is an entirely pliable entity that will bend to our preferences if we just want it enough.”

“Chomsky is asking us to think less about simplistic considerations of good and bad and to instead practice some hardheaded cost-benefit analysis. Specifically, he’s suggesting that perpetuating the conflict by enabling short-term Ukrainian victories will ultimately only increase the risk of a truly ruinous war between NATO and Russia and result in greater destruction to Ukraine, without much changing the eventual outcome.”

“Americans grow up surrounded by World War II nostalgia and feel denied their birthright of ethically uncomplicated and heroic wars.”

I am beginning to doubt that WWII was as ethically uncomplicated as it’s now made out to be. The victors have just had 80 years to write the history and smooth out the complications.

“The fickle American imagination will turn to other things. And the future of Ukraine, even in an optimistic vision where they resist any substantial permanent capture of land by the Russians, will still be unsettled, still saddled with a weak central government, endemic corruption, a virulent strain of ultra-nationalist far-right sentiment, and the consequences of now being stuffed full of foreign arms and ordnance.

“I don’t think this will stay a feel-good story for long. I do hope I’m wrong.”

The Sadness of War by Morris Berman (Dark Ages America)

“What the MSM, especially the social media, also does is block out (i.e., censor) empirical studies and alternative narratives. Keen political analysts like John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, and Michael Brenner are not welcome on its sites. And what do these scholars and journalists point out? Among other things, that Putin was trying, for 15 years, to sit down with the US and discuss its concerns regarding Russian border safety.”

“Americans are certainly not open to Mearsheimer’s argument (for example), that it is the US that bears responsibility for what is happening in the Ukraine. Americans barely know what facts are, and in any case are not interested in them. What gets their attention are emotions, which they stupidly confuse with ideas.”

Using War To Assault Freedom by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“I have argued in this column and elsewhere that the Biden administration sanctions imposed on Russian and American persons and businesses are profoundly unconstitutional because they are imposed by executive fiat rather than by legislation and because the sanctions constitute either the seizure of property without a warrant or the taking of property without due process.

“When the feds seize a yacht from a person whom they claim may have financed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, they are doing so in direct violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

“Similarly, when they freeze Russian assets in American banks, they engage in a seizure, and seizures can only constitutionally be done with a search warrant based on probable cause of crime.

“As well, when the feds interfere with contract rights by prohibiting compliance with lawful contracts, that, too, implicates due process and can only be done constitutionally after a jury verdict in the government’s favor, at a trial at which the feds have proved fault.”

“[…] Congress enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and the Magnitsky Act of 2016. These constitutional monstrosities purport to give the president the power to declare persons and entities to be violators of human rights and, by that mere executive declaration alone, to punish them without trial.

“These laws turn the Fourth and Fifth Amendments on their heads by punishing first and engaging in a perverse variant of due process later. How perverse? These laws require that if you want your seized property back, you must prove that you are not a human rights violator.”

Ted Rall 13.04.2022

Against World War III by David Bromwich (Antiwar.com)

“When a leader speaks of an international rival with unbounded contempt, it renders negotiation impossible. Yet the president’s advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have done little to blunt his message. Congress, too, is full of members who yesterday could not have found Ukraine on a map but today want US missiles to shoot down Russian planes. The US/NATO plan looks forward to a long and bloody war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians killed, Ukraine vindicated and the Russian economy destroyed.”

“Words are going to matter more than usual in the next few weeks. The let’s just do this mood is as deranged now as it was in 1962. Trap the invader in a tight enough corner, choke off all the exits, make him feel he has nothing to lose, and he will drive the world off a cliff as surely as our generals and think-tank adepts, our senators and columnists. “I am,” says Macbeth, “in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” We had better step back before we step any further.”

Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Scahill on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Media, Propaganda, and Accountability by Jeremy Scahill / The Intercept (YouTube)

At 2:20, Noam answers,

“I think that support for Ukraine’s effort to defend itself is legitimate. It it is, of course, it has to be carefully scaled so that it actually improves their situation and doesn’t escalate the conflict, to lead to destruction of Ukraine and possibly beyond. Sanctions against the aggressor are appropriate, just as sanctions against Washington would have been appropriate when it invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan, or many other cases. Of course, that’s unthinkable, given U.S. power.

“The right question is: what is the best thing to do to save Ukraine from a grim fate, from further destruction? And that’s to move towards a negotiated settlement. There are some simple facts that aren’t really controversial. There are two ways for a war to end: One way is for one side or the other to be basically destroyed. And the Russians are not going to be destroyed. So that means that one way is for Ukraine to be destroyed. The other way is some negotiated settlement.

“If there’s a third way, no-one’s ever figured it out.

“So we should be doing is […] primarily moving towards a possible negotiated settlement that will save Ukrainians from further disaster.”

We don’t know much by Ted Rall

Ted Rall: 22.04.2022

Roaming Charges: Runaway Sons of the Nuclear A-Bomb by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Nearly 120 years later people are still arguing over what started WW I. But there’s almost unanimous agreement that the cause of WW II (in Europe at least) was the way WW I ended and the punitive sanctions imposed on Germany at Versailles. They would still be fighting WW I if the negotiators of the armistice had to agree on what caused the war. Perhaps they still are…

“Similarly, people will debate what triggered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But the real question now is how it will end, who will negotiate the peace, how many people will die before it concludes and how long it will be before the next war starts–since the end of one war invariably sows the seeds for the next.”

“As to the argument that USSR’s nuclear arsenal prevented it from being invaded by the US, in the end it didn’t, of course. In the 90s, Russia was over-run without a shot by the US, in the guise of Chicago School-trained economists who looted what was left of the Russian economy and left it in the kleptomaniacal clutches of the current neoliberal yacht club that runs the Kremlin.”

“[…] we are approaching the point where Xi, perhaps the last rational leader on the world stage, will become convinced that Putin, Biden, Johnson and Zelensky are mad men, fully capable of blustering and blundering into a nuclear war, which–even if survivable–won’t be good for business.”

“You can vote for someone who says, “There’ll be no more oil drilling on federal lands. Period. Period. Period.” Win. And get more oil drilling on federal lands than the evil guy you voted out of office.”

That’s Biden, the “hold-your-nose-and-vote” choice, who has now authorized more oil-drilling on federal lands than Trump did. And he’s only just over a year into his term. Biden is going to Biden. Biden’s career made it very clear that he was not going to do any of the things he promised that he would do—because he’d had 50 years to do them and never had. We also had ample proof that he would lie about everything to get power. None of this is controversial. It’s just unclear how so many otherwise-intelligent people voted for him anyway. Oh, wait, it is clear. The Trump Derangement Syndrome that got even to Mr. Chomsky. Biden is going to be worse for humanity than even Trump was. It was hard to conceive how that could be, but here we are: backpedaling quickly on climate-change regulation, expanding fossil fuels, and provoking war with nuclear powers.

“Rex and Jared Baum are an Idaho father and son who like to shoot animals together. It’s a bonding thing. In March of last year, the pair started tracking a female grizzly near Yellowstone National Park. When the bear noticed the men and started to run away, pops and his boy started shooting their Ruger-5.7 handguns. Jared later said he thought he must have shot the bear 40 times. When the bear finally collapsed, Jared told the wildlife cops that he “noticed it was a grizzly” and that he’d “shot it too many times and she was going to die.” So, humane animal shooter that he is, he “finished her.” Rex and Jared left the bear by the Little Warm River and pitched their Rugers ($869 a piece) into a pond. The grizzly had been fitted with a radio collar and a few days later sent a mortality alert to wildlife officers, who eventually discovered the bear’s remains a couple of weeks later. The bear had given birth that winter, but by the time wildlife biologists reached its den, the male cub had starved to death. Old Rex got three days in jail and a $1,000. Jared was sentenced to a month in jail and $12,000 in fines. But there’s nothing they can do to replace those two bears.”

Jesus. This is so small a thing, but it feels like it describes a lot more about people.

“According to the book Curbing Traffic, “Currently about two-thirds of all Dutch children walk or bike to school, with 75% of secondary school kids cycling to school. By enabling safe and active travel, Dutch cities prevent an estimated one million car journeys to school each morning.””

“People are now lamenting to slow extinction of the DVD, which reminded me of Alexander Cockburn’s introduction to the technology, which he came to revile as much as he did CDs, even though he never owned a DVD player. When Tim Robbins called Alexander Cockburn to ask if we’d do a commentary for the DVD of Bob Roberts, Alex said, “Sure how many words do you want us to write?” Tim said, “As many words as you can say in an hour and half.” Alex: “I’ll get back to you.” He rings me up: “Jeffrey, three questions: Have you ever watched a DVD? What’s a DVD commentary? And who the hell is Bob Roberts?” In the end, Tim put us up in the sprawling Fairmont Hotel in Oakland in big suite with a vast spread of food and several bottles of Sonoma wines. We were meant to talk about the film while it played muted on a giant monitor before us. Months go by and somebody sends me a review of the DVD, which notes that it comes with two commentaries, one with Gore Vidal and Tim Robbins, the other “a strange but edifying conversation with Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair which defies every rule of such features.””

I’d never heard of the movie Bob Roberts (1992) before. The plot sounds similar to A Face in the Crowd (1957) with Andy Griffith. Bob Roberts stars Alan Rickman, Tim Robbins, Giancarlo Esposito, Ray Wise, Gore Vidal, David Strathairn, James Spader, Helen Hunt, Pamela Reed, and Gore Vidal. Wow. I cannot put into words how much I want to watch this movie and both commentaries.

“Zoe Baker: “I hope we can all agree that if Marx were alive today, he’d absolutely use Engels’ Netflix account.””

“People are surprised that Tina Turner hasn’t been inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame. The Rock Hall of Fame is a marketing gimmick for the hedge funds that own the rights to the music. Its mere existence is antithetical to the spirit of rock-N-roll. Stay out Tina and stay proud. We know what you did.”

Tina Turner has lived in Switzerland since 1994 (Küsnacht and since January 2022, Stäfa) and has been a Swiss citizen since 2013, where she had to pass a citizenship test in German. She renounced her American citizenship six months later.

“Attorney for Amber Heard: “Did you ever do drugs with Marilyn Manson?”

“Johnny Depp: “I once gave Marilyn Manson a pill so that he would stop talking so much.””

Minsk II: Two Words You’ll Never Hear on Mainstream News by Walt Zlotow (Antiwar.com)

“Ask a hundred Americans and you’ll be lucky to find even one who’s ever heard of Minsk II. But ask those same Americans how the Ukraine war started, and you’ll likely get “Russian President Putin woke up one day and decided to re-establish the Soviet empire, starting with Ukraine.”

“That is because our government and its slavishly loyal media have created a false narrative for maximum propaganda to support pouring billions in weaponry into the Ukraine war zone, ensuring that death and destruction will proceed endlessly.”

Journalism & Media

This AI will tell you if you’re being a jerk by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Dorsey built a central feed of unpaid thought workers who now surface pop cultural artifacts that huge media companies like the New York Times or CNN then turn into more formal pieces of content. Twitter doesn’t compete with these institutions, it has inserted itself as a middleman and only still exists because real media companies know how to monetize its content better than it can. Oh, and, also, Dorsey helped build a system for running ads on that feed of unpaid labor so like what are we even talking about here???”

The Washington Post’s “Libs of TikTok” Nothingburger by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“My problem is there’s no allegation of corruption or impropriety in the story. (I’m actually working on another story about a would-be corporate scandal in which a different major newspaper used the door-knock technique on a peripheral character. Maybe it’s an editors’ fad?). The Lorenz piece essentially accuses LibsOfTikTok of being popular and driving legislation like the Florida law barring discussion of sexual orientation in schools through the third grade. Also, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, and Tucker Carlson like it. It doesn’t really go beyond that.”

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt (The Atlantic)

“This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.””

“The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider […]”

“Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable.”

The essays don’t mean anything and are quickly recognizable for an astute reader, but that is not the audience, unfortunately. Even GPT-3's only superficially convincing text will overwhelm people who basically can’t read. GPT-4 will rule the world.

The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet by Elizabeth Nolan Brown (Reason)

“Nonetheless, it’s a financially precarious, and perhaps even dangerous, time to be in the business of online porn. And one of the biggest reasons why is that a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep online porn in business. In some cases, that pressure has led to the creation of onerous new laws; in others, it has been aided by support from powerful figures in business and government. These groups have repeatedly sought to conflate the existence of consensual commercial sex and porn production with the prospect of forced sexual exploitation, often with lurid statistics about exploited minors that don’t stand up to scrutiny.”

Puritans have been the problem in that country from the absolute get-go.

“The purity culture ethos of shame, abstinence, and fallen women still permeates these groups’ activism. But it’s been repackaged as a bid to protect women and kids from trauma and sexual harm rather than to uphold the sanctity of marriage and biblical womanhood.”

“In all of these cases, an underlying kernel of harm is alleged, such as a teen being blackmailed into sending a stranger sex videos or women being duped into appearing in online porn. But rather than target the perpetrators of that harm directly, the NCOSE strategy is to go after platforms that—however briefly or unknowingly—hosted evidence of it taking place.”

“At its core is the idea that sex work can never just be work; it’s always exploitation. Hawkins says as much: “That sex buyers must pay to sexually access the bodies of others demonstrates that the sex in prostitution is unwanted by those being paid. Payment, whether in cash or by other things of value, is the leverage used to abrogate the lack of authentic sexual desire of those in the sex trade.””

But you’ve actually described work. You wouldn’t do it if you weren’t being paid. That’s literally how everything in the economy works. There are vanishingly few people who would continue doing their work if they weren’t compensated for it. This is a very Marxist argument, essentially condemning the whole of capitalism, not only sex work. While I heartily approve, I hardly believe that’s what the speaker intended.

“In other words, these groups have gone after online sex work and pornography by making it difficult, if not impossible, for sexually oriented businesses to process payments and collect money for services rendered—if they can create accounts at all.”

““Any assertion that we allow CSAM”—that stands for child sexual abuse material, the new officialese term for sexualized content featuring anyone under age 18—”is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue,“ protested Pornhub in a statement. It went on to point out that an Internet Watch Foundation analysis has found only “118 incidents of CSAM on Pornhub in a three year period.” This is out of millions of videos—around 13.5 million before the purge, according to Vice.”

“None of those numbers offer definitive proof of anything, since they’re a function of how much a service is used and by how many people as well as the company’s proactiveness and internal definitions. But to the extent that online exploitation is a problem, they suggest that porn sites aren’t the chief vectors. Indeed, Kristof’s op-ed even admitted that these mainstream sites may be trafficking in far higher volumes of illegal imagery. Nonetheless, he closed his column by calling on credit card companies to stop doing business with Pornhub.”

Because Nicholas Kristoff is a sanctimonious asshole who knows which side his bread is buttered on. He was never going to write in the NYT that Google and Facebook were responsible for more child pornography than Pornhub. His brain couldn’t even think something like that, regardless of the evidence.

““Pushing for more aggressive content moderation, especially from infrastructure-like entities like payment processors, web hosts, [content delivery networks], etc, is a terrible idea that will always backfire against marginalized people and social movements,” tweeted Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future.”

Evan Greer seems like a good person. Smart and articulate in interviews.

“It’s not just traditional banks and credit card companies aggressively policing adult business. Many online payment processors, such as Square, PayPal, and Google Pay, explicitly reject transactions for adult-oriented businesses and performers, or have been known to close sex worker accounts without warning.”

Science & Nature

NASA Climate Scientist Has Had Enough by Lee Camp & Peter Kalmus (YouTube)

This is an interesting interview with Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist who’d recently been arrested in a climate protest. He’s made the movie Being the Change: A New Kind of Climate Documentary (IMDb)

Zurich Werdhoelzli: How does a sewage treatment plant work? by Stadt Zürich (YouTube)

This is a great, 13-minute video, with interesting graphics and animations and no interviews. Narration is in English.

The Great Billionaire Space Caper by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Much as the military once replaced cheap army cafeteria food with Cinnabon franchises and high-cost meals prepared by firms like KBR, and the NIH basically exists to provide free R&D to pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, NASA no longer builds much for itself. Instead, it’s lately become little more than a vehicle for funding the phallic moon race between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos-owned Blue Origin.”

The latest IPCC report calls for rapid transformations across all sectors. It’s ‘now or never’ to prevent the worst by Alexi Ernstoff & Pierre Collet (Quantis)

“Greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) must peak before 2025 to avoid overshooting the 1.5°C mark. In other words, we effectively have mere months to hit peak emissions. The window for action is closing rapidly and we’re far off track.”

“We have all the tools we need to rapidly decarbonize the global economy. Upping the investment by three- to six-fold is necessary, but the capital exists — it just needs to be allocated to the right places. And business-as-usual places us on a far more costly path.”

“It concluded with high confidence that demand-side strategies could cut global GHG emissions by 40-70% by 2050. But this won’t be possible unless companies act to accelerate — not obstruct — these changes. Businesses must be active players in informing, educating and engaging their consumers to change behaviors and influencing demand for products and services that are at odds with sustainability — even when it means a fundamental shift in the business model and the transformation of product portfolios; decoupling profitability from resource consumption.”

Ahahahaha we are cooked. You might well say our future depends on teenagers not masturbating. Put a fork in it, baby, it’s done. It was a helluva ride.

“The report says behavior and cultural changes represent “a substantial overlooked strategy” left out of transition pathways and scenarios.”

Are you fucking serious? It’s not overlooked! It’s just impossible. I honestly would be delighted, but literally everything is working against it.

I no longer grade my students’ work – and I wish I had stopped sooner by Elisabeth Gruner (The Conversation)

“Most of the questions I answer for students are about how I grade and what information will be on a test. This is because they need good grades to get the certificate to get the job. I oblige because I know they need the certificate and so my bosses don’t get mad. And if a student wants office hours just to talk about interesting things, I am annoyed because I need to spend my time grading papers so the other students can pass the class, get certificates and get jobs.”

Art & Literature

Have you ever wondered if you’re living in a Philip K. Dick novel? by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

Liberal Education by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

Married, but not happily

On the idea of an Adirondack Mountains National Park by David Gibson (Adirondack Almanack)

“[…] the real crux of the matter, however, lies in the character of the administration of Adirondack lands under Federal management. The National Park Service, despite many accomplishments, has been over-susceptible to the pressures of the highway builders, of those who conceive of parks as highly developed, semi-rural playgrounds and amusement centers, and also of those who hope for private profit from operating establishments for entertainment nearby…The issue is very clear. If New York State cedes to the Federal Government state-owned Forest Preserve lands, it is virtually certain that their wilderness character will be destroyed, sooner or later…Control of the area should remain where it is.”

Philosophy & Sociology

#115 Modern Philosophy and The Role of The Philosopher feat. Justin E. H. Smith by UnSILOed Podcast (YouTube)

“They’re trying to figure out how it gives the world shape and meaning. To some extent, my philosophical project has always been to invite people to study the history of philosophy in somewhat the same way. I don’t care if Leibniz was right about things. I certainly don’t care if the pre-Socratics got nature right. What I want to know is what this reveals to us about the range of representations of the world of which human beings are capable that has helped them structure that world and give it meaning.”

Harvard Canceled its Best Black Professor. Why? by Good Kid Productions (YouTube)

I thought this was a great quote from Fryer, but it came from a cited podcast.

“Roland Fryer: I think the truth helps us. False narratives do not. I find it frustrating, I find it insulting, that people would change the truth because they think they’re trying to help us. They’re just trying to help themselves. The truth is enough. I’m just following the data wherever it leads. What are you doing?”

He himself was not interviewed in this video. It’s unclear why. I’m interested to learn more about this case, but am not sure it’s as clear-cut as the video makes it appear. An interview with Roland Fryer would help clear things up, I think.

Technology

Lithium costs a lot of money—so why aren’t we recycling lithium batteries? by Staff (Ars Technica)

I didn’t read the article, but immediately thought “because we’re wasteful idiots.” But it’s more accurate to say that the predatory elite class that benefits tremendously gets rich no matter what, whether or not a solution is useful long-term.

ContraChrome by Leah Elliott

“When asked what Contra Chrome is about, she will answer: „It‘s about you. Seven of ten readers will reach this site using Google Chrome, which is a very different road than other browsers like e.g. Firefox.“

“In Contra Chrome, Leah carefully charts this road and its terrain in a funny and easily accessible way. In webcomic form, she documents how over the last decade, Google’s browser has become a threat to user privacy and the democratic process itself.”

Git Credential Manager: authentication for everyone by Matthew John Cheetham (GitHub)

“Conditional access is of particular importance for enterprises. The ongoing global pandemic has lead [sic] to a large increase in the number of people working from home from a wide range of personal devices outside the corporate firewall. The adoption of such conditional access policies is becoming a popular tool for enterprises to keep corporate data secure.”

I like these policies because they enforce authorization rules that are not bound to the originating network.

Programming

Dissecting the async methods in C# by Sergey Tepliakov (Microsoft Dev Blogs)

• Async methods are very different from the synchronous methods.
• The compiler generates a state machine per each method and moves all the logic of the original method there.
• The generated code is highly optimized for a synchronous scenario: if all awaited tasks are completed, then the overhead of an async method is minimal.
• If an awaited task is not completed, the logic relies on a lot of helper types to get the job done.

Using dotnet format Command to Format the C#/.NET Code by Ryan Miranda (CodeMaze)

“dotnet format is a tool that was added a while ago that we can install as a standalone tool. But as it now ships as part of the .NET 6 SDK, there is no longer a need to install anything. The tool is used to enforce .editorconfig rules or default rules to source code, such as whitespace rules, or analyzer/code-style rules.”

UI/UX (KnowYourMeme)

Thinking on ways to solve a DARK/LIGHT THEME SWITCH by Adam Argyle (YouTube)

There is a lot to learn about CSS and animations here. The larger middle part felt a little long, but there is a lot to learn about advanced CSS—and using PostCSS to use up-and-coming features, like nesting—and even more to learn about animations and using SVGs with masking. See the accompanying article Building a theme switch component for a more compact, copy/pastable version.

“A website may provide settings for controlling the color scheme instead of relying entirely on the system preference. This means that users may browse in a mode other than their system preferences. For example, a user’s system is in a light theme, but the user prefers the website to display in the dark theme.

“There are several web engineering considerations when building this feature. For example, the browser should be made aware of the preference as soon as possible to prevent page color flashes, and the control needs to first sync with the system then allow client-side stored exceptions.”

Why You Should Include Debugging In The Interview Process by Zhenghao

“As a software engineer, apart from meetings and writing design docs, I’d say at least half of my programming work isn’t just coding – the other half largely involves searching through a codebase and reading existing code or code-adjacent artifacts like error messages, tests, and logs. And oftentimes, coding isn’t the hardest part.”

“When one is debugging, they engage in all five activities. It entails a sequence of searching, comprehension, exploration and writing code. And it is incredibly revealing to watch one debug […] On top of its comprehensiveness, debugging is what software engineers do on a regular basis. It is relevant to the actual work.”

Video Games

flibit_unreal_unity by Ethan Lee (GitHub)

“[…] in the last few years the quality of that back half of development has rapidly declined, to the point where people are absolutely sick of their own projects by the time they’re finished… or more accurately, abandoned, because long-term maintenance of Unity games is appallingly hard. Developers of all kinds like to accumulate technical debt and then panickingly try to pay it off at the 11th hour, and to say Unity charges interest is a pretty gross understatement. Others have talked about this at length so I won’t get into it too much, other than that profiling and improving performance is still really really hard […]”

Licensed developers have access to the entirety of Unreal Engine’s source code. They can find out how to fix their problems better because they can debug that code as well. They can even submit fixes in that source, if that’s the most appropriate place to put them. Unity, by contrast, has a large amount of their engine closed-source, available only as binary packages (C#, where you can decompile) or not at all (C++ executables and units). The up-front prototyping is super-fast, but you can’t dig down and make the engine better, either for yourself or for everyone else running into your problem.

My experience with Unity is also that, not only is the engine monolithic, but the IDE is also monolithic. It has its own source-control system, FFS. It didn’t have first-class support for unit or integration testing. You could run in-game tests, but they were so slow—and the UI was awful. I had to twist things around to be able to run core code in a modern unit-testing environment in Visual Studio or Rider. It’s possible that it’s gotten better by now—this was about two years ago. I’ve seen that Rider is making leaps and bounds as a Unity editor—but also touts its integration with Unreal Engine.

StarCraft 2: Google DeepMind AlphaStar (A.I.) vs Pro Gamer! by LowkoTV (YouTube)

A friend sent me this older video of the Google DeepMind AI defeating one of the world’s best Starcraft players. The discussion in the comments was also pretty interesting—of course half of it was shit-posting—but there was some discussion of how to describe what AIs “do” and how to even compare a human versus an AI in a game like this. The moderator mentions several times that the AI’s APMs were quite high—especially in the heat of the battle. One of the commentators mentioned that an AI APM is likely to be more valuable than a human APM because people tend to “jitter”, which drives up APMs but doesn’t really contribute.