Links and Notes for April 22nd, 2022

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Technology
• Programming

Economy & Finance

Elon Closes In by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

The following is Matt’s transcript from a podcast that he did with some fool who’s worth billions of dollars because of crypto (founded the FTX exchange, whatever that means).

“Matt: Can you give me an intuitive understanding of farming? I mean, like to me, farming is like you sell some structured puts and collect premium, but perhaps there’s a more sophisticated understanding than that.

“Sam Bankman-Fried: [five long paragraphs full of bullshit equivalent to the one below]

“And they’re like ‘10X that’s insane. 1X is the norm.’ And so then, you know, X token price goes way up. And now it’s $130 million market cap token because of, you know, the bullishness of people’s usage of the box. And now all of a sudden of course, the smart money’s like, oh, wow, this thing’s now yielding like 60% a year in X tokens. Of course I’ll take my 60% yield, right? So they go and pour another $300 million in the box and you get a psych and then it goes to infinity. And then everyone makes money.

“Matt: (27:13) I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that was so much more cynical than how I would’ve described farming. You’re just like, well, I’m in the Ponzi business and it’s pretty good.”

Why Didn’t Vanguard, the Largest Mutual Fund Family in the U.S., Need to Borrow from the Fed while the Wall Street Titans Did? by Russ & Pam Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“First of all, the Fed is supposed to be the lender of last resort to commercial banks in the U.S. – banks that make loans to businesses and consumers to keep the U.S. economy running – not the lender of last resort to the trading houses on Wall Street like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS, whose derivatives and subprime concoctions brought on the 2008 crisis which ushered in the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression.”

“Now under the tenure of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, the Fed has not only experienced the largest trading scandal in its history, replete with the former Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan trading like a hedge-fund kingpin in S&P 500 futures while sitting on inside information as a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, but the Fed is also back to bailing out the crazy concoctions on Wall Street – this time with the cover of a news blackout by mainstream media.”

Elon Got His Money by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Reuters notes that “With Tesla’s strong quarterly report on Wednesday, Chief Executive Elon Musk has scored a hat trick of performance goals worth a combined $23 billion in new compensation,” with about 25 million shares of options vesting at an exercise price of $70.01 each. Nice quarter! Here’s a little bonus, go buy yourself Twitter.”

Elon Checks His Pockets by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“In particular we talked about TerraUSD, whose price is maintained by trading with another cryptocurrency called Luna, and about how Terra is diversifying its “foreign reserves,” as it were, by buying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The idea is that as Terra has gotten big, it can buy other cryptos to defend its peg to the dollar, instead of relying on the value of Luna. I wrote: “The basic structure of the trade is (1) Ponzi, (2) acceptance, (3) diversification, (4) permanence.””

“[…] then you could transition it to being an algorithmic stablecoin. Keep $1 on hand for every coin until everyone treats your coin as being worth a dollar, and then start keeping $0.90 on hand, then $0.80, etc., keeping enough money to defend the peg but not enough to fully redeem every coin in every scenario.”

The Stability of Algorithmic Stablecoins by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“If Sharecoin is worthless, it cannot be used to support the price of Dollarcoin. And because you just made it up, there is no particular reason for Sharecoin to be worth anything, so there is no particular reason for Dollarcoin to be worth a dollar. If I made up Sharecoin and Dollarcoin on my computer and said to you “I will give you the number 10 billion in this Excel spreadsheet if you give me 1 million U.S. dollars,” you would say no, and if I raised my offer to 400 quadrillion you would not change your mind.”

“The basic structure of the trade is (1) Ponzi, (2) acceptance, (3) diversification, (4) permanence. I feel very dumb typing that! But I guess it works.”

Public Policy & Politics

The US Has No Idea Where Its Ukrainian Military Aid Is Going by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“Unfortunately, a political climate as militaristic as it is conformist means there is almost no public pressure on the Biden administration to do anything other than what it’s already doing: glutting the country with weapons while refusing to engage in negotiations to end the war. The president is about to announce another $800 million worth of military aid for the country, and a White House spokesperson has said that “we are always preparing the next package of security assistance to get into Ukraine.””

The war in Donbas by Yasha Levine

Note: The following notes are from an article that Yasha wrote in 2014, after the putsch.

“It was a bloody conflict that leveled a big part of that region. And significant part of that it involved Ukrainians shelling and killing Ukrainians civilians to “liberate” them from “evil Russians terrorists.” Now it’s the Russia military doing the shelling and killing, invading to “liberate” Ukrainians from “NATO Nazis” and “the Satanic West.” People here just can’t catch a break.”

“The country’s new leaders took a hardline military approach to the separatist activity in east Ukraine, but found they didn’t have the cash. The military could barely afford to keep its tanks and APCs fueled, let alone fund a protracted war against rebels and local insurgents backed by Russia. So Ukraine started brutally gutting the budget in search of funds, including getting rid of aid to single moms and people with disabilities. Starving the needy freed up about $600 million, but it wasn’t nearly enough.”

“Kharkov sits very close to the combat zone in eastern Ukraine and has been on the receiving end of a steady flow of panicked and bewildered families — mostly women, children and pensioners — escaping the fighting. There are least 150,000 refugees in the city. It was a humanitarian catastrophe and the UN has been very critical of Ukrainian authorities for doing next to nothing to help.”

The Forces Pushing Asylum Seekers to Cross the English Channel are Poorly Understood by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“My main point is that it is the “push” to people who believe that they have no choice but to escape their broken countries, and not the “pull” of the British and Western European living standards which is the decisive factor in propelling people into undertaking their dangerous journeys.”

“The direct impact of violence is a cause of flight, but in states permanently gripped by war, the conscription of young men of military age by all sides is an ever-present threat. Families often see this as a death sentence for their sons, since once in an army, it is difficult to get out.”

“This deepening of the general economic collapse is the outcome of intensified sanctions applied against Syria, Iran and Afghanistan that have led to the decline or collapse of currencies and soaring prices. Pro- and anti-government forces are equally affected. Though Raman teaches in a Kurdish-held area allied to the US, his teacher’s salary, which used to be worth the equivalent of $300 a month in 2018, is now worth only $25.”

Now is the Time for Nonalignment and Peace by Roger McKenzie & Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“The Bandung Spirit was for peace and for nonalignment, for the peoples of the world to put their efforts into building a process to eradicate history’s burdens (illiteracy, ill health, hunger) by using their social wealth. Why spend money on nuclear weapons when money should be spent on classrooms and hospitals?”

“We are overwhelmed these days with certainties that seem less and less real. As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, there is a baffling view that negotiations are futile. This view circulates even when reasonable people agree that all wars must end in negotiations. If that is the case, then why not call for an immediate ceasefire and build the trust necessary for negotiations?”

“These people in the blue suits of bureaucracy are not to be trusted with the world’s future. They fail us when it comes to the climate catastrophe; they fail us when it comes to the pandemic; they fail us when it comes to peacemaking. We need to summon up the old spirits of peace and nonalignment and bring these to life inside mass movements that are the only hope of this planet.”

“What is needed is an alternative to the two-camp world of the Cold War. That is the reason why many of the leaders of these countries—from China’s Xi Jinping to India’s Narendra Modi to South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa—have called, despite their very different political orientations, for a departure from the “Cold War mentality.””

China Could Be the Big Winner of the War in Ukraine by Walden Bello (Jacobin)

“The double standards in Western responses to the war is something that some on the Left in the West have been drawing attention to.”

Everybody has, across the so-called spectrum. Tucker Carlson points it out. He’s not classically left-wing. But maybe it’s time to dispense with increasingly unhelpful labels.

“This is why trying to create a unified anti-Russian alliance isn’t going to work. Everyone knows there are clear double standards and the United States is really using the Ukrainian crisis to reassert its hegemony. I think Washington was hoping that somehow it would be able to reconstruct the past and create amnesia about what happened in the Middle East with its wars there, but that hasn’t worked.”

Yes it has, among the monied countries. It has not worked among the classically subjugated countries.

“So I would say that an invasion of Taiwan is not in the cards, and China would be crazy to do it. The South China Sea is crawling with American power, and the Taiwan straits are avenues for US ships. We are talking about the most powerful navy in the world, concentrated on containing China in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits.”

Is it that powerful though? Or just big? I wonder whether the vaunted ability of the U.S. Navy to project force is a phantom.

“The US has consistently, in the last few years, spent three times what the Chinese are spending.”

The U.S. spends 3x as much overall, and 2x as much as a percentage of GDP. Per capita, the U.S. spends 12x as much as China. See List of countries by military expenditures (Wikipedia)

Siding With Ukraine’s Far-Right, US Sabotaged Zelensky’s Peace Mandate by Aaron Maté (Scheer Post)

“The overwhelming message from Congress, fervently amplified across the US media (including progressive outlets) with next to no dissent, was that when it comes to Ukraine’s civil war, the US saw Ukraine’s far-right as allies, and its civilians as cannon fodder.”

“The far-right threats to Zelensky undoubtedly thwarted a peace agreement that could have prevented the Russian invasion. Just two weeks before Russia troops entered Ukraine, the New York Times noted that Zelensky “would be taking extreme political risks even to entertain a peace deal” with Russia, as his government “could be rocked and possibly overthrown” by far-right groups if he “agrees to a peace deal that in their minds gives too much to Moscow.””

“Echoing his late friend and colleague Stephen F. Cohen, Mearsheimer stressed the centrality of the US role. “The Americans will side with the Ukrainian right,” Mearsheimer said. “Because the Americans, and the Ukrainian right, both do not want Zelensky cutting a deal with the Russians that makes it look like the Russians won. So this is the principal reason I’m very pessimistic about Ukraine’s ability to help shut this one down.””

Noam Chomsky on How To Prevent World War III by Robinson (Current Affairs)

“It was pretty clear that human intelligence and its glory had reached the point where it would soon be able to destroy all life on Earth. Not yet. I mean, the atom bomb had limited capacity. The bombing of Hiroshima in many ways was not worse than the firebombing of Tokyo a couple months earlier, and in scale probably didn’t reach that level. But it was clear that the genie was out of the bottle, that modern technology and science would advance to the point where it would reach the capacity to destroy everything,”

“My feeling at that time was, we’re lost. I mean, if human intelligence is that far ahead of human moral capacity, the chance of closing that gap is slight, particularly witnessing the reaction just increasing in following days. Basically, nobody cared.”

“We know the basic framework is neutralization of Ukraine, some kind of accommodation for the Donbas region, with a high level of autonomy, maybe within some federal structure in Ukraine, and recognizing that, like it or not, Crimea is not on the table. You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, “I don’t like hurricanes,” or “I don’t recognize hurricanes.” That doesn’t do any good.”

“Robinson And the only real debate is, how much in arms should we give them? And should we simply give them arms? Or should we intervene militarily? And that is the debate. But a more rational way of looking at this, as you say, would be to think about how to prevent Ukrainians from dying in this horrible war. And that would very alter the range of perceived options.

“Chomsky I would agree except for the word “rational.””

Also the word “give”.

“You can be rational for genocide and extermination. Henry Kissinger, who’s much lauded in the United States—I’m sure he was being quite rational when he issued an order to the U.S. Air Force transmitted from his half-drunk boss, Richard Nixon. The order was, I’m quoting it, massive bombing campaign in Cambodia, “anything that flies on anything that moves,” in other words, wipe out the place. It’s a call for mass genocide. I don’t think you can find a counterpart in the archival record; you might try. Well, that was perfectly rational. It was a way to get ahead in Washington. This was to move on to greater glory, nothing irrational about that. In fact, that worked very well. He’s now one of the most honored and respected people in the country.”

“So it’s not that the United States is acting in a way that doesn’t make sense. It’s that when you look at the history of U.S. policy, you see us doing things that are, as you say, perfectly rational, but just happen to be sociopathic.”

“Despite what American political leaders might believe—they might believe that they’re idealists, they might believe that they are people who are sincerely concerned with combating authoritarianism—when we actually evaluate their actions, what we see is a real, ruthless self-interest consistently driving our actions in the world.”

“Meanwhile, the British intellectuals were praising themselves as the most moral people in the world, even including the best of them, like say John Stuart Mill. It’s pretty hard to find an intellectual of higher moral standing. So what was he doing? Well, go back to 1857, one of the peaks of British criminal activity: vicious, murderous destruction of uprising in India. Mill knew all about it. He was an agent of the East India Company. Mill wrote a famous essay, which is taught in law schools in the United States, apparently without understanding what he said. It’s worth reading. It’s an article on intervention, and he said we should be opposed to intervention in the affairs of others, but he said there are exceptions. One exception is when a country like Britain carries out the intervention because Britain, he said, is an angelic country. It’s not like other countries. In fact, we’re so magnificent that other countries can’t understand it and the heap obloquy upon us because they can’t understand that the actions we take are for the benefit of mankind. When we slaughter Indians, and conquer more of India, to increase our control of the opium trade, so we can break into China by force, they just can’t understand how angelic we are, so they criticize us. But nevertheless, we have to put their criticism aside, recognize that they’re just not capable of understanding our magnificence and go ahead with our humane actions. That’s John Stuart Mill. I don’t know of any American intellectual who is capable of shining his shoes. So are we surprised when they say the same?”

“The major country of Africa, the Congo, suffered hideously under Belgian atrocities, even worse than most of the European atrocities, which is a pretty high bar to get over. Then they finally decolonized in 1960: the main country in Africa, enormous resources, could have been a rich country, it was leading Africa towards freedom and development. The U.S. and Belgium weren’t having that. Eisenhower issued a hit; CIA was supposed to murder Lumumba. They didn’t manage. Belgian intelligence got there first and turned Congo into a horror chamber ever since.”

“That’s not ancient history. People in the Global South know those things. They know about Iraq, Central America, and Vietnam. They know what we’ve done. So when they hear these pronouncements, they just either crack up in ridicule or can’t believe what’s going on in this uncivilized, barbaric area of the world that is Europe and the United States.”

“The U.S. strategic posture—the current one—was established by Jim Mattis of the 2018 Trump administration. [It’s as follows:] We have to shift from what was called the Global War on Terror. (I won’t talk about what it really was, but what was called the Global War on Terror.) We have to shift from that to confrontation with peer powers, to confrontation with China and Russia. We have to be powerful enough to be able to defeat both of them in a nuclear war. If there’s a better definition of lunacy, I’d be interested in hearing it.”

“In other words, we own the world. We carry out aggression and violence anywhere we like because we own the world. But if China is doing things we don’t like, off its coast, we have to encircle them with sentinel states, armed to the teeth and aimed at China. That’s considered very liberal…forthcoming. Yay, Biden. We have to defend ourselves from Chinese aggression. And there are things that China is doing that they shouldn’t be doing, like they’re violating international law in the South China Sea. The United States is not in a particularly strong position to make a fuss about that, since the United States is the only maritime power not even to have ratified the Law of the Sea. But that’s us. We own and run the world. So we don’t have to ratify anything. We establish what writers of foreign policy will call the “rule-based liberal order.” We do support that because we set the rules. So, therefore, we want the rule-based international order, not this old-fashioned, UN-based international order where we don’t set the rules. That’s no good; that goes out the window.”

“Meanwhile, we send Australia a fleet of nuclear submarines to combat China in the South China Sea, where China has maybe half a dozen old-fashioned diesel submarines, which you can easily detect. They don’t have what we have. We have to send a fleet of nuclear submarines, which are advertised publicly as able to enter a Chinese court and silently attack any Chinese target. We have to defend ourselves against the Chinese threat. We, of course, have a fleet of advanced nuclear submarines, but they’re not sophisticated enough. One Trident submarine now can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world. But that’s not enough. So we have to get rid of them and upgrade them to more advanced ones, Virginia-class submarines. One Trident submarine destroying 200 cities anywhere in the world: We can’t get by with that. We’ve got to update it.”

“We have to increase our military budget to defend ourselves from the Chinese and the Russians. Germany has to raise its defense budget because Russia might attack it. The Russian army—which can’t conquer cities 30 kilometers from the Russian border which are not defended by a modern army—is poised to attack Germany. So we’re supposed to believe. So Germany has to increase its military budget.”

“First, George W. Bush, who dismantled the ABM treaty. That’s a serious threat to Russia. Then Donald Trump, whose wrecking ball destroyed whatever else he could find, including the Reagan-Gorbachev INF Treaty, which prevented short range nuclear missiles in Europe and greatly reduced the threat of war. So Trump got rid of that. And just to make sure that everyone understood he was serious, he arranged, along with Jim Mattis, that as soon as the treaty was dismantled immediately, within weeks, the U.S. carried out tests of weapons designed to violate the treaty. To make sure the Russians understand: We’re coming after you with missiles that can attack you, and you’ll never even know they’re coming. That was one of Trump’s major steps.”

“That happens to be the current state of the world. And Europe is falling for it. Like Germany, we have to arm ourselves to defend ourselves from a military force that can’t conquer a city a couple of miles from its border.”

The Blitzkrieg Failed. What’s Next? by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)

“The combination of technological backwardness with economic dependence negates even the superiority of the Russian armed forces over their Ukrainian opponents, because they can count on the almost unlimited resources of all the countries of the world with which Russia, thanks to the remarkable diplomatic talents of the Lavrov team, has managed to quarrel.”

This is a Russian voice, but I’m feeling that they’re underestimating the animosity on the NATO side. NATO wants to rob Russia of its resources. That’s it. Why buy it when you can steal it? They would like a vassal, like Iran under the Shah. They don’t negotiate down unless they sense danger. We’re not talking about Russia invading the U.S here. That’s a joke. That’s not even on the menu. It’s the other way around. The invasion and attacks are currently economic and military only through a proxy, for now. But it honestly never mattered what Russia did, at least as viewed by someone who’s been reading the U.S. and European press for 20 years. The Russophobia is real and overwhelming.

I Can’t Not Write by Alla Glinchikova (Russian Dissent)

“I know that all their “sympathy” and “compassion” is nothing compared to the horror and the pain that I and my two peoples are experiencing, drawn more and more into this fratricidal conflict, from which in the end only we, Russians and Ukrainians, will suffer. We are now shooting at each other and we will pay for all this for a long time to come.”

“And this drive to “waste” is felt more and more, because the economy, cut up and pulled apart offshore, does not leave much hope for a normal, well-fed life. But, this drive is not directed at those who pulled the country apart.”

“If you squabble with each other about property and can’t just sit down and agree, why should you be surprised that others are not averse to taking advantage of this? Why did you decide that they would think more of you, than you would of yourselves? The number one lesson for Russia from the past thirty years is that if you want to be traded with, to be respected and recognized in the world, if you want to be strong, first of all, do not neglect economically, politically and culturally your closest surroundings.”

“[…] we, as two countries, neglected this wisdom of our ancestors and forgot about it. And now we’re paying for it at the highest price, with the blood of Russian and Ukrainian boys in a fratricidal war. It’s difficult to realize this when the rockets are already firing and compassionate patriots and democrats are pumping us full of weapons from all sides, but it’s necessary. There is no other way.”

“What are the global advantages of Russophobia? Firstly, because it is not Nazism. If you hate Jews on ethnic grounds, you are a Nazi, but if you hate Russians on ethnic grounds, you are a supporter of democracy, humanism and human rights. This is very convenient and vice versa if you are a supporter of democracy, humanism and human rights, you are obliged to hate Russians as genetic enemies of humanism”

We’re Against War, and We Won’t Back Down by Alexander Batov (Russian Dissent)

“Although we should take an anti-war stance due to these crimes against humanity, we do not call for desertion. A communist who finds himself in the active army must conduct his own propaganda among colleagues. We must also prepare for repression. One should take care to secure information, or else many leftists will have to pay for their frivolous attitudes towards these issues. We will not falter on the chosen path. The truth is on our side.”

Extended episode: How to End the War in Ukraine with Scott Ritter by Useful Idiots (Katie Halper & Aaron Maté) (YouTube)

At 1:14:00, Scott Ritter says,

“What happens when the Ukrainian government hands out weapons willy-nilly to everybody on the street. Everybody gets a big gun. Everybody gets a Javelin missile; everybody gets a Stinger.

“What happens—as was the case, for instance, in Kharkov—where they opened up the prisons? They let the most dangerous elements of society free, organized them into battalions, and armed them with Javelin missiles, Stinger missiles. These are criminals. You say ‘they’re fighting in defense of society.‘ No. These guys already proved: they don’t care about society. That’s why they were in jail. And now you’re liberated them, and you’ve given them these weapons, and their number-one concern isn’t saving Ukraine, it’s saving themselves.

“And what do these criminals do? They operate in the underworld. And what’s in the underworld? A black market. And I can guarantee you, the black markets isn’t just the streets of Kharkov or Kiev—it extends into Europe. And you’re going to find that these weapons, in the hands of these criminal elements […] they’re fleeing through the underground rat-lines back into Europe, armed with the weapons that are going to keep them rich.

“They’re going to sell them to the highest bidder. The highest bidder are [garbled] terrorists. And, if you want to see—the U.S says ‘that’s a consequence we’re willing to accept’—what happens three years from now, when the prime minister [sic] of France, driving through the streets of Paris, and a Javelin missile takes our his [or her -ed.] limousine? Is that a consequence we’re willing to take?

“What happens when an American airliner is trying to land in Frankfurt and a Stinger missile blows it out of the air? Both things came from the U.S. shipments sent to Kiev. It’s going to happen because we’re pouring thousands of weapons into Ukraine and giving them into the hands of the most undesirable elements in European society and we can’t account for them. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what’s going to happen.

“It’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. And who’s to blame? Joe Biden.”

At 1:28:10, he says, after a discussion of how many nuclear-deterrent treaties have been negated by the U.S.,

“They [the Russians] have a system called “dead hand” that can handle that [a decapitation strike]. If you take him out, the dead hand takes over, fires the missiles anyways. So don’t even think about a decapitation strike because the missiles are comin’.

“But, the Russian doctrine is “launch on warning”, which means: as soon as they get an indication of launch. Because these are hypersonic missiles, the period between notification of an indication of a missile impacting is under five minutes. That’s not much decision-making time.

“So what happens when there’s a mistake? What happens if they get an artificial indication of a launch? What happens if there’s an accidental launch? What happens if something goes wrong and makes the Russian think that there was an actual launch? They got five minutes to figure it out. And, if they don’t figure out it out, they’re hitting the button, and the missiles are going.

“That’s the situation we’re finding ourselves in today. We’re talking about the closest we’ve ever been to global thermonuclear annihilation. And nobody’s talking about it. Everybody’s acting as if this is business as usual. It’s not, ladies and gentlemen. This is the end of the world. And it’s going to happen because we’re dumb, we’re stupid, we make mistakes. And we’ve eliminated any potential for the Russians to sit back and go ‘could this be a mistake?’

“These missiles can’t be allowed to deploy to Germany. They can’t be allowed. If they do, then it’s literally over, because there will be a mistake.

“So, how do we stop this from happening? How do we convince the United States that this is a bad idea? And, unfortunately, there are only two answers. One is: Russia wins so decisively that they control the agenda and, therefore, they dictate the new European security framework. That’s a difficult pill for the United States to swallow. That’s a tough one for NATO to swallow.

“Another one is: something’s going to happen this Sunday. Marie LePen is running for President of France. I’m not a big fan of Marie LePen, but I love her right now. I think she’s the greatest thing in the world. Why? Because if she wins the election, France stops all this nonsense now. There won’t be any Finland joining NATO.”

I’ve had similar thoughts about LePen. Her politics are otherwise odious, but she is staunchly against foreign involvements. She’s very much on record for that. France’s “non” vote in NATO would stop a lot of these shenanigans. Maybe she’d roll over and betray her campaign promises, too, though, just like everyone else does. It’s probably not worth the risk. I feel back for the French though: Macron vs. LePen is just as appalling a choice as Trump vs. Biden.

“Right now, if Biden wants to flip this, maintain a credible NATO, maintain a credible U.S. presence in Europe, and bring peace to Europe, then you need to end this war right now. No more nonsense about sending artillery that will never be used. No more nonsense about flooding the market with javelins. No more nonsense about anything. No more nonsense about war crimes. End the war now. Find a way to get Russia back into the Europeans community in a meaningful fashion. That will bring peace and prosperity. And I can tell you this too: it’s Nobel Prize and he would be re-elected in 2024. Joe: do you want to be president in 2024? Make peace in Ukraine. Do you want to guarantee you’re irrelevant: keep doin’ what you’re doin’.”

Macron re-elected French president against neo-fascist Marine Le Pen by Kumaran Ira, Alex Lantier (WSWS)

“The race between France’s widely-despised “president of the rich” and its leading neo-fascist provoked disgust and disillusionment among broad layers of workers. Abstention was the highest recorded since the 1969 elections, when the then-massive Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) called for a boycott. Nearly three million people cast blank or spoiled votes. Including those who did not vote, 16 million voters, or one-third of the electorate, did not vote for either candidate.”

Thomas Sankara the Upright Man YouTube by Afrikanews (YouTube)

“Je me retrouve un peu comme un cycliste qui grimpe une pente raide, qui a à gauche et à droite des précipices, mais il est obligé de pédaler, sinon il tombe. Alors, pour rester moi-même et pour senter moi-même, je suis obliger a continuer se lancer la […]”

My translation is a bit rough, and I’m not sure I even transcribed it correctly above, but I think it’s something like,

“I feel a little bit like a cyclist who’s climbing a steep hill, with precipices to the right and left, but I’m forced to keep pedaling—or else I’ll fall. Therefore, to stay true to myself and to feel like myself, I’m obliged to continue to throw myself into it.”

Shocks to the System by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“State’s Antony Blinken and DoD’s General Austin were in Kiev over the weekend on a face-saving mission. My guess: they tried to persuade Mr. Zelenskyy to throw in the towel. He may be too desperate and crazy to listen, but it’s truly game-over. The Russians will treat him with kid gloves, perhaps give him leave to settle in Miami and enjoy the American dream with the fortune he has squirreled away. There will be changes in the map. Ukraine will sink back into peaceful obscurity while the US and Europe have to struggle with the impoverishing blowback from wrecking the global trade settlement system.”

That’s one possibility, yes. I think there will be tremendous blowback from this whole historical interlude.

Russia vows “lightning” response to NATO as war threatens to spill beyond Ukraine by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“A day prior, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had warned that NATO-supplied weapons shipments inside Ukraine “will be a legitimate target for the Russian Armed Forces.”

““Warehouses, including in the west of Ukraine, have become such a target more than once. How else could it be? NATO is essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy. War means war.”

“On Wednesday, Russia cut off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria in response to crippling economic sanctions levied by the US and European Union. The Kremlin is also threatening to end its supplies to other NATO members, including Germany, which is highly dependent on Russia for natural gas.”

Biden massively expands US war with Russia by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“Biden’s dishonesty is a reflection of the fact that the US population does not support war with Russia, and that the administration’s strategy is to create a set of facts on the ground that make war inevitable, then leave the American population with a bill of goods.”

“On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his most open threat to date to retaliate against the US and other NATO members for their involvement in the war.

““If someone decides to intervene into the ongoing events from the outside and create unacceptable strategic threats for us, they should know that our response to those oncoming blows will be swift, lightning-fast,” Putin told Russian lawmakers. “We have all the tools for this… We will use them if needed. And I want everyone to know this. We have already taken all the decisions on this.”

“If this is the response of Russia to $3.7 billion in US weapons flowing to its borders, what will be its response to $20 billion?”

They’re not taking Putin’s words seriously, either because they don’t care or because they believe their own myths about his weakness. He may not actually be able to accomplish his goals because of a foolish and unfounded confidence on his part in his own military power, but he doesn’t bluff. He is going to at least try to do what he said he would try to do. And they’re ignoring him every time. Our lives are in these fools’ hands.

Will Putin Submit to US-Imposed ‘Weakening’? by Patrick Buchanan (Antiwar.com)

“Said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on his return from a Sunday meeting in Kyiv with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy:

“The United States wants “to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.”

““Russia,” said Austin, has “already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops … and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

“Thus, the new, or newly revealed, goal of U.S. policy in Ukraine is not just the defeat and retreat of the invading Russian army but the crippling of Russia as a world power.”

“Are Putin & Co. bluffing with this implied nuclear threat?

“When Georgia invaded South Ossetia in 2008, Putin’s Russian army reacted instantly, ran the Georgians out and stormed into Georgia itself.

“When the US helped to overthrow the pro-Russian government in Kyiv in 2014, Russia plunged in and took Crimea, the Sevastopol naval base, and Luhansk and Donetsk.

“When Ukraine flirted with joining NATO and Biden refused to rule out the possibility, Putin invaded in February.

“When he warns of military action, Putin has some credibility.”

As Scott Ritter also said, several times, “Putin don’t bluff”. That no-one in power seems to have realized that is going to be our undoing.

Fresh Hell: Leaked Deets by Jason Arias (The Baffler)

“Finally, we present an exciting case study in innovation: Freshii, a Canada-based fast casual chain, has installed self-checkouts at several of its locations where customers are offered virtual assistance from a human beamed in from call centers in countries like Nicaragua, where they’re being paid just $3.75 an hour, a third of the minimum wage in Ontario. If this could work at scale, we could really discipline the workforce and finally crack the back of inflation. ”

The Global Economic Shock of the Ukraine War by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“It is a measure of the all-embracing effect of the war in Ukraine that it is now affecting the cattle herders in the swamplands of South Sudan as it is the marriage market in Syria.

“In both cases people with very little are finding that they are even less able to meet their needs than before. Yet the crisis is not solely economic because it means increased great power competition which will destabilise some of the most fragile states in the world.”

Roaming Charges: Was That Some Kind of Joke? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Biden’s $33 billion “emergency” military aid package for Ukraine is three times the size of the EPA’s entire budget for 2022.”

“The Ukraine war can only end diplomatically. But not until every possible weapons deal is made and all of the PAC contributors have gotten their cut of the action.”

“Rand Paul often gets so carried away with himself that he loses the thread of his argument, as happened in his questioning of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. But his central point remains sound: “While there’s no justification for Putin’s war on Ukraine, it doesn’t follow that there’s no explanation for the invasion.””

“Chevron nearly quadrupled its profits from last year’s record earnings, reporting a $6.3 billion profit in the first quarter, up from $1.37 billion in the same quarter in 2021. Its revenues jumped to $54.37 billion from $32 billion last year. Exxon reported doubling quarterly earnings from a year ago, even after writing off $3.4 billion from abandoning its operations in Russia.”

“Hassan bin Attash was detained by Pakistan’s ISI in a raid in 2002, he was 17 years old. He was soon turned over to the CIA and held at a black site for more than 120 days. Then Bin Attash was shipped off to Guantanamo prison, where he has been locked up for the last 20 years. He is now 37 years old. He has never been charged with a crime. Now he has been cleared for release by Periodic Review Board, which drolly concluded that his detention had “changed the trajectory of his life” and that he’d been “influenced by American culture.” He’s eligible for release, if the US can find a country willing, in the words of the Defense Department, to “rehabilitate” him. “Rehabilitate” from what? He should be getting half of the CIA’s budget in reparations for wrongful detention under torturous conditions…”

“Pat Dennis: “I’m sick of people calling everything in crypto a Ponzi scheme. Some crypto projects are pump and dump schemes, while others are pyramid schemes. Others are just standard issue fraud. Others are just middlemen skimming of the top. Stop glossing over the diversity in the industry.””

“The intake pipes in Lake Mead, which supply water to Las Vegas, are now above the surface of the lake.”

Intake in Lake Mead

Journalism & Media

Former Intelligence Officials, Citing Russia, Say Big Tech Monopoly Power is Vital to National Security by Glenn Greenwald (SubStack)

“A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy.”

“We call on the congressional committees with national security jurisdiction – including the Armed Services Committees, Intelligence Committees, and Homeland Security Committees in both the House and Senate – to conduct a review of any legislation that could hinder America’s key technology companies in the fight against cyber and national security risks emanating from Russia’s and China’s growing digital authoritarianism.”

JFC. That’s the military. They don’t hear the irony that they’re combatting authoritarianism with their own. I’m mad that they think we’re stupid enough to believe that they’re stupid enough to believe that.

“Note that this censorship regime is completely one-sided and, as usual, entirely aligned with U.S. foreign policy. Western news outlets and social media platforms have been flooded with pro-Ukrainian propaganda and outright lies from the start of the war. A New York Times article from early March put it very delicately in its headline: “Fact and Mythmaking Blend in Ukraine’s Information War.” Axios was similarly understated in recognizing this fact: “Ukraine misinformation is spreading — and not just from Russia.” Members of the U.S. Congress have gleefully spread fabrications that went viral to millions of people, with no action from censorship-happy Silicon Valley corporations.”

“The censorship goes only in one direction: to silence any voices deemed “pro-Russian,” regardless of whether they spread disinformation….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.”

“If a free and fair competitive market were to arise whereby social media platforms more devoted to free speech could fairly compete with Google and Facebook— as the various pending bills in Congress are partially designed to foster — then that new diversity of influence, that diffusion of power, would genuinely threaten the ability of the CIA and the Pentagon and the White House to police political discourse and suppress dissent from their policies and assertions.”

America’s Intellectual No-Fly Zone by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Chomsky said people like Freeman who depart from the national security orthodoxy are often left to give interviews on smaller independent sites, at which point establishment critics then go after them for being associated with other material on those sites, a neat trick.”

“Chomsky wasn’t saying Ukraine should “surrender” (as a practical matter even Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would have a tough time selling almost any cease-fire to Ukrainians, but that’s a different question). He was speculating about what the policy of the United States with regard to Ukraine should be, and laid out what he saw as two lousy choices. One is continual armament and proxy war against a belligerent and unpredictable enemy that happens to be relying on an outdated nuclear warning system. This path could lead to Armageddon or the complete destruction of Ukraine. The other choice is pushing for a negotiated settlement, the general parameters of which are already known to all parties. This would involve making highly distasteful concessions to a government already denounced across the West for having committed war crimes, and it also might not end hostilities for long.”

“Of a total of 840 U.S. sources who are current or former government or military officials, only four were identified as holding anti-war opinions–Sen. Robert Byrd (D.-W.V.), Rep. Pete Stark (D.-Calif.) and two appearances by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio). Byrd was featured on PBS, with Stark and Kucinich appearing on Fox News.”

“America seems tired of thinking and wants to get back to cheering, but sometimes there isn’t really anything to cheer for. Sometimes, unless you’re a Raytheon executive, all the options are awful.”

Savor the Great Musk Panic by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“I spent a good part of the last four years warning that asking unaccountable billionaires to meddle more in speech would result in exactly such a table-turning episode, in which the political mainstream’s cocky censor squad would wake up one day to find the wrong tycoon in charge, at which point they would cry foul and howl suddenly about the evils of oligarchy. For failing to cheer their vision of enlightened censorship, colleagues denounced me as a reactionary pervert in the employ of (pick one) Trump/Assad/Putin. So it’s hard to do anything but chuckle at their anguish this week.”

“Thanks to this clever mid-campaign push by the Clinton campaign, suddenly the issue of the 2016 Democratic primary was a supposed online onslaught of white male Twitter trolls who hated women and minorities and were Bernie’s real base. The supporters in Bernie’s enormous real-life crowds were apparently only pretending to be diverse masses of self-effacing pseudo-socialists who supported unions and free health care. According to Clinton acolytes, and waves of their “cultivated” blue-check pundits, these Bernie fans were really a stealth hate movement.”

“[…] the changes companies like Google dutifully enacted to their algorithms to combat “fake news” had the highly convenient effect of reducing traffic to sites critical of centrist Democrats. These were not just conservative sites, but also traditionally liberal and even socialist outlets like Common Dreams, Truthout, AlterNet, and the World Socialist Website.

“Of course none of the blue-check warriors currently howling about Musk cared then, because to them, such left-leaning critics of the Democratic Party might as well have been Russian agents.”

“For years, these folks had every chance to campaign for another, fairer way of dealing with online speech. Not only did they not do that, they specifically endorsed the model of opaque, billionaire-controlled, monopolistic star-chamber platforms, because they wanted to retain the power to smear and censor people they didn’t like on a mass scale. Moreover in just four years they went from drawing the line at Alex Jones to being unable to take a joke in the Babylon Bee. Now it might be blowback time and they’re sad. Could a less sympathetic group of people even be imagined? Is it wrong to find their angst hilarious? It doesn’t feel wrong. Enjoy the ride, knuckleheads, you built this roller-coaster.”

Science & Nature

The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History by Veritasium (YouTube)

“As a result of studies like these, the CDC’s guidelines for the acceptable level of lead in children’s blood dropped from 60 micrograms per deciliter down to 3.5. And, as far as we know, today, there is no safe level of lead. Globally, lead is believed to be responsible for nearly 2/3 of all unexplained intellectual disability. According to a study published in 2022, more than half of the U.S. population—that’s 170 million people—were exposed to high levels of lead during early childhood. Those born between 1951 and 1980 are disproportionately affected.

“The authors estimate that, in aggregate, lead caused a loss of more than 800 million IQ points. The world is less intelligent today because of leaded gasoline.

“[…] The U.S. saw a steady rise in crime from the 1970s to the 1990s. Then, it abruptly declined. This graph looks eerily similar to a plot of preschool blood/lead levels, but offset by 20 years.”

Humanity has long been well-within its power to destroy itself. It does so accidentally, for the stupidest reasons.

Do You Still Believe in the “Chemical Imbalance Theory of Mental Illness”? by Bruce E. Levine (CounterPunch)

“Apparently, authorities at the highest levels have long known that the chemical imbalance theory was a disproven hypothesis, but they have viewed it as a useful “noble lie” to encourage medication use.

“If you took SSRI antidepressants believing that these drugs helped correct a chemical imbalance, how does it feel to learn that this theory has long been disproven? Will this affect your trust of current and future claims by psychiatry? Were you prescribed an antidepressant not from a psychiatrist but from your primary care physician, and will this make you anxious about trusting all healthcare authorities?”

Art & Literature

Learning to Read, Again by David Kolb (ResearchGate)

“How To Read A Book preached multi-layered reading, ever deeper experiences homing in on the point and of the work. But there’s a time problem. Elaborate mixed media, complex web sites, music video filter the quantity, control the pace… and mixed media and performance art take time. It’s hard to skim them. Elaborate media productions have to be seen more than once if they’re going to be properly perceived; and you seldom have outlines or indexes to help. Nor are there enough trustworthy guides and reviewers.”

“You’re always going to miss something. It’s not just that you read this article or watch this video rather than another. It’s also that you know only a few languages and live only a short time. Enormous historical contingencies limit what you can encounter. You have to presume that the world and culture are rich enough that starting from this inevitably limited base you can still get to the heart of things.”

Or not. No biggie. Seriously, what is the obsession with seeing everything? You would see more if you spent less time being distracted by shiny things.

“The tool we have all learned to use is the web browser but that needs to be accompanied by better ways of collecting text and images, creating new ones, finding or making connections, sorting and tagging them and making comments on them. Then putting this into a new media object of our own, with some mix of images, words, videos, and so on.”

That’s Earthli for me. It’s a lot of work. Good practice, though. I don’t know anyone else who does anything like this, though.

Technology

The richest man in the world is buying Twitter and this is what he does on Twitter.

Elon Musk Tweet about Bill Gates

He has $45B to throw around and he was simultaneously shit-posting about another billionaire who’d shorted his electric-car company.

Programming

Take Control Over Your Coding Interview by Zhenghao

“I am not sure how you feel about this, but in my opinion, this is a pretty pointless interview question to ask new grads. The first solution is totally fine. Under the right circumstances, the second solution is closer to what you would want in production code, even though it is still not quite the table-driven development you’d want.”

I disagree completely. You can’t compare these solutions without knowing the requirements. What kind of team will maintain it? Will it need to be extended? The non-table version is easy to understand, modify, and debug. It’s also probably faster and more optimizable. The table version can be extended with data rather than code. Less risk of screwing up. But tests make that moot.

“Take control of your interview so you don’t have to guess what the interviewer has in mind. You do this by asking clarifying questions. Keep asking until everything the interviewer is looking for is clear to you.”

“As Joel Spolsky writes in his blog post: with this type of questions, he wants to see if the candidate is smart enough to “rip through a recursive algorithm in seconds, or implement linked-list manipulation functions using pointers as fast as you can write on the whiteboard”.”

Who needs that? Seriously what’s the point? I would never care about this if the code was unreadable/unmaintainable. Programming speed matters much less, with a suitable floor. Of course, that’s Joel Spolsky, whose opinion I’ve learned to take with a grain of salt long ago. (I would hazard that this quote is also from long ago.)

“One way to take control over the interview is to narrate your thoughts as you go and articulate any assumptions you have to make sure you get confirmation from your interviewer on your way forward or they should help you correct course.”

I kept a programming journal during evaluations to show thought process and assumptions.

Web color is still broken

“Almost all colors on the web (from the data in your average PNG file to hex values in CSS and SVG) are represented not as actual color intensities, but using a lossy compression algorithm called “8-bit sRGB”. […] it is more useful to think of it as a lossy compression technology.

“Unfortunately, by calling it a “color space”, we’ve misled the vast majority of developers into believing that you can do math on sRGB colors, […] Just like you can’t mix the bits of two MP3 files without uncompressing them* and expect to get something that sounds like both sounds mixed together properly, you can’t take two sRGB color values, mix them, and expect to get the right color. And yet, this is what every major browser does.

“The correct way to process sRGB data is to convert it to linear RGB values first, then process it, then convert it back to sRGB if required. If you are doing any mathematical operations on sRGB color data directly, your code is broken. Please don’t do that. It’s 2022; it’s about time we make computer graphics work properly.”

The struggle of using native emoji on the web by Nolan Lawson (Read the Tea Leaves)

“What do I wish browsers would do? I don’t have much of a grand solution in mind, but I would settle for browsers following the Firefox model and bundling their own emoji font. If the OS can’t keep its emoji up-to-date, or if it doesn’t want to support certain characters (like country flags), then the browser should fill that gap. It’s not a huge technical hurdle to bundle a font, and it would help spare web developers a lot of the headaches I listed above.

“Another nice feature would be some sensible way to render what are colloquially known as “emoji” as emoji. So for instance, the “smiley face” should be rendered as emoji, but the numbers 0-9 and symbols like * and # should not. If backwards compatibility is a concern, then maybe we need a new CSS property along the lines of text-rendering: optimizeForLegibility – something like emoji-rendering: optimizeForCommonEmoji would be nice.”

Routing: I’m not smart enough for a SPA by Taylor Hunt (Dev)

This is a very interesting analysis/data-dump of SPA characteristics and the disadvantages versus MPAs. There are advantages (e.g. offline capabilities), but if you’re not using that, then you might be better off making an MPA rather than trying to replicate HTTP functionality in JavaScript.

The Missing Kubernetes Type System by Daniel Mangum

“[…] the system that is enforcing our safety guarantees is itself not safe. On the other hand, something must implement the safety, so what Rust programmers are collectively saying is: “let’s shrink the amount of unsafe operations we need to do down to the bare necessities, standardize them in a single system, and test that system rigorously”. If we have confidence in the correctness of that small system, arbitrarily large systems can be built on top of it. This is the same premise behind hardware privilege levels and the operating systems that utilize them.”

“We don’t expect every developer to write their own compiler, why are we expecting every DevOps engineer (whatever the flavor of the month definition of that role is) to write controllers? It’s not that folks aren’t capable, it’s that it is not an efficient use of time and resources.”

“Providers supply the built-in types of your distributed systems programming language. Like the Rust compiler, subject matter experts who dedicate their time and energy to making behavior correct build these (more on this in a bit), which allows everyone else to build on top of them safely.”

“Though I called Crossplane a compiler, it’s more like a compiler framework (see Is Crossplane the Infrastructure LLVM?). A more apt term than “compiler framework” for describing what Crossplane does could be “type system manager”.”

“To re-emphasize my earlier point, writing controllers is not about some skill level that one group has and another does not. Rather, it is simply about who has the time and resources to invest in writing them well, creating that smaller bit of trusted unsafe code that allows us to safely build arbitrarily large abstractions on top.”

“I hope the takeaway from this post is not that Crossplane solves all of your problems, but rather an acknowledgement that the language we use for programming our distributed systems is lacking key features – features that we have collectively deemed useful in the context of writing software. We know that these features can be implemented in many different ways, and walking the line between adhering to a set of values and offering needed flexibility is hard. If we are going to do this right, we need everyone’s voice in the room. Come join us.”

Explaining Crypto’s Billion-dollar Bridge Problem by Corin Faife (The Verge)

“The answer that came up time and time again was “code auditing.” In the type of case described above, where a project’s development team might be working across different programming languages and computing environments, bringing in outside expertise can cover blind spots that in-house talent might miss. But right now, a surprisingly large number of projects don’t have any auditor listed.”

That is not surprising at all. People are “investing” incredible sums of money into financial products whose code is written with the shoddiest practices and no guarantees.

“Most companies are under huge pressure to grow, scale, and build new features to fend off competitors — which can sometimes come at the expense of diligent security work.”

This is exactly what you’re looking for in finance.