Links and Notes for August 25th, 2023

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun

COVID-19

BA.2.86 shows just how risky slacking off on COVID monitoring is by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

“Part of the reason there is so little data on BA.2.86 is that there is relatively little data on circulating variants in general. In early 2022, at the height of pandemic genomic surveillance, scientists worldwide submitted nearly 100,000 coronavirus genetic sequences per week to the public genomic database (GISAID). In the past month, however, weekly GISAID submissions have averaged around just 5,000.”

““The virus is circulating in every country and EG.5 is one of the latest variants of interest that we’re classifying. This will continue and this is what we have to prepare for,” she added. Currently, no single variant is dominant anywhere, and the virus is circulating essentially unchecked.”

Poor Kerkhova. What a shitty job she got—telling an uncaring world that it’s shooting itself in the foot. Again.

Economy & Finance

The Free Market Should be a Weapon Against the Rich by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“Everybody hates the rich and why not? We have nothing, they have everything, and they fucking stole it from us. I may not be the Castro worshipping Bolshevik I was in my twenties but as the Russians like to say, the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism.”

“What we’re witnessing is a growing civil war between competing cartels of oligarchs during the collapse of the morally bankrupt western civilization that gave birth to them both. In other words, the silver spoon riding whores of the Second Gilded Age are building even more industrial complexes to exploit the crisis of their own demise. Dante wept for there were no more hells left to dream of.”

“Gore Vidal wasn’t just being cheeky when he called capitalism “Socialism for the rich.” Every single billionaire, every global conglomerate, every Fortune 500 company is the direct product of the state. Without big government there would be no big business. Without highway subsidies and eminent domain there would be no Walmart. Without copyright laws and patents there would be no big pharma. Without the World Bank and the Fed there would be no George Soros. Without standing armies and world wars there would be no Exxon Mobile, no Lockheed Martin, no nuclear arms race, no global fucking warming.”

“We need to integrate the underground into a united front of divided tribal organizations that can exist and thrive without the state and then we need to drop out, sit back, crack open a cold bottle of knock-off Coke and watch the billionaires of the vampire class starve without a neck to suck dry.”

Public Policy & Politics

„Raub des Jahrhunderts“ – Wie die USA das venezolanische Staatsunternehmen Citgo zerschlagen by Ricardo Vaz (NachDenkSeiten)

“Bevor das Staatsunternehmen 2019 von den USA widerrechtlich übernommen und unter Kontrolle der von Washington unterstützten Opposition gebracht wurde, erwirtschaftete es regelmäßig jährliche Dividenden in Höhe von rund 1 Milliarde US-Dollar für den venezolanischen Staatshaushalt.”

“Exxon gehörte zu den Unternehmen, die sich weigerten, die neuen Rechtsvorschriften Venezuelas für den Ölsektor zu akzeptieren und ihre Projekte dort aufgaben. Nur ExxonMobil und ConocoPhillips lehnten die Entschädigungsangebote der Regierung von Präsident Hugo Chávez ab und strebten ein internationales Schiedsverfahren an.”

“Die Regierung von Nicolás Maduro betont die Verantwortung der Opposition für die mögliche Zerschlagung des Unternehmens und bezeichnet den Verkauf von Citgo als „Raub des Jahrhunderts“.”

Piraten des Potomac: US-Regierung lässt Tanker mit iranischem Öl im Wert von 56 Millionen US-Dollar entführen und in Texas entladen by Florian Warweg (NachDenkSeiten)

“Mutmaßlich auf Befehl der US-Regierung wurde am Wochenende ein Tanker mit iranischem Öl im Golf von Mexiko beschlagnahmt. Laut vorliegenden Schiffsverfolgungsdaten wird die Ladung im Wert von weit über 50 Millionen US-Dollar derzeit in der Nähe von Houston (Texas) entladen. Der US-Senat will den Erlös der Kaperung „den Opfern von 9/11“ zukommen lassen.”

“„Monatelang lag das Schiff im Südchinesischen Meer vor der Nordostküste Singapurs, bevor es plötzlich und ohne Erklärung in den Golf von Mexiko fuhr. Analysten gehen davon aus, dass die Ladung des Schiffes von amerikanischen Behörden beschlagnahmt wurde.”

“Was hat denn der Iran mit den Anschlägen von 9/11 zu tun gehabt, wird sich jetzt vielleicht der geneigte Leser fragen. Nach allem, was man weiß, gar nichts. Das hat aber ein New Yorker Gericht 2012 nicht davon abgehalten, den Iran zu insgesamt 10,5 Milliarden US-Dollar zu verurteilen. Die damalige hanebüchene und jedem rechtsstaatlichen Ansatz hohnsprechende Begründung lautete: Der Iran hätte „nicht ausreichend bewiesen, dass er nicht in die Anschläge des Terrornetzwerks Al-Kaida verwickelt war.“”

Just not even pretending to be a serious nation of even seemingly serious people. Just mad as hatters. Children with dangerous toys.

Biden’s Pointless Asian Summit by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Only people far away who concoct policies without leaving their Washington offices could entertain such fantasies. You have to conclude that these people are Orientalists at heart, to whom Asians are still merely stick figures with no shred of human complexity to them.”

“Only people far away who concoct policies without leaving their Washington offices could entertain such fantasies. You have to conclude that these people are Orientalists at heart, to whom Asians are still merely stick figures with no shred of human complexity to them. Biden and his policy planners seem to have surmised that two East Asian China hawks had come up at the same time like matching fruit on a slot machine.”

“I reckon Yoon and Kishida were more in the way of cowardly in not facing the 21 st century’s complexities, multipolarity high among them. They instead reverted to an old, demeaning dependence on the American imperium — signaling this in their obsequious acquiescence to Biden’s sweeping declarations of an historically significant turn in trans–Pacific relationship. Say “Yes,” be courteous, and do as little as possible: This is an established tactic when East Asians must mollify the crude heathens in Washington.”

When the First Amendment Dies by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“Congress made it the law of the land in 1980 that journalists and their publishers are not subject to police raids in America. If the government – local, state or federal – wants data from a journalist or publisher, it must obtain a subpoena from a grand jury and serve it civilly on the custodian of the records that the government seeks. This gives the journalist and the publisher 10 days in which to challenge the subpoena. It also preserves the institutional integrity of the press.”

US Colleges and Universities Are Becoming Giant Exploitation Machines by Daniel Denvir & Dennis M. Hogan (Jacobin)

“Neoliberalism, for me, really means the channeling of public goods into private hands: the capture of funds, of resources, of benefits dedicated for public consumption by private, often profit-driven actors.”

“[…] it also serves an important disciplinary function by loading students up with so much debt that they don’t feel like they can take the risks of engaging in radical social activism, because they’re far too exposed to financial penalties if they get kicked out of school or get arrested or can’t finish their degree or graduate with a “useless” degree.”

“If you think about the way that college and university education, whether public or private, is marketed to students, the idea is that there’s pretty much no amount of money that you can spend on your education investing in yourself that would be too much, because the wage premium of a college degree is still going to pay you back.”

“The lazy river is like a egregious example because it’s one of those things where . . . you put in a lazy river in 2017; it’s part of the $85 million recreation center. What makes it particularly egregious is that the classrooms are literally crumbling. The instructional facilities have not been maintained even as the recreational facilities, the sports facilities, and so on have been supercharged.”

“[In other countries,] institutions are thought of as having this mandate to serve local students, to serve students who are seeking different kinds of education. The mission is at least somewhat conceived of as a public good. Then the entire infrastructure of donors — of naming buildings after wealthy donors, of buying, endowing offices, chairs, what have you — it doesn’t exist, because there is no basis for cultivating that kind of culture around private philanthropic support for education.”

“Donations to colleges and universities are among the most regressive forms of giving that exist. Philanthropic giving to wealthy institutions is almost exclusively reputational laundering rather than advancing a social mission.”

“[…] ultimately you’re taking an institution that has the resources to engage in that kind of mission anyway, and you’re giving it extra money to put your name somewhere and get a tax write-off. That culture just doesn’t exist in other places. It really is so normalized for us, despite being bizarre in a global context.”

“We have the tuition side, where declining state and federal support for public education means that individual students have to hold the bag. We also have the labor side, where employers are increasingly unwilling to offer training and credentialing as a routine part of what it means to employ people, which means that people are then forced to go and get their training and credentialing themselves.”

“[…] the credentialing race has meant that there’s not even a pool of workers who are ready. Even if you were to throw a bunch of workers who are interested in getting those credentials into training programs today and give the credentials for free, you still wouldn’t come close to solving the labor shortage for months, in some instances, and years in others. That’s why there’s such a competition for the relatively smaller number of workers who already have these credentials.”

“[…] the workers who need credentials now to even participate in the economy and plug really dire labor market gaps are not going, for the most part, to a university. And they’re not coming from out of state. They’re going to these locally serving public institutions that specialize in offering these kinds of programs.”

“If you look at the composition of who’s actually employed by college and universities, especially private ones, what you see is massive outsourcing of the blue-collar and service work. You get contracts with Aramark, with Allied Barton, with security forces, with food vendors, whatever. Then you don’t have to directly employ those workers, which, by the way, means that you’re not subject to the same sort of labor protections and standards. It’s also a way to union bust and erode the college’s responsibility to employ people from local communities.”

“[…] one of the things that has really accelerated dramatically over the last few years is the amount of time spent doing assessment, documentation, and paperwork. When you start to look into this stuff, there are so many paradoxes. Even as there are more and more administrators running around fulfilling these roles, faculty are being asked to do so much more of their own administrative labor. The question is, why? How does that happen?”

“We’re asking people to become entrepreneurs of their own life. Which is not fair to workers who are looking to get a decent job and earn a stable living and raise a family and what have you.”

“[…] if you think about the liberals, the Obamas, the Democratic politicians and social figures, like the Mike Bloombergs, who want to foreground this kind of very narrowly, technically focused education . . . the hypocrisy is revealed in the fact that they would never themselves educate their own families and children in that way. They want to create one model of education to educate workers and then another model of education to reproduce their class and to educate the next leaders.”

“Other students are funneled into the two-year and certificate-granting institutions to get a short-term credential that’s going to let them get a job that capitalists happen to need today or tomorrow or next year. Then, roughly half the students are funneled into either prisons or low-wage work and are never given the opportunity to attend college or higher education really at all.”

“The answer to this has been increasing casualization — the replacement of permanent guaranteed work with short-term, term-limited, and incredibly insecure work. It’s also important to acknowledge that this is not exceptional about academic labor; it’s just something that American workers have been experiencing for decades now. There’s been an increasing turn toward subcontracting, toward hiring temporary workers, toward gig working.”

“[…] when you invested a decade of your life being trained to do a job, and then you’re told that the job doesn’t exist, it’s a difficult pill to swallow. It’s even more difficult because it’s not as though nobody’s doing the work that the job entails. It’s that they’re not going to pay you to do it in a way that makes it sustainable for you to live.”

“So when you talk about the university having an investment office, it’s not a couple rooms down the hall from the provost where some people sit and do accountancy. It is on the order of an investment fund. It’s substantial finance capital that’s being run by and for these institutions. And of course, it’s tax-free. So there’s nothing better.”

“But if you are dependent on tuition for most of your operating budget or a great deal of your operating budget, your ability to provide generous aid packages to students who need it is substantially affected. As a result, what you will do is you will admit richer students. So paradoxically, some of the less wealthy institutions in terms of endowment capital actually have some of the wealthiest student bodies, because they’re most dependent on tuition revenue.”

“[…] there are schools like Yale or Princeton, frankly, that have the latitude such that they could pretty much send people to school for free. But in spite of that, they continue to overwhelmingly enroll wealthy students.”

And it’s not merit-based; they’re laundering privilege into credentials. That’s their business.

“They’re going to end up graduating students with more debt who also have comparatively less-elite credentials when they’re done.”

“[…] they’re spending a fraction of their endowment on the university’s operations, period. So what good is an endowment if it’s not being spent on the university? Maybe this gets to a more philosophical question about capitalism. I’m lying awake at night thinking, why do people like Jeff Bezos want and need more money than they can ever spend by orders and orders of magnitude? What drives this pursuit of a larger and larger endowment as an end unto itself, almost?”

“But you hire financiers to invest your money and make money for you. That’s what they’re going to do. They’re not particularly worried about what you do with it afterward. Their job is to make it get bigger. They are simply doing their job.”

The heck with that. Why do these people exist? Why is a society OK with that? It’s like ticks or mosquitos or serial killers: they do not serve a purpose that is beneficial to society. In fact, they are actively harmful. We should be trying to limit or eliminate the damage that they do, rather than shrugging our shoulders and treating them like an unstoppable, unalterable force of nature.

“Because ultimately, who would you rather be? The person who’s living off spending 7 percent of $1 billion or the person who’s living off spending just 1 percent of $5 billion? It’s an easy choice.”

What the hell kind of question is that? NEITHER. Neither of those should exist. No wonder other socialists shit on Jacobin’s socialist cred.

“Once you start to open the door to saying you can’t invest in this because of that reason, then all of a sudden, it’s like, well, where can you ethically and equitably invest? And the answer starts to be nowhere, because there is no real ethical finance capitalism in a world where capital’s need to accumulate is causing endless depredation across the planet and has been for centuries. That’s where the need to have an endowment at all intersects with the purported mission of social good and the very liberal values that these colleges proclaim to hold.”

Yes. That is exactly correct. There is no way to reconcile those. Stop wasting time trying to find one. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

“Here in Providence, Brown has been expanding downtown and across the river, all while being exempted from property taxes, either largely or entirely.”

“Brown would like to begin to get into the game of owning a medical center because . . . what federal student loans are to colleges and universities, Medicare and Medicaid dollars are to medicine. So if you can combine those income streams, you can become very well-resourced very quickly. That, ultimately, is the goal, and I don’t think it’s entirely speculative to say that.”

So giant, tax-free endowments seek to grow by corralling even more government money into their maws. And we are powerless to stop them. We are not even ideologically equipped to consider this a problem. To the contrary, we consider this behavior to be the epitome of how the system should work: take what you can; fuck everyone else. Alpha-predator, top-of-the-food-chain stuff. Who can argue with success?

“[…] creates an environment in which the kinds of workers and students you hope to attract will feel comfortable. These things are all enabled by the kind of resources that only extremely wealthy schools have.”

No. It’s enabled by the kind of money that states have, but we choose to launder it through the wealthy, trusting in their beneficence when they redistribute a tiny fraction of it in what we hope we will consider fruitful and just directions. He’s just described trickle-down economics in what reads like very approving terms.

“These two things are intimately related: the ability of labor across the university to exercise some form of leverage to begin to contest top-down administrative decision-making, and the increasing centralization of administrative decision-making power among a small handful of extremely empowered technocrats. Which is not a term of derision; it is a term of art. These are highly trained, highly competent people. I’m not merely lobbing invective.”

This constant kowtowing to the people ruining everything is grating. They are good at a job that shouldn’t exist. Fantastic. The work they do consolidates wealth and power tremendously, and harms everyone else. It’s like admiring an assassin—you’re fine with it until they take out one of your own.

Management at California State University Is Living Large While Faculty Struggle by Matthew Ford (Jacobin)

“Budgetary shortfalls are the most common justification for denying faculty salary increases, yet administrator salary increases miraculously continue to roll out regardless of budgetary constraints.”

This is the way of the world. Management tends toward an amoral criminality where its sole purpose becomes to defend its own lifestyle, salary, and pension, treating the actually necessary employees of an organization as a necessary evil whose labor needs to be obtained as cheaply as possible. This is the exact opposite of how it should be: administration should be obtained as cheaply as possible, but it controls the pursestrings, so it just gives itself all of the money and hires all of its friends. There is nothing special about this. It’s just the same level of corruption that has always existed.

“If anybody is unsure where CSU management’s priorities lie, a brief glance at the new compensation package for new chancellor Mildred García should make things clear: García will receive an annual salary of $795,000, another $80,000 in deferred compensation, $8,000 per month for a housing allowance, and another $1,000 per month for a car allowance.”

There you go. She doesn’t teach, she provides no value to the actual mission of a university. She is probably really, really good at ensuring that money keeps getting shoveled in the direction of people who already have more than they know what to do with.

“To put this into context, the base monthly salary for lecturers who teach five classes per semester and hold a PhD is $5,400. Lecturers, in other words, make less per month than the chancellor is given for housing and car allowances; they also do not receive these allowances, despite the fact that they clearly need both far more than the chancellor does.”

“The annual salary for a full-time lecturer with a PhD ($65,000) is about 60 percent of the annual amount that the chancellor receives as a housing and car stipend ($108,000). Full-time lecturers earn a $5,400 monthly paycheck (before taxes), while CSU presidents who don’t have free housing get $4,200 or $5,000 per month solely for housing on top of their enormous salaries.”

“Today, students drown in debt to receive a CSU education, and many faculty are paid significantly less than K–12 teachers. Meanwhile, the highest payouts, along with free housing and car payments, go to those who neither teach nor do research.”

In New Hampshire speech, Bernie Sanders seeks to give Biden “progressive” credentials, comparing him to FDR by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

Oh, c’mon, Bernie. Really?

He said this:

“The Democrats, once and for all, must reject the corporate wing of the party and empower those who are prepared to create a grassroots, multi-racial, multi-generational working class party in every state in this country. Democrats, through words and action, must make it clear that they stand with a struggling working class, a disappearing middle class, and millions of low income Americans who are barely surviving.”

But then endorsed Biden for president.

The war machine must stop, but he endorsed Biden for president.

We need a principled leader to stand up to the weight of the last four decades of U.S. history, but he endorsed Biden for president.

On Cornel West he said:

“Sanders expressed his personal admiration for West, while claiming that re-electing Biden was essential to preventing Trump from returning to power. On “Meet the Press,” he said, “at the end of the day, I think the progressive community in general and the American people have got to make a decision as to whether we stand for democracy or authoritarianism.””

Ok, Ok, Bernie. You sure you don’t want to give any support for your theory that Biden is the lesser evil? That you’re really going to just ride that hobby-horse that any third-party candidate is just going to get Trump reelected? That this would somehow be worse than Biden’s having embroiled the U.S. in the Ukraine conflict?

Nope. He said:

“On “State of the Union,” he said he disagreed with “my good friend Cornel West” because “there is a real question whether democracy is going to remain in the United States of America,” and it was necessary to support Biden to keep Trump out.”

So Cornel West should shut the fuck up and campaign and vote against Trump, if not for Biden. Biden is the only thing standing between the U.S. and not having a democracy anymore. Can you imagine believing something so foolish? Wouldn’t you be terrified that this doddering old man is the only hope for the nation?

Of course, it’s the WSWS, so they’re going to shit on Cornel West as well, but for different reasons,

“West himself offers no genuine alternative to working people.”

That is a pretty broad brush you just painted with. The man hasn’t even had a chance to describe his platform yet. I guess the WSWS is going to be preemptively disappointed in him.

Still, as the article 115 dead and hundreds still missing in Maui wildfire disaster by Kevin Reed (WSWS) points out,

“After spending six hours in Maui feigning sympathy for the families of those who died and those who have lost everything in the wildfire disaster, President Joe Biden and wife Jill took a direct flight on Air Force One back to Nevada to resume their vacation at a billionaire’s luxury mansion in Lake Tahoe last week.”

That’s about all you need to say about Biden.

Well, there’s also this photo caption:

“President Joe Biden speaks with reporters after taking a pilates and spin class at PeloDog, Wednesday, August 23, 2023, in South Lake Tahoe, California. ”

A man in touch with the people. He might as well be living on that Elysium space station.

Journalism & Media

The Press and 2024 by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“[…] we are now on notice that the Democratic leadership intends to address the problem of Joe Biden’s worsening-by-the-day mental incompetence by pushing Harris out front effectively to stand in for the president on the campaign trail. I had been wondering for some time how they would handle this knotty problem. Harris is now cast as “something of a one-woman rapid-response operation,” as The Times put it. She will do the public campaigning, in other words, while voters are invited to reelect a president they will rarely see but for more of those staged videos shot from the basement of his Wilmington mansion.”

“[…] our media are now certain, and unfortunately with justification, that they can get Americans to think whatever it is the power elites want them to think, however preposterous this may be. And they are fully committed to this project in the interests of the power they serve.”

All non-independent media, unfortunately. I suppose that those would be the dependent media, dependent on press releases, funding, and access.

“Quite apart from selling us Kamala Harris so as to get a cognitively impaired man reelected to the White House, The Times and all the pilot fish that swim beside it are now covering up the president’s perfectly obvious involvement in his son’s influence-peddling schemes and the Justice Department’s corruption out both doors—on the Hunter Biden case and the gross politicization of the Donald Trump indictments.”

The Crucifixion of Julian Assange by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“Prophets believe in justice even when the world around them says there will be no justice. It is not that they transcend reality. It is that they are compelled to strike out against it, refusing to be silent no matter how hard life becomes.”

“Their enemy was not only suffering, calumny, poverty, injustice, but a life devoid of meaning. “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live,” the civil rights icon Fred Shuttlesworth said. Prophets cannot be intimidated. They cannot be bought. They are single-mindedly obsessed. James Baldwin, himself a prophet, understands. He writes:”

“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”

“Years after Hannibal was gone, the Romans were still not satisfied. They finished their work of apocalyptic vengeance in 146 B.C. by razing Carthage to the ground and selling its remaining population into slavery. Cato the Censor summed up the sentiments of Empire: Carthāgō dēlenda est — Carthage must be destroyed. Nothing about Empire, from then until now, has changed.”

“The current American Empire, damaged and humiliated by troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one despotic voice.”

“[…] the radical priest Father Daniel Berrigan, who spent two years in a federal prison for burning draft records during the Vietnam War, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood”: I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm … in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact,”

“[…] because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace.”

“Jeremiah, like Julian, understood that a society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.”

““WikiLeaks and you personally are facing a battle that is both legal and political,” Weinglass told Julian. “As we learned in the Pentagon Papers case, the US government doesn’t like the truth coming out. And it doesn’t like to be humiliated. No matter if it’s Nixon or Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat in the White House. The US government will try to stop you from publishing its ugly secrets. And if they have to destroy you and the First Amendment and the rights of publishers with you, they are willing to do it.”

“Julian exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling class And for these truths they came after Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power. “Red Rosa now has vanished too,” Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.””

“We have undergone a corporate coup, where poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where we, as citizens, are nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to be used, fleeced and discarded.”

Art & Literature

The Fate of the Animals by Sarah Clark (Fare Forward)

“Morgan Meis is not everyone’s cup of tea, and The Fate of the Animals is the most Morgan Meis book yet. Take that as you will. For my part, I found the book shatteringly beautiful. The Fate of the Animals is not “urgent,” or “important,” or “timely,” or any of the other things people tend to say these days when they want you to read a book. It’s simply beautiful, and true, and good. It will make you afraid. It will make you terribly sad. It will make you look at the world and think about God, and it will make you wonder. That’s about all you can ask a literary book to do.”

“[…] is about a disturbing painting called The Fate of the Animals from 1911 by a so-so German painter named Franz Marc; it is about painting itself, what it can do and what it cannot do; it is about seeing, sight, vision, revelation, apocalypse, about what our eyes can show us and what they cannot; it is about World War I, and death, and gardens; it is about God; it is about the whole central problem of everything, which is why does something exist instead of nothing, and why is it this something?”

“The man who painted this marvelous painting; the man whose beautiful letters we are reading; the man who, we discover, developed a way of seeing past the skin of the world to some kind of spiritual Reality—this man is dead, killed in a battle that robbed Europe of a generation.”

“Meis is often a cheeky writer. He is also a mystic. He is a follower of the sublime; he is trailing it, looking for signs of its passing. He is trying to write about something that by its very nature is beyond the scope of words. This often leads him to a chuckle, a little helpless shrug, some wordplay, and then he directs his attention elsewhere. It’s as if he’s circling the sublime and must dodge off whenever he gets too close.”

Searching for Tom Cruise by Jane Hu (The Paris Review)

“Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie actually constructed the entire train from scratch. “We had to build the train,” McQuarrie says to the viewer, “if we wanted to destroy it.” That kind of onetime high-stakes, high-production action sequence is key to why we love Tom Cruise—to why he’s credited with keeping the movies alive not just materially (at the box office) but also spiritually (by eschewing special effects and using real materials). He is the Akira Kurosawa of our time.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers by Freddie deBoer (Persuasion)

“A quarter of a century ago, these platforms did not exist; equipment was much more expensive; and know-how far harder to access. Now, the tools are available to anyone. Audiences have never been larger, and never before have they spent so much time consuming artistic content.”

“The growing number of people who are hungry to get rich in the creator economy—who believe themselves to be deserving of success by dint of their education and hard work—coupled with the awareness that almost all of them will fail is an example of elite overproduction. We have an artistic class which is predominantly made up of people who enjoy none of the financial rewards afforded to artists.”

“Our culture lionizes the arts and habitually degrades ordinary jobs—not just low-paying blue-collar jobs but middle-class white-collar ones as well. It’s hard to see a future without a large number of young people who will settle for nothing but artistic success. And while it’s tempting to want people to spread their money and attention more widely, consumers have always tended to concentrate their cultural dollars in a small number of places.”

“Due to the rising costs of housing, health care, and education, many of the markers of successful adult American life (most obviously home ownership) have become unattainable for young people. Meanwhile, we’ve spent decades ironizing the trappings of both middle-class respectability and white-collar success, representing the former as boring and conformist and the latter as exploitative and selfish. I don’t have any particular disagreement with those critiques. But the countercultural texts that so viciously lampooned the ordinary definitions of success conspicuously failed to proffer realistic alternatives. The result, from my perspective, is a nation full of young striving types who have no coherent vision of success, no reasonably achievable path forward to avoid feeling like losers. And I think that this is both inhumane for them and unhealthy for society, which requires ordinary people to buy into a shared social contract.”

“Perhaps we can gently guide young people away from the notion that the only life worth living is one where they’re a writer or musician or influencer, and instead demonstrate that the security of ordinary jobs can be joined with the fulfillment of creating on the side. And perhaps we can develop a broader cultural definition of what it means for a life to be well-lived.”

Can There Be a Theory of the Email Job? by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“Reflexively, people seem to think of educated labor in terms of college graduates who a) tend to go on to some sort of graduate study, b) work in fields that directly utilize domain-specific knowledge from their majors or graduate education, and c) are generally high-income relative to the economy writ large.”

“Most people don’t have email jobs; most American adults , after all, still don’t have a college degree, the generally low-paying service sector is the fastest growing in our economy , and a large number of educated workers have jobs that are not email jobs for the reasons detailed above. And yet as a matter of informed speculation I’m willing to argue that many millions of Americans have email jobs, that their share of the workforce is growing, and that the constant tendency to think about college as a route from a particular major (prelaw, premed, computer science) to a particular educated position (lawyer, doctor, programmer) is therefore flawed.”

“[…] in contemporary culture, we have more ways to be a loser than a winner; we’ve comprehensively critiqued and ironized traditional forms of meaning such as identifying with one’s job, but never replaced them with anything; you’re a bum if you don’t have a job but a sap if you have an uncool one; the cultural dictate that the only life that’s worth living is a life in a creative industry is cruel and unworkable given that those fields have limited carrying capacity and they are unusually fickle in whom they reward.”

“And almost everyone agrees that the old ideal of identifying yourself with your profession, in the habit of the fabled salarymen of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, is an archaic and unhealthy ideology, one that excluded women and people of color and which amounted to participating in your own exploitation by the boss.”

That’s a complicated attitude. What about teachers? What about whatever it is that I do? You spend eight hours doing that thing, why not at least identify with it? Shouldn’t that be a goal, rather than a silliness dismissed out of hand? Or can we seriously not conceive of jobs worth doing anymore?

“Yes, I yearn for the end of late capitalism; yes, I think we all desperately need to be in unions. But in the realm of the immediately plausible, people need jobs, and we want to create better jobs rather than worse, and if we generally assume that all of this work stuff is a little ridiculous, we don’t need to heap extra derision on email jobs the way a lot of people do.”

Brickbat: Ideological Impurity by Charles Oliver (Reason)

“According to a social worker’s report, the two were asked how they would feel if a child in their care was LGBT. The two responded that they would still love the child, wouldn’t kick the child out, and wouldn’t subject the child to conversion therapy. But both opposed sex change treatments for those under 18 and expressed a reluctance to use pronouns that don’t reflect someone’s biological sex, and Catherine said it would be important for the child to remain chaste. The social worker recommended approval of their application with conditions for LGBT and religious issues, but DCF’s Licensing Review Team rejected the application.”

Look, I feel that this article would have been written differently if the couple had been Muslim and had expressed the exact same opinions. People are getting butt-hurt because classically religious stances are being viewed as increasingly intolerant and are not fit for adoption. This is just one more case of people being incapable of understanding that norms change—and sometimes those that benefited for a long time will all of a sudden find themselves on the wrong end of the stick.

If the couple had said that they would beat their child if it misbehaved, almost no-one today would think it odd that they’d been rejected as adoptive parents. This would not have been a reason to reject those parents 60 years ago. Norms change. It is perhaps not too much to ask that people who adopt a child agree to allow the child to develop in a normal, healthy way that works best for the child rather than that fits into the worldview of the parents. If a child is homosexual or trans, then it is preferable to have parents who would be understanding and flexible in that situation rather than just dropping the God-hammer. Oh, and also making sure the child is “chaste”, whatever the hell that means. For how long? Does the child have to wait until it’s married? Does it get to make its own choices about when or whether or whom it marries? Religious couples tend to be very cultish and they’ve enjoyed a tremendously long period during which no-one ever called them on their bullshit because they could hide behind a holier-than-thou” screen. We don’t want to let fanatics adopt if we can help it.

No One is Kenough by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“[…] the cultural options available to us now are conservative individualism and social justice individualism. While left and right seem totally polarized, they share one thing: the worship of the self.”

“The social problem is that we don’t need to be even more relentlessly individualistic! Individualism is the American religion, and one of the many sins of the social justice era of progressive politics is that its adherents have finally dropped whatever remaining vestiges of communitarianism and collectivism remained in left politics. In their place they’ve advocated for the supremacy of the individual, expressed (of course) through therapeutic language and the clod mysticism of yoga pants culture. I’m sure Greta Gerwig intended to make a 21st-century feminist tale, and I think she succeeded, but perhaps not in the way she means. Because by portraying therapeutic individualism as the only alternative to patriarchy, Gerwig has underlined the degree to which individualist capitalism now undergirds both sides of the American ideological divide.”

Technology

How ChatGPT turned generative AI into an “anything tool” by Haomiao Huang (Ars Technica)

“There is a way to do this. The input to an AI model is called the context window. You can think of the context window as the text that our magic auto-complete takes in and then continues from. One way to work with an AI is to feed its own output back into the context window so that each input isn’t just a command but a command plus a “history” to apply that command to. This way, you can get the AI to modify its past output into something better. But you need the AI to understand how to take commands to make edits and not just new output.”

“These internal numerical representations of words and concepts are called embeddings. It’s like a library filing system for words and concepts: You can look up a concept if you know its embedding, and vice versa. You can modify an LLM so that, instead of producing words, it can report to you its embedding for words and phrases. OpenAI and other AI companies often have special versions of their models to do precisely this.”

“Having an LLM base its answers on information fed to it is called “grounding.” This biases the LLM toward trusting the information in the context window more and is a powerful way to reduce the problem of letting the model make up answers.”

“Logic synthesis was a revolution in chip design. It meant that chip designers could think about “what should this chip do” rather than “how do I build this circuit.” It’s the same breakthrough that happened when computer programmers could write in high-level programming languages instead of low-level binary code. And it turned chip design into writing code.”

Hacking Food Labeling Laws by Bruce Schneier

“Companies like Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz have begun designing their products so that their packages don’t have a true front or back, but rather two nearly identical labels—except for the fact that only one side has the required warning.”

“Bimbo, the international bread company that owns brands in the United States such as Entenmann’s and Takis, for example, technically removed its mascot from its packaging. It instead printed the mascot on the actual food product—a ready to eat pancake—and made the packaging clear, so the mascot is still visible to consumers.”

Just absolute bastards, flouting the intent of the law in order to continue to market to and seduce minors into buying their products.

Programming

Use web components for what they’re good at by Nolan Lawson

“It might also surprise you to learn that, by some measures, React is used on roughly 8% of page loads , whereas web components are used on 20%.”

“Having a lot of consumers of your codebase, and having to think on longer timescales, just leads to different technical decisions. And to me, this points to the main reason enterprises love web components: stability and longevity.”

“The thing I like about web components, and web standards in general, is that I get to outsource a bunch of boring problems to the browser. How do I compose components? How do I scope styles? How do I pass data around? Who cares – just take whatever the browser gives you. That way, I can spend more time on the problems that actually matter to my end-users, like performance, accessibility, security, etc.”

“Too often, in web development, I feel like I’m wrestling with incidental complexity that has nothing to do with the actual problem at hand. I’m wrangling npm dependencies, or debugging my state manager, or trying to figure out why my test runner isn’t playing nicely with my linter. Some people really enjoy this kind of stuff, and I find myself getting sucked into it sometimes too. But I think ultimately it’s a kind of fake-work that feels good but doesn’t accomplish much, because your end-user doesn’t care if your bundler is up-to-date with your TypeScript transpiler.”

Queryable Logging with Blacklite (Terse Systems)

“SQLite has excellent ecosystem support, so much so that an SQLite database file is the only universal binary format accepted by the Library of Congress. The guidelines on appropriate uses for SQLite also seem very applicable to log file formats in general.”

We have left the cloud by David Heinemeier Hansson (Hey)

“The main difference here is the lag time between needing new servers and seeing them online. It truly is incredible that you can spin up 100 powerful machines in the cloud in just a few minutes, but you also pay dearly for the privilege. And we just don’t have such an unpredictable business as to warrant this premium. Given how much money we’re saving owning our own hardware, we can afford to dramatically over-provision our server needs, and then when we need more, it still only takes a couple of weeks to show up.”

“I still think the cloud has a place for companies early enough in their lifecycle that the spend is either immaterial or the risk that they won’t be around in 24 months is high. Just be careful that you don’t look at those lavish cloud credits as a gift! It’s a hook. And if you tie yourself too much to their proprietary managed services or serverless offerings, you’ll find it very difficult to escape, once the bills start going to the moon.”

some of the error messages produced by Apple’s MPW C compiler by Jason I. Hong

• String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that’s 3 more than ANSI said I should)
• …And the lord said, ‘lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement’
• a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program
• type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don’t care, I’m just trying to annoy you)
• This struct already has a perfectly good definition
• we already did this function

Fun

Pronounce by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“Teacher, how do you pronounce ‘o-u-g-h’?

“You have to know what’s before it. It could be cough, bough, tough, hiccough, through, though…you really just need to memorize each word and not think about the letters.

“Linquistic fun fact: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals.”