Links and Notes for October 20th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

Economy & Finance

McKinsey: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) by John Oliver (YouTube)

Crypto Finance Is a Speculative Scam That’s Worsening the Instability of Global Capitalism by Daniel Finn & Ramaa Vasudevan (Jacobin)

“[…] decentralization is a myth. You see that most clearly when there’s some kind of crisis and there’s a need for executive decisions. You don’t have any consensus-based mechanisms at work — someone at the top makes a decision. Decentralization is basically a nonstarter, even though it has been one of the supposed features of crypto finance that has been used to promote it very aggressively.”

“Crypto asset activity in the United States alone is estimated to have resulted in somewhere between 0.4 and 0.8 percent of total US greenhouse emissions. That may seem small, but it’s a range of emissions similar to that from the diesel fuel used in railroads in the United States. The environmental footprint of crypto is huge, with the massive amount of energy-guzzling computing power needed to support it.”

“[…] this means that what you might gain in terms of reducing environmental footprints, you’re going to lose in terms of exacerbating inequality, because only those who have assets can provide the collateral. Collateral-based systems don’t just fuel fragility: they also promote greater inequality because those with assets can plow them back in, earn more, put that back in, earn even more, and so on. It promotes an even more unequal distribution.”

“[…] there’s a paradox at work here. Since stablecoins are backed by conventional safe assets such as Treasury bills, crypto is ultimately dependent on conventional currencies as a source of credibility and stability. If crypto is to grow, it has to do so on the basis of its link to conventional currencies through stablecoins.”

“You exchange one crypto asset for another — you lend in a crypto token in order to invest in more crypto assets. The transaction is itself secured by crypto assets which may have been borrowed. Rather than funding real economic transactions — trade, investment — crypto lending and borrowing is solely for speculation and making money from arbitrage. It’s rent-seeking financial speculation in its purest form — finance for finance’s sake.”

“The second thing is that just as securitization — the alchemy which transformed illiquid, long-term loans like mortgages into liquid, tradable assets — remains entrenched and continues to be promoted in the workings of finance, even though it crashed the system in 2008, the innovations at the heart of crypto, embodied in blockchains, smart contracts, and tokenization, are reshaping conventional finance.”

“The world of finance already rests on flimsy foundations, and tokenization adds another layer to the illusion of value that fuels speculation. To give one example, there’s a new market for carbon tokens, which is making hay off the rising price of carbon offsets by buying and tokenizing cheaper carbon offsets. Of course, this has questionable implications for carbon emissions, but it’s a rich bonanza for the institutions trading in it. Through crypto, the processes of financialization are metamorphizing and metastasizing.”

“Crypto as it exists doesn’t depoliticize money — it merely de-democratizes it.”

Public Policy & Politics

The Fantasy of Energy Independence by Peter Z. Grossman (The New Atlantis)

“It has now been fifty years since the oil crisis that began when Arab members of OPEC imposed an embargo on the United States. Announced on October 17, 1973, the ban on oil exports to America was an act of retaliation for our aid to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The war itself had begun only days earlier when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel — the surprise attack on Israel by Hamas just days ago was apparently timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 war.”

Decency Becomes Indecent by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

““In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: ‘de-escalation/ceasefire,’ ‘end to violence/bloodshed’ and ‘restoring calm,’” Ahmed wrote. “The revelation provides a stunning signal about the Biden administration’s reluctance to push for Israeli restraint…””

Unleash the Kraken! Onward to Tehran! Mushroom clouds are cool!

“A headline atop an editorial in Saturday’s New York Times — signed, significantly, by the Editorial Board: “Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values.” Under it, this assertion: “What Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law.””

Well, if they believe it about the U.S., they have to at least pretend to believe it about Israel.

“Emhoff reassured them, “I know you’re all hurting…. But thank God we have the steady leadership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during this unthinkable time in our history. Their moral compass, their calm and empathy are what we need in this time of crisis.””

Incredible. This is Politburo/CCP levels of self-delusion. They’re deadly serious, but it sounds deeply sarcastic.

“Emhoff, just a brief aside, is the vice-president’s spouse.”

Ah, well, that’s why he’s so effusive.

“A criminal regime is dressed up as the democracy of the Middle East, Palestinians act violently without cause or provocation, the Israeli state is rightfully defending itself and its citizens — innocent citizens, of course.”

“May 2021, readers will surely recall, Israeli police attempted to restrict Palestinians’ access to al–Aqsa and the associated Dome of the Rock — this during Ramadan no less. “Then came Hamas’ retaliatory rockets fired into Jerusalem from Gaza after an ultimatum it issued to retreat from al–Aqsa was ignored,” I wrote in this space at the time . “And now we watch Israel’s fourth attack on Gaza in the past dozen years. And now we read in our corporate press of Israeli–Arab ‘clashes’ and of Israel’s ‘right to self-defense.’””

Roger Waters and the One-State Solution by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Israel has to build a wall around itself to keep out the people it forced into refugee camps at its formal founding in 1948, but that is O.K. Incessant violence against the Palestinian population: This is O.K., too—part of the story, as they say. For the sake of its security it must bomb the airports in neighboring countries, as it did this week in Syria and Lebanon. But Israel is Israel, Israel is a great post–World War II success, a monument to human decency and the rule of law, and Israel must be.”

“The two-state solution as the basis of an enduring settlement, the thought that Palestinians would accept forcible relocation to assigned lands elsewhere, was the path to calamity long, long before the Oslo Accords came along in the early 1990s, Said astutely pointed out. Even some of the great names among the Zionists understood this. “David Ben–Gurion, for instance, was always clear,” Said wrote. “‘There is no example in history,’”’ he said in 1944, “‘of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.’””

“The initial step … is a very difficult one to take. Israeli Jews are insulated from the Palestinian reality; most of them say that it does not really concern them…. My generation of Palestinians, still reeling from the shock of losing everything in 1948, find it nearly impossible to accept that their homes and farms were taken over by another people.”

“I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such….”

“I have considered Renan’s 1882 lecture, delivered at the Sorbonne, previously in this space ( here and here ), so I will not go long on it again. Not race, not religion, not language or what Renan called “community of interest,” not even geography (by which he meant natural boundaries, rivers and such) count in the making of a nation. A modern nation, he famously asserted, is “a daily plebiscite”—a vote each citizen casts by his or her participation each day in the life of the polity.”

“Waters ends his remarks with a reference as poignant as any I have heard in the course of these past 10 days. “Do we dream of a world where all men and women are equal under the law? Or not?” he asks. And then: My father, 1914 to 1944, dreamed that dream. He died in Italy fighting the Nazis to defend that dream. I dream that dream, too. No ifs, no ands, no buts, I dream that dream, too. So to whom it may concern: Please stop.

“Consider the reality with which Waters leaves us: A man whose father gave his life to fighting the Reich to liberate six million Jews is now brought nearly to tears watching the violence the descendants of those Jews inflict on an equally helpless population.”

“As to forgetting, as I have written in this space, I will say this quickly: There is the erasure of the past, as the apartheid state’s “if only” apologists incessantly attempt, and this is not what I mean, but rather, I mean forgetting as a way of liberating ourselves from the burden of eternal remembering such that we are prisoners of the past, captives of previous events, unable to act autonomously in the present.”

“Edward Said, the honorable, principled scholar, wrote works generously veined with the ideas of forgiveness and forgetting. Read his Times essay, as linked above: You will find these thoughts all through it. Israel as it is now constituted is a failed state. It is time, long past time, to begin again. Is there any question this can be done unless many, many, people forget about never forgiving and never forgetting?”

Israel’s Culture of Deceit by Chris Hedges (Mint Press News)

“I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian Hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t.”

“The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated .”

“The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians and Israeli media.”

Maybe because they don’t care about lyong to those for whom they have no respect?

“Expose Israeli lies and you are attacked by Israel and its supporters as an anti-Semite and apologist for terrorists. You are banished from mainstream media. You are denied forums to speak about the issue and, as has happened to me, disinvited from university events. It is an old game, one I have played as a reporter many, many times. I bear the scars of the lies spewed out by Israel and its lobby. Meanwhile, Israel continues its butchery, endorsed and even lauded by Western political leaders, including Joe Biden, who accompany the torrent of lies from Israel like a Wagnerian chorus.”

Goliath, Who Aspires to be David by Freddie deBoer

“[…] if it’s wrong for an innocent Jew to be killed by Hamas because of things Israel has done, then it must follow, should follow, and does follow that criticism of Israel cannot constitute criticism of the Jewish people. (I would also suggest that if you justify Palestinian civilian deaths through reference to Hamas, you justify Israeli civilian deaths through reference to the actions of the IDF; you should do neither.)”

“As of four days ago, at least forty-four countries expressed support for Israel in this conflict. How many will officially express support for the people dying by the droves in Gaza? Even the establishment governments of the greater Middle East (almost universally corrupt, theocratic, or both) don’t offer any real support to Palestinians. How much more help do you need, exactly, before you stop pretending like everyone is out to get you? The US military and State Department have been rigidly in Israel’s corner since before I was born, but the Latin Club at Cornell held a pro-Palestine rally in the quad, so that makes you the underdog? When you say no one stands with Israel, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“[…] one of my most sacred political beliefs is that anytime people are demanding that you take a loyalty oath, the demand itself is the best reason not to take it.”

“Hamas is a theocratic body, and I am opposed to theocracy, and whatever your perspective on political violence, they have harmed the interests of Gazans and all Palestinians. They killed innocent people, which I can’t ever countenance, and by the way they’re contributing to terrible outcomes for their own side in doing so. The attack made greater Palestine more violent and less free. I don’t need to denounce the attack because it comes pre-denounced by my moral values.”

“The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require. Permanent statelessness and dispossession for the Palestinians will ensure violence for generations. Only freedom for Palestinians can bring peace, and that’s the most hardheaded, ruthlessly pragmatic point anyone can make about this horrid crisis. And if Israel’s defenders feel put upon, othered, alone, it’s because Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free.”

Eradication would work too. That’s the path that Israel seems to be taking.

“Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free. I’m sorry, but it’s not a moral principle that says that Israel must bear responsibility for achieving peace and freedom. It’s a purely pragmatic statement of the reality of Israel’s overwhelming power in the region. Choosing sides has nothing do with it.”

Global: ‘Predator Files’ investigation reveals catastrophic failure to regulate surveillance trade (Amnesty International Security Lab)

“Among the 25 countries that the EIC consortium of media outlets found Intellexa alliance products have been sold to are Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Other clients include Oman, Qatar, Congo, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Pakistan, Jordan and Viet Nam.”

Switzerland’s in good company, I see.

This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen by Chris Hedges (Mint Press News)

“Psychologist Rollo May writes: At the outset of every war…we hastily transform our enemy into the image of the daimonic; and then, since it is the devil we are fighting, we can shift onto a war footing without asking ourselves all the troublesome and spiritual questions that the war arouses. We no longer have to face the realization that those we are killing are persons like ourselves. The killing and torture, the more they endure, contaminate the perpetrators and the society that condones their actions. They sever the professional inquisitors and killers from the capacity to feel. They feed the death instinct. They expand the moral injury of war.””

Wo bleibt eigentlich die deutsche Liebe für das Völkerrecht, wenn es um den Gaza-Streifen geht? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Zumindest die deutsche Politik weiß, dass ihr Blick aufs Völkerrecht ein sehr selektiver ist. Daher spricht man ja auch viel lieber von einer „regelbasierten Ordnung“, an die sich die ganze Welt halten solle. Diese „Regeln“ sind jedoch nicht mit dem Völkerrecht gleichzusetzen, sondern werden frei Schnauze vom Westen situationsabhängig ausgelegt und anderen vorgegeben. Das ist Doppelmoral vom Feinsten und offenbar stört dies zumindest hierzulande niemanden.”

“[…] eine Veranstaltung, bei der die Supermacht USA die gleiche Stimme wie – sagen wir – der pazifische Zwergstaat Vanuatu hat, muss natürlich jenen suspekt sein, die sich eine Weltordnung wünschen, in der die USA die Regeln bestimmen.”

“Seit der Gründung der Kommission wird diese von Israel und den USA mit aller Härte bekämpft und bereits im Februar 2022 weigerte sich Israel offiziell , mit der Kommission zusammenzuarbeiten. Den Internationalen Strafgerichtshof in Den Haag, der bereits 2021 Untersuchungen gegen alle Beteiligten am Palästinakonflikt eingeleitet hat, erkennen Israel und die USA übrigens auch nicht an.”

“Der Bericht verurteilt den Abschuss von Raketen und Mörsern durch die Hamas als klare Kriegsverbrechen. Im Bericht wird aber auch festgestellt, dass die durch die israelischen Angriffe verursachten Schäden und Opfer nicht in einem angemessenen Verhältnis zum militärischen Vorteil stehen, sodass auch diese Handlungen ein Kriegsverbrechen darstellen. Darüber hinaus stellt die Kommission fest, dass die Verhinderung der Einfuhr von Lebensmitteln und medizinischen Hilfsgütern in den Gazastreifen eine Verletzung des humanitären Völkerrechts darstellt. Der Bericht nennt auch noch weitere Kriegsverbrechen und Verstöße gegen internationale Menschenrechte durch den Staat Israel.”

“[…] bewertet die Washington Post kritisch und zitiert dabei Clive Baldwin, den leitenden Rechtsberater von Human Rights Watch. „Eine Million Menschen in Gaza zur Evakuierung aufzufordern, wenn es keinen sicheren Ort gibt, ist keine wirksame Warnung. Die Straßen liegen in Schutt und Asche, der Treibstoff ist knapp und das wichtigste Krankenhaus liegt in der Evakuierungszone. Dieser Befehl ändert nichts an Israels Verpflichtung, bei Militäroperationen niemals Zivilisten ins Visier zu nehmen und alle möglichen Maßnahmen zu ergreifen, um deren Schaden zu minimieren.””

“Es kann ja nicht angehen, dass über solche Fragen ein Organ wie die Vereinten Nationen mitredet, in denen auch Länder eine Stimme haben, die nicht zu unserer westlichen Wertegemeinschaft gehören und damit per se verdächtig sind, unsere „regelbasierte Ordnung“ nicht anzuerkennen. Und die Sache mit dem Völkerrecht? Die vergessen wir lieber wieder schnell und kramen sie erst dann wieder hervor, wenn man sie gegen Russland, China, Iran oder sonstige Bösewichte instrumentalisieren kann.”

It’s Not The ‘Israel-Hamas War’, It’s The Israel-Gaza Massacre by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Americans should probably worry about the rapid legitimization of this idea that civilians who have a government that kills people are all legitimate targets.”

“According to the logic of collective punishment we’re seeing circulated with regard to Gazans and Hamas, all American civilians deserve to die horribly because they permit themselves to be ruled by a regime which is orders of magnitude more violent and destructive than Hamas.”

“The mass media asked you to believe the Hamas attack was “unprovoked” . Then they asked you to believe blatant babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda . Now they’re asking you to believe Jewish kids were in school before dawn on a Saturday morning in Israel. Western journalism, folks.”

A Saturday that also happened to have been the culmination of a series of high holy days.

“I used to think all genocidal massacres are bad but then some really smart Israel apologists explained to me that this genocidal massacre is completely different because this genocidal massacre’s perpetrators believe they are doing the right thing for a good reason.”

“If there were two million Jewish people trapped by Christians in a giant open-air prison and placed under total siege, being told that half of them had 24 hours to relocate into the other half or be killed, nobody would have any confusion about what they were witnessing.”

“You know about 9/11 brain, kids? It’s when something scary happens and everyone goes insane and starts believing a bunch of lies and consenting to power-serving agendas that do exponentially more damage than the initial trauma.”

“The greatest trick white anti-semites ever pulled was getting Jews to leave western society in droves and move to a far away country to spend their lives beating up Muslims.”

Biden’s demand for $105 billion in military spending: A declaration of war against the working class by Eric London (WSWS)

“In his national address Thursday, US President Joe Biden demanded Congress allocate an additional $105 billion to fund the US military […]

“The latest demand includes $14 billion for Israel on top of the $260 billion the US has provided in military aid since 1948, and $61 billion for Ukraine, nearly doubling the $75 billion spent on the war against nuclear-armed Russia so far. Biden is also demanding $3 billion for military submarines, $2 billion for military encirclement of China, and $14 billion to further militarize the US-Mexico border […]”

Don’t we have a budget, though? Didn’t they already get almost $900B? Why don’t they use that? This is patently ridiculous, a farce.

There is no change here: but, just to let it be said … this is a farce.

“In concluding his speech, Biden called for shared sacrifice to fund the escalation of war on a global scale: “In moments like these, we have to remember who we are. We are the United States of America. The United States of America. And there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity, if we do it together.”

“Make no mistake, the US population will not pay for these wars “together.” The cost will be born entirely by the working class, while the spoils will go to the rich. Biden’s demand is a declaration of war against the working class, and all talk about “shared sacrifice” to “defend democracy” is nothing but lies.”

Empire makes mouth noises to quiet the public, while it does what Empire wants.

“According to a 2023 study from the National Priorities Project, $100 billion is more than the federal government will spend all year on education ($84 billion), transportation ($67 billion), or energy and the environment ($94 billion) and equals the total budget for healthcare ($100 billion). Total military-related spending this year will exceed $1.1 trillion.”

“The Biden administration’s demand comes as workers have been told “there is no money” to address the world population’s most urgent needs. For $100 billion, Biden could house every homeless person in America ($20 billion, per Globalgiving.org), feed every person facing starvation or acute malnutrition across the world ($23 billion, per Oxfam), forgive $30,000 in student loans for two million people ($60 billion) and still have almost $10 billion left over.”

These are all excellent points, and well-worth noting, but … Empire obviously doesn’t care. There is no way to guilt Empire into behavior more closely aligned with the needs of the many. It knows that what it is doing will work for Empire. It continues to work for Empire. The incentives are all in the same direction.

And Empire is a many-headed hydra, composed of multiple multinationals at this point. They have figured out how to profit even more massively by not paying for anything.

“According to the CBO, revenue on corporate taxes fell $5 billion from 2022 to 2023. A 2023 study from the Government Accountability Office reported that 34 percent of large corporations now pay zero federal taxes.”

The article Amira Hass Speaks on Gaza Slaughter by Jewish Voice for Labour (Scheer Post) includes an embedded video that appears like this.

Amira Hass interview on Democracy Now!

Amira Hass is a leading journalist (with Gideon Levy) at Ha’aretz. “Amira Hass is the only Israeli journalist who has lived in the West Bank for 30 years and has a deep understanding of the Palestinian experience.” I hadn’t seen the video, but I found it highly unlikely that there was really age-restricted content there. It seemed much more likely that YouTube’s algorithms saw her name alongside “Gaza” and noped right out of there, applying restrictions to make sure as few people watched the video as possible.

When I click the video to see it on YouTube. I get this:

YouTube is blocked

I removed the query arguments, one by one, but I still couldn’t open the video.

When I opened the base url (without the query arguments) in a new tab, it worked.

You know what? YouTube seems to be blocking referrals from Scheer Post. It blocks not only on the query argument, but also on the HTTP_REFERRER in the request. That is very much enforcing an agenda, but it’s also utterly unsurprising. We do not live in a free information environment. The U.S. corporations and government—entwined as they are—control the narrative ruthlessly.

When I finally got to the video, it was a Democracy Now! interview, from New York City, with journalist Amira Hass. There was absolutely no content in there that would be considered worth blocking or age-restricting in anything but an authoritarian Empire where YouTube is an arm of the State.

Her words were, of course, deeply unnerving, but that is reality. There were a few fleeting images of children being dug out of rubble—they were still alive, though.

Finally, the video (embedded from my site, where it’s still age-restricted but not blocked, if you click through).

Israeli Journalist Amira Hass: How Can the World Stand By and Witness Israel's Slaughter in Gaza? by Democracy Now! (YouTube)

And here’s the second, longer part of the interview. This second part was, mysteriously, not age-restricted at the time I originally added the link to a draft, but it’s age-restricted now. As with part one, I can’t see a reason why this video should be age-restricted, unless it’s for the disturbing subject matter. If that’s what triggers age-restriction, then more than half of the news videos on YouTube would have to be age-restricted.

Israeli Journalist Amira Hass, Daughter of Holocaust Survivors, Calls for Gaza Ceasefire Now by Democracy Now! (YouTube)

This is an incredibly good interview. Amira Hass discusses honestly how Hamas made a “distinctive blow” militarily that they don’t have any follow-up for. Citing at considerable length from the transcript:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In the piece, you write about your father, who would tell you as far […] back as 1992, he himself a Holocaust survivor, when you return from Gaza, he would say, quote,

“True, this isn’t a genocide like what we went through, but for us, it ended after five or six years. For the Palestinians, the suffering has gone on and on for decades.”

[…]

AMIRA HASS: Look, I mean, in 92 […], it was — we could say that it is not genocide. I want to say, I mean, I don’t — as I explain over and over again, I prefer not to talk now, not to dwell into definitions, but to describe the situation. Of course, in ‘92, in comparison to today, it was like a benign occupation in comparison to today, to what’s going on now.

“Look, Hamas proved to be very resourceful when it comes to the military operation. They knew how to neutralize Israeli surveillance facilities, how to neutralize the shooting, automatic shooting. They knew where the military bases were, etc. So they were very resourceful, in a way that I could have said impressive, if not for the atrocities that were committed later. And the atrocities were committed. And I know that it’s not the time to tell Palestinians to pay attention to this, because Israel’s revenge is a hundred times more bloodier, but still there were atrocities.

“So I feel there is a tremendous contradiction between the planning of the immediate military operation and what comes aftermath — what is the aftermath, because, for example, the civilian now — the civilian face in the West — in Gaza. If they knew they have such an operation, and they knew that Israel will retaliate ferociously, then why, for example, they did not even — I didn’t know — take care that people have water? I don’t know. I mean, if they can arrange to have so many weapons, they must have also prepared for assisting the civilian population, their civilian population. But I see that this, from what I can tell, from far, I don’t think — I don’t see that this has happened.

“I don’t think that Hamas can be erased. It can flourish outside of Gaza. But I don’t understand its political plan right now. Do they want to liberate all of Palestine, so it doesn’t matter if it will take 50 years, 80 years, and at the cost of lives of Palestinians and Israelis, that I don’t know who will return to the country? Who will live in this destroyed country, if this is the plan? If the plan is political, immediate political, is it worse to ask, demand the release of present Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, and the cost is so much? I think I know some prisoners in jail now. I don’t think they’ll be happy to be released, thanks to the death of thousands or tens of thousands of Palestinians.

“So, right now I see very — militarily, a very apt organization, that indeed gave Israel a very distinctive blow. But I don’t see that there is a political viable position that comes with it. That’s me now. I don’t know. I mean, we are waiting, because just war, just war, just bloodshed, where will it lead us to? Where will it lead the Palestinians to? Now it’s very difficult for people to criticize Hamas. There is a lot of support. But is it a political — does it have a political, logical, human perspective? I don’t see it.”

“Every Palestinian who is killed today in Gaza is registered in the Israeli-controlled population registry. Palestinians are not registered in a separate one. It’s Israel which controls. If a person is not registered, he is there — if a newborn is not registered in the Israeli registry of population, then the newborn does not exist. Israel controls still today. Palestinian Authority is obliged to give every name of a newborn and every change of address to Israel for validation of this change. So what is not responsible? It’s part of Israel. I mean, Israel controls the whole country, controls the people, decides how much water they have, what is the economy they are allowed to have. If they don’t go to universities in the West Bank, Israel decides. Israel decides about every detail of these people. So, what’s happening now is not Israel’s responsibility?”

Drone Warfare in the Nuclear Age by Michael Klare (Antiwar.com)

“A war with China may not be inevitable, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks observed recently, but it’s a genuine possibility and so this country must be prepared to fight and win. But victory in such a conflict will not, she suggested, come easily. China enjoys an advantage in certain measures of military power, including the number of ships, guns, and missiles it can deploy. While America’s equivalents may be more advanced and capable, they also cost far more to produce and so can only be procured in smaller numbers. To overcome such a dilemma in any future conflict, Hicks suggested, our costly crewed weapons systems must be accompanied by hordes of uncrewed autonomous ships, planes, and tanks.

“To ensure that America will possess sufficient numbers of “all-domain attritable [that is, expendable] autonomous” weapons when a war with China breaks out, Hicks announced a major new Pentagon program dubbed the Replicator Initiative. “Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people,” she told the National Defense Industrial Association as August ended.”

She named the program after the Star Trek device that can produce anything you want, out of nothing, for free.

The people in charge of the U.S. are all mad, just evil and mad. Whether it’s their madness which has made them evil, or their evil that’s driven them mad doesn’t matter. A healthy society would not put them in charge. The world is run by the most bloodthirsty, racist, tribalist, intolerant, small-minded, and piratical people. They bubble to the top. This reflects terribly on the rest of us. We must, in a way, hope that we don’t live in democracies, else we are … complicit.

“In making the case for the Replicator Initiative, Hicks touted America’s advantage in technological creativity and know-how. “We out-match adversaries by out-thinking, out-strategizing, and out-maneuvering them,” she insisted. “We augment manufacturing and mobilization with our real comparative advantage, which is the innovation and spirit of our people.”

“From her perspective, China, Russia, and this country’s other adversaries are more reliant on traditional forms of military mass (“more ships, more missiles, more people”) because they lack the natural birthright of all Americans, that “innovative spirit.” As she asserted, “We don’t use our people as cannon fodder like some competitors do,” we win by “out-thinking” them.”

Jesus, I guess as soon as you live in a fantasy world—as do all of the people in your audience—all bets are off and you can say whatever you want, no matter how unmoored from reality it is. This is pure marketing, pure sales. She’s a snake-oil salesman, touting vaporware. She’s probably angling for a job on the other side of that revolving door.

John Oliver Denounces Israel’s Bombing of Gaza on June 23, 2021 (YouTube)

Basically: If the suffering and terror is to end, Israel has to be the one to end it, one way or another. There are two sides, but one side has the overwhelming advantage over the other, militarily and in the form of control over all aspects of life. Israel has the support of all of the governments that it cares about, and on which it depends for support. The people of those other countries are divided and support is crumbling—even in Israel itself, from what little I’ve been able to read from the Israeli press—but Israel is still 100% in the driver’s seat and can decide how they’re going to end it: annihilation or reconciliation.

To Kill in Darkness by Elizabeth Vos (Scheer Post)

“Both the Al-Quds hospital and the UNRWA schools are in Gaza City, in the northern part of the Gaza strip, where Israel has already carried out heavy shelling of residential areas. Thousands of people were forced to seek shelter in institutions like hospitals and schools after their homes were destroyed. There is also no way to transport critically ill patients.

“Even if healthy mobile civilians want to leave targeted hospitals and schools, their options are extremely limited. There is no way out of Gaza and no way for aid to be delivered thanks to Israel’s total blockade. [After U.S. pressure, a total of just 20 aid trucks were let into the territory on Saturday morning.]”

“That schools and a major hospital in northern Gaza would receive such threats from Israeli forces would indicate that Israel intends to decimate as many large buildings and groups of people as possible in preparation for a ground invasion in the North.”

I really wonder what they’re thinking, like, what sort of outcome do they expect here? Are they really going for eradication, shooting everything on sight and letting the rest starve and dehydrate? Or … what? Do they think that the 75th time is the charm and that “the beatings will continue until morale improves” will work this time?

“Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, who previously recounted his experience during and after the al-Ahli hospital attack, reported via social media on Thursday that medical workers have been reduced to treating bacterial-infected wounds with vinegar.”

“On Friday, the Israeli government approved regulations that will allow it to temporarily shut down foreign news channels, paving the way to shut down channels like Al Jazeera.”

Biden Returns Empty-handed, Except for a Huge Bill for the American Taxpayers by Ralph Nader (Scheer Post)

“Did Biden press for the exchange of Hamas’ hostages for the release of Palestinian prisoners, including young Palestinians, who have been in Israeli jails for years without due process or charges? No! Worse, Biden failed to object to the Israeli military stating that the release of over 200 Israeli hostages is a “secondary priority” to smashing Hamas and Gaza “into the Stone Age.””

“Did Biden, in strong terms, tell the Israeli politicians that they have already exacted revenge many times over on the stateless people of Gaza – in civilian lives lost, injuries, related spread of disease, destitution and destruction? Did he say it is inhumane and counterproductive to bomb hospitals, clinics, schools, mosques, churches, apartment buildings, water mains, electric networks and ambulances, all of which is in violation of civilized norms and rules of war? Of course not. He greenlighted Israel’s genocidal warfare from the beginning of the Israeli assault and sent U.S. weaponry.”

“Now Biden wants Congress to approve $14 billion for Israel to address the colossal failure of Netanyahu’s extremist coalition to protect its own citizens on the border. (Adding only $100 million for Palestinian relief).

“That sum of money, to be authorized without any Congressional hearings or Congressional oversight, is greater than the combined annual budgets of the FDA, OSHA, NHTSA and the section of HHS, whose missions are to reduce the loss of hundreds of thousands of preventable American fatalities in the workplace, on the highways, and in the marketplace and the hospitals.”

“Biden should take a moment in the Oval Office to read page 121 of the book “The Jewish Paradox” by Nahum Goldman (January 1, 1978), the head of the World Zionist Organization. He quotes the leading Founder of the Israeli state, David Ben-Gurion as candidly saying to him: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why would they accept that?””

That was a long, long time ago, when many decades of myth-making had not yet occurred.

“Many members of Congress who demand giving Israel whatever money and weaponry it wants for whatever it does, violating human rights under international law in its illegal occupations and blockade, turn around and vote against the child tax credit, worker health and safety, universal healthcare, paid family leave and daycare for Americans. Their viciousness – as with the homicidal outburst of Gen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) against all Palestinians, and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) a Harvard Law graduate, saying “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza…” set new levels of depravity.”

Let Them Eat Cement by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.”

That’s an incredible number of Israelis who are also internally displaced.

“Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel.”

“Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.”

“Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai. ”

“The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.

““Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.

““Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.”

““Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.””

If I’d read this from almost anyone but Chris Hedges, I would be more doubtful of its provenance or veracity. I’m almost certain he triple-checked that this actually happened. Yup, I guess it checks out: “These animals can no longer live” says Israel’s oldest reservist (Al Jazeera) and Israeli veteran, 95, tells troops to ‘erase’ Palestinian kids he calls ‘animals’ (MSN)

Ukraine and Israel Are Very Special Democracies by Ted Rall

“Ukraine is so democratic that it doesn’t even need to have presidential elections anymore. Martial law again. And who declared martial law? Why, it’s that sly rascal President Volodymyr Zelensky—make that President-for-Life Volodymyr Zelensky. We’re so dysfunctional here in the U.S. that House Republicans can’t agree with themselves who should be Speaker. But Ukraine is streamlined! The guy who would be running for reelection this spring won’t have to, because he personally said so! That’s a very special democracy.”

“Israel has an à la carte democracy. They lock the Palestinians away in Gaza and the West Bank, out of sight and out of mind, stateless and hopeless and voiceless, under Israeli occupation but without the right to vote. The Jewish “majority” of Israel enjoys the Middle East’s only thriving democracy.”

“Imagine how cool it would be if we could do that here! Turn the flyover “red” states into an occupied stateless concentration camp without voting rights. The remainder, the coastal “blue” states, would become a liberal paradise. No more Trumpies. Abortion rights—back. E-vehicle charging stations everywhere.”

I would imagine that the utterly irony-free blue fools will be retweeting Rall for once, talking up what a good idea he’s had, when they would ordinarily be trying to get him banned.

Slavoj Žižek on Israel and Palestine (17.10.2023, Frankfurter Buchmesse) by sergeausrio (YouTube)

Gaza Update with Norman Finkelstein by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

As for the hospital bombing, Finkelstein says (A) Israel always bombs hospitals (he directed us to his posting Israel ALWAYS Acknowledges Its Atrocities by Norman Finkelstein), (B) even Israel says that 6000 rockets fired by Hamas since October 7th (their number) have killed “dozens” of Israelis and that it was a fragment of a Hamas rocket that leveled the hospital, killing over 500, which is on its face flatly unbelievable, (C) Why doesn’t the U.S. just publish its satellite data? It very clearly has detailed satellite imagery. It could clear this up immediately, and (D) why not let inspectors in? They could easily clear up what sort of weapon it was that caused the damage. Even from the footage, people can determine that it was a powered, warhead-equipped weapon, not a rocket dependent on gravity for its damage.

He thanks Aaron and Katie for having him on the show because almost no other “left” podcasts have invited him (more unaffiliated shows have invited him, like Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges, TrueAnon, etc.), despite him being by far the leading authority on Gaza.

TrueAnon, Episode 327: It’s Not Too Late (Patreon)

“If things were cut-and-dried, then our legal standard wouldn’t be ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, it’d be ‘certainty.’”

My God, what an absolutely brilliant 136 minutes. I’ve listened to every Norman Finkelstein interview I could get my hands on recently. A couple of weeks ago, I watched him discuss Ibram X. Kendi on the Bad Faith podcast. Since then, the Middle East has exploded and he’s been interviewed a few times: on Chris Hedges, Jimmy Dore, Useful Idiots, and TrueAnon. This is the best of them. TrueAnon is hands-down the best podcast I listen to. I appreciate Liz and Brace and young Chomsky very much.

I wrote the following comment on their Patreon:

I’m flattered that the crew read and liked my comment.

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Third Edition (Amazon)

Image and reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict

This is the preeminent authority on conflict. You can’t get his book.

If Israel Stops Murdering Thousands Of Children, The Bad Guys Might Win by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“The obvious other option is to move toward peace and reconciliation and right all the wrongs which gave rise to the attack on October 7, which would mean a one-state or two-state solution that Palestinians are happy with instead of the status quo of apartheid and tyranny and ghettos and a giant concentration camp of profound human suffering. That would allow the possibility of a ceasefire without the need for continued Palestinian resistance.

“But Israel is unwilling to do this because it would mean ceding a bunch of land or ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish ethnostate, so that option is framed as unthinkable nonsense instead of the glaringly obvious fix for this problem that it plainly is. Murdering children by the thousands and carpet bombing Gaza is seen as preferable to the measures that would be necessary to achieve a lasting peace.”

NYT Still Trying To Salvage Its Lost Dignity Over Hamas by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“On the one side, there’s the claim of Hamas, a terrorist group that had just raped, kidnapped, murdered and beheaded women, children and the elderly, and had a bit of a public relations problem on their hands, claiming Israel bombed a hospital when it turned out that the hospital was never bombed, but only a courtyard parking lot, and there is no evidence whatsoever to support any claim Hamas made.”

I’m honestly still surprised at how Greenfield still hasn’t gotten a hold of himself and started to apply his usual rigor to this topic. As he writes further down, “[…] the New York Times reported that Israel bombed a hospital and killed 200 500 800 471 Palestinians.” He writes the other numbers supposedly to show how disingenuous this whole affair is—because they can’t even get the number right immediately. He ends up at 471, which is a high number for a “parking lot”, no? But he doesn’t think to research and find out that the hospital grounds had been converted to a refugee camp, which is what was hit in the parking lot. He does no research to try to find out whether Israel bombing a hospital and then lying about it is something that has happened with depressing regularity. He doesn’t even change his opinion when Israel just quickly admitted to having bombed a church just the other day. He probably won’t even reconsider once Israel admits that it was one of their bombs (because only they really have that kind of firepower; if Hamas had it, Israelis would be in a good deal more danger than they currently are). Greenfield considers none of this because he’s been in a blind rage for weeks now. It’s unclear whether he’ll ever come back. He’s doubling down again and again.

Humanitarian crisis worsens in Gaza, as Biden describes civilian casualties as “the price of waging a war” by Jordan Shilton (WSWS)

“The global charity Oxfam criticised the Israeli government Wednesday for using “starvation as a weapon of war.” Noting that a mere 2 percent of normal food deliveries had reached the Gaza Strip since October 9, the charity pointed out that local supplies could not be distributed due to a lack of fuel and damaged roads from the Israeli bombardment. Food storage is also proving impossible, since refrigerators are not operating due to the absence of electricity. The lack of power, combined with incessant Israeli air strikes, has forced many bakeries and supermarkets to close, making it even harder to obtain food.”

“There are only three litres of clean water available per person in the Gaza Strip, just one-fifth of the 15 litres the UN says is the bare minimum necessary for populations facing a humanitarian crisis. The trickle of aid making its way across the Rafah border crossing includes lentils, flour and other dry goods, which are useless for a population lacking the water to prepare them.”

“Speaking alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese Wednesday, Biden declared, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed.

““It’s the price of waging a war.””

Dreist: UN-Chef Guterres behauptet, Israel-Palästina-Konflikt habe schon vor dem 7. Oktober existiert (Der Postillon)

““Dabei weiß doch jeder, dass vor dem 7. Oktober 2023 alles total supi war in den israelisch-palästinensischen Beziehungen”, widerspricht Nahost-Kenner Bernhard Adriani. “Es herrschten Friede, Freude und, ja, auch Eierkuchen zwischen diesen beiden Volksgruppen, bevor es zu dem grausamen Terrorangriff kam.””

Israel Has Permanently Lost The Argument by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“I cannot adequately express the immensity of my respect for the many, many, many Jewish voices I’ve seen taking a firm and forceful stand against the Gaza massacre. I’m just over here getting yelled at by strangers online and I find it pretty intense; you’re having much harder arguments with family, with friends, with people you’ve known your whole lives, about something that probably feels a lot more personal for you. You’re out there protesting, taking action and moving the needle, typically with far more skill and incisiveness than anyone else in the world.

“Big, big, big-hearted love to all of you. You amaze me.”

To be clear, I think that the Israeli State has lost the argument, but it had lost it long ago. When Johnstone writes that “[t]here’s no coming back from this,” I think that’s to be interpreted as: there’s no going back to a world in which it’s possible to portray Israel as a peaceful democracy surrounded by enemies against which it valiantly defends itself. The atrocities in Palestine over the last 40 years—just they way they’re made to live, as stateless people within the confines of another country that doesn’t recognize them as people—can no longer be reasonably papered over. The U.S. still gets away with most people not knowing how it treats its Native Americans; Canada also still enjoys a reputation as a “good guy”, despite its horrific treatment of its First People. Australia also somehow stays clean, despite its near-eradication of its Aboriginals.

Russia attacked Ukraine, which tarnishes its reputation as a level-headed, designated enemy. They have to own that.

Israel, right now, is doing a terrible job of managing its image to cover up its human-rights abuses. The people of Israel have to own this and move past it. The people of the U.S. should do the same for their country’s many transgressions. Israel has to grant full citizenship and rights to Palestinians. They cannot just take and take and take, rewarding the absolute worst members of their society with other people’s land and houses. That’s madness. It’s insupportable.

Oil And Gas Lobbyists Happy To Fill In Rest Of Nation On Who Mike Johnson Is (The Onion)

“While outsiders may not be familiar with the congressman, Johnson is already a bit of a celebrity in our industries for consistently putting our needs for fewer regulations over those of his constituents. And he does so out of the kindness of his heart, plus $240,000 in campaign contributions since 2018. Where other people see an anonymous, backbench lawmaker, we see a paragon of virtue who can help us advance our agenda.”

October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles by Max Blumenthal (The Grayzone)

“Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

“A separate report published in Haaretz noted that the Israeli military was “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base was filled with Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers at the time.”

“According to Haaretz, the army was only able to restore control over Be’eri after admittedly “shelling” the homes of Israelis who had been taken captive. “The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri residents were killed,” the paper chronicled.”

“Video filmed by uniformed Hamas gunmen makes it clear they intentionally shot many Israelis with Kalashnikov rifles on October 7. However, the Israeli government has not been content to rely on verified video evidence. Instead, it continues to push discredited claims of “beheaded babies” while distributing photographs of “bodies burned beyond recognition” to insist that militants sadistically immolated their captives, and even raped some before torching them alive.”

“[…] the mounting evidence of friendly fire orders handed down by Israeli army commanders strongly suggests that at least some of the most jarring images of charred Israeli corpses, Israeli homes reduced to rubble and burned out hulks of vehicles presented to Western media were, in fact, the handiwork of tank crews and helicopter pilots blanketing Israeli territory with shells, cannon fire and Hellfire missiles.”

Those people are already dead, their houses destroyed. However, it is valuable to determine who actually killed them. It’s important, no? If there are strong suspicions—as reported in one of Israel’s own leading newspapers—that Israel caused much of the destruction itself, that would go a long way to explaining the level of destruction that even Hamas was, by their own admission, surprised at having been able to wreak. If Israel immolated its own people in order to blame the destruction on Hamas, that provides a lot of fuel for the theory that Israel’s having been surprised by the Hamas attack was merely a subterfuge intended to convince us to allow them to finish off the ethnic cleansing of their lands. I’ll wait for more information, of course, but I am already wondering what those whose righteous anger has been fueled by these images and videos of Hamas war crimes would do were they to discover that much of what they believe had been done to Israelis by Palestinian terrorists were, in face, done by the Israeli state. Would they turn their ire on the Israeli state? Or would there be a massive disconnect? A short-circuit?

“The 2011 swap for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured five years prior and released in exchange for 1027 prisoners, provided clear inspiration for Al-Aqsa Flood. By storming military bases and kibbutzes, the Palestinian militants aimed to capture as many Israeli soldiers and civilians as possible, and bring them back to Gaza alive.”

“According to Haaretz, the commander of the Gaza Division, Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, “entrenched himself in the division’s subterranean war room together with a handful of male and female soldiers, trying desperately to rescue and organize the sector under attack. Many of the soldiers, most of them not combat personnel, were killed or wounded outside. The division was compelled to request an aerial strike against the [Erez Crossing] base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.””

“By 10:30 AM, according to an account the military gave to the Israeli news outlet Mako, “most of the [Palestinian] forces from the original invasion wave had already left the area for Gaza.” But with the rapid collapse of the Israeli military’s Gaza Division, looters, common onlookers and low-level guerrillas not necessarily under the command of Hamas flowed freely into Israel.”

“Yasmin Porat, the hostage who survived a standoff at Be’eri, described how a Hamas militant tied her partner’s hands behind his back. After the militant surrendered, using her as a human shield to ensure his safety, she saw her partner lying on the ground, still alive. She stated that Israeli security forces “undoubtedly” killed him and the other hostages as they opened fire on the remaining militants inside, including with tank shells.”

“Among the most gruesome videos of the aftermath of October 7, also published on the Telegram account of South Responders, shows a car full of charred corpses (below) at the entrance of Kibbutz Be’eri. The Israeli government has portrayed these casualties as Israeli victims of sadistic Hamas violence. However, the melted steel body and collapsed roof of the car, and the comprehensively scorched corpses inside, evidence a direct hit from a Hellfire missile.”

“[…] the young woman appeared to have been killed instantly by a powerful blast. And she seemed to have been removed from the car in which she was seated – and which may have belonged to a captor from Gaza. The vehicle was comprehensively destroyed and situated on a dirt field, as many others attacked by Apache helicopters were. She was scantily clad with her legs spread apart.

“Though she had attended the Nova electronic music festival, where many female attendees dressed in skimpy attire, and her parted limbs were typical of bodies with rigor mortis, Israeli pundits and officials ran with the claim she had been raped.

“But the allegations of sexual assault have so far proven baseless. Israeli army spokesman Mickey Edelstein insisted to reporters at the October 23 press briefing that “we have evidence” of rape, but when asked for proof, he told the Times of Israel, “we cannot share it.”

“Was this young woman yet another casualty of the Israeli military’s friendly fire orders? Only an independent investigation can determine the truth.”

If not the truth, it could eliminate what is definitely not true or what cannot be proven.

“Whether or not Israel is intentionally killing its captive citizens in Gaza, it has proven strangely allergic to their immediate release. On October 22, Israel initially rejected an offer from Hamas to free Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old Israeli peace activist, and her 79-year-old friend, Nurit Cooper. When the two were released a day later, video showed Liftshitz clasping hands with a Hamas militant and intoning “Shalom” to him as he escorted her out of Gaza. During a press conference that day, she described the humane treatment she received from her captors.”

I don’t speak Hebrew, so I can’t verify that her daughter translated for her correctly during her press conference. You also can’t rule out that she’s saying nice things because she hopes for further humane treatment for her still-captured husband. On the other hand, if she’d really been horribly treated, it’s perhaps unlikely that she would hope for better treatment for her husband if she says the right words. She seemed sincere, but I also don’t really have my thumb on the pulse of Israeli cultural signals, to say nothing of how an 95-year-old woman would act in that situation.

“The spectacle of Lifshitz’s release was treated as a propaganda disaster by the Israeli government’s spinmeisters, with officials grumbling that allowing her to speak publicly was a grave “mistake.”

“The Israeli military was no less displeased by her sudden freedom. As the Times of Israel reported, “The army is concerned that further hostage releases by Hamas could lead the political leadership to delay a ground incursion or even halt it midway.””

Ok. So Israel’s not denying the translation, just ruing that it ever happened. They need to keep the wind in the sails for an attack that will finally drive the Palestinians out of their country. They fear that the weak-willed populace will lose their nerve if the enemy isn’t sufficiently hideous or if the task is too heinous. He who stares into the abyss will find the abyss stares back at him, do you become what you hate in order to defeat it? and so forth.

They Let Humanitarian Aid In. Then They Bombed It So That Gaza Would Starve by Tareq S. Hajjaj (Scheer Post)

“One of the bakeries targeted in Nuseirat refugee camp had just received a huge shipment of flour from UNRWA, which had agreed with the bakery to sell the bread from the flour at half-price for the camp residents. UNRWA had just finished unloading the shipment, which was meant to cover the needs of the entire Nuseirat area, when the bakery was bombed and completely destroyed. They aren’t only targeting people and homes. They’re letting in aid, and then they destroy it before it reaches the people who need it. It’s calculated and deliberate. It’s meant to exterminate the civilian population.”

Without water, having flour is not as useful as it sounds, either.

Journalism & Media

Selbstgleichschaltung auf allen Kanälen by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Der größte Unterschied zum Medienwesen im Dritten Reich ist jedoch, dass heute kein Kollege mehr „von oben“ gezwungen werden muss, irgendetwas zu schreiben, an das er nicht glaubt. Man glaubt heute, was man schreibt. Da ist kein Zwang nötig. Politik und Medien befinden sich in einer toxischen Rückkoppelung.”

“Wie es so weit kommen konnte, dass Teile des deutschen Volkes sich vor etwas mehr als 80 Jahren einen Krieg geradezu herbeigesehnt haben, beschreibt er in „Von Bismarck zu Hitler“ sehr anschaulich. Wie viele andere Historiker schreibt auch Haffner dabei den Journalisten einen großen Teil der Verantwortung zu.”

100% correct, in all war-like countries, e.g., U.S. and Israel. The media do their best to train people not only not to meddle, but not to want to meddle.

For a Century, the Frankfurt School Has Studied How Domination Works in Modern Societies by Marc Ortmann (Jacobin)

“In the early years before the Nazis came to power, Horkheimer and his colleagues conducted research to understand why the socialist revolution did not happen as Marx had predicted. Through their studies on family, personality, and authority, they discovered that a significant portion of the working class did not identify with the idea of a socialist revolution, but rather with conservative political views.”

Middle Easterners Have Words For The Western Press Who’ve Been Lying About Them by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they’ve been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say.”

“Circumstances aren’t peaceful just because we are used to them. Just because you are able to go about your daily routine without major disruption doesn’t mean someone isn’t being horrifically abused by the status quo which makes your way of life possible. Peace doesn’t look like everyone complying with the status quo regardless of its abusiveness, it looks like the absence of abuse.”

Dismantle The Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Westminster Declaration (Racket News)

“Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.”

“As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.”

“Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.”

“We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. [Emphasis in original] Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.”

“By labelling certain political or scientific positions as ‘misinformation’ or ‘malinformation,’ our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defence against disinformation.”

“In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error. ”

“As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.”

I like the end. It reminds me of this quotation.

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Third Edition Paperback – January 1, 2008 (Amazon)

The authoritative book on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict—the only book on it—is not available.

Amy Klobuchar, You Suck by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Patience is wearing thin with the relentless determination of government figures — whether U.S. Cyber Command or a Minnesota Senator — to weed out independent media from the digital landscape. It’s not enough to have 99% of the informational space? They need all of it?”

“The Post repeatedly claimed to be describing social media activity of “online Russian bots” who were mostly ordinary users in the U.S. and other Western countries. That’s actual conspiracy theory that they wouldn’t have had to admit without Substack, and they have the cheek to seek a ban on us.

“These people are the worst. I would pay money to watch them all mauled by bears.”

The Slow Death of Authenticity in an Attention Economy by Cory Zue

“I have carefully curated a list of human beings who I know by name, and whose ideas and actions interest me. But authenticity is often at odds with growth.

“Why? Well to grow you need to be noticed. To be noticed, you need to stand out. And to stand out is—usually—inauthentic. Yes, we all say and do noteworthy things, but not every day. To do or say noteworthy things every day involves some degree of forcedness, repetition, or trying. The opposite of authenticity.”

Science & Nature

Wigner’s Many Friends: Quantum Mechanics And Reality by Jochen Szangolies (3 Quarks Daily)

“There is much philosophical discussion regarding what the ‘quantum state’ of a physical system actually is: does it describe physical ‘reality’ (there’s that word again!), or does it merely give some account of our knowledge, or is it something else entirely?”

“But this in itself causes complications. After all, in a physical world, an experimenter, even a conscious one, is just some configuration of particles—what should be special about that particular pattern? (More recently, an answer to this has been proposed, using tools from integrated information theory —essentially, postulating that the amount of integrated information, a measure for consciousness, that a state contains dictates its likelihood to spontaneously collapse.)”

“From this point of view, what the Frauchiger-Renner Gedankenexperiment really tells us is the impossibility of observer-independent facts, or the impossibility of a fully objective world independent of any subject within. There is not only a single story that can be told about the world; rather, there exists an inevitable patchwork of stories that can’t be unified into a single, coherent whole. As in Kurosawa’s classic Rashōmon, truth is not a monolithic entity, but instead a multifaceted concept reflecting, to some extent, always the faces of those trying to peer into it.”

NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12 billion miles away by Joshua Hawkins (BGR)

“ NASA has completed a critical software update for Voyager 2 that will help keep it running even longer. The update, which took almost 18 hours to complete, was transmitted to help Voyager 2 avoid the same problem that its sibling, Voyager 1, experienced last year. Back in 2022, NASA reported issues with readings from Voyager 1’s AACS, which stands for attitude articular and control system.”

Art & Literature

What’s a Predicate and Who Cares, Anyway? by Rebecca Baumgartner (3 Quarks Daily)

“The fact that we only truly need to understand grammar terms when we get around to learning a foreign language shows precisely why it’s unnecessary to do so in our native language. Learning a foreign language is an active and explicit process, so it makes sense that you’d need explicit instruction in grammatical structures (although even then, immersion can get you pretty far).”

Kind of? I guess? Does this author even know people who speak multiple languages?

“I think we underestimate kids if we assume that they won’t understand why one formulation is more interesting than the other, and what makes it so, without the baggage of grammar. We can trust them to organically grow into more sophisticated writers as they become more sophisticated readers and thinkers. There’s no need to fall back on overwrought metalinguistic explanations or misapplications of prescriptivist Latin and Greek instruction.”

I don’t know which kids you’ve been talking to, but they’re definitely more engaged than I’ve experienced.

“In fact, this perverse obsession with knowing how to circle subjects and underline objects rather than learning how to think and write critically is part of a larger trend in education of teaching to the test and using education as a means to an end. Dissecting sentences fits snugly into a curriculum based on grading rubrics, rote memorization, and a fetishization of standard formulations (I’m looking at you, five-paragraph essay ) at the expense of true critical thinking or exploration.”

Oh 100% agree.

“The instructional focus should be on giving them as much exposure to compelling texts and chances to practice their writing as possible, with the assessment criteria being primarily about higher-order things like setting a tone, developing an authorial voice, experimenting and playing with different styles and genres, building an argument, using evidence, finding reputable sources, and letting their personality and interests shine through their writing.”

Slow your roll there. Most kids can’t read, to say nothing of “finding their authorial voice.”

Killers of the Flower Moon by Brian Tallerico (RogerEbert.com)

“After being pushed off their property to the presumed wasteland of Oklahoma around the turn of the last century, the Osage Nation was stunned to find itself the recipient of the earthly gift of oil, making them the wealthiest group of people in the country per capita relatively overnight. Naturally, the people who had claimed a country they never owned wanted a piece of this action, leading to a battle for land in the region, […]”

““Killers of the Flower Moon” may not be a traditional gangster picture, but it’s completely in tune with the stories of corrupt, violent men that Scorsese has explored for a half-century. And yet there’s also a sense of age in Scorsese’s work here, the feeling that he’s using this horrifying true story to interrogate how we got to where we are a hundred years later. How did we allow blood to fertilize the soil of this country?”

It is who we are. The worst among us come to the fore. Think of the hill of buffalo skulls (Snopes).

“Through their story, the film doesn’t just present injustice but reveals how intrinsic it was to the formation of wealth and inequity in this country. It hums with commentary on how this nonchalant violence against people deemed lesser pervaded a century of horror. The references to the Tulsa Massacre and the KKK aren’t incidental. It’s all part of the big picture—one of people who subjugate because it’s so easy for them to do so.”

It’s the story of capitalism unbound by any real moral force.

“There are times when it feels like “Killers of the Flower Moon” could spin out into a broader political statement, but the performances, especially Gladstone’s, keep the film in the truth of character. The whole ensemble understands this element, playing the reality of the situation instead of treating it like a history lesson. Mollie Burkhardt didn’t know her saga would help found the FBI or bring light to injustice a century later. She just wanted to survive and love like so many who were robbed of those basic human rights.”

Our Dumb Century by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“[…] the real force of anti-Shakespearism, and of anti-humanism more generally, is coming straight from from the purportedly apolitical stats-mongerers and self-styled rationalists who sincerely believe of themselves that they come bearing not ideology, but only “tools”, not world-flattening ignorance, but only “methods”.”

“The most astounding thing to me about both Hanania’s and Bankman-Fried’s conceit is that it betrays no awareness, at all, of the way genius accrues over the course of centuries. Genius is not simply an intrinsic feature of works of literature, given at the moment they appear and stable from that moment on. It results in part from the particular reception-history the work receives, which cannot ever be predicted. The beauty of a work is to a great extent taphonomical, a product of the way it gets knocked around after the author’s death, the way its turns of phrase enter into our language and our habits of thinking.”

“[…] there might be someone writing today who is “better” than Shakespeare, whatever the hell that means. But no real meaning can attach to that claim for another 400 years or so.”

“The far more challenging task is to write in a way that motivates others to seek to write like you. This is something Shakespeare has clearly accomplished, over and over again, across several centuries.”

“Those from my own discipline, philosophy, mostly just come out to check the “public philosophy” box that is now included in the tenure-and-promotion process, with all the transparent eagerness of a high-school senior volunteering at a soup kitchen, thinking to himself the while: “I’m gonna put this on my résumé”. And when they get out there, before the public eye, what do they do? They mostly fumble the initial introduction with an irrelevant appeal to authority (“As a philosopher…”), and then proceed to recite orthodoxies that no one could possibly be surprised to hear from them, and that seldom seem to be the fruit of any real hard-won specialist expertise.”

“The present essay will probably be classified as a “rant”, by those who came into consciousness in our present dumb century, and have never heard of “jeremiads”, or “philippics”, or “diatribes”, or “screeds”. Those same people will call everything they like “brilliant”, and everything they don’t like “vile”. They will never yet have met a thesaurus.”

“[…] but we all know, at this point, that social media are the great mass around which all other discursive opportunities are orbiting, and the range of what may be said within these orbits is constantly being diminished, pulled downward by the gravitational force now at our society’s center.”

I for one am perfectly capable of ignoring it. I understand that Smith-Ruiu lives in a world where social media is more central to success, and I suppose it really does seem to be this way—that “social media are the great mass around which all other discursive opportunities are orbiting”—but we should be raging against that dying of the light, rather than accepting it. Yes, yes, the first step in fighting it is acknowledging it, but Smith-Ruiu already did that in his book.

“I would say that in my view the Hamas attack was atrocious and evil, and I’d add that if Israel conducted itself as I would wish, it would confound expectations and immediately set about investing in the very place the attacks came from, raising the standard of living, building up schools and hospitals, offering scholarships to Gazans, etc. That is of course not what Israel is going to do, and things are just going to keep being awful. I think it’s obvious that Hamas sought to goad Israel into retaliating with excessive force, and that therefore it is the worst thing Israel can do, strategically and morally, to react as Hamas expected.”

“If you think you can do away with these works, as our own dumb century thinks, as even our universities now think, you very quickly find that you are left in a world where only our small-scale loyalties remain. We have Kamala Harris, who can show you her art collection, and tell you that this vase was made by a gay African-American male, and that silkscreen was made by a Japanese woman, but can tell you nothing, at all, about the aesthetic properties of these works.”

“With no proper cultivation of an imaginative faculty that can enable you to get out of your own plight and at least momentarily into someone else’s, all you’ve got left are absolutes —settlers vs. natives, for example— with no resources available to move beneath these absolutes and remind yourself of how much flows from our common experience of humanity. This was just so obvious to so many of us in the previous century. I may be exaggerating, but to me the absolute viciousness on display on social media over the past week really is what a world without Shakespeare looks like.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Half A Million Kinksters Can’t Be Wrong by Aella (Asterisk)

“I don’t know if you know how survey-taking norms work, but trying to get someone to answer 1,000 items is absolutely unhinged. It’s like asking someone to meet for coffee and then forcing them to stay for 12 hours of small talk. And the final cherry on the top of this sundae of horror was that the size of sample you need to make findings significant in the traditional sense increases with the number of questions you’re asking (or, more specifically, correlations you’re checking). So I needed a big sample size — many thousands, at least. But how do you get many thousands of people to sit down and answer a thousand questions?”

“First off was shortening the amount of time to take the survey, which sounds simple but was agonizing. I couldn’t let go of any of my precious questions. Each question I considered cutting meant I was releasing all of the other correlations I asked about into the wind. I felt like a hoarder on a TV show, wailing as I watched Marie Kondo slowly approach my front lawn.”

“I also make my research a community effort — not only do I share my raw data and code, I regularly crowdsource questions from the public about what to study next. What hypotheses do people have that they want tested? I do drafts of survey questions in X polls, to see how commenters will inevitably misinterpret my wording and thus inform me on how to write the question more clearly in the future. I hope this process helps vanquish the sacredness of research.”

“I feel such care and compassion for people walking around with these strange arousal patterns in their head that often cause such alienation. They’re shunned or ignored socially, but also by researchers — because of the logistical difficulty, because institutional review boards make approval hard, because sexuality is a subject rife with potential triggers, or because people simply don’t want to investigate things that aren’t trendy or socially sympathetic.”

The Good and The Popular by Martin Butler (3 Quarks Daily)

“Similarly, with regard to the arts, the unashamed elitist might argue that good art is by its very nature difficult, requiring education, intellect, and effort. Popularity requires less. In line with Plato, Mill argued that there are two qualitatively distinct pleasures, the lower and the higher, the lower pandering to popularity, the higher more difficult to access. According to this way of thinking, the artist, writer or musician who follows high artistic ideals better not give up the day job, and it’s folly to expect the general paying public to appreciate such ideals even if the work produced is of the highest calibre.”

“At the other end of the spectrum are those who deny that there is any intrinsic distinction between the good and the less so, and that the only way to make a meaningful distinction is simply to count the ‘likes’, so to speak. Everything is simply a matter of opinion, so if we want to identify something as good, popularity is the only ‘objective’ means by which we can do it. As in the commercial world, ‘the customer is always right’, and the popular is the good. It is mere snobbery to pretend otherwise, a snobbery I could be accused of with my distaste for the aspiration to be an influencer. For according to this view there is only one kind of good influencer, and that is a successful one.”

“[…] the popular internet influencer who has researched what is likely to gain the most likes and carefully choreographed their internet posts on this basis has no other concern than maximising followers. Contrast this with a musician of some sort who has a particular musical vision which inspires them to write and perform their own songs on YouTube. Here the musician’s conception of the good (their musical vision) resonates with others and popularity follows obliquely from the realisation of their creativity.”

“Surely even those of the highest integrity who open themselves to public scrutiny – whether artists, politicians, or internet influencers – will inevitably candy-coat their ’products’ to make them more appealing. And is anything wrong with this? Probably not, but this is quite different from the case where candy-coat is all there is.”

“[…] internet influencing is essentially a commercial enterprise where the logic of ‘the customer is always right’ can so easily prevail, so if this becomes the dominant culture within democratic politics we are in danger of losing any concept of the good which is beyond the popular. And here the problem is not so much about not knowing how to tell the difference, but the dissolution of the distinction all together. Politics then becomes just another commercial project, a competition between who can get the most likes. And that surely is something to be concerned about.”

We’re More Ghosts than People by Hanif Abdurraqib (The Paris Review)

“My pal Franny has a poem about the end of the world where she says that the world has already ended well before we arrived, and will end again many times through our lives, and I think I believe in that, too. That each time there is a massive rupture in some corners of collective living, the world has ended and started over again. Each time I feel pushed beyond a place of past comforts to a point where I realize I can no longer return, a world has ended and started over again. Like most things, it is easier for me to consider the apocalypse as a series of small movements instead of a single event.”

I’d never thought of it so fatalistically. I think of them as “phases”. Not really “birth”, “school”, “work”, “death”, but childhood (0–18), college (18–22), New York City (22–30), move abroad (30–), found a business (33–49), Uster (49–).

“I fill my satchel with berries and plants that I never consume or craft anything with. I walk into the saloons and play card games for hours, winning or losing cents at a time. I drink and stumble around dirt roads with no aim. And I seek out sunsets. This is my favorite part. The mountains along the virtual world’s western landscape are the best for this. I climb up one, set up camp, and watch as the sun goes down. I allow Arthur to fold into these daily routines, which strip hours away from my own real-life daily routines. And this is, I think, how I will leave it. This is what the game will be for me now. I can untangle myself from the desire to save Arthur if I stop considering the inevitable.”

“I sit on my couch for an hour without moving, and make a man sit at the edge of a cliff without moving, both of us watching a fake sky drown in color, both of us not yet sure when we’re going to die or how much time we have left. There are probably better ways to attempt the playing of God, but there are certainly far worse.”

Accelerationism is Terrorism by Kevin Munger (Crooked Timber)

“The dominant meta-program of today is, of course, the market: the ultimate tool for transforming the world into symbols (prices). Venture capitalists like Andreessen are programming the programmers of software to program the users—but they are themselves programmed by the market.”

“The manifesto notes that “Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system.” That’s true for a vapid definition of “centralized,” but mainstream economists like Ronald Coase and Herbert Simon have long observed that the idealized “price-taking” firm is in reality quite rare, and that large, hierarchical organizations structure much of the economy.”

“Andreessen is more interested in the right hand of cybernetics—he specifically and repeatedly endorses the philosophy of Nick Land, the most famous proponent of Accelerationism. I can’t believe it’s come to this. Thiel famously said that capitalism and democracy are incompatible, and chose the former. Land’s Accelerationism says that (techno)capitalism and humanity are incompatible, and yet he still chose the former. So make no mistake. Accelerationism is terrorism.”

“Technological accelerationism aims to eliminate the human and instantiate the world of the inhuman functionary. The current rate of change is already incompatible with human dignity, and they want to speed it up.”

“Twenty years ago, social media companies started telling us “Hey! Here’s a new digital media thing you can use!” We individually used it, or didn’t. And then we all used it, because we had to . Just like the car. The existence of the technology restricts human freedom and agency. And now the damage has been done, social media has reshaped everything and to ban it today would itself be intolerably rapid change.”

It’s not impossible to avoid both, but you’re definitely swimming against a strong current, especially in the U.S., where you basically need a car, Facebook, and WhatsApp to even apply to, qualify for, or interview for most jobs.

“I argue that we should ban LLMs using first-person pronouns, both to preserve human dignity and to demonstrate to ourselves and to the Accelerationists that such action is possible.”

“The idea of progress, pernicious in all fields when applied without caution, has been disastrous here also. It assumes that man’s vital desires are always and that the only thing that varies in the course of time is the progressive advancement towards their fulfillment. But this is as wrong as wrong can be. The idea of human life, the profile of well-being, has changed countless times…The fact that we ourselves are urged on by an irresistible hunger for inventions does not justify the inference that it has always been thus.”

Let us not mistake change for progress. This is a myth sold to us by those who wish to change this to benefit themselves.

303 Creative at Hamilton College by Dale Carpenter (Reason)

“I was amazed at the level of sophistication and engagement of the students at Hamilton College. The perceptiveness of their questions was remarkable (student questions start about the 1:15:00 mark). What’s more, a large group of students stuck around for even more thoughtful discussion off-camera for about an hour—until we were expelled by maintenance personnel. I’ve rarely encountered law students at one of these kinds of events as genuinely curious and open to new ideas as these undergraduates were. Bravo to Hamilton for whatever it is doing to select students and fuel their intellectual fires.”

Technology

So Opera has a new icon in their beta version. It’s no longer the iconic red; instead, it’s now black-and-white.

It looks quite awful, so I wanted to find out if anyone knew how serious they were about it. Even though I’ve been an Opera user since version 3.x, back in the late 90s, and I’ve been a Reddit user for over 17 years, I’ve never visited the /r/operabrowser sub-reddit.

I quickly found a one-day-old topic called They should fire the design team! (Reddit) … which seemed like it might be related.

The introductory text seemed a bit incoherent, though, and more general than I would have liked.

After a few comments, some users chimed in with,

I backed away slowly and closed the page.

Not your average meeting series, episode 3

Teams bullshit statistics

“Did you know 78% of positive memories at work are from video meetings?”

Did you know that you can just make up statistics, state them authoritatively, and get people to start citing them for you? 98% of people will just repeat statistics that they hear without inquiring about sources, methodology, or even thinking about how one could even get the statistic.

• Does 78% gel with your own experience?
• If even possible to determine that number, to whom does it apply? People who work 100% remotely?

This stat is bullshit.

Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 by Simon Willison

Willison prompts “A super posh pelican with a monocle watching the Monaco F1” and gets the following ideas.

So far, so good. It’s really wonderful that you can get something that’s not completely random garbage. However, the bird is only watching the race in the top-right picture. In the first and fourth, it’s definitely facing the fourth wall. It seems to be posh in all of the pictures, to one degree or another. The first prompt asks for a “Photo”, but that doesn’t look like a photo. Still, cars, coastline, pelican. OK.

Then he says “More like the first one please”:

I guess it interpreted that it should stick the monocle. Willison is over the moon about how it really got what he meant, but … the three new pictures look a lot more like the second picture than the first one (which features the whole pelican). Still doing reasonably well but, if this were a human, you’d be pretty annoyed that it’s wasting your time. It didn’t understand what you wanted and just made more pictures, but not “more pictures like the first one.”

Next up is “Add a walrus.”

In response, he writes that “[t]hat second one is amazing. [emphasis in original]” Does he mean the one where the walrus is photo-bombed into the foreground? That’s not really amazing, is it? The walrus isn’t watching, but neither is the pelican—but he didn’t ask it to make the walrus “watch”, just to “add” one, which is, I guess, exactly what it did. The last one looks nice, but they’re not watching it at all (just “attending”?), and the background contains speedboats instead of F1 cars. In the third one, the F1 car is in the water, but that’s OK, I guess?

He continues playing with it, and being amazed at how it manages to kind of respond to his input, but shouldn’t we expect better? Maybe he’s amazed that it works at all, but we’ve got to get a bit more critical of this stuff—otherwise, it will continue to just generate medicocre images that only vaguely fulfill the requirements. It’s the difference between asking a child, an apprentice, or a professional painter for a picture of a tree. You wouldn’t be at all satisfied with the output of a child from an apprentice, nor with that of an apprentice from a professional. I suppose my expectations are higher.

Programming

Does Go Have Subtyping? by Bob Nystrom (StuffWithStuff)

“This is why Go only treats two slice types as assignable if they have the exact same element types. In PL parlance, slice types are invariant with respect to their element types. And, for a mutable data structure like slices, that rule makes sense. (A reasonable person might wonder then why Java and C# don’t have this rule and instead say that array types are assignable if their element types are. And then, because as you can see, it isn’t safe to do so, they have to add runtime checks if you try to stuff an element of the wrong type into the array.) So, OK, it makes sense for slice (and array) types to be invariant. What about function types?”

Or you could say that Go sacrifices usability for consistency, in order to prevent errors that almost never come up in practice.

“If a field of a struct is itself some struct type, the inner struct’s fields are splatted directly into the surrounding struct’s contiguous memory. If you have a local variable of a struct type, the fields are stored right on the stack (unless you take a pointer to the struct which escapes the function).”

Same in C#, though, just to be clear.

“In Go, the distinction between stored inline versus stored indirectly is made at each use site. That leads to some additional complexity for the user: they always have to think “should I use an interface, pointer, or struct type here?”, but it gives them more fine-grained control over how they spend memory and pointer indirection costs.”

Eiffel is like this too: expanded.

“There is potentially something clever you could do by supporting multiple entrypoints to functions for each pair of source and destination types, but with multiple parameters you quickly run the risk of exponential code size explosions.”

Swift did something like this for its generics-preserving ABI.

“If you didn’t care about how Go could be efficiently implemented because you were treating it purely as an abstraction, then this is a good way to look at it and compare it to other languages.”

That’s needlessly ugenerous. If you’re comparing the relative expressive power, then it’s important. Performance is a separate characteristic.

“Of the three, variance is probably the least valuable for users, so I think that’s a pretty smart trade-off.”

Disagree.

Don’t use DISTINCT as a “join-fixer” by Aaron Bertrand (Red Gate)

“[…] while we could spend a lot of time tuning indexes on all the involved tables to make that sort hurt less, this multi-table join is always going to produce rows you never ultimately need. Think about SQL Server’s job: yes, it needs to return correct results, but it also should do that in the most efficient way possible . Reading all the data (and then sorting it), only to throw away some or most of it, is very wasteful.”

“When I know I need to “join” to tables but only care about existence of rows and not any of the output from those tables, I turn to EXISTS. I also try to eliminate looking up values that I know are going to be the same on every row. In this case, I don’t need to join to Categories every time if CategoryID is effectively a constant.”

“There was another interesting use case I wrote about a few years ago that showed how changing DISTINCT to GROUP BY – even though it carries the same semantics and produces the same results – can help SQL Server filter out duplicates earlier and have a serious impact on performance.”

At the boundaries, static types are illusory by Mark Seemann (Ploeh)

“An application can talk to the outside world in multiple ways: It may read or write a file, access shared memory, call operating-system APIs, send or receive network packets, etc. Usually you get to program against higher-level abstractions, but ultimately the application is dealing with various binary protocols.”

“text” is just an alias for binary files that are usually UTF-8-encoded, but used to be ASCII-encoded, way, way back in the day.

“The bottom line is that at a sufficiently low level of abstraction, what goes in and out of your application has no static type stronger than an array of bytes.”

“An interaction at the application boundary is expected to follow some kind of protocol . This is even true if you’re reading a text file. In these modern times, you may expect a text file to contain Unicode , but have you ever received a file from a legacy system and have to deal with its EBCDIC encoding? Or an ASCII file with a code page different from the one you expect? Or even just a file written on a Unix system, if you’re on Windows, or vice versa?”

“Here I read a database row r and unquestioning translate it to my domain model. Should I do that? What if the database schema has diverged from my application code?”

Is having an outdated schema an error or something to be handled? Could the db be out of date? yes. If someone changes the schema whiled we’re running. Should we handle that gracefully? Or crash, restart, verify schema, migrate (or not).

“I’m fond of making the implicit explicit. This often helps improve understanding, because it helps delineate conceptual boundaries.”

“A static type system is a useful tool that enables you to model how your application should behave. The types don’t really exist at run time. Even though .NET code (just to point out an example) compiles to a binary representation that includes type information , once it runs, it JITs to machine code. In the end, it’s just registers and memory addresses, or, if you want to be even more nihilistic, electrons moving around on a circuit board.”

That’s correct. “bytes” are another abstraction, on top of two’s-complement, little-endian representation, on top of bits of silicon that represent either a 1 or a 0.

“In statically typed languages, we effectively need to pretend that the type system is good enough, strong enough, generally trustworthy enough that it’s safe to ignore the underlying reality. We work with, if you will, a provisional truth that serves as a user interface to the computer.”

“You can view receiving, handling, parsing, or validating input as implementing a protocol, as I’ve already discussed above. Such protocols are application-specific or domain-specific rather than general-purpose protocols, but they are still protocols.”

“You can write statically-typed, composable parsers. Some of them are quite elegant, but the good ones explicitly model that parsing of input is error-prone. When input is well-formed, the result may be a nicely encapsulated, statically-typed value, but when it’s malformed, the result is one or more error values.”

“This question of trust doesn’t have to imply security concerns. Rather, systems evolve and errors happen. Every time you interact with an external system, there’s a risk that it has become misaligned with yours. Static types can’t protect you against that.”

How Custom Property Values are Computed by Stephanie Eckles (Modern CSS Solutions)

“[…] once the browser determines the cascaded value, which is partially based on syntactic correctness, it will trash any other candidates. For syntactically correct custom properties, the browser essentially assumes the absolutized value will succeed in being valid.”

“This leads to an inability for custom properties to “fail early”. When there is a failure, the resulting value will be either an inherited value from an ancestor or the initial value for the property.”

“One way to discover the initial value for any property is to search for it on MDN, and look for the “Formal Definition” section which will list the initial value, as well as whether the value is eligible for inheritance.”

“To think about it another way: within the cascade, values can be inherited by descendents, but can’t pass values back to their ancestors. Essentially this is why the computed custom property value on an ancestor element cannot be modified by a descendent element.”

We’re Bringing Responsive Video Back! by Scott Jehl

“[…] due to the complexity involved in swapping video sources (e.g. matching timecodes, reloading heavy files, etc.), video media is assessed only at page load time, and not again after that when media changes from a browser resize (so it’s not quite like picture). Basically, you’ll need to refresh the page to see the video change.”

Generators are dead, long live coroutines, generators are back (Rust Lang)

Look, I appreciate that it’s not easy exploring the borrow-checker-based memory-allocation and asynchrony model, but if you’re a Rust developer, your head has got to be spinning. Async is so central to programming that it’s honestly difficult to consider programming without it—but in Rust, the syntax is quite complex, as is the logic. I absolutely understand it’s not easy—it’s way easier to do this kind of stuff with a garbage collector.

Anyway, I feel bad for companies and developers that are trying to stay at the forefront of the Rust tech stack right now. They must have whiplash. I’m sure if you’re using it for what it was originally intended, or for non-async programming, it still shines. I wonder how it fares against Zig, though.

Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app by Krzysztof Kowalczyk

“And yet I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without tests, because I did it.

“I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without anyone looking over your code, because I did it.

“If no one uses your app then who cares if it crashes.

“If many people use your app and it crashes, they’ll tell you and then you’ll fix it.”

Those four statements are contradictory. What they’re saying is not that you don’t need testing or code reviews, but that you can get your users to test for you.

I figure the author probably does test their code (everybody tests, even if that just means running the app), but not rigorously or in a way that you could say gives one the security of regression tests.

No-one worth discussing the issue with claims that it’s impossible to write complex code without automated testing. I’m a huge proponent of automated testing, and I wrote a relatively large, cross-platform renderer without a single automated test back in the late 1990s/early 2000s … it just took a long time, and I became increasingly terrified of making changes.

an aborted experiment with server swift by Ted Unangst

“Whenever a new language or framework comes out, people rush to try it, and github and stackoverflow and everywhere else is immediately filled with code samples that work with 1.0. But none of that info gets garbage collected when it becomes outdated, and people write fewer examples for new code, and the new samples have less link juice, with the result that the answers you seek are not the answers you find.”

“You can see the implementation of this extension in the source for HTTP2ErrorCode. But it appears in neither the documentation for HTTP2ErrorCode nor the documentation for ByteBuffer. I’m not sure how I would discover this method in the event that I did want to use it. I’ve been told the documentation simply needs to be rebuilt with the new version of DocC, but at the time of writing, that has not happened.”

“I’m not sure how this scales in a larger project. You use a component, they remove or rename a method, so then you just add it back? And bizarrely, due to the way extensions become globally imported, it may be some invisible dependency you’re using, leaving you unaware you’re using an obsolete method. This seems very likely to lead to chaos.”

“I cannot rule out the possibility that this is somehow my fault, since I don’t know swift that well, or at all really, so maybe this is just what happens when you forget to call await or something like that. But if that’s the case, this is an unfriendly failure mode for a supposedly modern safe language.”

Yeah, I’d have stopped working with it, too.

Fun

The Origin of Guitar Distortion (playing a 1949 Fender Tweed Deluxe… then going kinda nuts) by Rob Scallon (YouTube)

I like this, but I’m always reminded of how non-American I am culturally when I see people spending 75% of a video trying to figure out how much money they could get for things that are absolutely precious to them and that they’re still using. It just wouldn’t occur to me to even try to estimate how much money I could get for my bike. I’m still using it, why would that matter? I suppose that’s at least partially because I’ve been lucky to not have to be desperate for money, if I’m honest. But I also learned early to adjust lifestyle to available income (but I’ve been lucky that that actually worked and I never had to drop “food” or “rent” from the list).

Anyway, … cool video. Beautiful tone on that rig. And stick around for the last three minutes, where there is a definite “Oh hell yes!” moment. Goosebumps. Holy shit that rocked.

Official Swedish dictionary completed after 140 years (Guardian)

“The definitive record of the Swedish language has been completed after 140 years, with the dictionary’s final volume sent to the printer’s last week, its editor said on Wednesday.

“The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB), the Swedish equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, is drawn up by the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prize in literature, and contains 33,111 pages across 39 volumes.

““It was started in 1883 and now we’re done. Over the years 137 full-time employees have worked on it,” Christian Mattsson told AFP.”

“[…] “allergy” which came into the Swedish language around the 1920s but is not in the A volume because it was published in 1893,” Mattsson said.”

Brickbat: Terrorist Tacos? by Charles Oliver (Reason)

“Police in Valence, France, ordered a Chamas Tacos restaurant franchise to turn off its sign or face an administrative closure order. The problem is that the “C” in the sign is not working, and at night it appears to read “Hamas Tacos.” The owner of the restaurant told local media the “C” has not been working for months,”

This made me laugh right out loud.

France has really gone right off the fucking rails, though. Seriously, what a shitshow for a place that can’t shut up about liberté.

Video Games

Space Wreck is a hardcore, combat-optional, break-the-game RPG that clicks by Kevin Purdy (Ars Technica)

Space Wreck Full Release (YouTube)

“To get into a room guarded by a gun-toting security guard, you could, of course, win a shootout with the guard. You could persuade him to step aside. You could disguise yourself. You could, if small enough, climb into a nearby vent and sneak into the room. You could reprogram some nearby security bots to take out the guard for you. Nearly every situation in Space Wreck has this kind of flexibility, and some of them far more.”

“The plot is that you, a worker for an exploitative space mining corp in the not-too-distant future, have barely survived crashing on an installation. You need fuel and a fuel chip for your shuttle. A bunch of people, robots, doors, and puzzles stand in your way. Your build and your strategies determine how you will go through it all: sneaking, computer hacking, crafting and mechanical trickery, melee fighting, shooting, charming, perceptive, or some combination. To a large extent, all of them can work, and all of them are rich options for repeat playthroughs.”

“Things can go terribly wrong, but you should not, must not reload, because trying to get past with a different tactic is the fun.”

Your guide to the guides for fixing the internet by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“A Verified Xbox fan account was complaining this week about the size of women’s butts in Spider-Man 2 compared to Starfield. Apparently, Spider-Man 2 is too woke to give Mary Jane Watson a dump truck. Let gamers make games!!!”