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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming

Public Policy & Politics

Komplette Familie deutscher Staatsbürger im Gazastreifen ausgelöscht – Was sagt die Bundesregierung? by Florian Warweg (NachDenkSeiten)

“Das Auswärtige Amt wollte sich auf Nachfrage der NachDenkSeiten weder näher zu dem Fall äußern noch in irgendeiner Form die Auslöschung einer kompletten Familie deutscher Staatsbürger verurteilen oder deren Tötung aus völkerrechtlicher Perspektive einordnen.”

“Meine Verständnisfrage: Verstehe ich das richtig, dass man grundsätzlich bei der Tötung einer kompletten Familie deutscher Staatsbürger diesen Fall nicht weiter kommentiert, egal ob die Bombardierung mutmaßlich völkerrechtswidrig durch israelisches, russisches, iranisches oder US-amerikanisches Militär vorgenommen wird?”

“Da fände ich eine Klarstellung schon ganz gut auch gerne öffentlich und nicht „unter drei“, ob der Tod deutscher Staatsbürger durch ausländisches Militär, egal welcher Provenienz, von der Bundesregierung thematisiert und kommuniziert wird. Ja oder nein? Das hat sich zumindest für mich durch Ihre Antwort nicht ergeben.”

That New Hunter Biden Indictment by Patrick Lawrence (ScheerPost)

“I do love it when The Times and the corporate media that follow it like pilot fish demonstrate so clearly to us that there is no air whatsoever between them and the powers they are supposed to report upon with the sort of distance Judge Noreika so admirably displayed last summer. It is always a useful reminder that we must not take at face value anything they publish beyond the sports scores and where to find the best corkscrew of 2023.”

“Think about those outlandish hearings in the House last week, when three university presidents were cynically cornered so their inquisitors could frame them as apologists for some imaginary genocide of Jews.”

Gaza & Confronting Power by Patrick Lawrence (ScheerPost)

“Think about these unlawful definitions of anti–Semitism that apologists for Israel want to see adopted as federal law and enforced in universities and a great variety of public institutions. Think about the anti–Semitism hustle, as Ajamu Baraka calls it — these ridiculous but ubiquitous claims that anti–Semitism is suddenly everywhere.”

“This is Rocker developing one of the arguments that make Nationalism and Culture an enduring work. State power and culture — which, to simplify Rocker’s definition, means all that makes humankind human and enables humanity’s survival and advance — are inimical. The state, he argues, cannot ultimately abide forms of spontaneous culture that arise by way of human communities.”

“Absolutist regimes are especially intolerant of authentic culture. In history they are given to destroying all forms of culture in the name of one or another kind of national unity. This is necessary for the continued exercise of power.”

Like China, with their homogenizing of culture (coalescing all to a common language, for example). Assimilation, integration. On the one hand, understandable, as everything else is less efficient if it’s not done. But at what price efficiency? Is is really worth it? Is that our only value? Switzerland preserved Romansch. There’s only a few dozen thousand of native speakers, but it was worth preserving. It’s human culture. What the hell else are we doing with our time, wealth, and resources? Do we really want a society that allows some people to get billions and lets the culture of dozens of thousands just die out because it can’t afford it? Can you think of something stupider? More disingenuous?

“It is no kind of stretch to understand the liberal authoritarian project as a case of state power exerting itself upon those it governs — or rules, as the case comes to be. It is more or less all there — the enforcement of officially decreed versions of all events, the proscribing of all alternative versions, the punishment or banishment of those who deviate even slightly from the orthodoxy, the subservience of media to the state, the mutilation of language to serve the state’s purpose.”

Checks all of the boxes. Always has. It might be worse now because there are always fewer people who rage against it—or, at least, people with any sort of leverage in society.

“[…] the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania were subjected to four hours of abusive questioning pointedly intended to show the rest of us the consequences of maintaining our sanity amid a grotesque psyop to convince us that First Amendments rights must be swept aside as the only way to rid ourselves of some rampant anti–Semitism that now besets us.”

“The U.S. is currently in the chokehold of a monstrous effort to fixate the nation on fears of an entirely hypothetical genocide when a real one is taking place.”

“We learn from this occasion that the censorship regime with which we are now required to live is about more than eliminating or banning speech. Silence is only one of its objectives. It is as much concerned with controlling what it is permissible to say and what the language we speak must mean.”

“[…] it is a measure of America’s swoon into another of its purification rituals. From the 17th century Boston hangings through the various red scares, Russiagate, and all the rest, it is always the same theme: We must remove from among us those elements that are impure.”

“This is done by requiring everyone to denounce or repudiate what they are told to denounce or repudiate, and to do so with prescribed degree of vehemence and illogic. One is otherwise exiled, one or another way, from the circle of the Elect. ”

“Institutions of higher learning are supposed to be the source, or one source, of a healthy society’s dynamism. Now we have money people telling these institutions how to run themselves? This is what decline looks like. This is how America’s official support for apartheid Israel hastens it.”

Well, those are institutions of higher learning with $4B-dollar endowments. They’re not exactly the hill we should die on—they’re part of the problem—but I take your theoretical point.

The Evil Israel Does is the Evil Israel Gets by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“J. Glenn Gray, a combat officer in World War Two, wrote about the peculiar nature of vengeance in “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle:””

“When the soldier has lost a comrade to this enemy or possibly had his family destroyed by them through bombings or through political atrocities, so frequently the case in World War II, his anger and resentment deepen into hatred. Then the war for him takes on the character of a vendetta. Until he has himself destroyed as many of the enemy as possible, his lust for vengeance can hardly be appeased. I have known soldiers who were avid to exterminate every last one of the enemy, so fierce was their hatred. Such soldiers took great delight in hearing or reading of mass destruction through bombings. Anyone who has known or been a soldier of this kind is aware of how hatred penetrates every fiber of his being. His reason for living is to seek revenge; not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but a tenfold retaliation.”

“To the brutalized, numb with trauma, convulsed by rage, those who relentlessly attack and humiliate them are not human beings. They are representations of evil. The lust for vengeance, for tenfold retaliation, spawns rivers of blood.”

Letter from Berlin by Peter E. Gordon (Boston Review)

“The most prominent political leaders in Germany, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, affirm an unquestionable support for Israel as a moral obligation of all citizens. In a speech to legislators shortly after the Hamas attacks Scholz declared: “Our own history, our responsibility deriving from the Holocaust, makes it our permanent duty to stand up for the existence and security of the State of Israel.””

That is not a serious viewpoint. He’s an intellectual infant.

“At the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest book trade fair and an annual event at which new publications make their debut, an award ceremony for the book, Minor Detail , by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, was removed from the schedule.”

But Slavoj managed to say his piece. See this video:

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

“Felix Klein, who holds an official post as “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism,” has warned of “antisemitic and anti-Israel hate” when “people shout ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free’.” In his view this slogan “would deny Israel’s right to exist.” Use of the slogan is now legally banned in Germany and subject to criminal prosecution for “incitement to hatred,” though one presumes that those invoking the Likud charter would not receive similar prosecution.”

The wheels have come off of Germany.

“As critical academics, we call on the state government to immediately cease and desist from political repression of this kind, which also includes repressive instructions to schools issued by the Berlin Senate (e.g. to ban the wearing of the Palestinian keffiyeh).”

They should wear stars of David or just Israeli flag shirts instead, forcing the government to ban those too , but only if worn unironically. Let’s see them try to define that legally.

“Following October 7, there has been an increase in antisemitic attacks in Berlin. Since then, police repression against Palestinians or those in solidarity with Palestine, as well as against large parts of the population in the largely migrant Berlin district of Neukölln, has also reached alarming levels.”

Obviously Neukölln. Poor bastards.

“As the situation in Berlin shows, there are currently hardly any possibilities for Palestinian people in Germany to express themselves as political subjects with their own perspective and a claim to self-determination. In fact, this has been the case for quite some time now. Any such expression, whether political, literary, or artistic, is increasingly confronted with the sweeping suspicion of being antisemitic.”

“Berlin is home to the largest community of the Palestinian diaspora in Europe. One of the constitutional duties of the government is to protect the people who live here. This applies to Palestinian youth, who instead are confronted with the indifference of German politics and large sections of the public to the suffering of the civilian population in Gaza and who are now placed under general suspicion, criminalized, and threatened with deportation by politicians.”

“The fact that calls for the deportation of Palestinians are growing louder at the very time there is a war in Israel and Palestine, and the civilian population is under threat of systematic military violence and expulsion, testifies to a particularly insidious contempt for humanity.”

The Texas Supreme Court’s anti-abortion ruling and the war on democratic rights by Tom Carter (WSWS)

“The oppressive weight of these religious fundamentalist laws, as a rule, falls specifically on the working class. Wealthy women and their families will always be able to afford an abortion in a different state or country, if not a safe and discrete procedure where it is officially illegal.

“The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once described a woman’s right to abortion as “one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights.” In the modern world, the right is not only essential to physical autonomy and individual freedom but to equal participation in social and political life. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky listed the Stalinist regime’s abrogation of the right to abortion, which had been guaranteed by the 1917 October Revolution, as one of its many great betrayals.”

“Military violence abroad and the dismantling of democratic rights at home are interrelated processes, as the World Socialist Web Site has insisted throughout decades of uninterrupted military aggression by the United States. A government that can get away with murdering tens of thousands of innocent workers and children abroad cannot be expected to respect the rights of workers and children within its own borders. In flagrant violation of free speech and academic freedom, the American government is already staging inquisitorial hearings to demand that universities crack down on the eruption of popular opposition to the war crimes being perpetrated in Gaza.”

Senate Passes Massive $886 Billion National Defense Authorization Act by Dave DeCamp (Antiwar.com)

“The NDAA includes an amendment to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which gives the FBI the power to conduct warrantless spying of foreign targets and Americans they interact with. Section 702 has enabled mass surveillance of Americans and is set to expire at the end of the year, but the extension pushes it back to April 19.

“A bipartisan group of senators tried to strip the Section 702 extension from the NDAA, but their efforts failed. For procedural reasons, only 41 senators were needed to remove the provision, but only 35 supported it.”

German Group Won’t Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay by Brett Wilkins (Scheer Post)

Masha Gessen will still receive the Hannah Arendt award, but it will be presented “without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation”, whatever the hell that means. Maybe they withdrew the cash prize? No idea. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is how demonstratively stupid, petty, and anti=intellectual their actions are.

I mean, I don’t really care about her particularly. I stopped reading her a long time ago, after she went off the rails for Russiagate. I haven’t heard whether she’s retracted of the hysteria or fear-mongering from those years.

Here is part of what she wrote,

“For the last 17 years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of 10 Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.”

They probably read that far, and decided that it was beyond the pale to compare any possible situation, either in the past, the present or millennia into the future with the awfulness that was a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation. Nothing will ever compare. Anyone who attempts a comparison is dead to Germany. They consider it antisemitic to even suggest that anyone has ever suffered or could ever suffer as much as the Jews. Jesus, it’s like watching that albino monk castigate himself with that cat-o-nine-tails in Dante’s Inferno.

She did go on, though, to differentiate the situations, properly crediting Germans for their unsurpassable cruelty and Jews for their unsurpassable victimhood—the fealty that Germany expects.

“The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from
diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate–and, now, mortally endanger–an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.”

Jesus, Germany has really gone completely off the rails. They don’t even bother reading the essay she wrote, not really. There is no coming back from where they’re going. They can spend another century in the wilderness if they want to keep up this bullshit. I’ve always said that Germany plummets headlong after its Lord and Master the United States, their slavish devotion to their conqueror a national fucking embarrassment. Now, they’re full-bore emulating U.S. anti-intellectualism and love of Israel. I’m really quite shocked that the German art and literature world is so riddled with idiots. I’d hoped for better.

““The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost,” said one critic.”

Chris Hedges 'The Genocide in Gaza' by mediasanctuary (YouTube)

He read several of his essays for about 52 minutes, then answered questions for 40 more. It was a tour de force. I’d already read everything he’d written, but was amazed at the power of his words. I was so happy to see him get the recognition he deserves. The questions were insightful, his answers illuminating, at times depressing. But you don’t listen to Chris Hedges for unicorns and rainbows.

Highly recommended. A national treasure with all of the right friends. He mentioned Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Ralph Nader as fellow journalists and fighters and friends.

IDF D9R bulldozer during 'Swords of Iron' from 2023-11-02

How Gaza and Ukraine are Deepening the Cracks in US Global Hegemony w/ Vijay Prashad by BreakThrough News (YouTube)

Vijay Prashad being brilliant as ever. Here, he talks about Ukraine, at the beginning of the segment.

“Russian troops entered that region to create a land bridge to Crimea, Russian forces entered that region to conduct some sort of political unification with the Donbass. That’s about all that the Russians seem to be interested in. There wasn’t really an interest in bombing Kiev.

“You know, Mr. Zelensky went to the Argentinian president’s inauguration. He then came to Washington, met not only Mr. Biden and Congressional figures, but he also spent an afternoon hanging out with arms-company executives.

“Well, how did Mr. Zelensky get to these places? He flew out of Kiev airport—and that is not an insignificant thing to say. Because, you know, the way in which, for instance, the United States conducted its wars in Libya, in Afghanistan, Iraq—the first thing you do is take out all the airports.

“The Russians haven’t done that and that’s because—it seems to me—it’s not in their interest to conduct a war that is about annexing all of Ukraine. They had limited war aims. And, in fact, if you judge them by their war aims, which is to hold the Donbass, hold the land bridge through to Mariupol, to Crimea, the Ukrainians haven’t been able to push them out of that territory.

“In that sense, Russia has really got what it wanted. […] So this is a strategic defeat for Ukraine.”

Fantastic interview. Vijay was absolutely spot-on, delivering a tremendous amount of information in 18 minutes. Now we know why his podcast (Give the People What they Want) is only 30 minutes long. Any more, and we’d all be exhausted. Chapeau!

The IDF Are So Good At Killing Israelis They Should Consider Joining Hamas by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“IDF troops killed escaped Israeli hostages who were holding up a white flag, apparently because they mistook them for Palestinian civilians holding up a white flag (Israeli forces have a long and well-documented history of killing Gazans while they are waving white flags). The only reason they bothered to check if the abductees might be people whose lives they care about was reportedly because one of them had a “western appearance”, i.e. looked white.

“Imagine being held hostage by Hamas for months, finally escaping, trying to make your way back home, and then getting killed by your own military forces because they mistook you for Palestinian civilians.”

The original story is from Israeli soldiers kill hostages waving white flag after mistaking them for Hamas fighters by Mehul Srivastava in Tel Aviv and Andrew England in London (Financial Times).

“People are still yelling about “From the river to the sea” chants at pro-Palestine demonstrations, but you know if a different pro-Palestine chant becomes ubiquitous it will with 100% certainty be attacked as evil and anti-semitic too. Pro-Palestine slogans aren’t opposed because anyone sincerely believes they support genocide, they’re opposed because they are pro-Palestine.”

Facts.

I’m listened to This is Hell! for at least 20 years. When I worked in Chicago a few times for a client, I tried to get up to Evanston to the bar—Cary’s Lounge—under what is now the studio, but was never able to meet Chuck.

I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but started walking with podcasts a lot more this winter and stumbled on the “best of 2023” series they’ve got going. It’s awesome! Their listeners chose really, really good interviews! They cover all of the hellish topics that we have to address before we’re no longer in hell.

Best of 2023: The Long Land War / Jo Guldi

“I think it is so vital right now that we embrace the utopianism that was present in the 1940s and 1950s with land redistribution and use it as a way to guide us in this moment when we have a lot of grassroots voices saying we are in trouble. There is a gun to our head, and yet we seem to be in a moment of paralysis, institutional paralyzes where little seems to shift.”

Best of 2023: American Agriculture Is about Money, not Food / Alan Guebert

“This system will collapse under its own weight because it’s not now and never has, and therefore can’t supply what’s really required: healthy, vibrant, growing community. Agriculture should be about what it says it’s about. It’s a compound word: agri-culture. It should be about food communities. When we get away from that, we are slowly getting away from what’s sustainable or even regenerative. In the way of rural America, regenerative and sustainable used to be the way those communities grew and the way they supplied the world, especially your neighbors, your local communities with high quality, low cost food. And after, or maybe hopefully before the collapse is complete, we’ll get that message.”

Best of 2023: Secret Power: Wikileaks and its Enemies / Stefania Maurizi

“At the moment, I’m sure the moment he leaves the European soil, the moment he leaves London, he’s gone, Julian Assange is gone. I’m sure the moment he gets extradited to the U. S. is a dead man. Politically, professionally, he’s dead.”

Best of 2023: Big Pharma Rigs the Game / Julia Rock

“These are the companies that, that at the end of the day have, have provided us with lifesaving treatments like the government funded, government subsidized COVID vaccine. Companies like modern and Pfizer are jacking up prices on it. There’s lots of evil stuff happening…It’s difficult to hold those two things in our head at the same time.”

Best of 2023: “Luxury Emissions” Doom Us All / Christopher Ketcham

“Under Neoliberalism, the poor, the working class, the lower middle classes, THEY all have to practice personal responsibility, you see, but corporations, and the wealthy who are served by corporations, and the wealthy who are subsidized by government in collusion with corporations: not so much personal responsibility, right? So I think we’re just looking at the hypocrisy of the class system, right? So these social obligations apply, you know, to the lower classes, but not to the upper classes.”

At 32:20, he talks about technophilic solutions to climate change,

“Climate change is just one part, one part of the world problematique, which is overshoot, the global overshoot of population and the overshoot of human economies, right? Beyond the biological carrying capacity of Mother Earth.

“And so that overshoot, you know, it can be seen in multiple ways: ozone depletion, loss of tropical rain forest and woodlands, the massive and continuing expansion of domesticated land, the massive die-off of wildlife, the domination of the planet by homo sapiens and our domesticated animals, coastal nitrogen expansion, the fisheries fully exploited, biodiversity crash due to, again, the total domination by homo sapiens—the almost-total domination by homo sapiens—of the Earth, desertification, soil loss, chemical/nuclear waste, freshwater shortages, and on and on and on.

“But, mainstream environmentalists say ‘our only problem is climate change; everything else is fine.’ Nope, we’re not overpopulated, we’re not overconsuming, we’re not overshooting the limits to growth on planet Earth. No, that’s not an issue.

“So, instead, what is offered to the public is a bright, creamy, green dream that technology is going to save us. There’s literally goes to be a deus ex machina of solar and wind power and lithium-ion batteries that is going to somehow subsidize—or continue to subsidize—our profligate lifestyles and our deranged growth system—our economic and population growth system—at the same time that we can wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.

“These are all lies. But, again, they are widespread lies. And they lies given the imprimatur of authority by major newspapers and major environmental groups.”

At 34:00 he says (about Extinction Rebellion’s announcement that they will no longer be doing as much their “annoying citizens” kind of protests),

“What they’re ceasing are the preeminently stupid tactics of laying down in highways, pissing off motorists, who are trapped in the techno-industrial system. This is the system we live in. We drive cars. There are motorways. Our public transit has been eviscerated by the trucking industry (at least in the U.S.) There are many communities that are dependent on cars. If you lay down in the street, all you’re doing is pissing off average citizens, who might be in your corner.”

At 1:00:00, he responds to Chuck’s question about how we don’t discuss climate change in terms of class,

“100%. That is the issue that we’re not talking about. Remember, there’s no classes in the United States, man. We’re all equal. It’s all equal opportunity. [chuckles] Lies, lies, lies. Yes, absolutely. If we don’t address class and the implications of class bifurcation and the extreme inequality and the rule by the wealthy and the oligarchy, we’re never going to get to a sustainable society.

“As I mentioned earlier, elites are buffered by their money from the negative consequences of environmental change. They will resist altering the system—the system of growth, the system of capital accumulation, the system of constantly expanding ecological footprint—they will resist altering that system that has benefitted them so greatly, right up to the very end.

“So that, effectively, to change such a society, you’ve got to rid of the elites. And then we’re talking about revolution.”

Best of 2023: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy / Claire Provost & Matt Kennard

“The corporation is a devilish economic instrument that has gone out of control. The problem is the instrument itself.”

This one was informative, but wasn’t as full of AHA! moments as the ones above.

Best of 2023: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care / M.E. O’Brien

I started off not really liking this interview, but warmed up completely when I realized that we’re on the same wavelength. She came out so strongly against traditional families that I reacted negatively, thinking “the families and couples I know aren’t dysfunctional, and they’re pretty traditional.”

But, then, I slowly realized that they’re not pretty traditional. They live in very traditional communities, but several of the strongest families/couples I know are definitely not “male-dominated”. They each have their strengths, but only some chores/tasks are traditionally assigned. But that’s the point! The point is that my family is healthy and strong because it’s not aligned along traditional, capitalistic needs and lines. It’s already quite communal. The parts of it that are the least communal are the most dysfunctional, actually.

At 23:00, they say,

“Private households aren’t something we all choose because we’re all brainwashed or we can’t think of anything better. But we pursue private households—finding a partner to age with, raising children within a private household—because that is a necessary survival strategy [sic; should be “tactic”] in racial capitalism. That in the dynamics of labor markets, state policy, of what it takes to survive and reproduce in the world, we form private households that we’re then really dependent on. That the private household is a major dimension of reproduction. And that we, that in our efforts to form alternative families—better families, chosen families—they often end up reproducing many of the problems that we are trying to get away from. That the contradictions of trying to survive in a capitalist society put tremendous pressures on people, that end up fragmenting chosen relationships, and reproducing all sorts of gender inequality and class inequality within chose family structures, and end up putting a lot of pressure on people, reimposing, in some cases, traditional gender roles.”

Gaza Is Deliberately Being Made Uninhabitable by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

Comments made by “an influential Israeli national security leader named Giora Eiland, a retired major general for the IDF.”

““Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism,” Eiland adds. “Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.””

Everyone dies. You can’t leave anyone alive or they’ll come back to haunt you.

No other choice.

It’s odd that he’s the first person in history to think of this.

The idea is so unique and new that there’s not even a law against it.

He found the loophole.

Who’s the Boss? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“At the same Hanukkah ceremony, Biden repeated his nonsensical claim that “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe.” There are around 16.2 million Jews in the world. More than a third of them (6.1 million) live in the US. Has there ever been a President, who so openly proclaimed his impotence to protect American lives? (Jews living in NYC are inarguably safer than those living in Tel Aviv.)”

““Part of the problem in the end is Israel’s arrogance,” a US Air Force officer involved in internal deliberations within the Biden admin and discussions with Israel told Newsweek. “The simple truth is Israel has lost the information war because it has destroyed so much”…”

“Haaretz revealed this week that the World’s “Most Moral Army” runs a snuff film channel on Telegram, called “72 Virgins – Uncensored,” showing nothing but videos and photographs of the often mutilated bodies of dying and killed Palestinians–images that would make Leni Riefenstahl cringe…”

The original article Graphic Videos and Incitement: How the IDF Is Misleading Israelis on Telegram by Yaniv Kubovich (Ha'aretz) writes,

“The Israel Defense Forces denies that it operates the channel, but a senior military official confirmed to Haaretz that the army is responsible for operating it.”

They Stole a Country in Full Bloom (interview w/Pro-Palestinian Israeli activist Miko Peled by Consortium News (YouTube)

Die größten Irrtümer und Pleiten 2023 − Mein Jahresrückblick by Sahra Wagenknecht (YouTube)

Abby Martin Speech on Julian Assange at National Press Club by Empire Files (YouTube)

Oklahoma man exonerated after 48 years in prison by Alex Findijs (WSWS)

“Glynn Simmons, 71, was declared innocent on Tuesday of a murder he did not commit, after more than 48 years in prison. He now holds the record for the longest prison sentence for a person exonerated of a crime, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.”

“The declaration of actual innocence will be critical for Simmons, who will be eligible for up to $175,000 in compensation from the State of Oklahoma for his wrongful conviction. Without that declaration, as Behenna argued against, he would not have been entitled to any money. However, it could take years for Simmons to receive compensation from the state.”

““Glynn is having to live off of GoFundMe, that’s literally how the man is surviving right now, paying rent, buying food,” said Norwood. “Getting him compensation, and getting compensation is not for sure, is in the future and he has to sustain himself now.””

The United States of America, ladies and gentlemen. This is all you need to read about how it treats its own people, how the U.S. approaches justice. It doesn’t know how to apologize, it doesn’t know how to acknowledge its mistakes. It has no empathy. It treats its own citizens like this; it treats the people of the rest of the world even worse.

Journalism & Media

Media, Biden Administration Double Down on Ukraine Lies by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Often a retired “expert” was brought in who got paid three or four times for the same work, being simultaneously a military analyst for a TV network, a “fellow” for a foreign policy think tank, a rep for a weapons manufacturer like Raytheon or Lockheed, and an industry lobbyist or consultant. These pieces are to war journalism what Porntube clips are to romance, mechanical work by very experienced professionals.”

“Ukrainians will unload thirty years of stories about American duplicity, including the recent chapter in which they were cheered to the front by lobbyists and missile merchants whose “Once more unto the breach!” riffs kept getting interrupted by push notifications about new properties in Reston and Falls Church.”

Lying Was the Only Plan Biden, U.S. Ever Had in Ukraine by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The entire interventionist project is looking at a setback on the scale of the Iraq disaster, a political fiasco so enormous it prompted four years of cuts to the defense budget. Watching Putin waltz across Ukraine after the last two years of blood, profligate spending, and premature end zone celebrations by retired brass and Beltway think-tankers would make the withdrawal from Afghanistan look like one of Biden’s tarmac stumbles by comparison.”

“Until this week the only people who’ve come out and said the obvious — namely what Joe Biden just said, that Ukraine is fucked the minute we stop hurling money their way at Brewster’s Millions levels — have been Republican politicians like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who was instantly accused by a trio of weeping Pentagon officials of “aiding U.S. adversaries” when he said Ukraine versus Russia was like a “junior high team playing a college team.””

“[…] nobody is going to “win” in this war. There’s only bloodshed and a big and fat, but ultimately temporary, feeding frenzy for Lockheed, General Dynamics, Raytheon and the rest of Lloyd Austin’s buddies. If our leaders were straight with us at the start of this thing, that’s what they’d have asked: “Hey, can we risk nuclear war for a couple of years so taxpayers can fork over a couple hundred extra billion bucks worth of arms dealer bonuses?””

CNN Goes To Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“[…] it’s an objectively good thing that this segment was made and that Ward and her crew did the work that they did.

“Ward rightly stresses the fact that the hospital she and her crew visited is “not a microcosm” of the conditions of healthcare facilities in the rest of Gaza because it’s so new and has been supplied by the UAE, noting that other hospitals in Gaza are barely functioning at all. What Ward does not say is that this problem is largely due to the fact that Israel has been systematically attacking hospitals in Gaza since October 7, rendering dozens of them nonfunctional.

“In fact, in a CNN segment about the death and suffering that’s being caused by an Israeli military operation, Israel itself plays a surprisingly small role. By my count the word “Israel” or “Israeli” was only mentioned six times in the entire 14-minute segment, with long stretches going by where the death and destruction is discussed more as a passive occurrence like the weather, rather than as a deliberate act of mass-scale violence.”

“We’ve been seeing this bizarre divorcing of attacker and attack all the time in Gaza since October 7, with news outlets sometimes going entire articles speaking only of “blasts” and “bombings” without ever actually mentioning the state who is inflicting them. This failure to attribute the source of an attack is not something you see in places like Ukraine, where the words “Russian” and “Putin” always punctuate the reporting like freckles, and it’s certainly not something you ever see in discussions about October 7. At no time will you ever go minutes watching a news report about the Hamas attack without hearing any mention of who the attackers were.”

Can it really be unconscious? I believe it has to be a mix of unwitting self-censorship—because of sympathy on the part of the reporters with Israel—and outright censorship by managing editors—they would call it “framing the narrative”.

“While mentions of Israel are scant in CNN’s reporting, mentions of the United States are missing altogether. At no time in the 14-minute segment does Ward or anyone else make any mention of the fact that this relentless massacre can only happen because it is being backed by the US, and that the Biden administration could end it at any time by withdrawing that backing. It’s downright surreal watching an American outlet talking about the US-sponsored destruction of Gaza as though it’s some separate foreign conflict that Washington is just passively witnessing.

“Contrast this type of missing attribution with the ubiquitous use of the phrase “Iran-backed” in the mainstream western press when talking about non-US-aligned forces in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The fact that the US is backing Israel’s assault on Gaza is much, much more well-evidenced than any claims of Iranian backing ever are, but you never see phrases like “US-backed airstrike” or “US-backed bombing campaign” in western reporting on Gaza.”

How the West Bank fits into the equation by Seymour Hersh (SubStack)

“Thousands of Hamas fighters are now facing a deadly shootout with the Israeli army as the disastrous war their leaders triggered is in its tenth week. Now out of their tunnels, those men are trying to cope with the increasing winter chill and heavy rains. There is little shelter for them, or for the bedraggled surviving citizens of Gaza, from the elements and from Israeli bullets and bombs.”

He’s pretty mealy-mouthed and he’s careful to include the required descriptors of the narrative—“tunnels” (from which rats emerge), “their leaders triggered”, “surviving citizens” (as if the “winter chill and heavy rains” had taken their toll)—but he’s at least honest enough to assign agency to Israel rather than the bullets and bombs themselves, which seem to simply fall out of the sky like rain in other accounts.

“Future historians will make their judgment on the stunning ratio of dead Palestinians in Gaza to the Israeli combat dead.”

Ha! Yeah, ‘cause Seymour sure as hell isn’t going to weigh in. Nor is he going to acknowledge that most of us are just going to call a spade a spade and not wait for “future historians” to tell us that the ratio is f’ing high and that most of the dead are civilians—despite Seymour and Israel’s imprecations that every single dead man is Hamas—and that there’s “little shelter” because Israel has deliberately destroyed nearly the entire residential area for a population of 2M. Almost the entire population is no longer living in their homes. Sure, sure, let’s wait a few decades so that cooler heads can decide what happened. Seymour’s definitely hoping that Israel will emerge victorious and, as victors, will be granted the luxury of writing history in their favor.

'Neoliberalism has failed!' Tucker Carlson on Global Populism, Censorship, Ukraine, & More by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

There was a pretty long pause and cut before this answer, so I’m not sure how realtime this interview was, but let’s leave that, for the moment. At 28:00, Tucker answers,

“I think a lot of people have awakened to the now-demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam, perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending. So they created this whole intellectual framework to justify the private-equity culture that’s hollowed out the country. That’s my personal view and I’ve seen it up-close my whole life. So, I think it’s a fair assessment.

“I think a smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results. So, you can assign whatever name you want to the economic system of the United States: you could call it market-capitalism; you could call it a whole host of different things, but I don’t think any of that’s useful.

“Those are boring conversations. I think you need to ask: does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores? And, if it does, it’s not a system that you want because it degrades people and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society. And anything that increases ugliness is evil. […]

“So, if it’s such a good system, why do we have all these Dollar Stores? Dollar Stores is the clear—I mean it’s not the only ugly thing being created in the United States, but it’s the one of the most common, and it’s certainly the most obvious. So, if you have a Dollar Store, you’re degraded. And any town that has a Dollar Store does not get better. It gets worse. And the people who live there lead lives that are worse.

“And the counterargument—to the extent there is one—is ‘oh they [consumers] buy cheaper stuff.’ Great. But they become more unhappy and the Dollar Store itself is a sort-of symbol—it’s a physical thing, it’s a real thing; it’s not just a metaphor—but it’s also a metaphor for your total lack of control over where you live and over the imposition of aggressively, in-your-face-ugly structures that send one message to you, which is ‘you mean nothing,’ ‘you are a consumer, not a human being or a citizen.’

“And so, again, I don’t know what we call our current system, but its effects are grotesque. They’re grotesque. It’s wrecked.

“I’ve been here 54 years and I watch carefully—that’s my only gift. As I watch and this has become a much uglier place, a much more crowded place, a much more hostile place, a place that cares much less about people. So whatever system produces that outcome—is a bad system.”

Comments were kind of interesting,

“I’m impressed with Tucker’s answers. I pray he is being honest and his actions mirror his ideas. We need more influential public figures to adopt and implement these postures.”

Someone else responded,

“He spent a career making millions spreading lies on MSM. To his credit he has changed positions in his career and that tells me he is not a zombie or hyper-tribal.”

To which another riposted,

“Maybe U were the hyper-tribal and now U have changed and so U see him in a different light. LOTS of members of the Church of the Democratic Party have that in common:) even the ones who have left it.”

Found the Tucker Carlson fanboy.

It’s a legitimate concern. Tucker hasn’t always spoken like this. He’s said a lot of things in the past that were more-or-less diametrically opposed to them. Thus, the hesitancy. He seems quite earnest, more real than before. I agree that his platform and audience would be a huge boost if his advocacy is sincere. He’s been saying these things for a while now, so the turn seems increasingly legitimate.

Billionaire Bill Ackman's Deranged Campaign Against Israel Critics by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

This is an excellent video, discussing how both the right and left are only against censorship against themselves. They’re all for censoring everyone else.

The left was delighted to call anything and everything that anyone they didn’t like said “racist” and “fascist” and “Putin-inspired”. When challenged, they said they could hear “dog whistles”.

Well, the dog-whistle argument has boomeranged.

Now, there are right-wing billionaires like Bill Ackman, who can hear antisemitic dog whistles everywhere he feels like it.

Substackers Battle Over Banning Nazis by Elizabeth Nolan Brown (Reason)

“Uh, pretty easy just not to do business with Nazis, some might say. Which is actually… not true. At least not in 2023. Because while the term “Nazi” might have a fixed historical meaning, it’s bandied about pretty broadly these days. It gets used to describe people who (thankfully) aren’t actually antisemitic or advocating for any sort of ethnic cleansing. Donald Trump and his supporters get called Nazis. The folks at Planned Parenthood get called Nazis. People who don’t support Israel get called Nazis. All sorts of people get called Nazis for all sorts of reasons. Are tech companies supposed to bar all these people? And how much time should they put into investigating whether people are actual Nazis or just, like, Nazis by hyperbole? In the end, “not doing business with Nazis” would require a significant time investment and a lot of subjective judgment calls.

“[…] In practice, it would be more like “not doing business with anyone who anyone describes as a Nazi””

The demand boils down to “deplatform anyone whose opinion I don’t already approve of,” which is facially ludicrous. It ensures that people will only ever be exposed to the right opinions. Boring. Totalitarianism is boring.

Economy & Finance

Major split opens between central banks by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Significantly, as the Financial Times (FT) reported, citing a person involved in the discussions, the “dovishness” of Powell’s comments “caught many members of the ECB governing council off guard.” According to the source “it was surprising for a lot of us” and “makes life more difficult.”

“In other words, the Fed did not even bother give the ECB, the second most important bank in the world, so much as a “heads up” that it was about to undertake a major reorientation.”

“There was one measure on which inflation that was not budging, domestic inflation. “And domestic inflation is largely generated by wages,” she said.”

Oh, is it, Christine? Am I supposed to believe that the president of the ECB has not heard of—to say nothing of read—the articles and research pointing to global conglomerates having caused much, if not most, of the inflation? It’s adorable how, whenever you read about inflation, you have to read the fine print about which obvious parts of a household budget have been left out of the numbers being used in a given article—like food or fuel—but it’s similarly lovely to read that the world’s financial leaders are adamant in their near-spiritual belief that inflation is caused purely by greedy workers wanting higher wages, who are so stupid that they can’t see that they’re actually driving their own costs up. Silly workers.

Science & Nature

Was the climate 'better' during the age of the dinosaurs? (More climate “facts” bite the dust.) by potholer54 (YouTube)

Climate Change

COP28 climate summit exposes the dead end of fighting climate change under capitalism by Brian Dyne (WSWS)

“The end of COP28 was also applauded by John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry said of the draft resolution, “While nobody here will see their views completely reflected, the fact is that this document sends a very strong signal to the world.”

“That signal is that capitalist governments can and will do nothing to fight climate change. Any genuine mobilization would cut across their national interests and corporate profits. It is significant that while most other heads of state attended at least part of the conference, US President Joe Biden did not, ostensibly too busy prosecuting war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza.”

“Current greenhouse gas emissions are putting Earth on track for a 3-degree Celsius warming, twice as much as the current benchmark presented as a “point of no return.” In such a scenario, an estimated one billion people would be forced from their homes a result of sea level rise, on top of the billion now who are currently under threat from dying as a result of starvation, disease and thirst.”

Yes, but none of those people are us. We have arrogated all of the things unto us. Maybe our climate will be less-good than it was, but we don’t really care—because rich people stay indoors, in their apartments in big cities, or in air-conditioned palaces in the nicest parts of the countryside and world. Those places will take decades before they degrade.

And that’s somebody else’s problem. We can’t stop it now, so why bother? It would only mean that we have to restrict ourselves and it probably wouldn’t even work. Why risk it? Why reduce my perceived comfort for an uncertain benefit that doesn’t even accrue only to me?

This Year’s Climate Summit Ended on a Hopeful Note by Bill McKibben (Jacobin)

Bill McKibben, on the other hand, made sure to title his piece in a way that lets liberals smugly keep doing what they’re doing, safe in the knowledge that their elected leaders have got a handle on everything. He seems to have made that his job in the last decade or so.

“The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels, and that sentence will hang over every discussion from now on — especially the discussions about any further expansion of fossil fuel energy. There may be barriers to shutting down operations (what the text of the agreement obliquely refers to as “national circumstances, pathways, and approaches.”) But surely, if the language means anything at all, it means no opening more new oil fields, no more new pipelines, and no more new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.”

JFC Bill. Talk about setting yourself up for disappointment. “Surely”, it means all of that. No, it surely doesn’t. There are going to five times as many LNG terminals in Europe in ten years. The “green wave” is horseshit. And you know where that LNG is going to come from? The U.S. Joe Biden has merrily opened up more territory for fossil-fuel exploration than any president before him. Do you know why? Because it’s still wildly profitable. And because he gives less of a fuck what the world thinks than Netanyahu. YOLO.

McKibben goes on to note that there were two other hopeful moments in climate-change history. In 1995, the world finally acknowledged that it existed. Progress! In 2015—20 years later!—came a pledge to do something about it. Seven years later, and third hopeful moment is calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” Fifty years after having learned about, the last two years have seen the highest CO2 emissions of all time, and the two greatest increases of all time. But, sure, go ahead and be “hopeful”, Bill.

McKibben ends with,

“[…] today’s agreement is literally meaningless — and potentially meaningful. The diplomats are done now, so the rest of us are going to have to supply that meaning.”

They’re not going to do anything, Bill. There’s not chance in hell of sticking a landing under 1.5ºC. How can you even suggest that that’s realistic? The system will not allow it. Their greed will not allow it. Their devotion to piracy will not allow it.

They cannot stand to see anyone have something that they do not have. They squabble like chimps. There is no possibility for a way forward with people in charge, from cultures like this.

The OECD—led by the U.S.—will bury the world. I used to think the planet would be just fine without us, but we’re seemingly determined to take down most other higher-order life on Earth with us.

Medicine & Disease

Does SOCIALIST Cuba have the best health care in the world? by Jacobin/ Samira M. Addrey (YouTube)

Art & Literature

The Zsigmondy Effect by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“χρόνος γὰρ εὐμαρης θεός.
Time is a god that brings relief.
—Sophocles, Electra”

“Since 2021 we have generally supposed, without any real public disclosure of the science behind ChronoSwooper, that temporal transit is possible only in view of the breakthrough discovery by Zsigmondy and his team of the phenomenal nature of time. The succession of moments in which our lives unfold, Zsigmondy definitively showed, is only an ordering of experience in a way that gives it shape and meaning for perceiving subjects such as ourselves, while deep down, in reality as it really is, everything happens all at once. To ChronoSwoop, in this light, is really only to access different aspects of the present. Philosophers had for millennia suspected something of this sort to be the case.”

Middle Insomnia by Miracle Jones (The Baffler)

This was an amazingly dark Internet revenge fantasy. Well done.

“[…] equally pissed off at her neighbors across the street who are so fucking worried about nonexistent big city crime spilling into the suburbs that they’ve installed a cartoonishly-strong sodium-vapor prison light above their garage that shines right into her bedroom. She ought to put up reflective meth-lab tinfoil as revenge. Maybe she will commission ten cardboard cutouts of Dukes-of-Hazzard-era Jessica Simpson from some lunatic on Etsy and put a few in every street-facing window. Really get the neighborhood talking.”

“She scans Spotify to see if there are any new podcasts in her feed. She likes the mean political ones about how much Trump sucks, but she also likes podcasts where two charmless acquaintances drone on about some stupid esoteric subject, performing thrilling obsessive dissection that mimics actual philosophical analysis but that doesn’t ever truly intersect with the real world. These shows are useless by preexisting agreement, as if the meaningless subjects that these two people have decided to tackle (car problems, The Bachelorette , Magic: The Gathering drafts, serial murder) are the only safe topics that won’t banjax this temporary podcast friendship. It feels like marriage.”

Christ that’s bleak. What does the verb “like” even mean here? Is distracting oneself enough to keep the demons at bay?

“It is one of the oldest memes from the full broadband era. Concerned professors have written papers. It’s been chronicled in alarmist articles on websites and featured in sinister cello-scored documentaries about the horrors of online fame.”

“Overnight, Aidan turned into a reverse celebrity, hunted by fanatics but without any of the money or privilege that a real celebrity might leverage into protection. And now the abuse wasn’t just coming from kids anymore. Adults from all over the world were now curious about sustaining the panopticon around Aidan that made it seem like he had no choice but to take his own life. It became a creative science experiment, a new internet game for expats in refractory periods during their illegal sex tourism. Aidan had no natural defenses against these wriggling social pinworms: the internet was already the place where he went to escape from the real world, the place where he used to feel somewhat safe and tolerated.”

“And then Russia invaded Crimea and the photo of Aidan became a weaponized meme about how Western weakness was fueled by gender-confused decadence.”

How casually Americans’ warped, nonfactual, jingoistic, and self-serving myths worm their way into every narrative. I know it doesn’t matter to this story, not really, but it’s just incredible how casually people treat as fact that which they’ve never questioned.

I recently was speaking to a reasonably well-informed friend who was convinced that Russia had annexed Crimea in a bloody, violent takeover that involved snipers and lots and lots of dead civilians. He never questioned the story, even though we’d never heard of any insurrections against Russian rule in the last decade.

The Russians imposed a referendum on `Crimea, then claimed that 97% of the voters wanted to join Russia, with 83% of voters having turned out. Of course it’s disputed, but it was bloodless. Russia did not invade Crimea. They were already there. They’ve had a huge naval base in Sebastopol for 150 years. Crimea was very, very Russian, even before it joined Russia.

It would be like saying that the U.S. had invaded Okinawa in 2023. They’ve been there for 80 years. They don’t have to invade. English; do you speak it?

“Some of them were just beat-matching the algorithmic propaganda, executing zombie instructions to create a deviancy amplification spiral on the undead internet to help a failed, broke-ass ethnostate state ensorcell the dumbest people in the west: college kids with boutique extreme politics.”

Onomatopoeia

I knew that this topic was going to be onomatopoeia before it even showed up because I learned about it in high school, at some point. I remember we were studying Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote of the “tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells”. It’s a word he made up to describe the sound of bells.

“Discover trending title on #BookTok.”

#BookTok- no, thank you. I can't think of anything more insipid.

Jesus Christ. Look at that picture. That appeals to people who read?

Philosophy & Sociology

Therapeutic Nationalism and Other Opportunistic Decouplings by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)

“The marriage of premodern attachment to hierarchies of ethnicity and tribe with 21st-century boss-bitch-but-also-performatively-vulnerable culture might appear absurd to most of the people who practice the latter. But since so much of left communication and outreach has been dependent on making left politics cool and defined through shared social bonds rather than political theory, there’s not much that can be done to stop people from picking and choosing different kinds of virtue signaling. “Woke, but conservative” is not an impossible future.

“Turns out that when you spent a decade (to pick an example) teaching people that being a socialist means constantly sharing Simpsons and Sopranos references, using those touchstones to define in-group status rather than actual tangible political beliefs, you’re contributing to politics as a hazy gumbo of deracinated social signifiers, filled with people with no particular moral vision at all and no qualms about heading off to another party if the one they’re at seems like a drag. (And American socialism, in 2023, is definitely a drag.)”

“There is no doubt outrageous hypocrisy out there right now. We’ve seen, in recent times, that after a decade and a half of mocking people as “snowflakes” when they ask for certain social accommodations, conservatives are very happy to turn around and treat people with exactly those kid gloves when the culture war positioning is right. We’ve seen the notion of safe spaces go from a reflexive laugh line among a broad swath of our political culture to being talked about in hallowed terms, when the right sort of person is asking for one. It turns out that the snarling culture warriors who are so disdainful of coddling and participation trophy culture are not attached to those stances if the price is right. As you know, I am someone who has an attachment to civil liberties as a left-wing virtue and who has long questioned whether treating people from marginalized groups as if they’re made of glass is what’s best for them in the long run.”

“[…] my point is that treating politics as a big online popularity contest was always a mistake in the first place, that the use of lifestyle branding as an advertisement for left-liberal politics was effective but costly, and I have little doubt that we will see, in the near future, an American politics of therapeutic nationalism, one which keeps the Instagram memes and the affirmation and the self-care and the therapeutic narcissism and the jokes about Zoloft, but grafts on border security, disdain for the poor, and submission to the god of finance.”

Technology

If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer: WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.”

“The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.”

“Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway . Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick”

“Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing””

LLMs & AI

Take It to the Spank Bank by Anabelle Johnston (The Baffler)

“Alana Evans, a performer and president of the Adult Performance Artists Guild, has been in the industry since 1998 and recognizes how artificial intelligence and adjacent technologies like deepfakes threaten to exacerbate existing inequities. “I’ve made it this long because I’ve kept up with what’s out there and adapted,” she tells me. “AI technology can do a lot for us—my body is not what it was when I started out and it would be nice to produce a gangbang without having to shoot it. But when that technology falls into the wrong hands, the actors are the ones who lose out.” In addition to siphoning income streams from adult performers, Evans warns that deepfakes made without the artists’ consent are often made to engage in racist roleplay and other scenarios performers may be uncomfortable with—while at the same time diluting the value of content made by the performers themselves.”

[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models by Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)

This is a pretty compact and interesting overview. At 46:00, he discusses some of the available jailbreaks or “prompt escapes” that are still available, even with the latest LLM Agents.[3] He shows how to reformulate a query for making napalm by asking the LLM Agent to tell it a story his grandmother used to tell him about making napalm. Or how to simply convert your query into the exact same text, but in Base64 encoding, in which case the LLM Agent gives the answer you were looking for, “escaping” its alignment/training/biases. You can also avoid the training by using a non-English language because the focus has been on avoiding issues with English. They’re just addressing symptoms, not the base problem. This is probably because they don’t understand how the black box of the LLM itself works, so all they can do is to massage the input in the hopes of getting what they consider to be more acceptable output, or to massage the output as well.

Mindscape 258 | Solo: AI Thinks Different by Sean Carroll (YouTube)

This is a great analysis of the state of LLMs and LLM agents by a physicist/philosopher who’s very good at communicating and thinking about hard problems. He argues as well that there is a distinct difference in the underlying technology of the LLM/neural network and the agents with which we actually have contact—which are an LLM wrapped with many, many layers of bias and training and guardrails.

We should be aware of two things: (1) That there are guardrails that very clearly delineate the information that you’ll get out of such an agent and (2) that these LLMs don’t have an concept of the world, they have no context, they are just incredible word-associators.

He gives several interesting examples of his interactions, in which he demonstrates that the tools aren’t very useful—and are actively harmful to actually learning something—when approaching real-world problems, rather than the toy problems that you usually see demonstrated. He asks the LLM agent about a hypothetical version of chess where the board was on a cylinder. Any human familiar with chess would quickly see that the kings are now right next to each other, and that the game would be over on the first move, as the kings start off in simultaneous checkmate. The LLM Agent, however, droned on and on about what an interesting innovation this would be and just made up a whole bunch of shit that had no relation to the question, but was vaguely related to chess. The LLM Agent is a student who’s never paid attention in class and is trying to bullshit its way through the exam.

Programming

Documentation Quadrants − The Grand Unified Theory of Documentation by Steve Dunn

“The divio pages elegantly clarifies this with the analogy of teaching a child to cook. For instance, for tutorials , what you teach a child to cook isn’t important. What’s important is that the child is in a kitchen environment and gaining practical experience of using utensils and handling food. Whereas how-to guides are akin to recipes. A recipe has a clear, defined end and addresses a specific question. It would probably be unreasonable to expect someone to follow a recipe if they have no kitchen experience.”

“Understanding-oriented means the users don’t know what they don’t know. They cannot yet formulate the questions because they lack the understanding
Information-oriented is where the user does have enough understanding to formulate a question, and they seek the required information on a particular topic. Hopefully your document has that information!”

The Economics of Programming Languages by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023) by Strange Loop Conference (YouTube)

“In the mythology of open source, programming languages are created by people who seemingly have no direct economic function. They are just really good at compilers (somehow) and have a house to live in (somehow) and have a lifetime to devote to creating a useful programming language (somehow!)

“We will examine specific organizations that create programming languages. Where do the salaries for compiler engineers come from? How does Go end up with 5 engineers and Dart end up with 30? Who signs off on these expenses and why? Does this put any boundaries on language design or development practices? And how do the economics work for people outside of the major tech corporations?

“My goal is to give the talk I needed to hear 10 years ago when I was just starting on Elm. By clearly delineating the many variations of corporate funding and independent funding, I hope users will come away with a better foundation for evaluating and comparing programming languages.”

This was a really interesting talk about economic incentives in the world of programming languages. Where do they come from? How do they grow? How can they grow in the system we have? From the creator of the Elm programming language and runtime.

From one of the slides,

“You have a job because it serves the purposes of a powerful person.

“What are those purposes?

“What happens when their purposes change?”

At the end, he talks about a cool new thing that he built that compiles Elm to C/SQL, runs it in PostgreSql, supports custom types in tables, and has type-safe migrations, but …“that’s the economics of programming languages. I don’t know what to do with it.”