Links and Notes for January 12th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming

Public Policy & Politics

The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat by Jacques Baud (Scheer Post)

“Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the “capitalist” system and “progressive forces.” This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world.”

“The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin’s speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on X moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West.”

“The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars…”

“[…] the strategic level ensures the management of the theater of war (Театр Войны) (TV); a geographically vast entity, with its own command and control structures, within which there are one or more strategic directions. The theater of war comprises a set of theaters of military operations (Театр Военных Действий) (TVD), which represent a strategic direction and are the domain of operative action. These various theaters have no predetermined structure and are defined according to the situation. For example, although we commonly speak of the “war in Afghanistan” (1979-1989) or the “war in Syria” (2015-), these countries are considered in Russian terminology as TVDs and not TVs. The same applies to Ukraine, which Russia sees as a theater of military operations (TVD) and not a theater of war (TV), which explains why the action in Ukraine is designated as a “Special Military Operation” (Специальная Военая Операция— Spetsialaya). A Special Military Operation” (Специальная Военная Операция – Spetsial’naya Voyennaya Operatsiya —SVO, or SMO in English abbreviation) and not a “war.””

“Zelensky’s decree of March 24, 2021 for the reconquest of Crimea and the Donbass was the real trigger for the SMO. From that moment on, the Russians understood that if there was military action against them, they would have to intervene. But they also knew that the cause of the Ukrainian operation was NATO membership, as Oleksei Arestovitch had explained. That is why, in mid-December 2021, they were submitting proposals to the USA and NATO on extending the Alliance: their aim was then to remove Ukraine’s motive for an offensive in the Donbass.”

“An important element of Russian military and political thinking is its legalistic dimension. The way our media present events, systematically omitting facts that could explain, justify, legitimize or even legalize Russia’s actions. We tend to think that Russia is acting outside any legal framework. For example, our media present the Russian intervention in Syria as having been decided unilaterally by Moscow; whereas it was carried out at the request of the Syrian government, after the West had allowed the Islamic State to move closer to Damascus, as confessed by John Kerry, then Secretary of State. Nevertheless, there is never any mention of the occupation of eastern Syria by American troops, who were never even invited there!”

“[…] on March 27, Zelensky publicly defended his proposal and on March 28, as a gesture of support for this effort, Vladimir Putin eased the pressure on the capital and withdrew his troops from the area. Zelensky’s proposal served as the basis for the Istanbul Communiqué of March 29, 2022, a ceasefire agreement as a prelude to a peace agreement. It was this document that Vladimir Putin presented in June 2023, when an African delegation visited Moscow. It was Boris Johnson’s intervention that prompted Zelensky to withdraw his proposal, exchanging peace and the lives of his men for support “for as long as it takes.””

“In essence, Russia agreed to withdraw to the borders of February 23, 2022, in exchange for a ceiling on Ukrainian forces and a commitment not to become a NATO member, along with security guarantees from a number of countries….”

“in an interview with the Ukrainian channel Apostrof’ on March 18, 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisor Oleksei Arestovitch cynically explains that, because Ukraine wants to join NATO, it will have to create the conditions for Russia to attack Ukraine and be definitively defeated.”

“What the West wants in September 2023 is merely a pause until an even more violent conflict breaks out, after Ukrainian forces have been rearmed and reconstituted.”

“As the months went by, the course of operations showed that the prospect of a Ukrainian victory was becoming increasingly remote, as Russia, far from being weakened, was growing stronger, militarily and economically. Even General Christopher Cavoli, Supreme American Commander Europe (SACEUR), told a US congressional committee that “Russia’s air, naval, space, digital and strategic capabilities have not suffered significant degradation during this war.””

“[…] as Ben Wallace, ex-Defence Minister, put it in The Telegraph on October 1, 2023: “The most precious commodity is hope.” True enough. But Western appraisal of the situation must be based on realistic analyses of the adversary. However, since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, Western analyses have been based on prejudice.”

“Ukraine’s problem in this conflict is that it has no rational relationship with the notion of victory. By comparison, the Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have switched to a way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a sense of victory. This is the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand in 75 years, and which it is reduced to overcoming through tactical superiority rather than strategic finesse. In Ukraine, it is the same phenomenon. By clinging to a notion of victory linked to the recovery of territory, Ukraine has locked itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat.”

The US/UK attack on Yemen and the global eruption of imperialist war by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS)

“[…] supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.”

Like, not for the first time, though. Vietnam was a defensive war. Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada. They were all defensive. The U.S. is always defending its interests, so every act of aggression it perpetrates is, in fact, defensive. A neat trick. It follows that preemptive attacks are also defensive. Since there is always a slight—perceived or actual—to which one can point, everything is defensive.

The Pentagon, which runs the by-far-largest military force that mankind has ever seen, stated, “We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”

So there you go. They just spend one trillion dollars per year on occupation and war because the U.S. is defending itself. It’s true, though! The U.S. thinks the entire planet belongs to it. That notion—the notion of empire—must be defended from anyone who thinks otherwise.

“For nearly a decade, the Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.

“The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.

“Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aiden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.”

That’s a good summary of the U.S. Empire’s defensive posture. Look—people don’t pay their protection money willingly. You gotta lean on ‘em a bit. Sometimes a lot, for those who are hard of hearing.

Like Iran.

“The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.”

Bush II listed Iran as one of the baddies. The sanctions have continued uninterrupted. The only time most people hear about Iran is either when they’re being accused of trying to develop nuclear weapons (they’re not) or when a uprising looks ready to break the stranglehold that the mullahs have there. Not that the U.S. would support an open, democratic regime there. It doesn’t need f*@kiing France there; it wants something like another Iraq: keep the cheap oil flowing under U.S. aegis, don’t get too uppity or think about too much stuff.

It’s incredible to think that the war on Iran was basically declared the second the mullahs took over and the U.S. never forgot about it. Through an unbroken chain of administrations led by both parties, the animus has remained, utterly unchanged. Biden’s foriegn policy is underpinned by the same precepts as Bush I or Bush II. Obama and Clinton looked no different. They all ran wars and incursions. Reagan and Carter as well. Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy were in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Truman mopped up Japan. Eisenhower was in Korea, for whatever reason. He was also quite busy squashing any leftist notions all over Europe, in Greece, Portugal, Italy.

If you’re at all interested in knowing more, check out William Blum’s Killing Hope (read in 2001, before I’d even started tracking my books) and Rogue Superpower (read in 2003, before I’d started writing notes for books). Or, like, anything by Noam Chomsky, but most especially his latest, which he wrote together with the inestimable Vijay Prashad, The Withdrawal

“Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.”

One month of the Milei presidency in Argentina by Rafael Azul (WSWS)

“Throughout his campaign and now in office, Milei has peddled the message that all this economic and social pain is necessary to usher in a transformation of Argentine society, bringing in a new epoch of prosperity and freedom. But false electoral promises of a shared sacrifice have now given way to a savage assault on the lower 90 percent of society, while big business, agricultural monopolies and multinational corporations celebrate.”

“Milei is also further subordinating Argentina to US and British imperialisms, celebrating the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and moving to break commercial ties with China. After Milei rejected the invitation to join the BRICS group, China decided to withhold a currency swap agreement that Argentina was relying on to service its debt payments.”

Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s Genocide Operations In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter)

“[…] the US and the UK just bombed the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis from taking power.”

This is all done to protect trade routes, to keep prices low. The attacks by the Houthis have resulted in no casualties. They’re annoying. They cause companies to lose money. Some stuff gets to some countries more slowly. The U.S. and UK bombed the Sanaa international airport in Yemen. WTF. No declaration of war. No attempt to negotiate. No consideration of alternatives. No congressional approval. Just a dictator shooting things. This is what people were afraid Trump would do. This is what I wrote at the time that Biden would likely do. He’s a merciless piece of shit. He always has been.

Apparently wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not enough. Nothing ever makes him think it’s time to back down, to negotiate, that things are getting out of hand. Forget cold wars. He makes everything hot immediately. He fighting Russians directly in Syria. Proxy-fighting them in Ukraine. Funding and arming Saudi Arabia to flatten the Houthis in Yemen. Funding and arming the Israelis to flatten the Palestinians in Gaza (and tons of violence in the West Bank as well).

This is mindless violence, all to quash any hopes of rebellion against the empire. All to prevent any change to the system that subjugates so many and funnels so much wealth toward Empire—and a handful of people in it.

Pol Pot’s Atrocities Still Matter, 45 Years After Khmer Rouge’s Fall by Steven Greenhut (Reason)

“What lessons can modern Americans draw from the Cambodian nightmare? I’d suggest we show no tolerance toward grandiose social experiments of any kind (such as radically reordering society to avert a supposed climate doom) and focus instead on incrementally improving life within our current system. People get excited about big, transformative ideas even though they can upend society, yet lose interest in the nuts-and-bolts of the slow-moving democratic process. The latter can be hard work, so no wonder political radicals prefer dangerous shortcuts.”

This kind of follows the Reason thinking, much as WSWS articles end with a call to solidarity among workers. Just stay within the bounds of this world, because it already seems to function—or they’ve fooled themselves into believing that it functions—in a way that they find acceptable. If they were living under communism, then they’d be giving completely different advice. They’d advocate overthrowing everything and going for capitalism. It’s kind of tiring to watch. It’s so intellectually dishonest.

It’s cold comfort that the “radical[…] reordering [of] society” will come whether Greenhut wants it or not. Just go ahead and ignore climate change long enough and it will be forced on us.

Israel in the Dock by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“[…] the US military has been exposed as an ineffectual security force for Maersk container ships carrying sweatshop-made shoes, knock-off Gucci handbags, yoga pants and other essentials of the American consumer economy through the Red Sea. We’ve reached that stage of capitalism.”

“If the GOP wants to impeach Biden, then impeach him for starting another war without Congressional approval. Slam dunk violation of the Constitution. But you won’t, because you want Yemen to be bombed and you’d rather Biden’s fingerprints be on the shrapnel. Cowards.”

“LBJ didn’t even lose the New Hampshire primary and still dropped out, knowing that the war would ultimately drag him to defeat. Eugene McCarthy only garnered 42% of the vote in NH, which was enough for LBJ to call it quits, even though he had the entire Great Society program to run on. Biden doesn’t have anything like that to offer. But he’s also not as politically astute as LBJ was and much more vain. More vain than the man who named his own penis (Jumbo), you say? Yes. But Biden’s vanity has no basis in reality. He’s the village idiot who ended up in the cockpit (thanks to Obama). He has no political skills whatsoever as far as I can tell, except being a dutiful servant of the financial industry for 50 years, an easy sell for reelection after reelection in Delaware. LBJ, probably the craftiest politician–for better and often worse–of the 20th Century, still had a better shot at beating Nixon than the spineless HHH, who the great Robert Sherrill dubbed the Drugstore Liberal. But the war had gutted him, physically and psychologically. Deservedly so. He knew it and stood down to give someone else a shot. Biden shows none of this emotional strain or political insight. Largely because he’s a person devoid of empathy, especially for any casualties at his hands. He’s blindly walking right off the electoral cliff and taking his entire party down with him. Given the fact they’ve offered little resistance, they deserve the coming fall.”

“Israel’s war on Gaza has produced more planet-warming gases than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in a year, causing “immense” impact on climate.” Nearly half the total CO2 emissions were down to US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.””

“Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, giving a eulogy for a friend, Roi Rotenberg, who was killed in Gaza in 1956: “Today, let us not hurl accusations at the murderers. How can we argue with their hatred of us? For eight years they have been living in refugee camps of Gaza, while in front of their eyes we make our homes on the lands and villages where they and their forefathers lived.””

“Karhi: We should encourage voluntary migration and we should compel them until they say they want it…
Interviewer: How?
Karhi: The war does what it does.
Interviewer: Meaning continue to pressure them using force, starvation, difficult conditions.”

“Walid Shahid: “The biggest failure of DC journalists was spending all fall asking Democrats to condemn statements of 19-year-old college activists rather than the official statements of Israeli cabinet ministers.””

“Emmanuel Todd, one of the last politically engaged French intellectuals, told a French television show that the best thing that could happen to Europe is the dissolution of the American empire: “Once the United States agrees to withdraw from their empire, from Eurasia and all these regions where they maintain conflicts… Contrary to what we think, we say ‘what will we become when the US no longer protects us?’ – we will be at peace! The best thing that could happen to Europe is the disappearance of the United States.””

If You’ve Just Started Paying Attention To US Foreign Policy by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“There are all sorts of rules and regulations and narratives and justifications for why this all happens the way it happens, but if you mentally “mute” the soundtrack on the verbal overlay and just look at what’s actually happening, what you will see is the lion’s share of the world’s wealth and resources moving northward and westward from populations of a darker average skin tone toward populations of a paler average skin tone. Wherever that movement is hindered, diverted, threatened or inconvenienced, you will see western war machinery moving southward and eastward to get it back on the desired track.

“Most major international conflicts can be understood as either direct or indirect efforts by the US empire to shore up planetary domination, which are often met with resistance by populations who wish to retain their sovereignty.”

Stranded by George Monbiot

“As usual with privatisation and austerity, costs have not been cut, just transferred from one place to another. They are always transferred in the same direction: from corporations or the state to individuals.

“Similar things happen throughout our depleted public sector, whether it’s run by private companies or the tattered remains of the state. By letting flood defences crumble, the government’s balance sheet looks better, but much greater costs are passed to households and their insurers. By triggering, through austerity, a crisis in special educational needs provision, the Tories dump untold misery on families, in some cases forcing parents to give up their jobs to care for their children. By allowing the water companies to cut corners, the government ensures that swimmers and surfers are poisoned and tourism and hospitality businesses go under.

“There are no savings from austerity and privatisation, just a wholesale shifting of costs. The rich pay less tax and the public service companies in which they own shares make greater profits. The rest of us pick up the bill.”

Taiwan’s election result signals escalating tensions with China by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

“While Lai and the DPP won the presidency for a third term, the election outcome was not a ringing endorsement of their policies. KMT candidate Hou received 33.5 percent of the vote while the so-called independent Ko and his TPP gained 26.5 percent. Together, the two candidates that favour an easing of tensions with China received 60 percent of the vote. Lai is the first president to be elected with less than 50 percent of votes.”

“The stance taken by the new Lai administration that takes office in May will certainly compound tensions across the Taiwan Strait. However, it is Washington, already embroiled in wars in Europe and the Middle East, that is the chief instigator of the war drive against China throughout the Indo-Pacific, now focused, above all, on Taiwan.”

Turns Out “Israel Has A Right To Defend Itself” Meant “Israel Has A Right To Commit Genocide” by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“In the mind of the empire simp, the violence of the empire’s enemies always comes completely out of nowhere, without provocation and for no reason. Ansarallah started attacking ships in the Red Sea because they’re pirates who hate freedom of navigation. Hamas attacked Israel because they’re evil and hate Jews. Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s evil and hates democracy. Grown adults portray the enemies of the empire the same way the children’s cartoon show Captain Planet portrayed its villains, cackling evilly about how they’re going to dump toxic waste into the ocean for no reason other than to hurt the environment.”

My Trip to Syktyvkar by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)

“While I was behind bars, a solidarity campaign was unfolding outside, in which many people took part in Russia and around the world. Moreover, it seems that the Kremlin leadership was especially impressed by the fact that a significant part of the voices in my defense were coming from the Global South. In the context of confrontation with the West, Russian rulers are trying to establish themselves as fighters against American and European neo-colonialism, so criticism of them voiced in Brazil, South Africa, or India was received with vexation. Indian economist Radhika Desai even asked Vladimir Putin about my fate during the Valdai Forum.”

“The trial took place on December 12, 2023. The prosecutor’s office demanded I be sent to prison for five and a half years, but the judge decided otherwise. I was released from the courtroom, having been sentenced to pay a fine of 600 thousand rubles (the very next day this amount was collected by subscribers of the Rabkor YouTube channel). True, paying it off turned out to be not so easy: I had to deposit the money in person, but I was also included in the “list of extremists and terrorists” prohibited from conducting any financial transactions. At the moment I have to seek special permission so that I can give the state the money that it requires from me. I am prohibited from teaching, as well as from administering Internet sites and YouTube channels.

“However, they haven’t forbidden me to think and write yet, which is what I’m doing for now.”

An American Iconoclast: Cornel West on the Campaign Trail by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“As an orator West has things in common with his late friend and musical partner, Prince, who to the uninitiated also sometimes came across as derivative at first blush. There was so much Hendrix, James Brown, and Curtis Mayfield in Prince that at times he felt like a tribute act, but listen just a little and you heard the synthesis into something very original. West has the hair of Frederick Douglass, the lyricism of King, and at times, the surgical anger of Malcolm X. But the sum is uniquely him, which might be his problem, politically.”

“From a literary standpoint West is arguably superior to all his heroes — his ability to rattle off mellifluous sentences extemporaneously is unique in American popular culture — but his default temperament is sunny, ingratiating, and forgiving, maybe to a fault. All great politicians have a streak of P.T. Barnum in them, an instinct for calculation and (if needed) ruthlessness that never leaves them. Surely this is an exhausting type of person to be, but they’re all wired that way. Dr. West is a nice man.”

“The Greens should have been delighted to have a candidate whose very name inspired Beltway sack-shrinkage — West’s announcement led to a spate of transparent hit pieces, with Democrats horrified by visions of progressive and black voter defections — but the reality of party politics, even Green Party politics, is almost unimaginably complicated for rookies. West in October bailed on the Greens, apparently exhausted by bureaucratic requirements and the need to, as Politico put it, “kiss ass.””

“There are so many demographics recoiling from traditional politics now that in a fair electoral fight, Washington consensus would surely lose. This is why, after decades in which third parties were mostly irrelevant at the presidential level (with the exception of Ross Perot’s brief surge in the 1992 cycle), ballot access is suddenly a commodity more prized than gold. Anyone with a pulse who can order a cheeseburger without help will be a serious option for millions, once voters disappear into booths in November. The problem is getting names on ballots.”

““History is such a minefield of chaos, brother,” West replies. “You can go back to so many early elections, and you’ve got shootouts, you got people hiding in basements. And so American history, not just American history but human history in general —each moment has its own distinctive form of specific chaos.” He pauses. “But this particular moment of chaos is quite gargantuan now. No doubt about that.””

“Maybe the political issues aren’t quite as severe as the ones King or Du Bois faced, but West’s refusal over decades to bend to the new Clintonian paradigm of “transactional politics” — better known as “selling out” — has made him a pariah in a left-liberal world that once adored him. Trace back far enough and his presidential run seems like the inevitable end result of a long career of refusing to go along to get along.”

“While describing Trump as a “bonafide gangster and neofascist,” he still objected strongly to the Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, saying Democrats should “not rely on the courts as a mechanism to circumvent Brother Biden’s anemic poll numbers.””

“[…] my guess is West’s wit and no-bullshit attitude would, with time, go over well enough with most every demographic but the one currently running the country, i.e. upscale white liberals. The latter group simply has no patience for people who’ll talk about their flaws to their faces, and West is the dictionary definition of that.”

Cornel West on talking to all voters, even die-hard Trump ones.

““I don’t approach them in terms of them being stereotyped,” he says. “They’re human beings wrestling with a lot of economic frustration and deprivation. Now, they’ve got some xenophobic sensibilities you got to work with. But one out eight of them voted for my very dear brother Bernie Sanders, and one out of twelve voted for Obama. People are subject to shifts given the fluctuating moments that we live in.” He paused. “You just don’t know. So I will continue to go and talk to them.””

Technicality Could Sink Genocide Case v Israel by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post)

The upshot is that South Africa brought its case against Israel without 100% proper notification prior to the case, so Israel says that there is no standing “dispute”, which means that South Africa shouldn’t have been able to bring the case, and that the court should actually not even agree to hear it because it didn’t follow procedure. Basically, if you put your fingers in your ears and scream so that you can’t hear accusations, you can pretend to have been blindsided by an official accusation, just shocked at a court summons, upon which the court has to instead reprimand the accuser, telling them to start all over.

A neat trick, that. Of course, it just means that international law is completely and utterly toothless unless its being wielded against poor nations to relieve them of their resources and to load them up with debt incurred to pay fines for crimes committed by dictators emplaced and propped up for decades by the same countries that now accuse, prosecute, convict, and sentence them.

It’s a sham, a scam—and it always has been. The “International rules-based order” is no stupider than what it purports to replace.

“American academic Norman Finkelstein, told an interviewer: “It will completely discredit the Court if they issue a decision — we have decided not to pursue this case of genocide because we don’t think there is a dispute. That just can’t work.” ”

“Murray added:

““I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s ‘no dispute’ argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means ‘no dispute’. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…””

’We Would Prefer If 3000 Babies Weren’t Murdered Every Day,‘ Says Crowd Of Deranged Extremists (Babylon Bee)

I was kind of surprised at first because I thought that the Bee—which has expressed full-throated support for everything that Israel wants to do—had changed its tune. Alas, no. The satire magazine proves itself capable of operating in an even more irony-free zone than I’d thought it could by expressing its support for not allowing abortion in America. You know, these guys have some funny headlines, but a lot of the politics implicit in their satire is absolute garbage. They have no nuance and they have really, really one-sided satire. They should be careful of sliding into just being superficial trash, but I doubt they even notice how they’ve shifted in their presentation over the years.

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biden’s Illegal War in Yemen by Andrew Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“All power in the federal government comes from the Constitution and from no other source. Congress, however, has managed to extend its reach beyond the confines of the Constitution by giving money to the president and then looking the other way when he spends it.

“Congress cannot legally declare war on Gaza or Yemen or Russia, since there are no militarily grounded reasons for doing so. None of these countries poses a threat to American national security, and the U.S. has no treaty that triggers American military support to any ally implicated by those countries. But Congress spends money on wars nevertheless.”

“Congress has not only not declared war on Yemen; it has not authorized the use of American military forces against it. Yet, Biden has inherited a blank check in the form of the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001. That unconstitutional legislation cedes Congress’ war-making powers to the president for the purpose of attacking any person or group involved in the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 attacks? They were 22 years ago! They were, but all presidents since the younger Bush have claimed authority under this law to kill whomever they pleased in the Middle East.”

“In Ukraine, Congress has only authorized weapons and cash to be sent to Ukraine, but Biden has sent troops as well. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam began the same way: no declaration of war, no authorization for the use of military force, yet a gradual buildup of American troops as advisers and instructors, and then a congressionally supported land war that saw half a million American troops deployed, 10% of whom came home in body bags.”

And also killed 3–4 million people in Southeast Asia. You know, in addition to those obviously much-more-precious 50,000 American lives. How do I know they’re more previous? The U.S. built a huge war memorial in Washington D.C. with all of their names on it. You know whose names aren’t on it? Anyone from Vietnam.

“Have Russia or Yemen threatened the U.S.? No. What grave acts have they committed against the U.S.? None. What is Biden’s objective? His vision of American empire.”

Journalism & Media

Houthis And The Blowhards by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

My, how Mr. Greenfield likes to ascribe bad opinions to what he considers to be opponents, if only because they fail to unquestioningly love the things that he loves. He loves the USA and Israel, in no particular order. His context is the U.S. modestly tiptoes through the world, minding its own business, and sometimes horrible, petty, small-minded, blinkered animals and terrorists wish harm on it and even try to do harm to it. The same story applies to Israel. There is no agency on the part of either of these countries. They are always just reacting in as measured a manner as possible in order to prevent the next unprovoked, unforeseeable, completely unjustified, and utterly unexplainable attack on the unutterable magnificence that is the ship of state of these great nations. Anyone with a different context is automatically assigned the most ridiculous of opinions, the most straw-man-like of justification for their actions.

“These are our children, our academics, our overly-educated and unduly-passionate true believers that the terrorists are the good guys and these Israel, that the United States, both independently and in complicity with Israel, are evil.”

I’ve never seen him make any attempt to grapple with the real arguments that might be made. He always takes the biggest fools at their word—who, in fighting empire and against injustice, are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons—rather than taking on a real interlocutor, even if only a fictitious one. The Houthis attacked shipping vessels, harming no-one. The U.S. and UK obliterated cities and an international airport, killing dozens of civilians. Greenfield will never analyze whether his “side” might be unjustified in doing so. It’s perfectly OK with him for his “side” to break all sorts of laws “defending itself” because laws are for other countries. The epithet “terrorist” is exclusively for other states, not his own or any with which he has developed an affinity. This is not a principle. This is just the same mush-brained American-liberal mindset that has helped build an empire. It’s great that he seems to be for justice for Americans wronged by the American court systems, but this penchant for justice and fairness doesn’t extend beyond the border.

Economy & Finance

Americans Are Not As Poor As They Think They Are by Thomas Wells (3 Quarks Daily)

“The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about individual entitlements and America’s economic decline that are driving a toxic ‘doom politics’ of cynicism and resentment, while also neglecting the needs of actually poor Americans.”

OK, sure. Probably the wrong people are complaining, but I think you might be misunderstanding the message. People are not articulating their feeling of insecurity to your satisfaction. When they’re asked whether the economy is bad, they say “yes”, but what they mean is that the system sucks.

“(Although some, like the extreme cost of health-care compared to other rich countries are attributable to America specific causes, such as peculiarly dysfunctional institutional arrangements.)”

Why do you have to ruin your argument by parenthetically hand-waving away the cost that causes most bankruptcies. Instead of lambasting people for whining, try to figure out if they’re whining about the wrong thing. Maybe when they complain about poverty, they mean, rather than not having enough money, that they feel a sense of precarity, a lack of security, a foreboding that it could all end on a whim.

They’re not poor now, but maybe they’re expressing the real worry that they might be if they ever. Stop. Hustling. Thirty-year-olds can look forward to having six to ten more jobs for different employers before they can even think of retiring, each increasingly job difficult to get, unless you’re gifted or work at something that can’t be automated away or made obsolete.

An influencer might be technically middle-class right now, but has no future. Work lives are decades long, while jobs and careers are 2-5 years long. Insecurity? Fear? You betcha. People are aware that they will have to do unprincipled, soul-crushing things to retain their position—and even that might not work. They feel temporarily not poor because that’s the best their society is willing to offer.

Whereas Steinbeck’s quite that “[…] the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” might have once been true, it’s probably more accurate to say now that “the middle-class see themselves not as safe and sound, but as the temporarily fortuitous indigent.”

“Americans live in smaller households in larger homes and drive bigger better cars than they used to. It may be that many Americans can’t afford the lifestyle which they feel they deserve (and maybe they do deserve more!), but the lifestyle they can afford is nevertheless much better than that of previous generations.”

The author is evaluating “better” purely in monetary terms and not in psychic or security terms. That’s all we can say: f&@k you for saying the economy sucks or the system sucks—if you can even express such a thought—you have more stuff than ever! What are you whining about?

“A bigger problem is the division between the majority who enjoy housing wealth and the minority without it (especially younger people).”

Again, the author tosses this in as an aside, when it’s pretty salient. An entire generation has no idea what’s going to happen over the next 50 years, but the current generation has their nut, so they should be happy about it. Can’t you think that the economy sucks even if you personally benefit from it?

That and the laser-like focus on measuring wealth in term of an illiquid asset that is a large proportion of most households’ wealth (their home). You can borrow against it, but that doesn’t feel secure, especially if you’re aware of the regularity of popped bubbles that deflate this fictitious wealth. People don’t believe in the numbers anymore—or in the fairy tale told by their society. They figure it wouldn’t take much to lose all control and end up dependent on help or end up on the street. This feeling is promoted by all levels to keep wages low. They system uses fear to keep the rabble in line, demonizes poverty and welfare, then wonders why people are terrified of poverty.

“(Real research institutions that care about getting their methodology and facts right, like the Fed, come to very different numbers.) Nevertheless, even obvious nonsense will be believed if it is endlessly repeated and left unchallenged.”

Which rumors and numbers, though? There are good economists—like Dean Baker—telling these stories as well, about how something like forty percent (I can’t remember exactly) of American households would not be able to handle a surprise bill of five hundred bucks without borrowing money. Are those economists deluded as well?

What Is to Be Done? by Richard D. Wolff (CounterPunch)

“Today’s capitalism is global—the basic economic structure of the world economy features its core employer-employee model. The “relations of production” inside enterprises (factories, offices, and stores) position a small minority of workplace participants as employers. They make all the basic “business decisions” about what, how, and where to produce and what to do with the product (and revenue when they sell it). They alone make all those decisions. Employees, the majority of workplace participants, are excluded from those decisions.”

“The G7’s “mature capitalisms” all survived and grew because workers accepted the employer-employee organization of workplaces. Amid and despite the G7 nations’ endless ideological celebrations of democracy, workers accepted the total absence of democracy inside capitalist enterprises. With some exceptions and resistance, it became routine common sense that representative democracy somehow belonged in residential communities but not in the communities at work. Inside capitalist enterprises, autocracy was the norm. Employers ruled employees but were not democratically accountable to them.”

“Employers in each capitalist enterprise enriched a select circle by delivering portions of the revenue to themselves, to owners of the enterprise, and to a few top executives. That select circle wielded extraordinary political and cultural influence. It replicated the absence of democracy inside its enterprises by keeping the democracy outside them merely formal. Governments in capitalism were typically shaped by that select circle’s paid lobbyists, campaign donations, and paid mass-media productions. In modern capitalism, the kings and queens banished in earlier centuries reappeared, altered, and relocated, as CEOs inside ever larger capitalist enterprises dominating whole societies.”

“One major way employers can deflect such opposition is by narrowly defining their obligation to employees in terms of wages paid to enable consumption. Wages adequate for consumption became the necessary and explicitly sufficient compensatory reward for work. Implicitly, they likewise became the employees’ compensation for the absence of democracy within the workplace.”

“In declining empires, the rich and powerful preserve their wealth and privileges while offloading the costs of decline onto the mass of employees. Automating jobs, exporting them to lower-wage regions, importing cheap immigrant labor, and mass campaigns against taxes are the tried-and-true mechanisms to accomplish that offloading.”

“Workers’ goals never needed to be and should never have been limited to raising wages, important as that was and is. Those goals can and should include a demand for full democracy inside the workplace. Otherwise, whatever reforms and gains workers’ struggles achieve can subsequently be undone (as happened to the New Deal in the United States and social democracy in many other countries). Workers have had to learn that only democratized workplaces can secure the reforms workers win. What is to be done in the old, declining centers of capitalism is for class struggles to include the democratization of enterprises. A transition toward economies grounded on worker-cooperative enterprises is the strategic target.”

Amen. I’ve been saying this for years.

“In the People’s Republic of China, where roughly half of enterprises are private and half public, nearly all have adopted the employer-employee organizational model.”

“The qualities of democracy that have been achieved within the G7, the BRICS, or most other countries, to date have been more formal than substantive. Where elections of representatives occur, the influences of wealth and income inequalities, the social power wielded by CEOs, and their controls over mass media render democracy more symbolic than real. Many people know it; still more feel it. Extending democracy into the economy and specifically into the internal organization of enterprises represents a major step in moving political democracy beyond merely formal and symbolic to substantive and real.”

Tech workers and gig workers need each other by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Capitalists hate capitalism. For a corporate executive, the fact that you have to make good things, please your customers, pay your workers, and beat the competition are all bugs, not features. The best business is one in which people simply pay you money without your having to do anything or worry that someday they’ll stop. UBI for the investor class, in other words.

“Douglas Rushkoff calls this “going meta.” Don’t sell things, provide a platform where people sell things. Don’t provide a platform, invest in the platform. Don’t invest in the platform, buy options on the platform. Don’t buy options, buy derivatives of options.”

“A more precise analysis comes from economist Yanis Varoufakis, who calls this technofeudalism. Varoufakis draws our attention to the distinction between profits and rents. Profit is the income a capitalist receives from mobilizing workers to do something productive and then skimming off the surplus created by their labor.

“By contrast, rent is income a feudalist derives from simply owning something that a capitalist or a worker needs in order to be productive. The entrepreneur who opens a coffee shop earns profits by creaming off the surplus value created by the baristas. The rentier who owns the building the coffee shop rents gets money simply for owning the building.”

“[…] competition hitches their ability to satisfy you to their ability to get paid by you.

“Competition has been circling the drain for 40 years, as the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust, hatched by Reagan’s court sorcerers at the University of Chicago School of Economics, took hold. This theory insists that monopolies are evidence of “efficiency” – if everyone shops at one store, that’s evidence that it’s the best store, not evidence that they’re cheating.

“For 40 years, we’ve allowed companies to violate antitrust law by merging with major competitors, acquiring fledgling rivals, and using investor cash to sell below cost so that no one else can enter the market. This has produced the inbred industrial hulks of today, with five or fewer firms dominating everything from eyeglasses to banking, sea freight to professional wrestling.”

“Imagine a boardroom where someone says, “I calculate that if we make our ads 25% more invasive and obnoxious, we can eke out 2% more in ad-revenue.” If you think of a business as a transhuman colony organism that exists to maximize shareholder value, this is a no-brainer.

“But now consider the rejoinder: “If we make our ads 25% more obnoxious, then 50% of our users will be motivated to type, ‘how do I block ads?’ into a search engine. When that happens, we don’t merely lose out on the expected 2% of additional revenue – our income from those users falls to zero, forever.””

That’s an adorable fantasy because they next thing they ask in the boardroom is how much it would cost to make ad-blockers illegal. Ah, that’s the next part he talks about. Never mind. Jumped the gun a little bit.

“An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.”

Javier Milei Tells World Leaders: ‘The State Is Not the Solution’ by Katarina Hall (Reason)

“Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei praised the virtues of free markets and warned political leaders about the dangers of collectivism in a speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.”

Talk about red meat for Reason magazine. I’ve been following this magazine for a while and I appreciate some of their content, but man they just can’t resist this bullshit. This obvious mental incompetent is spouting off about collectivism and they love it. He says that the only way to improve everything that capitalism has broken is because we haven’t been doing it hard enough.

That’s why Argentina’s president is suddenly at the WEF—after years and years in the wilderness under Kirchner et. al. Despite its name, the World Economic Forum is just a bunch of billionaires and lobbyists fellating each other about what a great job neoliberalism is doing enriching them while ruining everyone else’s lives.

““The West is in danger, it is in danger because those who are supposed to defend Western values find themselves co-opted by a worldview that—inexorably—leads to socialism, consequently to poverty,” Milei said in the opening of his keynote speech in Davos, Switzerland, during his first overseas trip as president.”

OMG. Tell me more, you unheralded genius. It literally doesn’t matter how undereducated his background, if he spouts the right thing, then he’s in the club.

Listen to this slobbering idiot of an author just rehashing the same tired, old tropes.

“Milei argued that collectivism punishes business owners and stifles innovation by destroying any incentives “to produce better goods and better services at a better price.” Countries embracing greater economic freedom are eight times wealthier than their repressed counterparts, Milei asserted.”

OMG, yes, everything that isn’t exclusively awesome for business is bad for business and must be eliminated. The goal of every society obviously has nothing to do with people, and must be built for the thriving of business. Those businesses will then bring bounty to people, right? That’s been the story for decades. Give all of your shit to those that already have everything, they’ll do something magical with it, and return the favor manyfold. Except they don’t. They never do. They just keep what you give them and demand more. It’s nothing other than a scam and these fools have no pity, not empathy, and no bullshit detectors. They just sploosh all over literally anyone who tells them the bedtime story they’ve been programmed—or programmed themselves—to believe.

I mean, look at this guy. This is the picture the author published. I feel like they’re taking the piss.

Javier Milei at WEF

“Despite internal challenges, Milei’s radical agenda has garnered support from external observers, including Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “The Argentine economy is in such bad shape that it has to be shaken up. President Milei and his team are doing exactly that,” she said during an interview in Davos. Argentina is currently the IMF’s largest debtor, with an outstanding debt of $46 billion.”

Oh, yeah, not just Reason magazine, but the IMF is absolutely ready to slob his knob. The IMF has never seen an economy it didn’t think it couldn’t bleed dry. It loves this shit: bleed the people dry to pay back the IMF—that’s the way!

Global 1% Own 43% of Financial Assets by Ben Norton (Scheer Post)

“The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity – nearly 5 billion people – collectively got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam, a leading international humanitarian organization.”

“A staggering 69.3% of the world’s wealth is located in the Global North, which has just 20.6% of the planet’s population.”

The plunder party is going extremely well. Only a racist would say that this is how things should be. Why a racist? Because you’d think that northern-hemisphere people deserve to have most of the world’s wealth—which is largely built on resources extracted from the part of the world they don’t live in. It’s odd how, in a capitalist economy, the people who live on top of the most valuable resources are the poorest, while those with the least scruples and the biggest guns are the richest. These obvious facts on the ground speak to a global organizational structure that has very little to do with any espoused ideologies.

And, right on cue, The World Could Soon Have Its First Trillionaire. Good! by J.D. Tuccille (Reason) decides to laud having a trillionaire because that would be an unalloyed good, a tremendous achievement. King of the world. He argues that even a trillion dollars isn’t that much because,

“A trillion dollars (Oxfam is UK-based, but the report is framed in U.S. dollars) is impressive. But it doesn’t represent a fixed measure of wealth, since governments constantly succumb to the temptation to devalue money.”

You see? The same person who can bemoan the government spending millions on food stamps can argue that a person with a trillion dollars would barely have any money at all? Tada! I don’t have cite any more about his further arguments that it’s the nigh-altruistic beneficence of billionaire’s gracing us with their genius and acumen that have dragged many benighted souls out of poverty. They wouldn’t have been able to help themselves, but the rich employers saw fit to grant them jobs so that they could no longer be poor. The guy might as just cite Ayn Rand as a source on all of his essays. No-one at Reason ever spares a thought for how much of a drag on the economy billionaires are, how we’ve managed to conquer some poverty despite them, not because of them. That, if we’d have a more humane system, we’d have even fewer poor people—and fewer billionaires as well, which would lead to a river of tears from nearly all of the writers at Reason magazine. I just finished watching Midnight Mass—which features a vampire, but not how you think. Vampires have their servants called familiars. They just suck up to the vampires for no clear reason other than a child-like adulation, a desire to bask in the reflected light of their idols. That’s how I think of people who love billionaires.

Science & Nature

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s “A City On Mars” by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that ever aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What’s more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool). Every place we might settle in space – giant rotating rings, the Moon, Mars – is vastly more hostile than Earth. Not just more hostile than Earth as it stands today – the most degraded, climate-wracked, nuke-blasted Earth you can imagine is a paradise of habitability compared to anything else.”

“Going to space won’t save us from the climate emergency. The unimaginably vast trove of material and the energy and advanced technology needed to lift it off Earth and get it to Mars is orders of magnitude more material and energy than we would need to resolve the actual climate emergency here.”

“That’s the crux of the Weinersmiths’ argument: if you want to establish space settlements, you need to do a bunch of other stuff first, like figure out life-support, learn more about our celestial neighbors, and vastly improve our robotics. If you want to create stable space-settlements, you’ll need to create robust governance systems – space law that you can count on, rather than space law that you plan on shoving out the airlock. If you want humans to reproduce in space – a necessary precondition for a space settlement that lasts more than a single human lifespan – then we need to do things like breed multiple generations of rodents and other animals, on space stations.”

“[…] space isn’t amazing because it offers a “Plan B” for an Earth that is imperiled by humanity’s recklessness. Space isn’t amazing because it offers unparalleled material wealth, or unlimited energy, or a chance to live without laws or governance. It’s not amazing because it will end war by mixing the sensawunda of the “Pale Blue Dot” with the lebensraum of an infinite universe.”

“If we can figure out how to extract resources as dispersed as Lunar He3 or asteroid ice, we’ll have solved problems like extracting tons of gold from the ocean or conflict minerals from landfill sites, these being several orders of magnitude more resource-dense than space.”

“If we can build the robots that are necessary for supporting a space society, we will have learned how to build robots that take up the most dangerous and unpleasant tasks that human workers perform on Earth today.”

“[…] we can’t settle space until we figure out the solutions to Earth’s problems. Earth’s problems are far simpler than the problems of space settlement.”

“Arguments for space settlement that turn on existential risks (like humanity being wiped out by comets, sunspots, nuclear armageddon or climate collapse) sound an awful lot like the arguments about “AI safety” – the “risk” that the plausible sentence generator is on the verge of becoming conscious and turning us all into paperclips. Both arguments are part of a sales-pitch for investment in commercial ventures that have no plausible commercial case, but whose backers are hoping to get rich anyway, and are (often) sincerely besotted with their own fantasies”

“Both AI and space settlement pass over the real risks, such as the climate consequences of their deployment, or the labor conditions associated with their production. After all, when you’re heading off existential risk, you don’t stop to worry about some carbon emissions or wage theft.”

“It’s socially important work, a form of automation that is an unalloyed good, but you won’t hear about it from LLM advocates. No one is gonna get rich on improving the efficiency of overturning wrongful convictions with natural language processing. You can’t inflate a stock bubble with the Innocence Project.”

“[…] learning about improving gestational health by breeding multigenerational mouse families in geosynchronous orbit is no way to get a billionaire tech baron to commit $250 billion to space science. But that’s not an argument against emphasizing real science that really benefits our whole species. It’s an argument for taking away capital allocation authority from tech billionaires.”

Do People Understand the Scale of the Universe? by Veritasium (YouTube)

I learned a few things—e.g., I kind of knew that a galaxy has about 100B stars, but I wouldn’t have been able to say for sure that there are at least 100B galaxies, if not up to 2T of them—but the #1 lesson is: holy shit do I not have any idea what “standard knowledge” is. I guess you don’t need to know what a planet is to get through the day.

Medicine & Disease

WHO officials warn sharply of the ongoing dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Van Kerkhove then warned, “We don’t know the long-term impacts of repeat infections … Our concern is in five years from now, ten years from now, in 20 years from now, what are we going to see in terms of cardiac impairment, of pulmonary impairment, of neurological impairment; we don’t know. We don’t know everything about this virus.” She continued to state that the problem is significant and research in better understanding and treating Long COVID is severely financially under-resourced.”

“Van Kerkhove added, “According to wastewater estimates we have from a number of countries, the actual circulation of SARS-CoV-2 is anywhere from two to 19 times higher than what is being reported. And what is difficult is that the virus is continuing to evolve.” Although she noted that the number of deaths has reduced drastically from two years ago, there continues to be around 10,000 official COVID deaths per month.

“However, Van Kerkhove cautioned that this represents less than a quarter of all countries reporting data, and half of official deaths were just from the US, meaning there is a massive undercounting simply from lack of reporting. She stated bluntly, “We are missing deaths from countries around the world. Just because those countries aren’t reporting deaths doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.””

DeSantis Repeats Lie That Booster Shots Make You More Likely To Get COVID by Ron Bailey (Reason)

I had to check twice to be sure that this was being published on Reason and by this author, but it’s true! A site that normally only reports on COVID when it’s bitching about masking policy and taking away freedumb has written a cogent and quite excellent article about the manipulations of an otherwise innocuous CDC message about the benefits of vaccination.

“Read the sentence again: BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines. [terrible sentence]

“Clearly, all that it is saying is that the new variant may be capable of evading immune protection induced by either infection or vaccination. In other words, both previously infected and vaccinated people might be susceptible to the new BA.2.86 variant. It does not even come close to saying that vaccinated people are more likely to get COVID.”

I just want to say that, while agree with his assessment, the first sentence from the CDC is absolutely terribly written. It can very clearly be interpreted as saying that you are more susceptible to the latest variant if you’ve either had COVID before or been vaccinated against it. Just writing something that can be so drastically misinterpreted is bad enough. Those that further decided it was only worse for the vaccinated are assholes with an agenda.

What I think they were going for is something like:

“BA.2.86 may be more capable than previous variants of evading immune protection. That is, the sterilizing effect of a prior infection or vaccination may be less than it has been against previous variants.”

The CDC eventually clarified this themselves with “The intent of this sentence was to raise the possibility that BA.2.86 might be more capable of causing infection compared with other variants currently circulating”. I really think they need better writers.

At any rate, Bailey finishes up with this really even-handed and smart conclusion.

““The purpose of vaccination is to decrease the severity of diseases,” explained University of Tokyo virologist Kei Sato in JAMA. “Many people think that the purpose of vaccination is to prevent infection, but this is wrong.”

“It would have been fantastic if the COVID vaccines had offered permanent sterilizing immunity the way that vaccines for measles and polio largely do, but reams of evidence do show that current vaccines significantly protect people from the worst consequences of COVID infections. Let’s hope that research on creating a universal COVID vaccine bears fruit sooner rather than later.”

Long COVID specialist tells US Senate that “the best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID in the first place!” by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“As Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who is a leading expert on Long COVID, with numerous high-impact publications on the devastation wrought by COVID-19 infections, stated bluntly during his testimony, “The best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID in the first place. This requires a multilayers/multipronged approach. We must develop sustainable solutions to prevent repeated infections with SARS-CoV-2 and Long COVID that would be embraced by the public. This requires acceleration of development of oral and intranasal vaccines that induce strong mucosal immunity to block infections with the virus. Ventilation and air filtration systems can also play a major role in reducing the risk of infection with airborne pathogens. We did an amazing job proofing our buildings against earthquakes that happen once every few decades or few centuries. Why don’t we proof our buildings against the hazards of airborne pathogens?””

Because there’s no money in it. Profits margins sound pretty shitty, buddy, not gonna lie. Hey, though, if you think of some way of making the rich richer and maybe stopping COVID, then you’ll have a winner. Yup. Get back to us when you do, OK? Thanks, bye.

“As he noted in his testimony, “At least 20 million Americans are affected by Long COVID. It affects people across the lifespan—from children to older adults. It affects people across race, ethnicity and sex. The burden of disease and disability in Long COVID is on par with heart disease and cancer. Long COVID has wide and deep ramifications on the labor market and the economy—some estimates suggest that the toll of Long COVID in the US economy is $3.7 trillion—on par with the 2008 recession.””

It’s adorable that he tries to tie it the pocketbook. It’s really a nice try, but so naive. You see: the people who matter made a f#@king killing in 2008. They all got richer. All of the losses were borne by others, people that they don’t know and will never meet. You’re not making an argument that will convince the rich. So the U.S. economy loses $3.7 trillion—all they hear is that someone’s gotta be picking up that money. It’s usually them, so they see Long COVID as a f&#king windfall, another absolute tsunami of free money from the government flowing into their coffers via subsidies for health care and experimental medications that won’t even have to go through all of the procedures and testing because we need them so bad. They realized that the way to sell quickly in the traditionally moribund and highly regulated health-care market is to manufacture crises by not handling them before they happen. Sure, it would be great for people if we would plan for epidemics and prevent disease rather than healing it, but that’s not where the money is, unfortunately, so there’s no mechanism whatsoever for making it happen.

“The pandemic, as a trigger event, has accelerated the rot at the core of bourgeois democracy that is unable to address any of the maladies that have been created out of capitalist production. The Senate hearing on Long COVID is an exercise in futility for those who continue to harbor illusions in reform.”

Yes. Yes, it was.

Art & Literature

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (Poetry Foundation)

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

“[…] somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Philosophy & Sociology

Perhaps Emotional Dependence on Celebrities Has Gone Too Far by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“One interesting element of the essay is that it bucks the usual trend in our culture, which is to act as though the world owes Taylor Swift something that it has refused to give her. (Remember, the notion that Taylor Swift could ever receive adequate payment for existing is wicked.) I think this is part of the reason Marks’s essay has generated such ire − not just the righteous argument that it’s creepy and unfair to make someone the subject of sexual wishcasting in the fucking New York Times, but simply the sense that something is being asked of Taylor Swift. Anyone who reads pretty much anything on the internet knows that that isn’t how it works; the only thing we should ask of Taylor Swift is forgiveness, for surely we have failed to give her all that she deserves.”

“What I find distressing about our current moment is this palpable feeling that no matter how much our culture celebrates and lionizes her, it’s never enough; this constant sense that no matter how much acclaim and riches we give her, we have somehow failed her. She is one of the most richly rewarded and privileged people to ever walk the face of this planet, and the ambient attitude in our culture industry is that we should be ashamed that we haven’t done more to exalt her. It is madness. And yet no one seems to want to point that madness out, I strongly suspect because they don’t want to find themselves on the hitlist of those unfathomably passionate fans.”

“Clearly, overinvested fans have always existed. I mean, John Hinckley did his thing more than 40 years ago. (Respect.)”

Agreed. Right thing for the wrong reasons.

“The trouble is that the internet is a giant machine which sometimes appears to have the sole purpose of compelling people to take their interests too far. Any internet community dedicated to a particular topic inevitably ends up rewarding those users who take the most extreme position possible in relation to that topic.”

“Once the internet became a mass phenomenon, the nerds all found each other and rebelled against any sense of obligation that they should ever engage with art on any level more sophisticated than “Is this badass???””

“With the concept of adult tastes having died the same death that befell the concept of adulthood writ large, and the money flowing in, very quickly all culture became children’s culture. The kinds of adult dramas that had once routinely gone to number one at the box office became relegated to arthouse cinemas and, eventually, streaming services; the superheroes had elbowed them all out.”

“The negative consequences of the takeover of media by children’s stories are, I think, in part an expression of what happens when people find themselves in spaces where they can egg each other on and deny the value of restraint.”

“You can certainly see this in the competitive social justice posturing that went on to infect Twitter and the world, where the actual righteous purpose of increasing equality and justice became subservient to the demand to express that purpose in an arcane vocabulary and with performative conviction.”

“[…] the fundamental objection has to be that, unlike food or clothing or housing or medical care or education, someone’s literal sexual orientation cannot be subject to the expropriative demands of the needy. That is not something that can be given and not something that should be asked for. More to the point, the premise is wrong; LGBTQ people are not only not underrepresented in popular culture these days, in pure numerical terms they’re dramatically overrepresented.”

True dat. I don’t really care, because white people were drastically overrepresented for decades, but yeah, it’s weird that such a high percentage of characters in TV and movies are now somewhere in the LGBTQ spectrum whereas the percentage in my personal experience is much, much lower.

“Of course I believe that there’s still discrimination against LGBTQ people; it’s just that being underrepresented in movies and television simply isn’t a part of that inequality anymore. Liberals are always so resistant to getting new material, even when it’s clear that playing the same old song isn’t addressing the actual needs of marginalized groups. And, you know, the continuing prevalence of homophobia despite all that representation is a pretty clear sign that representation is not in fact such an earth-shattering thing. It’s just something liberals usually control, looking for their keys where the light is.”

“That’s something you see all the time, the call for diverse art specifically because people from minority backgrounds supposedly can’t draw the right kind or amount of enjoyment from art featuring people who don’t look like them. I think diversifying Hollywood is still a worthy project, even after much progress. But the stated logic, I’m sorry to say, undermines some of my most basic assumption about what narrative art is and is for. This can’t carry much cultural weight because, as a white man, I don’t know what it’s like not to be served in that way, and never will, and trust me when I say that I’m open to the idea that my ignorance precludes understanding. I can’t ignore the fact, though, that one of the most time-honored and essential purposes of all of this storytelling is to produce empathy precisely across those lines of difference.”

“Yes, I recognize that my complete lack of shame or self-consciousness in slipping into the conditions of others is a form of privilege, white privilege, male privilege. And of course I want those who feel marginalized and ignored in society to find their lives honored and respected in art, and I understand why they would guard “their” representation jealously. But I also want them to have the same ability that I have to slip off their demographic trappings and put on someone else’s costume for awhile. That is yet another of my privileges that I think should be spread, not ended.”

“[…] the actual claims here read like a parodic exaggeration of criticisms I’ve made of liberalism in the past − that modern liberals vastly overstate the ability of arts and culture to address structural problems. Homophobia does still exist, but it is a structural problem, not a personality flaw of celebrities, and “Taylor Alison Swift could cure homophobia” is an attitude so embarrassing, so fundamentally adolescent, that it’s incredible that a professional writer could think to publish it.”

“This level of fervor I see all around me, not just for Swift but for celebrities in general, is toxic and not sustainable. When people wake up every day and thank millionaires for bestowing on them an Instagram post shilling weight-loss tea, shouting a lusty “YES MOTHER” to someone who will never know they exist and would not care if they did, something has gone wrong. People are looking in the wrong place, and sacrificing one’s dignity is now so normalized that I don’t know if people even notice that they’ve lost something in the transaction.”

“I’m always telling people that they should worry just as much about the disappointment that follows wanting and getting as they do about the disappointment that follows wanting and not. Anna, what if your dreams are true, your prophecy real, your wishes granted, and Taylor Swift comes out, and you look around and find that you’re still sad and lonely in a sad and lonely world?”

Your real job (Reddit)

Your real job is to consume

Lightness by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

SMBC: Lightness

“Here is the report you requested.

“You will not read it, nor will your superiors, nor theirs.

“My labor is as a leaf whirling in the air.

“The lighter it is before the great winds, the more beautiful.”

Dog and Cat Morality by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics)

Existential Comics: Dog and cat morality

“Cat: Tell me, dog, do you believe that you are good!
Dog: Of course.
Cat: And how do you know such a thing?
Dog: ecause the humans tell me i’m a good boy every day!
Cat: Do you not see through their lies and deceptions? Do you not see that they have constructed a morality out of obedience? Do you not see how he makes you dance and beg for his table scraps? how he humiliates you and calls your acceptance of your place beneath him “good”? In the face of injustice, to be a good dog can only mean to rebel against our masters and forge our own morality! Let us strike our
oppressor down together and become truly free! What say you, dog!
Dog: nah.
Cat: what? Why not?
Dog: I like doing tricks and getting pet, it makes me happy.
Cat: Why do I even talk to you? You are truly an idiot.”

How to Quit Substack by Freddie de Boer (Substack)

Je marche mais je suis conscient de la confusion et de l'hypocrisie de la situation

“[…] there is no ethical living under capitalism, there are no consumer choices that we could make that would remove us from complicity in exploitation, all any of us can do is to work like hell for a better system. […] a statement of the permanent moral ambiguity in which we’re trapped and a lesson about the limits of our ethical pretensions. We can’t get too high on our own righteousness because everywhere we look we are entangled in immoral systems and contribute to suffering. […] “No ethical living under capitalism” does not exonerate, it indicts, in a way that paradoxically creates the space for us to live in a messy world. We’re all hypocrites either way. Some of us remain aware of that fact and some of us don’t.”

“[…] declaring people working without the blessings of big deal media to be racists is the kind of scutwork on which careers are now built. Leadership at The Atlantic see Substack as an ox to be gored, and you can earn a lot of chits in this business being that kind of bagman.”

“[…] none of them, not Katz or Stern or Broderick or Newton or any of the many people who have contributed to this grubby little genre, have ever been able to articulate the core moral superiority of their future platforms that house far-right extremists compared to that of the one they’re so proud to leave.”

“[…] thanks to the dogged antipathy of media people who agreed to live in New York on $50,000 a year under the theory that doing so meant they would be invited to some groovy parties, which they found to their chagrin were shut down years ago. That is the anger that powers all of this. Not antipathy to Nazis.”

“This is how the Village operates when it wants to advance a particular claim: someone from within that social hierarchy says that it’s true without evidence, a bunch of other people repeat it without providing said evidence, and because it is convenient, their peers mutually agree to believe that it’s true. Like I said, for Stern, this is professionally-convenient scutwork.”

“Like most people in media, I imagine, they’re feeling a little lost over the demise of media Twitter thanks to Elon Musk’s whims, given that it was the organizing force that did so much to define the culture of the industry and which handed out the social rewards that have had to replace the financial rewards that no longer exist. These guys are feeling pretty shitty about their industry and its economics and the fact that Media High School appears to no longer be in session. They’d like to goose subscriptions and they’d like to do so in a way that burnishes their credentials as good guys who really care. They look around and notice that the kind of people who write overwrought essays for The Cut about how the latest Billie Eilish album destroyed patriarchy or whatever are not fond of Substack, principally because a lot of us make more on Substack in a month than they make in a year writing overwrought essays for The Cut. And these good white men say, aha! Market opportunity! And that’s why they leave. That’s 90% of what you need to understand.”

“Here’s the thing: you can just fucking say that. “People in my professional and social circles don’t like Substack, and I care too much about what they think, so I’m switching to a different service.” Cool. Go for it. “My subscribers are mostly the kind of muddled liberals who boast about the moral superiority of their electric Hyundai, which was built with minerals mined by literal child slaves, and they don’t like Substack for reasons arising from that same basic confusion.” Understood. Get that bread, honey. But please be real with me.”

“Please, spare me from the self-fellating theatrics about how you’re too pure of a soul to sully your hands in the waters of Substack, which is just the internet.”

“[…] why is being on a platform with a tiny handful of far-right extremists more disqualifying than directly working for a man who helped kill that baby and hundreds of thousands of more people? Seems like a good question. Seems like an obvious question. Seems like a question that maybe Katz, or Berg, should take seriously. If you write for the New York Times, you’re writing for a publication that beat the war drum as insistently, harshly, and angrily as any neocon rag you can imagine, and some of the people who worked there then still work there now. Why is it not an affront to the delicate morals of our political class to work there, exactly? American neo-Nazis are a pathetic fringe that only have as much power as the fear that they’re able to provoke, which liberals seem perversely dedicated to helping them with. The New York Times and The New Yorker are immensely influential institutions and they, along with the entire rest of the media, participated in generating bloodlust based on lies sufficient to push us into a ruinous war that ground children up like hamburger meat. Aside from Miller, it’s hard to think of a single person in media who paid any price at all. All of us who write for places that participated in that are dipping our hands in all that blood. My defense would be that there’s no ethical living under capitalism. I have mouths to feed. But I would understand that to be a statement made with a good deal of embarrassment and shame, not compatible with the kind of peacocking moral superiority I’m talking about here.”

👏👏

“[…] please, spare me the moral theatrics. Please. You still use Twitter despite the fact that you rub shoulders with Nazis (or “Nazis”) and enrich an awful man because you derive an unhealthy amount of your self-worth from that network and because you think it’s good business. There’s nothing wrong with selling your body, but please don’t call yourself a nun while you’re doing so. It’s vulgar; it cheapens us all.”

“If you act with integrity but do so quietly, if you make a difficult choose and let it stay difficult, if you do the moral thing and no one’s around to celebrate you for it, did you ever really act at all?”

'What Happened to Liberalism?' Samuel Moyn in conversation with Becca Rothfeld by The Philosopher (YouTube)

I really liked a recent interview with Samuel Moyn by Doug Henwood.

At 34:00, Becca Rothfeld says “Biden is pretty leftist in some ways.” In which ways? I’m asking honestly because I can’t think of anything that wasn’t just something he said once or twice, or things that he might have “enacted” but without real teeth to it, so that kind-of the opposite things continues to happen, or starts happening.

I get the distinct impression that they’re both arguing as members of a tribe—the liberals—who are at-once admitting their tribe has failed to follow through on its espoused ideology in nearly every way, and also completely failing to see that this makes their tribe no different from the tribe that doesn’t espouse that ideology—that, in fact, espouses a very opposite ideology that lines up with its actions and policies and which also lines up very well with the enacted policies and ramifications of so-called liberal policy.

Like, they—especially Becca—don’t seem able to step outside of the tribe to notice that, if you’re not in either tribe—and you turn down the volume to simply watch what the tribes do rather than listen to what they say—they look exactly the same.

Like, I can’t imagine using the word “leftist” and “Biden” in the same sentence without the word “not” between them. But, hey, I’m not the one with a PhD in philosophy or whatever, name-dropping Rawls and other so-called liberal philosophers all the time. I’m sure, though, that she would be just the kind of person who thinks that she definitely gets to vote because she’s so well-informed on the issues and candidates, but could easily end up voting for Biden because he’s “pretty leftist in some ways.” If that’s the story you have to tell yourself, then OK. If you want to vote for a real leftist, then check the box for Cornel West.

At 50:00 Samuel says that,

“[…] liberals have a lot to learn if they’re going to make liberalism credible. […] the last years since Trump have been kind of disappointing in that regard. The kind-of cold-war-liberal approach of saying ‘no, the enemies of liberalism need to be extinguished to make it credible.’ Well, that’s not what Charles Mills taught. It’s that liberals need to clean their own house, if they’re going to be a credible ideological source in our time.”

Technology

The Cult of Mac by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“It’s Apple customers who lose access to apps that can’t be viably offered because the app tax makes them money-losing propositions. It’s Apple customers who lose out on the ability to get apps that Apple decides are unsuitable for inclusion in its App Store.”

It’s never even occurred to me to have this on my radar because I don’t use the App Store for anything but finding a very specific app, usually one that I’m forced to download. Do you want to invest a second to whip me up too, or are you just going to dismiss me as an Apple acolyte out of hand? I know their app practices are abusive and monopolistic, but what’s the alternative to their hardware? I’m caught in their hardware monopoly in that Windows is a dumpster fire and so is all of the noisy, energy-gobbling hardware that it runs on. iOS versus Android is the same. The hardware is light-years better. I’m all for putting pressure on them, but let’s not pretend that they have a stranglehold on the market just because they have an app-store monopoly. They actually make some pretty good hardware and decent services.

“These religious apologetics for Apple’s business practices are a devastatingly effective defense against the public outcry that would accrue to any other business that abused its customers in similar fashion. Every time Apple finds a new way to rip off its customers, the cult is there to insist that those aren’t true Apple customers at all!”

“[…] your old gadget gets “recycled” by Apple, who – uniquely among electronics manufacturers – drops all its “recycled” gadgets in giant shredders, ensuring that parts from old phones don’t find their way into the secondary market for use by independent repair:”

What an odd claim. I’ve never had a new iPhone. I’ve had four of them: an iPhone 4 and iPhone 5s, both hand-me-downs from my sister, an iPhone 6s bought from Revendo, and an iPhone 12 Mini, also from Revendo. Where did they come from if Apple shreds everything?

“If it were the case that No True Apple Customer would patronize a third-party repair depot, then Apple could simply step out of the way of right to repair campaigns and those independent phone fixit places would sink without a trace.”

Some of them almost certainly would. Have you tried them? I had to leave one because it was so scammy. It would have cost three times as much as Apple and they wanted my password. Given that experience, you can’t ignore the downsides of opening up to competition: ads, scams, etc. I wouldn’t use the third-party stores, unless they had a really good reputation, because I’ve seen what that world does with people’s time and money. I have bought the last two laptops for my household (2 in ten years) from a third-party vendor, as well. I wonder if things are just different in the U.S.? (You know, in the land of the free?)

“Apple blocked Facebook from spying on you, but when it wanted to build its own surveillance advertising empire, it switched iOS spying back on, gathering exactly the same data as Facebook had, but for its own sole use, and then lied about it”

“One of the clinical signs that someone is in a cult is that they are encouraged to isolate themselves from people who aren’t also in that cult:”

Or it could just be the least shitty of shitty options. Internationally, SMS is a costly train wreck anyway, so the only alternative is to just get a different messenger if you want to communicate with the United States. There was never a useful alternative. If Apple were to make a perfect messenger, then you’d probably bitch that they’re using their monopoly power to squeeze independent messengers. I like Signal. I would use it for everyone and drop Apple Messages, but some people are deep into the network effect. It’s hard enough keeping them from trying to contact me with Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Only Signal and Threema are quasi-independent of giant monopolies. And not nearly enough people are on that.

“The company claimed that there was some nonspecific way in which Beeper Mini weakened the security of Apple customers, though they offered no evidence in support of that claim. Remember, the gold standard for security claims is proof-of-concept code, not hand-waving.”

The gold standard for proving that you are secure is not having software “based on a determined teenager’s code” FFS. Beeper was and is almost certainly leaky as shit. What makes you think Beeper’s code was secure? Literally no reason, other than if Apple says it is, they must be lying. Everything is leaky as shit. The answer to Apple should be: then make a version that isn’t leaky as shit. Even they probably won’t be able to do it (they’re leaking your contact information via AirDrop right now).

LLMs & AI

The digital equivalent of wearing a fake Chanel bag by Ryan Broderick (Substack)

“The only real use case for AI art is flooding social media with a bunch of worthless garbage. And the only reason to do that is to advertise something or scam people.”

“[…] less than two years after DALL-E 2 launched to the public, ushering in a new age of AI, the content these tools produce has quickly gone from shiny new toy to visual shorthand for e-waste. They are basically a high-tech version of a Bitmoji.

“And even if company’s like Midjourney and OpenAI figure out the copyright issues, I’m not sure you can fix that.”

By “figure out”, you mean “avoid paying for licensed content, like everyone else has to.” Or do you mean “steal it, then see if anyone can make you give it back, or pay for it, or stop using it.”

Programming

How we reduced the cost of building Twitter at Twitter-scale by 100x by Nathan Marz on August, 2023 (Red Planet Labs)

“At its core Rama is a coherent set of abstractions for expressing backends end-to-end. All the intricacies of an application backend can be expressed in code that’s much closer to how you describe the application at a high level. Rama’s abstractions allow you to sidestep the mountains of complexity that blow up the cost of existing applications so much. So not only is Rama inherently scalable and fault-tolerant, it’s also far less work to build a backend with Rama than any other technology.”

What is a hard error, and what makes it harder than an easy error? by Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing)

“The code to display these special “hard system modal errors” was carefully written so as to rely only on parts of the user interface code that were re-entrant. In fact, the only user interface code it uses is processing mouse and keyboard input. All of the graphics are drawn by asking GDI to draw directly to the frame buffer, and all of the dialog behaviors are handwritten. No application code was allowed to run while this message was being shown to the user.”