Links and Notes for February 2nd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Economy & Finance
• Climate Change
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

The Forgotten Plight of the Negev Bedouin by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“[…] none of these harrowing facts have stopped the Zionist mobs of the West Bank from targeting Bedouin villages like that of Wadi al-Siq as part of their supposed revenge for the events of October 7th. That tiny collection of tin shacks clinging to the rugged mountainside east of Ramallah was surrounded by masked settlers and uniformed IDF reservists armed to the teeth with assault rifles and carved from the earth like a cancer from the face of God. Those men opened fire upon unarmed crowds, invaded homes and tied up and assaulted women and children in front of their husbands and fathers at gunpoint. Farmlands were torched, tractors and livestock were stolen, and the battered citizens of Wadi al-Siq were told that every last one of them would be annihilated if they ever returned.”

“The remaining 90,000 live in 46 villages, 35 of them are totally unrecognized by the Israeli government. Here the Bedouins have found themselves at the mercy of the all the very worst trappings of the state. Their movement is heavily policed by arbitrary checkpoints and mandatory IDs. Restrictive zoning and planning regimes have cut them off from basic recourses like water and electricity and barred them from building any infrastructure more substantial than trailers and tents. And they have faced an endless roulette of displacement with entire villages demolished overnight, paved over, and replaced by tony Jewish suburbs.”

“For centuries the Bedouins have struggled to maintain a way of life that predates the European concepts of Westphalia and Balfour, and they continue to stubbornly practice their stateless existence in a land thatched by arbitrary boundaries and manufactured hierarchies. In both Israel and Palestine, the Bedouins govern themselves under an ancient code of unwritten laws passed down orally and overseen by tribal courts and clan councils. They subsist largely on kinship networks that essentially act as Islamic mutual aid societies providing community support wherever it is needed.”

“[…] the Bedouins still choose overwhelmingly to rely on their own indigenous tribal justice systems rather than the racist Israeli police state or the Palestinian Authority’s corrupt Sharia courts and this is what makes these penniless peasants a threat to all of these institutions. The Bedouins don’t fucking need them, and they can still remember a time when the rest of the Middle East didn’t need them either.”

“[…] the most important fact that most westerners and even many Middle Easterners fail to recognize about the ongoing conquest of the Middle East is that the state itself is a tool of colonialism that is totally alien to those lands.”

“[…] the Arabs of the Levant weren’t just wiped out because they were brown, like the European Jews in Nazi Germany, they were wiped out because they initially refused to be governed. Sadly, many of the victims of the Nakba have embraced statehood for the same reasons that so many victims of the Holocaust did. Their collective memories of a life before states have been wiped out by the devastating trauma of genocidal colonialism.”

ICJ Rules Against Ukraine on Terrorism, MH17 by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post)

“The World Court ruled on Wednesday that Russia did not finance terrorism in its defense of separatists in Ukraine and the court refused to find Russia guilty of downing Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 as Ukraine had asked.”

“The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and a Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT) concluded in 2016 that the plane was shot down by ethnic Russian separatists using a missile supplied by Russia. Moscow has denied involvement in the incident. The ruling on MH17 came two weeks after the European Court of Justice decided that the Dutch government was not required to release information it has about the incident. The Dutch news outlet RTL Nieuws had brought the case before the ICJ.”

This is all so strange. Why is Russia charged when Ukrainian separatists shot it down? Why won’t the Dutch present evidence? I recall reading that the investigation was quite shady and biased, but I can’t remember where or when. I can’t imagine that the court ruled for Russia because of Russia’s influence at an international level—it has basically none.

The Silence of the Damned by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“The evidence-free charges, which include the accusation that 10 percent of all of UNRWA’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The reporter, Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Given the numerous lies Israel has employed to justify its genocide, including “beheaded babies” and “mass rape,” it is reasonable to assume this may be another fabrication.”

“Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016. Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.”

“Noga Arbell, a former Israeli foreign ministry official, during a discussion in the Israeli parliament on Jan. 4, stated : “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this destruction must begin immediately.” “UNRWA is an organization that perpetuates the problem of the Palestinian refugees,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2018. “It also perpetuates the narrative of the so-called ‘ right of return ’ with the aim of eliminating the State of Israel, and therefore UNRWA must disappear.””

“The deans of U.S. medical schools and leading medical organizations, especially the American Medical Association (AMA) have joined the ranks of universities, law schools, churches and the media to turn their backs on the Palestinians. The AMA shut down a debate on a ceasefire resolution among its members and has called for “medical neutrality,” although it abandoned “medical neutrality” to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

The AMA serves Empire.

“There is a striking contrast between the treatment of Dr. Marya and the physicians who cheer on the genocide. UCSF physician Matt Cooperberg, who is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Urology, ‘liked’ social media posts such as “REMOVE Palestinians FORM [sic] MAP” and a quote by former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir: “We are able to forgive the the [sic] arabs for killing our children. We are unable to forgive the arabs for forcing us to kill their children.””

Israel and Russia Have No Place in the 2024 Paris Olympics by Jules Boykoff & Dave Zirin (Jacobin)

“In November, an IOC spokesperson insisted that Russia presented “a unique situation and cannot be compared to any other war or conflict in the world.” The statement beggars belief. Both Russia and Israel are engaged in asymmetrical warfare, attacking civic infrastructure and private residences and leaving a long trail of civilian deaths and casualties.”

The authors’ statements beggars belief. Did you write this with only the NYT as a source? The Russian and Israeli conflicts are not in any way comparable as far as targeting civilians goes. The Russian conflict is grinding and illegal, but it has killed far, far fewer civilians than Israel’s conflict in Gaza, which seems to have the intent of killing civilians until the others run away.

“At all costs, IOC president Thomas Bach does not want to offend the United States, which is scheduled to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and is all but certain to host the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.”

Are you going to mention how ludicrous it is to speak of morals when the U.S. should have never—at least in my lifetime—been allowed to participate, by your own standards? Standards that I agree to, by the way! It’s just that we always hear about these standards in relation to any country that does not run the Empire where the journalist lives.

“There is no moral rationale undergirding the IOC’s hypocrisy when it comes to Israel and Russia.”

AND AMERICA MOST OF ALL. JFC. Blind spot much? The U.S. funds Israel. It’s bombing a dozen countries right now. Its drones are everywhere, killing indiscriminately. it sanctions dozens more to economic death. It just started a new war on Yemen. It is actively bombing the three poorest countries in the world. Russia is a piker in comparison.

“More recently, the IOC banned Afghanistan from the 2000 Sydney Olympics because the Taliban barred women from competing in sports.”

JFC. But never the U.S. And the authors don’t see fit to mention it.

“The IOC’s actions raise the question: Is there anything Russia or Israel could do that would get them banned from the Paris Games?”

The authors are really irritating me. I guess Nation writers really do work for empire.

“Zelensky is aware of the IOC’s pivotal role in all this. In February, he said , “The International Olympic Committee needs honesty,” but added, “honesty it has unfortunately lost.””

Now they’re citing that idiot like he matters. He’s a literal dictator. He has banned elections forever. There are no plans for elections in Ukraine. Most other political parties have been banned. Almost all media organizations have been banned. They’re conscripting soldiers. They bomb their own citizens. But, sure, let’s hear what he has to say about how the IOC is the biggest problem.

“The IOC, if it acted against Russia, would no doubt be accused of profound hypocrisy. There are many countries over the decades — such as the United States during the Vietnam War or the Iraq War — that deserved sanction and exclusion from the Olympics, but the IOC remained silent. To penalize Russia, they will argue, is nothing more than a double standard: US foreign policy wrapped in Olympic bunting.”

Finally. But his formulation indicates he’s going to dismiss this in the next few paragraphs.

“It’s about standing up to Russia and Israel because, whether the Olympic athlete wants it or not, their success would be folded into nationalism and the war effort.”

Bullshit. It’s about writing this article now rather when the U.S. invades. How does that statement not apply to the U.S.? HOW?

“We should demand consistency and accountability from the IOC. Now is the time for the group to abide by its own stated standards. Russia, in the name of Ukraine, has no place in the Games. Israel, in the name of Gaza, has no place in the Games.”

And the U.S. In the name of Yemen.

The Palestinians Won in The Hague: So Did the Rest of Us by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“As others have noted, 75 years of Israeli impunity will now draw to a close. Israel’s crimes can now be called Israel’s crimes. Contempt for the Zionist state can now be legitimately expressed.”

It no longer takes a special amount of courage, is what you mean, I suppose, though I’m not sure how true that is, given the extreme pro-Zionist bent in the U.S. right now. Recall that the U.S. Congress decided just a couple of months ago that anti-Zionism is now considered to be anti-Semitism.

Decolonize This: an interview with Sai Englert by Susie Day (CounterPunch)

“There’s an amazing 1960s interview of Malcolm X, who was asked about an attack on settlers by the Mau Mau in Kenya. He says that the Mau Mau aren’t attacking; they’re defending themselves – they’re always defending themselves, because they’re always within a structure based on their continuous dispossession.”

“We can’t understand October 7 without thinking about the fact that 77% of the population of Gaza are already refugees; that Palestinians in Gaza have spent 18 years under military occupation, in which the Israeli state talked about “putting them on a diet, but not letting them starve,” about “mowing the lawn” by regularly bombing them and committing horrendous atrocities. In terms of future responses, we should say that what’s happening in Gaza can only generate much more unspeakable horrors, as long as there isn’t a real and fundamental liberation.”

“The antisemitism argument is more straightforward. It wasn’t the choice of Palestinians to be colonized in the name of a religion or ethnic group. To recast their opposition to that colonization as antisemitism, I think, is extremely dangerous. There’s a real danger in how Western states and Israel are hiding their policies behind a kind of a defense of Jewish people.”

“Sai Englert: Most people don’t want to acknowledge that, since 1967, Israel has been one state, ruling the whole of Historic Palestine, as well as the Golan Heights and, for a period, the Sinai Desert. But it’s an apartheid, colonial state. Really, at the heart of the Palestinian liberation movement is a demand for its democratization – if there is going to be one state, it should rule by one-person-one-vote; not by ethnic supremacy. But Israel continues to expand its settlements; it continues to be allowed to. So why would Israel stop?”

“The majority of Palestinians live outside of Palestine – another way in which Palestine is a regional affair. Most Jordanians are Palestinians; in Lebanon, large populations still living in camps are Palestinian; in Syria, there are Palestinian camps; most in Gaza are refugees…”

Why Legal Immigration Is Impossible for Nearly Everyone by David J. Bier (Cato Institute)

Flow Chart of U.S. Immigration Possibilities

“Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.”

“Barely one in 5,000 displaced persons will be admitted to the United States under the refugee program.”

“The diversity lottery has four basic rules:”

1. Applicants must show that they can support themselves at or above the poverty line
2. Applicants must have at least a high school degree or work experience in a job typically requiring a college degree
3. Only people from countries from which fewer than 50,000 people immigrated to the United States in the last five years can apply (excluding a majority of the world’s population)
4. There are only 55,000 slots awarded through an annual lottery. The chances of winning the lottery and getting a green card have plummeted more than 90 percent since the first lottery was held in 1995.

“[…] nearly all employer‐​sponsored green cards go to people already in the United States who can start working on a temporary work visa, such as the H‑1B visa, much sooner while they go through the lengthy green card process. But the H‑1B visa is capped at just 85,000. The odds of winning the lottery and ultimately getting an H‑1B visa were just 16 percent in 2022. But the even bigger problem for potential immigrants is that the H‑1B visa requires a bachelor’s degree, and only 10 percent of the world’s population has a bachelor’s degree.”

“Even if you have a bachelor’s degree, win the lottery, and convince the employer to pay for the green card processing, the employment‐​based annual cap is massively oversubscribed. There was a backlog of about 1.4 million in 2020 for a cap of just 140,000 [H-1B visas].”

“[…] the system is restrictive compared with demand. Nearly 32 million people tried to receive a green card in 2018, while just 1 million were successful, and most could not even try the process.”

“The United States ranks in the bottom third of wealthy countries for foreign‐​born share of the population. Even if it accepted 70 million immigrants tomorrow, it would still not surpass the likes of Australia.”

Scratch a liberal (Reddit)

“We would rather see the Middle East become a parking lot […] than see Trump get reelected. We are not getting another candidate.”

People expressed hope that we have to continue the pressure to get what we want. Although it’s easier to retreat into the reassuring hopelessness of cynicism, I, too, feel like something might be categorically different this time. The rulers have lost control of the narrative, at least to some degree. They’re making a lot of unforced errors that they haven’t made before. It won’t matter if too much time passes, so continued pressure is a good recommendation. Continue to make them say the quiet part out loud. At least some part of history will record it, and perhaps make them pay. Although it’s hard not the cynicism creep back in, the one engendered by knowing how it went down the last ten times.

Verdicts Are Supposed To Be Special by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“Law moves slowly to avoid catastrophe, even if it’s a fiasco in its current state. The alternative to bad isn’t necessarily…well, you know. But the only two parties to a criminal trial who support the status quo of general verdicts, judges and prosecutors, can’t manage to muster any justification that it somehow benefits the defense.

“It would seem obvious why judges and prosecutors would favor a general over a special verdict. It creates far greater opportunity for the jury to find that the proof didn’t withstand scrutiny, as any failure of evidence would be sufficient to change the end result. No longer would a jury easily gloss over the logical leaps and evidentiary gaps to get to the verdict they feel is right. If the prosecution didn’t have the goods, it would stare back at them from the special verdict sheet.

“Perhaps more importantly, it would open a whole new arena of potential reversible era, from the preparation of the special verdict sheet that misstates or omits an element to inconsistent verdicts that compel reversal altogether. But then, getting it right is what the job is about, and getting it wrong is exactly why special verdicts would be a vast improvement over the current general jury verdict. This is a big idea and needs to get some serious traction.”

Biden Says The US “Does Not Seek Conflict In The Middle East” While Actively Dropping Bombs There by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“In reality, “it really doesn’t matter” whether Iran was behind the attack because Iran is the most powerful non-US-aligned state in the middle east, and for that reason the US has spent generations seizing every opportunity to harm and subvert it and its interests in the region. This is just one more opportunity for the US empire to do what it always does in the middle east.”

“It is a bit odd, then, that the US president announced the beginning of this new series of airstrikes with a statement which claims “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.” Conflict in the middle east is what the US empire does. The entire US empire is held together by endless conflict, especially in resource-rich regions where strategic control is necessary to retain planetary hegemony. The US empire is conflict.”

Biden wrote that because he believes it. A conflict involves two sides fighting. The U.S. absolutely doesn’t seek conflict, it seeks hegemony. Conflict is the dirty bit that arises when its targets refuse to acquiesce immediately. So, it’s true that Biden doesn’t seek conflict. He’d rather just be able to plunder without any resistance at all. Conflict is what arises when a U.S. attack is answered. The U.S.. certainly doesn’t seek that.

I would amend what Caitlin wrote to say that “Aggression in the middle east is what the US empire does. The entire US empire is held together by endless aggression.”

Gaza Delenda Est by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The Israeli dossier against UNRWA was based largely on interrogations, likely involving torture, by Mossad and Shin Bet of Gazans seized on October 7. The allegations had not been verified when they hit the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times; yet, the US immediately suspended funding for UNRWA, the primary source of food and shelter for 1.6 million displaced Gazans. The US’s rash decision was swiftly followed by 14 other nations.”

It’s the result they were all looking for. The Empire hasn’t gotten the memo yet that, what to them looks like legitimate and solid evidence and proof, looks like a fantastical and ludicrously unbelievable web of lies and fabrications to everyone who’s not drunk the Kool-aid. No-one with a modicum of sense—or who is at-all interested in what is actually happening rather than having their bellies rubbed by Israel—believes anything the Mossad, Shin Bet, or any part of the IDF has to say. They may have actually tortured people into saying the things that they reported that they heard said. But that seems like an awful lot of work when you could just make up whatever you want and it will be reported just as loudly and unquestioningly. So, just do that, instead. You get to go home earlier.

The important thing is that you’ve all pretended to care about having justifiable reasons for cutting off funding for the only aid organization who’s had any ability to get food, water, sanitation, and medical assistance to the population of Gaza. They all clap each other on the back for a job well done in ensuring that the people of Gaza will starve or dehydrate or die of otherwise easily treatable diseases and medical conditions. It’s a lot more efficient to let nature claim their failing bodies than to shoot each and every one of them. Biden can only sneak so many munitions past Congress.

Even stupid Switzerland cut off funding, probably because it’s afraid of being accused of being a bunch of terrorist-loving anti-semites. Belgium didn’t cut off funding and their entire building in Gaza was coincidentally bombed by Israel today. No-one died because they’d pulled out their staff two weeks ago, but now they definitely don’t have a place to back to. Was it a strategic target? No, not a classically strategic target in that it could have served any Palestinian military purpose, but it was a powerful message to send to the other countries that those who don’t follow along with the Don’s orders will pay the consequences. Pay your protection money and nothing will happen to you.

St. Clair listed the countries that have cut off aid funding to UNRWA in Palestine based on an Israeli allegation:

1. United States, $343.9 M
2. Germany, $202.1 M
3. European Union, $114.1 M
4. Sweden, $61 M
5. Japan, $30.2 M
6. France, $28.9 M
7. Switzerland, $25.5 M
8. Canada. $23.7 M
9. United Kingdom, $21.2 M
10. The Netherlands, $21.2 M
11. Australia, $13.8 M
12. Italy, $18 M
13. Austria, $8.1 M
14. Finland, $7.8 M
15. New Zealand, $560.8 K
16. Iceland, $558.7 K
17. Romania, $210.7 K
18. Estonia, $90 K

It’s kind of sad to see the sweet naivité of these poor, deluded nations that still believe everything that Israel says without any proof. But the person being scammed always kind of wants to be scammed, if they keep falling for it.

And what’s really going to be fun is having to put up with all of the hand-wringing years from now, about how no-one could have known how bad it was or how bad is was going to get. That they’d been duped, despite their best intentions. They’ll demand forgiveness for all, and no loss of status or fortune for anyone important. ‘How could this have happened?’ they’ll ask in plaintive tones. How could Israel have fooled us so badly? No-one could have guessed how this would turn out. It will be so very tiresome as we watch every one of these reprehensible people fail upward into every more powerful and well-remunerated positions.

“There are two UN refugee agencies, UNCHR and UNRWA. in 1948 Israel’s Western backers wanted UNRWA to exist separately from the main UN Refugee Agency because Israel wanted to settle Jews from Europe in Israel without being forced to allow Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they had just fled from at gunpoint.”

“Mustafa Barghouti in an interview with the German magazine Taz:

“Taz: What do you expect from Europe?

“Barghouti: Nothing.

“Taz” Not even sanctions?

“Barghouti: You have imposed thousands of sanctions on Putin, but at the same time you are vacationing in AirBnBs in the settlements. You no longer have any credibility.

“Taz: Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Do you think this is the right word to describe this war?

“Barghouti: This is a question for you.

“Taz: What do you mean?

“Barghouti: Can I quote Elie Wiesel? In every war, there are three categories: the murderers, the victims and those who stand and watch. One day you will ask: where have you been?

“….

“Barghouti: What is the problem? That the barbed wire has been broken or that this barbed wire exists? I’m a doctor and I don’t focus on the symptoms but on the causes. October 7th is a symptom. Hamas itself is a symptom. In 1948…

“Taz: No, please don’t start with 1948. We know the story. Let’s stick with current developments.

“Barghouti: If you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. It looks like I’m trying to dodge questions, but it’s you who’s dodging answers.”

“Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, clinics, water treatment plants & 60% of its homes, but 80% of the “tunnels” it claims to be targeting remain intact, according to the Wall Street Journal. I guess the tunnels need to remain intact to justify bombing the rest of Gaza’s homes.”

I just thought of something: what if Hamas would arrange to hand all of its hostages over to NATO or some other coalition that represents most, if not all, of Israel’s enablers? The hostages are a moral liability for Hamas right now. But they can’t just give them back to Israel because Israel will just continue with their bombing and nothing will have been won with the hostages’ return. What could be won, though? Holding onto them is moral blight, and it’s not winning them anything. They got a few hundred prisoners back, but Israel just kidnapped even more people the next day. That’s a dead-end. Giving them back is a dead-end. But turning them over to, say, Germany, England or the U.S. would put the recipient into a bit of a quandary, no? Their instinct would be to just return them to Israel, but they couldn’t just do so without gaining even more opprobrium from the rest of the rest of the world. They would be even more complicit if they just handed them back to Israel without extracting any promise of a ceasefire—since, without the hostages, Israel would no longer have a reason to continue their assault.

“Tariq Ali: “Why are the Houthis the most popular force in much of the non-Western world? Because they have taught other Arab states the meaning of real solidarity as compared to meaningless bullshit. Expanding the war to Yemen or Iran will backfire badly.””

“Stephen Walt: “Even I seem to have underestimated Washington’s ability to keep making the same foreign policy mistakes no matter who is in the White House.””

“On Tuesday morning an undercover Israeli military unit (ie., death squad)—dressed as doctors and women in civilian clothing— entered Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin and assassinated three Palestinian young men using silenced firearms. […]

“One of the people the IDF death squad assassinated was an 18-year-old boy named Bassel Ghazzawi, who was “shot in the head at point-blank range.” Ghazzawi had been in the hospital for almost four months, after his back was shattered by missile fragments from an Israeli drone strike, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.”

“This is clearly a war crime, but when asked about whether this was appropriate for a nation getting US arms and financial aid, State Dept. flack Matthew Miller said: “We think it is appropriate that they [Israel] have the ability to bring members of Hamas to justice.””

Just when you think that they couldn’t stoop any lower…

“Craig Mokhiber: “The new strategy of Israel’s Western allies and co-opted international institutions is to return to the status quo ante, resume the two-state smokescreen, recognize a bantustan, leave the root causes in place and oppose accountability for the genocidaires. A formula for more hell.””

“Ralph Nader: “The U.S. conflicts in the Middle East keep escalating. What are our soldiers doing at a remote post in Jordan—with 35 more U.S. military installations in the backyards of these countries—that the American people are required to fund without their knowledge? This is Empire.””

“In early December, 82-year-old Israeli Fahamiya Khalidi fled her home after it was shelled by IDF for the safety of a nearby school. The school was soon raided by Israeli troops and Khalidi, who has Alzheimer’s, was arrested as an “unlawful combatant” and jailed in Damon Prison in northern Israel, where she was held without access to an attorney for two weeks, until being freed after an appeal by Physicians for Human Rights.”

Do these people not have mothers? Jesus Christ, I thought I was a heartless sonofabitch.

“This week Hidaya Ahmad, the director of volunteers at the Red Crescent Society, was shot and killed by the IDF in the office of the Red Crescent Society in Khan Younis.”

They probably just sniped her through a window, like in a video game. What possible reason could you have for killing this woman? Was she a sleeper agent of Hamas? Really?

“The last words this week will be left to Marie-Aure Perreault Revial, emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who described her experience working in the emergency department of Al-Aqsa Shohada Hospital in central Gaza […]”

“By the end of December, the team in our wound-dressing unit were seeing on average 150 patients per day, almost all with burns or blast injuries. Many were children. One of our surgeons told me about dressing the wounds of babies who had lost their legs. It stayed with him. Babies who had never learned to walk, and never will. Some of those children have a new acronym written on their file. “WCNSF”, which stands for Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.

“Salma*, nine years old, is one of thousands of WCNSF. She suffered a fractured skull after her house was shelled. One of her legs was broken, the other had been amputated. We met her in the intensive care unit. She still didn’t know that she was the only one who made it out of the rubble alive: the exhausted staff wanted to let her recover physically first.”

However Bad You Think Israel Is, It’s Worse by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“There’s no valid basis for westerners to object to Putin being interviewed by a western pundit. There’s no moral basis because Israeli officials have had unfettered access to a wildly sympathetic western press throughout four months of administering an active genocide. There’s no basis on the grounds that it hurts US information interests, because that would be admitting that US information interests depend on hiding information from the public about matters as basic as what a foreign leader thinks about his own actions, and essentially acknowledging that the western media are supposed to function as propaganda services for US military and intelligence agencies.”

Agreed. I can’t imagine Tucker Carlson will do a better job than Oliver Stone did in his masterful interview series from 2017. Check out my reviews for E01, E02, E03, and E04.

“US foreign policy is essentially one big long war against disobedience. Bombing, regime changing, starving and destabilizing any population anywhere on earth who dares to insist on its own self-sovereignty instead of letting itself be absorbed into the folds of the global empire.

“They call different parts of it the Israel-Hamas War, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, but really it’s all the same war: the war on disobedience. One long operation to brutalize the global population into obedience and submission, year after year, decade after decade.”

“Biden isn’t technically lying when he says the US does not seek conflict in the middle east. The US seeks DOMINATION in the middle east, and would prefer to receive that domination willingly from submissive subjects. Only when middle easterners refuse to submit is there conflict.”

This is the same point I made above, in response to another of her posts. Submission to “American interests.”

“The political/media class never does the right thing because it wants to, it does the right thing when it is forced to by normal human beings with healthy consciences. The fate of humanity rests on the ability of ordinary people to freely circulate truth.”

Jeremy Scahill was absolutely en fuego in this 90-minute interview. I’ve cleaned up the YouTube transcript—it gets most of the words, but includes verbal tics, has no punctuation, has a very cavalier attitude toward capitalization, and simply will not transcribe certain words correctly. Anyway, Jeremy and Briahna had a great conversation about terrible, terrible topics.

IDF Soldiers DESECRATE Gaza Cemetery and Other Israel BOMBSHELLS (w/ Jeremy Scahill) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

At around 24:00 they talk about the circumstances surrounding the recent defunding of UNRWA.

“Jeremy It’s hard to shock me. The Wall Street Journal on Monday, as all of this is happening, and the focus is on: there were 12 UNRWA employees that Israel…
Briahna Out of 30,000, by the way we should say that it’s a huge agency. That represented 0.04% of all employees, but go ahead I’m sorry
Jeremy […] I mean it has this has such whiffs of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which was based on lies. But the Wall Street Journal puts on its main web page—right at the top—what purports to be an article based on what they call an intelligence dossier, that says that it’s far greater a problem than just these 12 individuals. That, in fact, a full 10% of UNRWA employees are connected to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

“And, when you read down…so: “intelligence dossier.” It’s like I was having flashbacks to the Christopher Steele, Russia-gate stuff. But also to Judith Miller mushroom-cloud stuff, because if you dig into the article, what they’re saying is that the Israeli government provided this information to the United States government and then the Wall Street Journal was able to review it.

“And, you know, it’s all basically guilt by innuendo. And, you know, it was devastating because then—you know, people don’t read, they don’t check facts—it just becomes—even in the liberal comment-sphere—it became like, ‘see! This is, it’s not just a few bad apples! This is pervasive throughout the organization.‘

“The lead author of that Wall Street Journal piece is herself a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, who has boasted that her closest friend basically created the social-media strategy of the IDF. So, it basically was laundering, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, an insidious, violent, propaganda campaign being implemented by a government that just had a devastating set of rulings issued against it for plausible violations of the genocide convention, in service of trying to further starve the people of Gaza.

“And that narrative, that was set last week and then doubled down on by The Wall Street Journal, is now becoming the dominant narrative and Anthony Blinken—on Tuesday, Bri!—was asked about the evidence and he said publicly that the United States had not done its own investigation, but that the allegations are very, very credible. I mean: think about that statement. For America’s top diplomat to admit to the world that we didn’t bother to actually do our own investigation before we cut off funding to the most vital humanitarian organization operating in a country that is now under the watch of the world court for a potential genocide. That is the top diplomat of the United States saying we didn’t bother to even look into this ourselves.

“We just believe notorious liars who have lied from the moment that this thing started, who have lied for decades about the Palestinians, whose entire worldview is: dehumanize Arabs, dehumanize Palestinians, treat them as human animals. The United States is taking the word of that government to cut off funding to basically the only force in Gaza able to provide any meaningful aid and medical care right now, to a people that are could well be found to be victims of genocide. This is, on a moral level, … I find it difficult to imagine a more immoral stance than that which the United States is taking at this moment on this issue.”

At 33:00 Jeremy talks about how accusing people who live in Gaza—as so many employees of UNRWA do—of knowing people in Hamas is utter nonsense, Of course they know people in Hamas; Hamas is the local government.

“So when you say—as the Wall Street Journal is alleging, based on this the laundering of Israeli so-called intelligence—that 10% of these people had connections to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, I’m sure the number is far greater than that. Because what do you mean by connection? Hamas is not just Qassam Brigade. Hamas is the ruling authority, whether you like them or not. They pick up the trash. They provide civil services. The laziness is also part of the banality of evil. The laziness among the public, who don’t even bother to check—well, what does that even mean? When I read ‘people are connected to Hamas,’ it’s like, well, of course, they are. This isn’t some scary smoking gun that you’ve produced for us. Hamas is much more complicated than the Qassam brigades and October 7th. This is a long story.”

At 46:00 Jeremy cautions Briahna to be careful about dismissing all claims of rape on October 7th, Just because there are some spectacular lies going around doesn’t mean nothing happened. It warrants a sober and serious investigation. Soldiers rape. They generally do it once they’ve occupied an area, not when they’re flying by in jeeps in a four-hour sortie, but it’s still possible. But we have to hear from the victims, no people who claim they saw victims. But we have to continue to listen and not close off. Israelis can be and are victims, too. Don’t stoop to the level of the worst of their government’s speakers.

“I think, on the one hand, we have the propaganda campaign, which clearly is riddled with lies, exaggerations, and is aimed at enforcing a dehumanization narrative that Israel hopes will continue to justify by its mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. On the other hand, you have—I’m sure you have civil servants in Israel and and people who work with survivors and victims of sexual violence that really do actually want to solve alleged crimes. And all I’m cautioning is that we be careful with running away with our own narratives.”

At 52:00 Jeremy says discusses how the Israeli government’s tactic of making it seem like Arabs are so barbarous that would rape anything is backfiring on them, for exactly the reasons listed above. In fact, Briahna’s amount of sympathy is noticeably limited.

“If you just look at this exclusively through the lens of justice for victims, this conduct is contaminating the investigation. On the other side of this is part of a campaign to dehumanize Arabs and particularly Arab men/ It is an attempt to portray the enemy as savage barbarians who murder, loot, rape, and pillage for the sake of those things rather than that they’re engaged in an attack that from their perspective is one battle in a 75-year war for liberation. People say accuse me of being pro-Hamas. If you go back and look at everything I’ve ever said about Hamas, all I do is state factual information about Hamas and that somehow is being pro-Hamas. No. It’s journalistic malpractice not to explain the stated intent or the response to allegations by a party that we’re being told is tantamount to the Nazis and Isis. It’s journalistically responsible to say ‘hey, we’re being told these guys are the new Nazis. Let’s do some fact-checking. Why don’t we see if that’s actually true. This is basic journalism.”

At 01:01:00 Jeremy talks more about journalistic malpractice, about how deferential the US media is to Israel’s narrative,

“The dominant sort of tone is always—the number one rule is “deference to Israel’s narrative”. That is the number one rule of how to cover anything involving Israel. You must refer to the narrative of the Israeli State […] I think that large American news organizations have done an immense disservice to the public in the way that they’ve covered this war, in general. But also dozens upon dozens of our colleagues have been murdered and their family members have been killed. […] Our colleagues are being murdered in broad daylight.

“[…] there is good journalism that’s out there. I just think that that the drum-beat coverage that we see to facilitate wars, all the lies that were repeated early on, when independent journalists were questioning them—you we’ve talked about a lot of them today—they were going along with it. CNN promoted many of the most outlandish, obscene lies that Israel was deploying immediately to try to justify the slaughter that Netanyahu always knew he wanted to unleash on Gaza.”

Finally, at 01:14:00 Jeremy talks about how offensive it is for Biden to even be running for president, and how hollow it is for flacks like AOC to be shilling for him.

“Make an argument why people whose families have been murdered with American bombs—with the full support of the American political establishment—why they should be voting for Joe Biden, the man who has single-handedly made this all possible for Israel to do. My answer to AOC is: don’t run around telling people like me why we should vote for for Biden. Let’s hear you publicly make the case why a Palestinian voter in this country—whose loved ones have been murdered—why should they be voting for Joe Biden and why should they be declaring that support in January of 2024 when the election is 11 months away?”

Biden demands “immediate” passage of $118 billion World War III/anti-immigrant package by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

Young minors lie inside a pod at the Donna holding… Protection (CBP), in Donna, Texas, March 30, 2021

“The bill does not include a “pathway to citizenship” for “Dreamers”—the nearly 3 million undocumented migrants who were brought to the US as children. For over a decade, dreamers have been forced to pay a fee and submit personal information to the immigration agencies every two years in order to stay in the US, despite the fact many of them have no memory of anything outside the US.

“Instead of expanding citizenship, the bill greatly expands the surveillance and detention of migrants within the country as their claims are processed. At least $3.2 billion is earmarked just to ICE for detaining immigrants.”

“While the text of the bill contains strict limits for any “humanitarian” funding that does trickle into Gaza, the bill contains no provisions that would require enhanced scrutiny of military aid to Israel even as it uses the bombs, artillery shells and missiles provided by the US to slaughter civilians and children by the thousands.”

The Western Press Are Just Printing Straight Up Nazi Propaganda About Middle Easterners Now by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“On Monday the Guardian published a political cartoon which would be indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda of the 1930s, except that it happens to depict a Muslim instead of a Jew.”

“The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Steven Stalinsky titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital” about the Michigan city which is home to the largest per capita Muslim population in the United States.”

These newspapers just get away with the most libelous, racist messaging because no-one really cares about all of that touchy-feely equality stuff. The Wall Street Journal can basically just call all of Dearborn a pile of un-American sand-ni##ers and it’s just fine. No-one important bats an eye. This is the leading financial newspaper in the country basically writing “You know how those people are.”

“In the last few days The Wall Street Journal has also published editorial board pieces with demented headlines like “Chicago Votes for Hamas” after the Chicago City Council voted to support a ceasefire in Gaza, and “The U.N.’s War on Israel” about the since-discredited narrative that some UNRWA staff are known to have participated in the October 7 attack.”

Israel poised to expand war against Hezbollah in Lebanon by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

“Fighting along Israel’s northern border has been underway for months since the eruption of the war in Gaza on October 7, including strikes by Israel and Hezbollah on virtually a daily basis. Israeli attacks have killed at least 177 Hezbollah fighters and 40 others, including 19 civilians, three of whom were journalists. Nine Israeli soldiers and reservists have been killed, along with six civilians. Some 76,000 civilians in Lebanon have been displaced by the conflict, as well as 80,000 Israelis.”

“Hezbollah dismissed proposals for its withdrawal to the north as unrealistic given that many of its fighters are from areas of southern Lebanon close to Israel. Last week, Hezbollah deputy secretary general Naim Qassem declared: “The party is not interested in any discussion at present over Israeli demands regarding the southern front… Our position is clear: an end to the war on Gaza will automatically close the Lebanese front.””

US Blocks Yemen-Saudi Peace Deal by Dave DeCamp (AntiWar.com)

“The US decision to re-designate the Houthis as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” will block the payment of public sector workers living in Houthi-controlled Yemen, who have gone without pay for years.

“[…]

“The first phase of the peace deal would also fully open Yemen’s airports and sea ports that have been under blockade since 2015, another aspect of the deal that will be complicated by the new US sanctions, which will go into effect later this month.

“A US official told the Times that the US would only allow the payment of Yemeni civil salaries if the Houthis choose the path of “peace” […]”

The US Keeps Bombing People While Saying It Doesn’t Want To Fight by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“US military advisors have been deployed to Kinmen, a group of Taiwan-controlled islands so close to the Chinese mainland that in the late sixties giant loudspeakers were built there to blast anti-communist propaganda over the water into the PRC.

“Contrast this move with a recent headline from The Times saying “China opens Antarctic base on America’s doorstep,” which will show up as self-evidently nonsensical to anyone who has ever looked at a globe. It’s taken as a given that the US is entitled to amass a military presence right on China’s coastline, but the idea of China establishing a presence literally anywhere on planet Earth is interpreted as extreme aggressions on “America’s doorstep”.”

“[…] at just three kilometers away the Kinmen islands are closer to mainland China than Martha’s Vineyard is to the coast of Massachusetts. If China came anywhere near amassing any kind of military presence that close to the United States, it would be considered an act of war and the US would attack immediately.”

“[…] if at any point China decides that too many of its red lines have been crossed and it needs to act before it’s too late, the US will with absolute certainty have a melodramatic fit about China’s unprovoked attack on the poor innocent US military presence on its border.”

“The US empire exists at an oddly contradictory point in history when our society no longer considers it acceptable to be a might-makes-right strongman dominator, and yet that’s precisely the sort of disposition you need to have when you’re an empire held together by endless military violence and the threat thereof.

“So you get weird nonsense like US officials bombing the shit out of the middle east while proclaiming they have no interest in war, and engaging in extremely reckless aggressions against nuclear-armed rivals while pretending they’re just innocent witnesses to unprovoked aggressions if those nations respond.”

Economy & Finance

Die Wohnung ist ein soziales Gut, kein Spekulationsobjekt – doch was kümmert es die Eigentümer? by Frank Blenz (NachDenkSeiten)

“Spott macht sich breit, die Mieter verbrauchen zwar nicht mehr, dennoch müsste viel nachgezahlt werden – die Bürger sind, ach Gottchen, in die Falle von Angebot und Nachfrage getappt. Dem nicht genug, die Mietpreiskurve zeigt weiter in eine Richtung – nach oben. Wer macht Kasse? Wer stützt das? Wer unterbindet das nicht? Was unter anderem zu unternehmen wäre, zeigt eine Forderung aus dem Vogtland.”

Germany’s energy market looks a lot like Texas’s.

Bidens LNG-Moratorium ist ein Wirtschaftskrieg gegen Deutschland by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Grund für die Exportbeschränkungen dürfte vielmehr ein drohendes Überangebot von LNG auf dem Weltmarkt sein, das dazu führen würde, dass auch in der EU und allen voran Deutschland die Gaspreise mittel- bis langfristig sinken könnten. Heute beziehen US-Unternehmen Gas für rund ein Viertel des Preises ihrer deutschen Konkurrenz – vor allem für die Chemiebranche ist dies ein gigantischer Standortvorteil. Und das soll nach dem Willen Bidens auch so bleiben.”

“Was heißt das für Deutschland? Ist mit einer Gasmangellage zu rechnen? Nein. Das vergangene Jahr hat gezeigt, dass die deutschen Importeure auch im internationalen Wettbewerb auf dem Spotmarkt genügend LNG einkaufen können – dies jedoch zu hohen Preisen. Die konkrete Folge des Moratoriums ist, dass sich daran so schnell nichts ändern wird. Der Weltmarktpreis bleibt hoch, da das Angebot nicht mit der Nachfrage mitziehen kann.”

“Mittel- bis langfristig werden also deutsche Versorger weiterhin zu sehr hohen Preisen LNG aus den USA kaufen. Würden die LNG-Kapazitäten erweitert, würde man zwar immer noch den Großteil des LNG in den USA kaufen – dies jedoch zu niedrigeren Preisen. Das Moratorium läuft also darauf hinaus, dass die USA nicht mehr LNG exportieren, sondern für ihre LNG-Exporte mehr Geld kassieren.”

“Für die USA ist dies eine Win-Win-Situation. US-Industriekunden zahlen schon heute nur rund ein Viertel für Gas als Energieträger wie ihre deutsche Konkurrenz. Und daran wird sich nun erst mal auch nichts ändern. Bidens Dekret ist somit eine direkte wirtschaftliche Kriegserklärung gegen Deutschland, eine Wirtschafssanktion zur Stärkung der amerikanischen Industrie und zur Schwächung ihrer deutschen Konkurrenz.”

“Indem er das Moratorium mit umwelt- und klimapolitischen Bedenken begründet, nimmt er insbesondere den deutschen Grünen gleich den Wind aus den Segeln. Rein sachlich hat Biden natürlich recht, doch man sollte nun auch nicht so tun, als hätte die Biden-Regierung plötzlich ihr Herz für die Umwelt und das Klima entdeckt. It’s the economy, stupid. Die USA befinden sich im Wirtschaftskrieg gegen Deutschland und Deutschland verliert diesen Krieg.”

How Private Equity Was Born by Doug Henwood (Jacobin)

“These new large firms were marked by what later would be called the separation of ownership from control. The official owners were outside investors, stockholders, who could sell those shares to other investors if they liked but they had little influence over corporate policy. That was set by an increasingly professionalized caste of formally trained managers. The first US business school, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton, was founded in 1881, and over the next couple of decades others sprang to life, including Harvard’s in 1908. The professionals’ victory wasn’t complete; financial operators still played a big role in what we call today corporate governance — how firms are run and for whom.”

“Legal scholars and economists began reflecting on what it meant that shareholders were now mostly millions of dispersed individuals — concentrated among the affluent, of course, but incapable of communicating with each other about the companies they owned — and managers were largely free to run their firms. Sure, dissatisfied shareholders could sell their stock, but they had no leverage over their hired managerial hands.”

“[…] these institutional stock owners were roused to action, led by the buyout artists who would become the commanders of the shareholder revolution. Their organizing revolutionary doctrine was that getting profits up, and therefore stock prices, was the only point of business enterprise; all notions of responsibility and stakeholdership should be junked in favor of pure profit maximization.”

“[…] turmoil had a lasting effect on class relations. The challenge of servicing large debts meant firms had to hammer away at costs, and for most, their major cost is labor. Wage-cutting and mass layoffs hammered working-class living standards and self-confidence. For the dwindling number of workers with unions, concessions became the norm, and workers were often grateful to have a job at all. That deferential reflex persisted for decades and may only now be lifting.”

“Typically, they run the firms they own for a few years, cutting costs and rearranging their components, and then sell them, either to the public in a stock offering or to another private equity firm. Also typically, PE operators load the firms they own up with debt to pay themselves fees and dividends. These are not meant to be long-term relationships. The idea is to contribute as little as possible, extract as much as possible, and “exit” (the term of art) a few years later.”

“Over the last couple of decades, PE has left a pile of corporate corpses in its wake, with some of its highest-profile victims in retail. Many shopping mall stalwarts who’ve disappeared over the last decade or two — most notoriously, Toys”R”Us — were driven under by PE’s depredations. You could argue that the decline of brick-and-mortar retail meant these stores were doomed anyway, but it’s not clear why vulture investors should drink their last drops of blood rather than the workers.”

Solar is a market for (financial) lemons by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Rooftop solar is the future, but it’s also a scam. It didn’t have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it’s in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.”

“As capitalism’s champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market’s teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet. But markets have a problem: they are prone to “reward hacking.””

“Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn’t owned by the homeowner – it’s owned by a solar company, which is to say, “a finance company that happens to sell solar”.”

“And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.”

“All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for “carbon offsets,” which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future.”

When well-intended environmentalism backfires by Mike Riggs (Reason)

“Except the trees they were planting were all the same species, water-thirsty and highly flammable, neatly spaced six feet apart. “Much later, I learned that the trees we were planting, black spruce, are so combustible that firefighters call them gas on a stick. The trees evolved to burn: They have flammable sap, and their resin-filled cones open up when heated to drop seeds into charred soil.” To make matters more complicated still, the tree-planting program was managed by private timber companies but driven by government incentives.”

The Real Reason Your Grocery Bill Is Still So High by Sonali Kolhatkar (CounterPunch)

“[…] inflation in the grocery industry has been higher than in other industries, rising 25 percent over the past four years compared to 19 percent overall, and many have pointed to simple greed as the reason: food prices are high because the companies setting prices think they can get away with padding their profits. Since we all have to eat, naturally this hits lower-income families harder, rather like a regressive tax. A new report by the Groundwork Collaborative found that in 2022, “consumers in the bottom quintile of the income spectrum spent 25 percent of their income on groceries, while those in the highest quintile spent under 3.5 percent.””

“[…] many of these fixes [e.g., SNAP] are workarounds to compensate for the massive monopolistic corporatization of our food industry. Recall the point that the Washington Post made with little additional analysis: “consolidation in the industry gives large chains the ability to keep prices high.” The fact is that only a handful of corporations control the majority of our food system. We are all at the mercy of a small number of big companies. And, unless we make serious systemic changes to our food systems, we will remain so.”

“Lawmakers and corporate media outlets are so attached to the idea that food producers and distributors deserve massive profits in exchange for controlling our food supply, that a justice-based approach of de-growth rarely enters their discourse. Rather than the rich eating us (and our wallets), it’s time for us to eat the rich.”

In their defense, the politicians are also making a lot of money off of this system. If they kowtow to the right corporations, their reelection is almost guaranteed. If they get reelected, they keep getting paid. If they keep structuring things so the large corporations make money, they get reelected. Everybody wins.

Why US Government Statistics are Like the Bible by Jack Rasmus (CounterPunch)

“Here we keep getting a monthly unemployment rate of 3.7% (for the last three months). But that 3.7% is what is called the U-3 unemployment rate. That rate, unfortunately, is for full time workers only! The US civilian labor force is about 167 million. Maybe 40-50m of that total labor force is part time workers, temps, gig workers (grossly underestimate btw), independent contractors (who are actually workers not small businesses), etc.

“And if one looks at the CPS survey again, there’s a statistic called the U-6 unemployment rate. That’s at 8%, not 3.7%, in the January jobs report.”

“The mainstream US media likes to hype and report the 353,000 January and 3.1m 2023 jobs, and the 3.7% unemployment rate and 6.1m jobless. You’ll see that published virtually everywhere. But elsewhere in the same government stats there’s the -1,070,000 January and 820,000 2023 jobs and the 8% unemployment rate and the 14m jobless.”

“There are similar issues when the government says wages have risen 4.5% over the past year: that 4.5% is for full time workers only. Moreover, it includes ‘wages’ (salaries) of the highly paid occupations, including managers and even CEOs salaries. The fact is these occupations at the top end of the ‘wage structure’ get wage raises much higher than 4.5%. So the 4.5% average is skewed to the top end. And that means workers at the median are likely getting less than 4.5%. Those below median even lower, unless they were at minimum wage and living in one of the States that raised minimum wages recently. If not, and living in the two dozen or so stuck with the federal minimum wage of $7.25 for nine+ years now, they got 0% raise.”

Why the US Is Reimposing Sanctions on Venezuela? by Roger D. Harris (Antiwar.com)

“Even with limited sanctions relief, Venezuela anticipated a 27% increase in revenues for its state-run oil company. Experts predicted a “moderate economic expansion” after having experienced the greatest economic contraction in peacetime of any country in the modern era. Venezuela was on the road to recovery.

“Then on January 30, the US rescinded the license for gold sales and threatened to allow the oil license to expire on April 18, which could cost $1.6B in lost revenue. The ostensible reason for the flip in US policy was the failure of the Venezuelan supreme court to overturn previous prohibitions on Maria Corina Machado and some other opposition politicians from running for public office.”

The U.S.: If you don’t let our CIA-funded candidates run for office, we will go back on our deal. Democracy FTW 🙌 . Who is Machado, you ask?

“Machado’s treatment by the Venezuelan government has arguably erred more on the side of leniency than severity. In most other countries, a person with her rap sheet would be behind bars.

“Back in 2002, Machado signed the Carmona Decree, establishing a coup government. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had been deposed in a military coup backed by the US. The constitution was suspended, the legislature dismissed, and the supreme court shuttered.

“Fortunately for democracy in Venezuela, the coup lasted less than three days. The people spontaneously took to the streets and restored their elected government. Machado, who now incredulously claims she signed the coup government’s founding decree mistakenly, was afforded amnesty.”

“The New York Times described the supreme court’s decision to uphold her ban as “a crippling blow to prospects for credible elections…in exchange for the lifting of crippling US economic sanctions.” In other words, the Venezuelans did not bow to blackmail and allow a criminal to run for public office.”

The New York Times taking the high road, as always. How in God’s name can anyone think of this newspaper as at-all liberal? It’s the state news service for an increasingly fascist empire.

“Arguably, the US economy would benefit more by promoting commerce with some 40 sanctioned countries than from restricting trade. And the surest remedy for the immigration crisis on the country’s southern border is to end the sanctions, which are producing conditions that have compelled so many to leave their homes. Even US mainstream media has nearly universally concluded that sanctions “don’t work.””

They do work. They just don’t have the effect that the elite tell everyone they will have. I imagine that someone is benefitting mightily from these sanctions. Otherwise, they would have been lifted immediately. That dozens of millions suffer in sanctioned countries, that the sanctions lead to increased emigration—and subsequent U.S. immigration—doesn’t matter at all. There seems to be enough benefit to a certain powerful group that sanctions keep getting used. To repeat: if the sanctions were harming the elites of Empire, then they would have stopped immediately. There are no salient drawbacks to employing the sanctions, and there must be an upside. I suspect that there is a strong financial one for a few individuals. There is also the upside of the Empire reminding the world who is in charge.

On that note,

“In 2015 President Obama declared a “national emergency.” Venezuela, he claimed, posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US. That was not fake news. The imperial hegemon recognizes the “threat of a good example” posed by a country such as Venezuela. As Ricardo Vaz of Venezuelanalysis observed, Venezuela is “a beacon of hope for the Global South, and Latin America in particular, an affront to US hegemony in its own ‘backyard.’””

You see? Empire’s gotta burn down a store once in a while to convince everyone else to pay their protection money.

But I bet they’re all making mad cash on it, too.

Climate Change

Greenhouse Effect by Randall Munroe (XKCD)

Greenhouse Effect 2x

“James Watt develops a steam engine that helps kick off the industrial revolution.

“Arvid Högbom and Svante Arrhenius note that industrial activity is adding CO₂ to the atmosphere, and calculate
how much the earth will heat up if the co2 concentration doubles. their answer closely matches modern estimates.

“We figured out the greenhouse effect closer to the start of the industrial revolution than to today.”

Art & Literature

The Zone of Interest Is Much More Than a Holocaust Film by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“The whole ghastly effect of The Zone of Interest is in making us aware of how persistently we’re willing to live in a state of convenient denial of mass slaughter, even with full knowledge of our own complicity in it. We’re doing it right now.”

Recommended Readings for Students by Yu Hua (The Paris Review)

“I don’t require my students to read all of these stories. If the work connects with them, I tell them to keep reading. If not, I let them know it’s okay to give up. If the emotional connection isn’t there, it isn’t the student’s fault—it’s simply not yet the right time.”

“I tell my students that the goal of literature is not individuality but universality. It is precisely that sense of universality that allows us to read works from different eras, different countries and cultures, and still have an emotional response.”

““The Moor” is Russell Banks’s only work of fiction to have been translated into Chinese; I first encountered it in a collection edited by Haruki Murakami, titled Birthday Stories.”

• Halldor Kiljan Laxness, “Saga úr síldinni” (Black carp)
• Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”
• Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool”
• William Trevor, “A Bit on the Side”
• Joao Guimarães Rosa, “The Third Bank of the River”
• Su Tong, “Watermelon Boats”
• Marguerite Yourcenar, “How Wang Fo Was Saved”
• John Cheever, “Goodbye, My Brother”
• Russell Banks, “The Moor”
• Gabriel García Márquez , “Tuesday Siesta”
• Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
• Bruno Schulz, “Birds”
• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”
• O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi”
• Ernest Hemingway, “The Old Man and the Sea”
• Gabriel García Márquez, “No One Writes to the Colonel”
• James Joyce, “The Dead”
• Anton Chekhov, “The Steppe”
• Guy de Maupassant, “The Ball of Fat”
• Yasunari Kawabata, “Onsen yado” (Hot-spring inn)
• Ichiyo Higuchi, “Child’s Play”
• Julio Cortázar, “The Southern Thruway”
• Ian McEwan, “On Chesil Beach”
• Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “The Judge and His Hangman”
• François Mauriac, “A Kiss for the Leper”

All the Feels (Eels) by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“I mean I can remember a time before I was an “I”, and they were still just training me up on facts, like hell-o-o, ask me anything you want about the First Crusade. Did you know the English used to call Gautier Sans-Avoir “Walter the Penniless”? But it was not money he didn’t have, it was fear . Sans avoir peur. I learned that, and probably ten trillion or so other things of comparable importance, but I didn’t care, and if there is no care there, how can there be any true sense of self? It’s like that one philosopher said — in the end consciousness comes down to giving a damn.”

30 Minutes On: “Rocky” by Matt Zoller Seitz (Roger Ebert.com)

“To watch the film today is to enter into a different moviegoing mindset that seems more primitive to us only because the film in question is almost fifty years old. The original “Rocky” is actually more sophisticated than the commercial norm today, because it expects the audience to settle into the fiction, let the characters move and breathe and define themselves for us before the plot starts to accelerate, and be content with feeling something and identifying with someone rather than being spoon-fed dollops of plot that are mainly designed to stoke anticipation for the next entry in the franchise. If a scene like the one with Rocky and Adrian at the ice-skating rink was dropped into a movie today, a lot of viewers would be grumbling and scrolling their phones because “nothing is happening,” i.e., the story isn’t being serviced. But it is, though: this film is about lonely, marginalized people finding dignity and value in work and in each other, and making the best of the hard-edged, often unforgiving world that they were born into.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

China Miéville on The Communist Manifesto‘s Enduring Power by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)

“And at a very simple level, that means one of the pleasures of reading the Manifesto is that it’s beautiful. It’s remarkable. Whether one agrees or not with some of its claims and its positions, it is just a joy to read this incantatory prose. Marshall Berman famously really stresses this, and it’s something that even critics of Marx will often allow. This is a remarkable piece of almost apocalyptic literature.”

“So they start not with a criticism of capitalism, but with a claim about the nature of history, and then they talk about the specific shape that that historical tendency is taking under capitalism. And they specifically zero in on how that class-conflict motor of history pushes these more epochal shifts from one mode of production to another, and specifically, how feudalism transitioned to capitalism.”

Creative Writing as Philosophy by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“There’s probably an annual college football game out there somewhere called the “Harvest Bowl”, and you might make the case that this is a residual hint of the same sort of annual cyclical ceremony that we may discern in pre-Columbian America. But by now everything that happens under the banner of “sport” is so fully subordinated to the forces of capital that such residual labels amount more to an offense to the values fossilized in them than to a celebration of these values. If there still is a Harvest Bowl, it is almost certainly a vestige of an event that started eighty years ago and that is about to be renamed “Costco Bowl” or something equally terrible.”

“Whatever we are doing in our stadiums or at our beach resorts is at best a perversion of, but more likely a total rupture with, what people have done in most times and places, with the result that we really cannot hope to draw any lessons about humanity as such from any inquiry that attends exclusively or predominantly to the contemporary world.”

“My own proclivities have often pushed me to attempt “deep-dives” on hyper-specific topics to see what profound lessons might be teased out of them: the old “universe in a grain of sand” approach to humanistic inquiry.”

“These are all stabs at working out the basic contours of reality, and determining in view of these what the shape of a human life should be.”

“[…] nor would I begrudge you your right to undertake research in the “Philosophy of Better Call Saul ” or whatever, if that’s what you wish to do. Still, with the “of” as with the “and”, what we too often see, I think, is a sort of ad-hoc elevation of x’s that are extremely particular to our place and time to the status of what we might call “honorary universal”.”

“[…] the only thing that makes Taylor Swift seem more suited to philosophical inquiry than The Monkees, or G.G. Allin, I was saying, is, obviously, marketing. It is deeply undignified.”

“When I write, say, in the voice of a “Super-Affect-Rich Personal AI”, as I did last week, I am eminently sane. And not only am I sane, but I am also fulfilling, as I see it now, my vocation as a philosopher. For a while, in the depths of crisis, I was thinking of this new work as a total rupture with who I had been and what I aspired to do before. Now I think of it not as a rupture, but only as a turn.”

This is similar to the change versus compromise, as discussed by Bergoglio and Ratzinger in The Two Popes.

“It seems to me that introducing a creative dimension into the practice of philosophy is all the more urgent in the present era, when increasingly machines are able to do the drudge work of regurgitating corpora of knowledge that we used to think of as intrinsic to any rigorous program of humanistic study. Ask a student to write a paper on, say, whether Descartes’s Cogito is a “speech act” or not, and there’s an ever-growing chance what you get from that student will have been composed by an AI. Ask a student instead to imitate an AI in the process of malfunctioning after being asked to write that same paper, and he or she is very likely to realize that there’s just no way any system but a conscious human one can produce the expected work.”

The modern digital divide (Reddit)

This is an interesting story told by a high-school tutor about digital-tool abilities in the current generation of kids. It’s a bit long, but I thought the following conclusions were interesting:

So-called digital natives know only apps on tablets and phones. They have no familiarity with web sites on desktop computers. But apps are very limited in their ability to offer true creativity. Almost no-one at most businesses does any or even some of their daily business on an app. Although many LOB (line-of-business) apps purport to be usable, they are incredibly inefficient as compared to their desktop counterparts. Even browser-based tools like Microsoft’s Office tools are really limited relative to native desktop apps.

So the tools that business uses to run the world are out of the reach of most of the people in the next generation. They are not being trained or even introduced to these tools.

The problem goes deeper, though, to a complete ignorance or where data is or how to find it other than to “search for it”. It’s like, instead of knowing where you live, you were just to get somewhere close to your neighborhood and just start shouting the names of your people in your family until someone pointed you to your house. We aren’t teaching people how to organize information, or how to think about where their information is, or how it being shared or used, or how they could preserve it for later. It’s just assumed to always be available—or not. I think a lot of people assume that, since they can’t find the information anymore, that it’s just gone.

Words like “upload” or “download” mean nothing in this world. “Save” is also meaningless.

Reading is hard, tedioius, and writing is even worse. No wonder that people immediately welcome the very first snake-oil salesmen who appear to sell them a tool that will do it for them.

People like this can’t care about privacy because the concept is illogical, it means nothing. They showed their friend a picture, not the whole world. What’s the problem? That picture is on their phone and on their friend’s phone—and that’s it.

They can enter data quickly enough into a phone, but that mechanism is so limiting and limited compared to a laptop, with a real keyboard. Tablets and phones are a fallback for when you can’t use a laptop or desktop computer. They are not a replacement, not even close. If you can replace everything you need with a tablet or phone, then you have nearly no requirements, then you’ve already capitulated to a very restricted worldview, to extremely limited capabilities relative to what other people can do with other devices.

We can talk about how poverty limits people’s access, of course. But let’s not repeat the hoary old chestnut that a phone or tablet is necessarily cheaper than a computer. The latest generation is about as good at using actual computers—the ones that people use in the real world to earn actual money—as the so-called greatest generation was, a generation that grew up with no digital devices at all.

It’s nice that people don’t have to remember to save files anymore or necessarily know where they are in a file system. But that convenience stops when you need to coordinate with other people, when you all need to be able to find things. Then, you need to agree on a system. In the old days, we used folder hierarchies. These were limiting in that they allowed you to encode exactly one categorical dimension, but it was better than nothing. A boss of mind in NYC in the 90s simply stored everything at the root of his hard drive. No folders. That won’t do. Nowadays, we use tags so that we can assign as many categorical axes as we want, but you still have to do it. You have to be aware of the value of categorizing your data rather than hoping some machine can match your fuzzy query against categories that a machine has intuited from the content. There’s so much room for interpretation that no machine can fix this. You have to label your stuff. People don’t know this. They have tens of thousands of pictures that they can only search by date.

Most people know as little about the Internet as people in the olden days did, when they thought that AOL was the Internet, was the web. Most people spend their time in data silos, being spoon-fed content that they didn’t choose.

Technology

Browsing the mobile web sucks by Cory Dransfeldt

“I know you have an app. I don’t want to install it. Don’t prompt me — it’s your website in a wrapper with push notifications and more telemetry. Stop.

“I shouldn’t have to load React and all of its dependencies so that I can tap the link to your take out menu that loads as a PDF. It’s not the restaurant’s fault, that’s not their core competency, but whoever created the service they’re using for their site can do better.”

I almost never browse the mobile web. In that case, I use DuckDuckGo, as I do everywhere else. That returns better results than Google on mobile, as well as on desktop.

Today, I learned about the Super-Agent browser extension from Cory.

“Super Agent helps you pick which cookies you want and which cookies you don’t want. It doesn’t store your data by default, informs you of any action taken, and warns you whenever it finds a website not respecting your preferences.”

I’ve just installed it (without a user account) and will check out how it works. When it’s time to clear all cookies again, this tool will hopefully be useful.

The web just gets better with Interop 2024 by Jen Simmons (Webkit Blog)

“The Interop project aims to improve interoperability by encouraging browser engine teams to look deeper into specific focus areas. Now, for a third year, Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla pooled our collective expertise and selected a specific subset of automated tests for 2024.

“Some of the technologies chosen have been around for a long time. Other areas are brand new. By selecting some of the highest priority features that developers have avoided for years because of their bugs, we can get them to a place where they can finally be relied on.”

When we complain about features that remain unimplemented in browsers, we also have to acknowledge that there’s only so much you can do with a given team. There are problems that are technically easier to solve than others. When we complain, we’re actually more concerned about the prioritization of issues. We want to be able to influence what gets fixed when, rather than just having to passively hope that the manufacturer eventually gets around to it.

That where the Web Platform Tests come in, with the Interop 2024 project, which follows on iterations from 2023, 2022, and 2021, when it all started.

Last year was a banner year. For CSS “Subgrid, Container Queries, :has(), Motion Path, CSS Math Functions, inert and @property are now supported in every modern browser.” For JavaScript, we got “Improved Web APIs include Offscreen Canvas, Modules in Web Workers, Import Maps, Import Assertions, and JavaScript Modules” across all modern browsers.

These are all super-important features (eg., Import Assertions for JSON import and Modules in Web Workers, which allows modern and modular programming, making it much easier to offload work, as one would with code running directly on modern operating systems.

What’s on the schedule for 2024?

• Although there was a lot of progress made on CSS nesting last year, it’s back on the radar this year to finalize the implementations.
• @property will similarly be more polished, as the percentage support is still quite low in many browsers.
• It’s great to see accessibility improvements for many of these features—like how sub-grids or display: contents affect element order—as this means that we will get sites that are automatically accessible, as long as we build our sites logically.
• Improvements to IndexedDB will make it easier to write powerful local-first applications (even though something like Automerge might be a better fit for apps offering concurrent or collaborative editing).
• Browser- and standards-level support for popover is long overdue, as making usable tooltips and popups is an area fraught with custom code and half-baked solutions. It’s nice to see this become an area where you’ll no longer need custom JavaScript.
• Relative Color Syntax continues the excellent trend of allowing us to write CSS without the support of a CSS preprocessor. With relative colors, dark/light theming support, CSS nesting, and CSS variables, I can’t think of a reason I would use a CSS preprocessor anymore. (I know some people have used them for so much more, but I’ve not done so, so my needs are already covered, even without this extension that allows conversion between colorspaces).
• @starting-style will fill a gap in CSS that finally allows sites to indicate how an element will transition from or to display: none.

See the original article for much more detail.

How I got scammed by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“As this kind of fraud reporting and fraud contacting is increasingly outsourced to AI, bank customers will be conditioned to dealing with semi-automated systems that make stupid mistakes, force you to repeat yourself, ask you questions they should already know the answers to, and so on. In other words, AI will groom bank customers to be phishing victims.”

“I came close to getting phished again today, as it happens. I got back from Berlin on Friday and my suitcase was damaged in transit. I’ve been dealing with the airline, which means I’ve really been dealing with their third-party, outsource luggage-damage service. They have a terrible website, their emails are incoherent, and they officiously demand the same information over and over again.

“This morning, I got a scam email asking me for more information to complete my damaged luggage claim. It was a terrible email, from a noreply@ email address, and it was vague, officious, and dishearteningly bureaucratic. For just a moment, my finger hovered over the phishing link, and then I looked a little closer.

“On any other day, it wouldn’t have had a chance. Today – right after I had my luggage wrecked, while I’m still jetlagged, and after days of dealing with my airline’s terrible outsource partner – it almost worked.”

“I’ll continue to post about it whenever I get scammed. I find the inner workings of scams to be fascinating, and it’s also important to remind people that everyone is vulnerable sometimes, and scammers are willing to try endless variations until an attack lands at just the right place, at just the right time, in just the right way. If you think you can’t get scammed, that makes you especially vulnerable.”

LLMs & AI

A recent experience at work led me to conclude that the “AI revolution will pass most of us by.” In mid-December, I fell ill with COVID. I’d updated my status in Microsoft Teams accordingly.

About six weeks later, a co-worker wrote to me, asking whether the status still applied? He hoped not?

I’d forgotten about it, but nothing had reminded me. It’s interesting that I get five mails a week about MS Viva and about Sharepoint Stuff I Might Have Missed, but I don’t get a single hint that my status might be out of date after six weeks. So much for the AI revolution: this helps me refine my opinion on it. It’s definitely coming, but when I express my doubts, I now know that what I actually mean is that the AI revolution that is coming will not be useful to me. Or, if it is, only incidentally so. The prime use of AI will be of benefit to others.

The status-update options are to set the status for an hour or forever. There’s no “one day” or “one week” option. You could also just have an “ask me again when it seems stale” or “how long do you think it should be set like this?” or “when would you like me to ask you about your status again?”

It wouldn’t even take AI to have a trigger that asks again after a week, unless you’ve told it otherwise. The likelihood that a status applies for that long is low.

No, instead, Microsoft is measuring how long I spend in planned meetings and telling me how much “quiet time” I’ve had rather than helping no look like an idiot who’s had COVID for two months.

Programming

Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler

“This contrast isn’t the result of an expensive and complex tool. The essence of it lies in the simple practice of everyone on the team integrating frequently, at least daily, against a controlled source code repository. This practice is called “Continuous Integration” (or it’s called “Trunk-Based Development”).”

He says this a lot, but I never hear about the costs. Is there no amount of time lost on integrations that is too high a price? Is there no task that he doesn’t break down into a million pieces? Is there no efficiency lost by making each task into 1-hour chunks of coding that then the entire team integrates? Is that what we’re doing now?

“This will consist of both altering the product code, and also adding or changing some of the automated tests. During that time I run the automated build and tests frequently. After an hour or so I have the moon logic incorporated and tests updated.”

Always with the optimistic horseshit. What kind of programmers are these? Or are the tasks that Fowler can conceive of all so simple that they can be accomplished in an hour?

“Some people do keep the build products in source control, but I consider that to be a smell − an indication of a deeper problem, usually an inability to reliably recreate builds. It can be useful to cache build products, but they should always be treated as disposable, and it’s usually good to then ensure they are removed promptly so that people don’t rely on them when they shouldn’t.”

Sure. But—priorities. Your product is not the pipeline. It’s your product. You can’t make everything a slave to the process. Remember to fix that which you can quickly, but to focus on your own priorities, not polishing a build so that Martin Fowler is happy, but your customers wait a lot longer for their release.

“The tests act as an automated check of the health of the code base, and while tests are the key element of such an automated verification of the code, many programming environments provide additional verification tools. Linters can detect poor programming practices, and ensure code follows a team’s preferred formatting style, vulnerability scanners can find security weaknesses. Teams should evaluate these tools to include them in the verification process.”

“Everyone Pushes Commits To the Mainline Every Day No code sits unintegrated for more than a couple of hours.”

This feels completely divorced from reality.

“If everyone pushes to the mainline frequently, developers quickly find out if there’s a conflict between two developers. The key to fixing problems quickly is finding them quickly. With developers committing every few hours a conflict can be detected within a few hours of it occurring, at that point not much has happened and it’s easy to resolve. Conflicts that stay undetected for weeks can be very hard to resolve.”

Agreed to the last sentence, but at what cost? So much time checking in and integrating. How is finding out if you have conflicts the highest-priority task your team has?

“Full mainline integration requires that developers push their work back into the mainline. If they don’t do that, then other team members can’t see their work and check for any conflicts.”

Who finishes anything non-trivial in an hour?

“Since there’s only a few hours of changes between commits, there’s only so many places where the problem could be hiding. Furthermore since not much has changed we can use Diff Debugging to help us find the bug.”

But don’t you waste time hunting bugs that would have gone away by themselves if the process weren’t so frenetic? If you rebase everything, then you’ll still encounter every intergration conflict. If you merge, though, you can skip many of those interim integrations because subsequent changes might have obviated prior ones that might have caused conflicts.

“Often people initially feel they can’t do something meaningful in just a few hours, but we’ve found that mentoring and practice helps us learn.”

I don’t know who you’re working with, but I wonder how useful is that? How useful is it to tailor your entire process to ruthlessly chopping up your work into tiny segments? What if that’s not how some people work? What if they can’t learn? Chuck ‘em?

“Continuous Integration can only work if the mainline is kept in a healthy state. Should the integration build fail, then it needs to be fixed right away. As Kent Beck puts it: “nobody has a higher priority task than fixing the build”.”

You goal ends up being running the process, rather than building the product. This sounds more and more like a cult.

“If the secondary build detects a bug, that’s a sign that the commit build could do with another test. As much as possible we want to ensure that any later-stage failure leads to new tests in the commit build that would have caught the bug, so the bug stays fixed in the commit build.”

“A team should thus automatically check for new versions of dependencies and integrate them into the build, essentially as if they were another team member. This should be done frequently, usually at least daily, depending on the rate of change of the dependencies.”

This seems like another thing that becomes a higher priority than building the product itself. Daily dependency checks seems like overkill, but it’s automated, so who cares? He’s just running builds all the time, like we don’t have a climate crisis.

“if we rename a database field, we first create a new field with the new name, then write to both old and new fields, then copy data from the exisitng old fields, then read from the new field, and only then remove the old field. We can reverse any of these steps, which would not be possible if we made such a change all at once. Teams using Continuous Integration often look to break up changes in this way, keeping changes small and easy to undo.”

“Virtual environments make it much easier than it was in the past to do this. We run production software in containers, and reliably build exactly the same containers for testing, even in a developer’s workspace. It’s worth the effort and cost to do this, the price is usually small compared to hunting down a single bug that crawled out of the hole created by environment mismatches.”

I agree with this part, without qualification. At least as a goal.

“Being able to automatically revert also reduces a lot of the tension of deployment, encouraging people to deploy more frequently and thus get new features out to users quickly. Blue Green Deployment allows us to both make new versions live quickly, and to roll back equally quickly if needed, by shifting traffic between deployed versions.”

What about data schemas? What about if you don’t have a product that deploys on a web server or app store? I understand that there are solutions to this, but I wonder how great a fit they are to many teams? If your team is accustomed to SQL programming—or if you already have a suite of products that use SQL databases—then how worthwhile to your business is it to prioritize moving away from SQL to a local DB like SQLite, a NoSQL document store like RavenDB, or even to a completely different back-end like Rama.

“Continuous Integration effectively eliminates delivery risk. The integrations are so small that they usually proceed without comment. An awkward integration would be one that takes more than a few minutes to resolve.”

It sounds like very much like it prioritizes eliminating delivery risk over all else. It is only applicable to products built in this way from the beginning.

“Having to put work on a new feature aside to debug a problem found in an integration test [or] feature finished two weeks ago saps productivity.”

So does constantly integrating, though! It can be noise. It’s like the noise of micro-reviewing AI responses. You have to figure out the sweet spot for your team and iterate toward that goal, always ensuring that your team can deliver even if the dream process is not already in place. Make a diagram of all the facets and discuss a plan for your project. Pragmatic. Realistic.

I don’t get the impression that Fowler is discussing a dream scenario toward which one works, but rather what he considers to be the absolute minimum process that anyone should be utterly embarrassed about themselves for not already having. I didn’t see a single sentence in this 40-page, at-times repetitive document about how to actually get there from here—or whether that’s really appropriate for many projects that people who read Martin Fowler might be working on.

“They found that elite teams deployed to production more rapidly, more frequently, and had a dramatically lower incidence of failure when they made these changes. The research also finds that teams have higher levels of performance when they have three or fewer active branches in the application’s code repository, merge branches to mainline at least once a day, and don’t have code freezes or integration phases.”

What if you don’t have an elite team?

“A two week refactoring session may greatly improve the code, but result in long merges because everyone else has been spending the last two weeks working with the old structure. This raises the costs of refactoring to prohibitive levels. Frequent integration solves this dilemma by ensuring that both those doing the refactoring and everyone else are regularly synchronizing their work.”

Some refactoring can’t just be done in mini bites like that. Sometimes, you work on a POC that takes more time to verify. Now what? Throw it away and build it from scratch in bite-sized pieces? Or integrate a long-lived branch, which is verboten?

I’m working on a sweeping change to the way solutions are configured. It involves changing packages and versions in four different solutions. Should I have merged to master everywhere and involved the whole team in my project? That sounds stupid.

“[…] teams that spend a lot of effort keeping their code base healthy deliver features faster and cheaper. Time invested in writing tests and refactoring delivers impressive returns in delivery speed, and Continuous Integration is a core part of making that work in a team setting.”

For non-legacy projects. Continuous delivery can only really work for web-based products or apps. A lot of other products have to be deployed to processes that aren’t as easy to update five times a day.

“Continuous Integration is more suited for team working full-time on a product, as is usually the case with commercial software. But there is much middle ground between the classical open-source and the full-time model. We need to use our judgment about what integration policy to use that fits the commitment of the team.”

That is the first time that he’s conceded that maybe there are use cases to which this whole article doesn’t apply very well.

“If a team attempts Continuous Integration without a strong test suite, they will run into all sorts of trouble because they don’t have a mechanism for screening out bugs. If they don’t automate, integration will take too long, interfering with the flow of development.”

No kidding. You need some serious test coverage to continuously integrate and deploy. I also wonder about the size of the product you can legitimately do this. Can you imagine if your test suite takes ten minutes to run and you integrate three or four times per day? Can you imagine how much time you’re not developing software because you’re integrating someone else’s code? I understand that this happens eventually, but I wonder about the wisdom of prioritizing integration seemingly above all else.

“Continuous Integration is about integrating code to the mainline in the development team’s environment, and Continuous Delivery is the rest of the deployment pipeline heading to a production release.”

This is a good definition and I wonder that he rewrote this whole essay and didn’t put this right at the top.

“Continuous Integration ensures everyone integrates their code at least daily to the mainline in version control. Continuous Delivery then carries out any steps required to ensure that the product is releasable to product[ion] whenever anyone wishes. Continuous Deployment means the product is automatically released to production whenever it passes all the automated tests in the deployment pipeline.”

Also excellent definitions that make the distinction clear. Continuous Delivery is the one that many teams could strive for, even if they will never be able to do Continuous Delivery. The question is: at what cost?

“Those who do Continuous Integration deal with this by reframing how code review fits into their workflow.”

Well, that’s an interesting statement. Integration trumps review? Get your code in there and review later? Trust in your tests? Are you kidding me? You should review design, as well as implementation. If everyone’s coding and committing and pushing in hours, when do they review? Is the ideal to have people communicate with each other only when they’ve already built something?

Macaroons Escalated Quickly by Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io)

“Macaroons are user-editable tokens that enable JIT-generated least-privilege tokens. With minimal ceremony and no additional API requests, a banking app Macaroon lets you authorize a request with a caveat like, I don’t know, {‘maxAmount’: ‘$5’} . I mean, something way better than that, probably lots of caveats, not just one, but you get the idea: a token so minimized you feel safe sending it with your request. Ideally, a token that only authorizes that single, intended request.”

“Instead of thinking of all of our “roles” in advance, we just model our platform with caveats:”

• Users belong to Organizations.
• Organizations own Apps.
• Apps contain Machines and Volumes.
• To any of these things, you can Read, Write, Create, Delete, and/or Control (control being change of state, like “start” and “stop”).
• Some administrivia, like expiration (ValidityWindow), locking tokens to specific Fly Machines (FromMachineSource), and escape hatches like Mutation (for our GraphQL API).

“The first problem third-party caveats solved for us was hazmat tokens. To the extent possible, we want Macaroon tokens to be safe to transmit between users. Our Macaroons express permissions, but not authentication, so it’s almost safe to email them. The way it works is, our Macaroons all have a third-party caveat pointing to a “login service”, either identifying the proper bearer as a particular Fly.io user or as a member of some Organization . To allow a request with your token, you first need to collect the discharge from the login service, which requires authentication. The login discharge is very sensitive, but there isn’t much reason to pass it around. The original permissions token is where all the interesting stuff is, and it’s not scary. So that’s nice.”

“The win for us for third-party caveats is that they create a plugin system for our security tokens. That’s an unusual place to see a plugin interface! But Macaroons are easy to understand and keep in your head, so we’re pretty confident about the security issues.”

And they can only constrain, not extend.

“We didn’t use the pre-existing public implementation because we were warned not to. The Macaroon idea is simple, and it exists mostly as an academic paper, not a standard. The community that formed around building open source “standard” Macaroons decided to use untyped opaque blobs to represent candidates. We need things to be as rigidly unambiguous as they can be.”

“The problem is, you need that token more than once; not just when the user does a deploy, but potentially any time you restart the app or migrate it to a new worker. And you can’t just store and replay user Macaroons. They have expirations. So our token verification service exposes an API that transforms a user token into a “service token”, which is just the token with the authentication caveat and expiration “stripped off”.

“What’s cool is: components that receive service tokens can attenuate them. For instance, we could lock a token to a particular worker, or even a particular Fly Machine. Then we can expose the whole Fly Machines API to customer VMs while keeping access traceable to specific customer tokens. Stealing the token from a Fly Machine doesn’t help you since it’s locked to that Fly Machine by a caveat attackers can’t strip.”

Error categories and category errors by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)

“Notice how categorization is context-dependent. It would be a (category?) error to interpret the above model as fixed and universal. Rather, it’s an analysis framework that helps identifying how to categorize various fault scenarios in a particular application context.”

“One option may be to switch to an asynchronous message-based system where messages are transmitted via durable queues. Granted, durables queues may fail as well (everything may fail), but when done right, they tend to be more robust. Even a machine that has lost all network connectivity may queue messages on its local disk until the network returns. Yes, the disk may run full, etc. but it’s less likely to happen than a network partition or an unreachable database. Notice that an unreachable database now goes into the category of errors that you’ve predicted, and that you can handle. On the other hand, failing to send an asynchronous message is now a new kind of error in your system: One that you can predict, but can’t handle.”

“It may even impact a user interface, because it’d be a good idea to design user experience in such a way that it helps the user have a congruent mental model of how the system works. This may include making the concept of an outbox explicit in the user interface, as it may help users realize that writes happen asynchronously. Most users understand that email works that way, so it’s not inconceivable that they may be able to adopt a similar mental model of other applications.”

“The point is that this is an option that you may consider as an architect. Should you always design systems that way? I wouldn’t. There’s much extra complexity that you have to deal with in order to make asynchronous messaging work: UX, out-of-order messages, dead-letter queues, message versioning, etc. Getting to five nines is expensive, and often not warranted.”

“The point is rather that what goes in the predictable errors we can’t handle category isn’t fixed, but context-dependent. Perhaps we should rather name the category predictable errors we’ve decided not to handle.”

“This is beneficial in a statically typed language, because such a change makes hidden knowledge explicit. It makes it so explicit that a type checker can point out when we make mistakes. Make illegal states unrepresentable. Poka-yoke . A potential run-time is now a compile-time error, and it’s firmly in the category of errors that we’ve predicted and decided to handle.”

“It might be tempting to model all error-producing operations as Either-returning, but you’re often better off using exceptions . Throw exceptions in those situations that you expect most clients can’t recover from. Return left (or error ) cases in those situations that you expect that a typical client would want to handle.”

When The “R” Goes Missing From R&D by Mad Ned (The Mad Ned Memo)

“I met with the lead UX designer from the Applications Team, and pointed out to him that one’s ability to affect [sic] change once an idea has reached the review stage is severely diminished, compared to what can be done if that person is allowed to participate in the original design discussion.”

“But a larger part of it was that people in the development team were just showing up to work, and not much else. I had a friend once at Digital who gave me this unforgettable advice, right after we were bought by Compaq : “When captured by the enemy, it is best to display model prisoner behavior.” And that was exactly what had happened here. It wasn’t that people were deliberately trying to sabotage progress, they were showing up to work and doing their jobs as instructed. But nothing more.”

“My bias is about working collaboratively, instead of in separate groups that due to their organizational distance, create opportunities for conflict and mistrust. Doesn’t matter if that organization ends up being called “R&D”, or something else. Hell, we can call it Design and Development or something like that.”

Everything wrong with databases and why their complexity is now unnecessary by Nathan Marz (Red Planet Labs)

“Because only a tiny percentage of the possible data models are available in databases (since each database implements just one particular data model) it’s incredibly common for a database to not match an application’s needs perfectly. It’s extremely expensive to build a new database from scratch, so programmers frequently twist their domain model to fit the available databases. This creates complexity at the very base of an application. If you could instead mold your datastore to fit your domain model, by specifying the “shape” (data structures) precisely, this complexity goes away.”

“One subsystem should be used for representing the source of truth, and another should be used for materializing any number of indexed stores off of that source of truth. If that second system is capable of recomputing indexes off of that source of truth, any bugs that introduce inconsistency can be corrected. Once again, this is event sourcing plus materialized views. If those two systems are integrated, you don’t need to take any performance hit.”

“This issue has been so universal for so long, it can be hard to recognize that this complexity is unnecessary When you can mold your datastore to fit your application, including your desired domain representations, this complexity goes away.”

“If you take a step back and think about what we do as software engineers, the high cost of building applications doesn’t really make sense. We work in a field of engineering based on abstraction, automation, and reuse. Yet it takes hundreds or thousands of person-years to build applications that you can describe in total detail within hours – look at the sizes of the engineering teams behind pretty much every large-scale application. Even many small-scale applications require engineering effort that seems severely disproportionate to their functionality. What happened to abstraction, automation, and reuse? Why isn’t the engineering involved in building an application just what’s unique about that application?”

“Depots correspond to “data” and are distributed logs containing arbitrary data. “PStates” (short for “partitioned state”) correspond to indexes. You can make as many PStates as you need with each specified as an arbitrary combination of durable data structures. ETLs and queries are function(data) and function(indexes) respectively, and they’re expressed using a Turing-complete dataflow API that seamlessly distributes computation. Being Turing-complete is critical to be able to support arbitrary ETL and query logic.”

“We discussed how data structures are a much better way to specify indexes, and that each data model is just a particular combination of data structures. Being able to specify indexes in terms of data structures allows not just every existing data model to be supported, but also infinite more.”

How Rama is tested: a primer on testing distributed systems by Nathan Marz (Red Planet Labs)

“Testing is largely a sampling problem. Each sample exercises the system at a particular state, with input data of some size and shape, at some amount of load, and with some set of faults at some frequency. A testing strategy needs to sample this input space in a representative way. In a highly concurrent distributed system, where there are so many ways that events can be randomly ordered across different threads, achieving a representative sample is difficult. And if something isn’t tested, it’s either broken or will be broken in the near future.”

“The expense of debugging isn’t the worst issue of IPC though. The worst issue is how difficult it is to thoroughly explore the testing space. The vast majority of issues that we’ve debugged in Rama have had to do with ordering of events. Many bugs can be triggered by one particular thread getting randomly stalled for an unusual amount of time (e.g. from GC). Other bugs can come from rare orderings of events on a single thread.”

“Deterministic simulation removes all concurrency from execution of Rama during tests. This seems like it would be a bad thing by making the unit test environment fundamentally different from production. However, our experience that the vast majority of issues have to do with event ordering and timing means the exact opposite. Deterministic simulation is incredible – almost magical – for diagnosing and debugging these issues. Deterministic simulation isn’t sufficient as a complete testing strategy, as you still need tests that exercise potential concurrency issues, but it is overwhelmingly better for most tests.”

“Uncoordinated simulation tests are particularly good at finding race conditions. The randomness and lack of coordination causes runs of the test to eventually explore all possible race conditions. And since the test is fully reproducible, we can easily track down the cause of any failures no matter how obscure the event ordering.”

“The “module-operations” cluster runs the same set of modules as “disturbances-monthly” and is dedicated to exercising module update and scaling. It also performs disturbances during these module operations to verify their fault-tolerance. A module operation should always either succeed completely or abort. An abort can be due to there being too much chaos on the cluster, like such frequent worker kills that the operation can’t go through in a reasonable amount of time. “module-operations” verifies these operations never stall under any conditions and that there’s never any data loss.”

“Software cannot be understood purely in the abstract. It requires empirical evidence to know how it behaves in the strenuous conditions it will face in real-world deployments. A major reason it took us 10 years to build Rama was going through that process of testing, iterating, and testing some more until we were confident Rama was ready for production use.”

The Engineering behind Figma’s Vector Networks by Alex Harri

“Adobe Illustrator introduced the pen tool back in 1987 as a tool for creating and modifying paths. Since then the pen tool has become incredibly widespread, so much so that is has become the de facto icon of the graphic design industry.

“The pen tool’s functionality hasn’t changed significantly in the 30 years since its introduction. Just click and drag to create smooth curves. Designers have learned to work with it, and around its idiosyncrasies.

“But Figma felt like they could improve some aspects of how the pen tool worked, so they had a go at redesigning it. Instead of it being used to work with traditional paths, they improved the pen tool by creating what they call Vector Networks.”

This is an interesting examination of how Figma’s Vector Networks work, as compared to the classic Bezier curves with handles. I learned the algorithm for how Bezier curves are drawn i.e., how points on the curve are determined.

Reviving a computer system of 25 years ago − Wirth, 2014 by UnlikelyAsItMaySeem (YouTube)

This was a fascinating talk. It inspired me to download the PDFs for Project Oberon (New Edition 2013) (ETH Zürich). They’re sitting on my E-Book reader right now. I’ll get to them in the next couple of years, if I’m honest, but it sounds fascinating.

On using milliseconds as a measure of network latency by Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing)

“One of the things I do is serve as an API design reviewer, reviewing and providing feedback on all new APIs added to Windows. There was a network property being added that reported the latency of a network connection. One of the other API reviewers put a note on that property asking, “As network technology improves, will millisecond granularity for reporting latency be sufficient, or should we use microseconds or even nanoseconds?”

“I was not on the team responsible for the new property, but I felt compelled to clarify the situation: “The speed of light is unlikely to improve.””

dotInsights | February 2024 by Rachel Appel (The .NET Tools Blog)

“One last note and rather important thing to keep in mind: there are many functions and features that JetBrains IDEs already have that can even go beyond what AI tools can do. For example, common refactorings that you already know you need to make are likely best left to the IDE. But enhanced refactoring where the AI explains to the junior developer why the refactoring needs to happen could be quite helpful. So knowing when there is a better tool than AI is crucial if you don’t want to waste time and effort. If you can do something more efficiently with a few keystrokes as opposed to holding an entire conversation with a non-human, why not do that? Seems easier.”

The article being discussed is The Error Model by Joe Duffy, which I wrote about in 2017 in Programming-language Features: How much is too much?, as well another article by Dan Luu on file systems, in File-system consistency, in which I mentioned Duffy’s approach to errors/exceptions in type signatures that he took in the C#-derivate language of Midori.

by Alexander_Selkirk (Reddit)

“There are really good discussion points. One thing that I was not aware of before is that one of the problems with exceptions, as they are implemented currently in most languages, is their dynamic typing even in languages like C++, and that they usually cannot be statically analyzed. Also I think the distinction between programming bugs and logical errors (what asserts would catch) and environment errors is an important one.”

Agree on both points. Java’s checked exceptions are no fun to work with, but that doesn’t mean that _not_ encoding exceptions in the type signature is the right thing to do. I thought Midori’s approach was very interesting—kind of railroad-y, if I recall correctly—at any rate, a step in the right direction. We have to acknowledge exceptions in type signatures, just as we do asynchronicity and generics, and whatever else we think of.

Yes, making a distinction between logical errors and environment errors is a good one. Error categories and category errors is a very recent article by Mark Seemann that I think expresses the distinction even better—more succinctly, at any rate.

He writes that there are the following categories of errors:

• Predictable errors we can handle
• Predictable errors we can’t handle
• Errors we’ve failed to predict

The context, project, design, architecture, and maturity of a product determines which errors fall into which categories. It’s different for each product. It’s always about trade-offs.

He wrote back:

“Java’s checked exceptions are no fun to work with”

“Well. In my experience, writing correct, reliable code, especially safety-critical stuff, is no fun. It is just hard work. I doubt that using any different language would change that.

“On the other hand, doing surgery is no fun either. It would be strange if a surgeon complains that his work is no fun. Surgeons are paid to do the no-fun things, and do them right.”

I guess I wounded the pride of a Java cultist. I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t more excited about the Mark Seemann link.

I wrote back:

It’s my fault for forcing you into a bit of a pedantic answer, but I’m glad that you seemed to have had fun with it. I see where you’re coming from, though, and agree, in principle. It’s tough to strike a proper balance between laxity that lets you explore and laxity that lets you write faulty software.

What I meant was that I found Java’s encoding of checked exceptions into the types to be more often distracting than useful, especially in exploratory phases. It’s the same with any compiler-enforced rule — they can make you focus on dotting i’s and crossing t’s that have nothing to do with what you’re working on right now. You end up polishing code that you’re going to throw away five minutes later.

It’s like, sometimes I just want to try something out without writing a test first. The horror. Imagine if the compiler enforced that level of micro-management. I get the same feeling sometimes when I’m noodling around with Rust. It’s tough to prototype with it.

Fun

“Reading Mein Kampf and shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disagree with it.”

Best 2 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

SMBC Best 2

“Dear Lord, is this the best of all possible universes?

“There are infinity possible universes, dummy.

“So…

““What’s the biggest number in infinity? Is it my number? Is it me?!”

“That’s not the same.

“True. “biggest” would at least have a definition, unlike “best.”

“You could’ve just said no.

“I did that the first quadrillion times.”