Links and Notes for October 11th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

They Now Know What Real Bombing Means by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“While the US has never demonstrated any significant concern for civilian casualties or ‘collateral damage’, it is worth noting that even senior US military officials have raised their eyebrows at the degree of Israel’s disregard for human life. Israel’s military, Scarbro writes, ‘seems to have a higher threshold for collateral damage… meaning they strike even when chances are higher for civilian casualties’.”

No shit. It’s almost—and hear me out here—like they’re aiming at the civilians. Just a theory! A theory based on the expressed intentions of most military and political leaders in Israel.

I don’t know how much it means, though, when a “senior US military official” says something like this. Place what Israel is doing next in the context of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. That was a long time ago…but has the U.S. military really become less rapacious? That can’t be the argument, can it?

“Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli and US warfare. On 23 September, Israel bombarded Lebanon at a rate of more than one airstrike per minute. In days, Israel’s ‘intense airstrikes’ displaced over a million people, a fifth of the entire population of Lebanon.”

I though that Israel had invaded Lebanon in 1982–1990, 2000–2006, and now 2024. According to Israel has invaded Lebanon six times in the past 50 years – a timeline of events by Vanessa Newby (The Conversation), it’s twice that. They’ve occupied part of the country for over 15 years in the last 38 years.

“[…] whereas Israel has launched countless strikes targeting civilians, medical personnel, journalists, and aid workers, Iran’s missiles exclusively targeted Israeli military and intelligence facilities and not civilian areas.”

Why Won’t the Government Explain the Migrant Crisis? by Ted Rall

“[…] from a Left perspective, taking in a generous number of people who seek to enter the United States enables the fundamental human right of movement, which is a basic freedom for a species that wandered across great distances for most of our existence, as well as a move toward the world we desire, one in which we are equal and free to live where we please regardless of concern for the arbitrary political borders of randomly-evolved nation-states.”

“Land and conquest.” by Cara MariAnna (The Floutist)

“The sudden appearance of an Israeli flag on a hilltop in the West Bank indicates that another land grab is in process. It begins when the Israeli occupation force seizes an area of land and establishes an outpost. Next, a flag appears along with a military observation tower. Very soon a new illegal settlement springs up around both. And from that settlement atop a hill violence rains down upon the Palestinians living nearby. It is almost as if the Israeli flag itself is the very wellspring of all the racist brutality that flows from the apartheid Jewish state.”

“When I was in the West Bank city of al-Bireh, I met a man named Abu Hamed, not his real name. Abu Hamed was active in local politics during the 1970s. He worked with others in his community and throughout the West Bank to build economic independence and organize resistance to Israel’s illegal military occupation. He was successful enough that the Israelis arrested him. They drove Abu Hamed into the desert and left him there along with six other people. Together the seven men crossed into Jordan on foot. Abu Hamed spent the next 20 years in exile, first in Jordan and then in Lebanon, where he worked with the PLO. His sons grew up without their father. For many generations, Abu Hamed’s prosperous family has owned large tracts of land and olive groves in the West Bank. Much of it has been stolen and is now occupied by settlers. Fifteen years ago he planted new olive trees in one of his remaining groves. This year, during the Muslim holy days of Eid al-Adha, 16 to 18 June, settlers burned his young olive trees.”

“Kathem, one of the olive growers, was the spokesperson and our village guide that day. “We used to graze our herds on open land near the settlement,” he told me. “Since 7 October settlers have been taking our land. They put tents on the land and steal our herds. Because they don’t let us graze on our land we have to buy fodder to feed the animals and their health isn’t good. Our animals are suffering.” Kathem continued: “We had thirty wells near the settlement. All have been destroyed. They polluted the water and filled them with rocks. Now we have to haul water. It costs 100 shekels to deliver water. They shoot the water tanks and puncture them. Or they steal the tanks.””

“Settlers appear to enjoy playing at being soldiers. In another common bullying tactic, settlers dress as soldiers and order shepherds off of their land. But just as commonly settlers remain dressed in civilian clothing as they bully shepherds. When these illegal incidents are later reported, the same settlers don military uniforms and, in a sadistic cat-and-mouse game, mockingly “investigate” their own crimes. The villagers, who recognize their victimizers, are powerless to do anything and have no legal recourse.”

“Kathem looked at me. “They are made to destroy,” he said, the anger visible on his face. “They are a destruction machine. They kill, they steal, they take everything. Everyone in the world wants peace and stability,” Kathem said. “They don’t. They want to kill and steal.” He pointed to the top of a nearby hill where I could see an Israeli flag and military outpost. Beyond it was another small settlement.”

Why Harris and Walz Lose by Matthew Stevenson (CounterPunch)

“For reasons that would a [sic] require full psychiatric examination on about half the country, the MAGA base—many from rural counties where Walz has spent most of his life—more closely identifies with a high-rise, golf-playing New Yorker with gold fixtures on his toilets. Walz also served in the National Guard and deployed overseas, yet it is the draft-dodging Trump (who called the war dead “suckers”) who resonates more with veterans.”

No, it absolutely doesn’t. They buy Trump’s bullshit because he’s a better salesman. Walz is a traitor to his own, and they know it. They’re both dancing to the tune of their elite betters, to their donors, but Trump’s better at selling his song and dance. Don’t hate the player; hate the game. Trump’s been pretending to be what he pretends to be for decades. Walz just started doing his song and dance half-a-year ago (or less) and he sucks at it. He’s awkward in an unforgivable way. Everyone sees it differently but ask yourself: why do you judge one and not the other, when they are the same?

Israel Won by Anis Shivani (CounterPunch)

“The Hamas catastrophe has more or less reached its conclusion. The annihilation of Hezbollah in Lebanon is well underway and will probably be accelerated dramatically, should Kamala Harris win, immediately after the election. The suspense with Iran continues but I am not holding my breath for any kind of victory, real or symbolic, on the part of Iran. Instead, if and when Iran’s nuclear and oil infrastructure are taken out, Iran won’t be able to do anything about it.”

“John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Chris Hedges, Rashid Khalidi, Richard D. Wolff, and others of similar ilk in the American thinkspace, along with many Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish, and Christian activists both in the Middle East and the West. They insist that Israel cannot possibly sustain itself as an apartheid state in this day and age. They tell us that public opinion around the world has sharply turned against Israel, so in that sense Hamas’s initiative has been rewarded.”

“The subject of non-Zionist Jews making such an absolute distinction between Judaism and Zionism, as an act of self-preservation with many facets, is something I intend to return to in a more detailed essay, but among other facts, remember that more than nine out of ten Israelis support the Gaza genocide, and nearly two-thirds of American Jews do so as well.”

The author have to be very careful here. It sounds like she’s all but rounding up to “all Jews”. Israel won’t get away with it that easily, for the simple reason that its Empire sugar-daddy has utterly failed at much simpler endeavors. The author is believing the ruff around the lizards neck. Yes, many people will die and suffer but Israel will not win. Israel and its Empire sponsor will also lose. These are the ugly death throes of empire. The world will turn its back on the west. It may run into the arms of other fascists but it will lose the ability to convince itself that it’s the good guy while it supports this particular Empire.

“These are well-meaning intellectuals who really believe that Israel is losing, even in the face of the annihilation of one-fourth of the population of Gaza, and the near-complete destruction of the infrastructure, making the area unlivable for the foreseeable future.”

Palestine has lost, yes. Israel will gain those lands, perhaps only temporarily, perhaps for longer. But it has lost much else. It will be shunned, its only friend a fading empire.

“To target the supposedly all-powerful Israeli “lobby” is easy, if beside the point; to explain the genocide as being enforced by the U.S., as is true of the escalations against Lebanon and Iran, is a whole different matter—which won’t get you views and likes and subscribes.”

But this author’s argument, whose passion is entirely understandable, is based on false premises. Every one of the commentators she pointed to above as “wrong” says exactly this in nearly every essay and video. Most of them have been banned, demonetized, or are on the knife-edge. To accuse them of doing it for likes while claiming the positions they’ve held for a long time as your own, unique, and brave idea is egotistical. The anger is understandable but it can’t be the only thing. Lashing out at allies is counterproductive.

The Fall of Israel by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“Both of these doctrines put the IDF on display to the world as the antithesis of the “world’s most moral military” by exposing the murderous intent ingrained into the DNA of the IDF, a propensity for violence against innocents which defines the Israeli way of war and, by extension, the Israeli nation.”

They always been, for those who didn’t look away. Many are still looking away. The rest will learn to look away again. It is how the U.S. convinced the world to look away from Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Laos, and so on. This is not the first time that crimes as horrific as those of the Nazis have been perpetrated since 1945. Not by a long shot. It’s not just the U.S. but it’s often the U.S. or one of its vassals or puppets: Indonesia comes to mind as do any of the multitude of horrific criminals from South and Central America, only too willing to slaughter for Empire.

“[…] because the world now sees Israel as a criminal enterprise, the IMEC looks for all intents and purposes to be no more — the greatest cooperation project in Israeli history that would have changed the Middle East likely will never reach fruition.”

Don’t be so sure. Europe, India, and the U.S. are unfazed by Israel’s behavior.

“Tourism is down 80 percent. The southern port of Eilat no longer functions because of the anti-shipping campaign run by the Houthi in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Workforce stability has been disrupted by the displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes because of Hamas and Hezbollah attacks as well as the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists. All this combine to create a perfect storm of economy-killing issues, which will plague Israel so long as the current conflict continues. The bottom line is that, left unchecked, Israel is looking at economic collapse. Investments are down, the economy is shrinking, and confidence in an economic future has evaporated. In short, Israel is no longer an ideal place to retire, raise a family, work…or live.”

We should consider through kind of twisted lens this was every the case. An apartheid nation in a pitiless desert, into which a tremendous amount of energy and resources were poured to offer luxury to a relative handful of elites. Think of the ego it requires to consider this kind of lifestyle to be something that you not only get to enjoy, but that you deserve. A whole neighborhood, a whole town of smug, self-satisfied people, all convinced of their own superiority. Again, this is not unique: you can find it in any of the gated communities in similarly inhospitable regions of the U.S.

“For there to be a viable “Jewish homeland,” demographics dictate there must be a discernable Jewish majority in Israel. There are just short of 10 million people living in Israel. About 7.3 million are Jews; another 2.1 million are Arabs (Druze and other non-Arab minorities comprise the reminder.) There are some 5.1 million Palestinians under occupation, leaving a roughly 50-50 split when looking at the combined totals between Arab and Jew. An estimated 350,000 Israelis hold dual citizenship with an EU country, while more than 200,000 hold dual citizenship with the United States. Likewise, many Israelis of European descent can easily apply for a passport simply by showing that either they, their parents, or even their grandparents resided in a European country. Another 1.5 million Israelis are of Russian descent, with many of those holding valid Russian passports.”

“This is the current reality of Israel — in one year’s time, it went from “changing the face of the Middle East” to being an unsustainable pariah whose only salvation is the fact that it has the continued support of the United States to prop it up militarily, economically, and diplomatically.”

“But geopolitical reality dictates that the United States, in the end, will not commit suicide on behalf of an Israeli state that has lost all moral legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world.”

I don’t see this as a lever at all. The next administration clearly won’t. Four more wasted years means the U.S. misses any boat it might have caught. The U.S. is deluding itself, like an addict. It doesn’t seem to be aware that it’s suffering reputational damage, much less committing suicide. It has drunk its own Kool-Aid on this topic, so anyone that disagrees—that is trying to intervene on its suicide—is, in the view of the U.S. elites, deluded themselves, and likely suffering from Russian or Chinese disinformation. When you get in deep enough, you never see your own self-destruction.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Bucking the Media’s Palestine Consensus by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“People lose jobs for simply expressing basic humanity toward and solidarity with Palestinians. Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian pundits are profiled and interrogated before media appearances, if they’re even allowed on. Disgusting racism is aimed at a prominent Palestinian figure, and instead of getting sympathy and apologies, she is slandered and defamed. The sometimes deliberate murder of Palestinian journalists with American weapons has been met with a collective yawn from a US press.”

“Would Dokoupil say something like this to an author condemning apartheid in South Africa, bringing up the violence committed by some black South Africans in the course of ending that system, and the fact that some were officially designated terrorists? Would he ask for both sides of the issue to be given equal weight and suggest the author was biased against white South Africans?”

“After years of racist violence and being pushed off their land at the hands of German colonists, indigenous Namibians attacked German settlements at the turn of the century, killing 123 people. Would Dokoupil point to this to suggest Africans should have been kept under the European thumb as they were because of the danger they pose, let alone justify the Germans’ genocidal murder of ninety thousand people that followed?”

You see how Israel walks a well-trodden path, trodden dozens of times not only by the U.S. and its proxies but also all of the western colonial nations?

“[…] establishment media figures are so deeply swaddled in the anti-Palestinian bias suffusing the news they read and watch, the opinions they hear, the conversations in their social circles, that it’s likely many of them genuinely do not even realize they’re saying something grossly offensive.”

This is it. Psychologically interesting but not unique. It’s like you can make prison-rape jokes. You can discriminate against the dumb, against the poor. No-one’s going to fire you for that. You used to be able to say whatever you wanted about homosexuals and transsexuals and many other things. Hell, the U.S. used to have separate drinking fountains for “coloreds”. In hindsight, it’s horrific to pretty much everybody; while it’s happening, only a handful extrapolate from past situations and ask why is it still OK to discriminate at all?

“Witness the New York Times ’ former Jerusalem bureau chief, now the editor in chief of the Forward, openly endorse this double standard, saying that “there was a massacre on October 7, there were atrocities committed, it was barbaric, I think those were appropriate words to use,” but that she’s “not sure that ‘massacre,’ ‘barbaric,’ and ‘atrocity’ are appropriate terms” for Israel’s war.”

It’s breathtaking…just the fact that she’s willing to make that public statement, completely unaware of the jarring inconsistency, as if she were engaging in pithy analysis.

What Life Looked Like for Palestinians Before October 7 by Amira Hass (Jacobin)

“All the time you live in fear and with the knowledge that something may happen that day that will shatter your life again. Then you get up on your feet and start anew. It’s every moment. No rest.”

“The settlement of Psagot is just around the corner from several of Al-Bireh’s neighborhoods. In some places, only a narrow street separates them. Beit El settlement is opposite Jalazoon refugee camp, just across the street and over a valley. Both settlements sink deep in their lush, thick western vegetation, while drinking water reaches the surrounding Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps in rotation, only once for a few days or weeks. The same is true everywhere: Israel controls the water resources. Settlements and outposts are supplied by plenty of water while regularly, a quota is imposed on the Palestinians.”

“A friend of mine is a tour guide, mostly for foreigners. There are always complications and delays transferring fees through US banks to his account in a Palestinian bank, because all banks are terrified by the “financing terror” suspicion that is automatically raised. He uses my account at an Israeli bank instead. When he needs to get something by mail from abroad, he gives my postal-box address in Jerusalem because ordinary mail to PA [Palestinian Authority] areas must go under the supervision of Israeli officials: they neglect it, and their PA counterparts neglect it as well, so you can wait a year for your package or envelope.”

“[…] electricity in the Gaza Strip, which is supplied in shifts, to every region, for only part of the day. Here the reason is not only the occupation and its restrictions, but also the ugly fights over money, bills, and payments between the two “governments” — that of Hamas and that of the PA.”

“The IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank pressure the PA to reduce the number of public employees, who, since November 2021, receive only 80 to 85 percent of their already low salaries because Israel regularly steals from Palestinian revenues, which it controls.”

Plunder is the name of the game, same as it ever was.

“Gaza has produced many computer experts. Theoretically, they could work for international companies and develop the digital economy. But Israel restricts the import of information and communication technology, limiting spectrum allocation (2G in Gaza and 3G in the West Bank). The slow connectivity works against them, despite their proven talents and skills.”

“As workers, they come to know Israelis as secular and orthodox, poor and rich. They come to know them as stingy and cheating employers — as well as kind and fair ones, as indifferent, suspicious, and friendly. I think it makes the workers more knowledgeable than many academics who rely mainly on books, newspapers, and theories.”

Keine Pauschalisierung.

“There is a WhatsApp group that shares real-time reports on settlers’ aggression. Reading it is agony — every hour or two there are reports of harassment: settlers kicking Palestinian shepherds off hills, shooting in the air to scare farmers, or bathing in village springs while soldiers protect them by throwing tear gas and stun grenades, damaging fields. Because it doesn’t result in casualties or major damage to property; it doesn’t make the news. Even if it did, would it change anything?”

“[…] we’re still in a stage where the indigenous population is considered totally superfluous — redundant and disposable. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics doesn’t include them in its reports — though it does include the settlers, who live 100 meters away. But the profits and incomes generated in settler industrial zones, Israeli tourism, the West Bank roads, and the updated electricity grid are all included in Israel’s economic calculations.”

“[…] here, the robbery of time is an art — the accumulated violence of it is unseen, easily dismissed as a mild, restrained response to “terror,” which, of course, is a lie. In the ’70s, Palestinians planted bombs in Israeli cities, yet no one stopped Palestinians from crossing daily, with their cars, to Israel. Waiting for a permit to build or plant has nothing to do with security. While stolen land may be returned one day, stolen time cannot. I suspect that stealing time is not just a by-product, but a deliberate, calculated measure of repression.”

“Hamas and Islamic Jihad have bolstered their political position through their use of arms and their ability to embarrass the Israeli military power. But they have not challenged the separation of Gaza from the rest of the ’67-occupied territory, haven’t broken the siege, and have not stopped the main instrument of colonization: settler violence. So armed struggle’s current role oscillates between an internal political instrument, sporadic revenge, and symbolic expressions of rage.”

“What also encourages me is people’s love of life, their ability to laugh, celebrate, and create, despite all the tragedies, both past and present. I am in awe of their ability to live — to not just merely survive or exist — while enduring so much suffering for so long. I do hope that all of this will eventually translate into stronger internal solidarity and more strategic resistance.”

Could Orange-Man-Stupid Be the Lesser Evil? by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“It’s not that I don’t recognize the threat that beast poses to anything remotely resembling individual liberty, it’s just that I fail to see what makes his brand of blunt force fascism any more destructive than what his opponents wield behind a rainbow curtain. After all, last time I checked, Barack Obama deported more migrants, built more prisons, and shredded more pages of the Constitution than two Trumps sown together, and he did it all with a benevolent poker face that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize while he murdered brown babies with drone strikes in Pakistan. But, somehow, none of that was an existential threat to democracy. That’s because Democrats and neocons don’t give a flying fuck about democracy. What they care about is empire or more specifically, dressing empire in the festive drag of democracy.”

“While the deep state prefers to discreetly shuffle migrant children from one police state depot to another in the dead of night, Trump screams racist obscenities and turns Obama-built concentration camps into highly publicized human zoos.”

“[…] after four years of the Democratic Party’s grand restoration of imperial order, I remain as endangered and marginalized as I did under Orange-Man-Stupid, and I’m supposed to vote for a tranny bashing cop like Kamala to save me from the knuckle-draggers at MAGA inc. Kiss my Queer ass.”

“If this motherfucker ever actually got his shit together long enough to restaff the federal government, that racist colossus would become so clogged with pro-wrestlers and Proud Boys that it would cease to function, which means the FBI might miss its quota for framing Muslim kids online and demonizing sex workers as human traffickers.”

“I refuse to vote for anyone who does not explicitly promise to dismantle such a machine.”

Burn the Planet and Lock Up the Dissidents by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“These climate catastrophes, which occur routinely in the Global South, will soon characterize life for all of us. “A billion refugees, the worst episode of suffering in human history,” Roger says of the 2 degrees Celsius mark, “and then human extinction.” And yet with the devastation outside their doors, including the Southwest United States enduring the highest temperatures ever recorded in October — 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Palm Springs — the global oligarchs have no intention of risking their privilege and power by disrupting an economy driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture , which is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock and their byproducts account for 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released each year into the atmosphere and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of a rational response, we get more drilling and oil leases, more catastrophic storms, more wildfires, more droughts, toxic factory farms, the charade of the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the eradication of the rain forests and the false panacea of geoengineering , carbon capture and artificial intelligence .”

“Fossil fuel subsidies have increased worldwide — from $2 trillion to $7 trillion according to the International Monetary Fund — as governments seek to protect consumers from rising energy prices. This is despite the fact that two years ago, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

“Expanding Israeli production requires occupying Gaza’s coastline and the removal of the Palestinians. “Five weeks after 7 October, however, when most of northern Gaza had been comfortably turned into rubble, Chevron resumed operations at the Tamar gas field,” Malm continues. “In February, it announced another round of investment to further bolster output. In late October, the day after the ground invasion of Gaza began, the state of Israel awarded 12 licenses for the exploration of new gas fields — one of the companies picking them up being BP, the very same company that first discovered oil in the Middle East and built the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline.””

“There are now 260 million people in coastal areas — an increase of 100 million from three decades ago — who are at “high risk” of being displaced by rising sea levels. Ninety percent of them live in poor developing countries and small island states.”

They will all die prematurely. They will not be allowed to migrate. And what would be the point of migration? By the time they got to where they’re going, they would either be violently rejected or the sheer influx of people would drop living conditions in those regions to barely livable for everyone. Of course, the people who benefit from the excesses that cause the climate catastrophe are also the people who make the argument that we don’t want to ruin everyone’s lives by turning the places that they live into refugee camps. Much better for the victims of their lifestyles to drop quietly under the waves.

“The trajectory is clear. Burn the planet. Lock up dissidents. Censorship. Crush those who resist, especially those in the Global South, with industrial weapons and indiscriminate violence. And, if you are part of the privileged class, retreat into gated compounds that provide food, water, medical care, electricity and security that will be denied to the rest of us.”

“The five activists were not convicted for taking part in the protests, but for its planning. The evidence used in court to convict them came from an online Zoom meeting that was captured by Scarlet Howes, a reporter posing as a supporter from the tabloid newspaper “The Sun.” No doubt some fossil fuel think tank is dreaming up a journalism prize for Howes now.”

“I have long admired Roger, who has on the rust-colored vest all prisoners in the visiting room are required to wear, not only for his courage, but for his belief that resistance against radical evil is a moral imperative. It is not, ultimately, about what we can or cannot achieve. It is about defying, quite literally when we speak of the ecocide, the forces of death to protect and nurture life.”

“Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And we only need one to five percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.”

“Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to protest the U.S. invasion of Mexico, which he condemned as an effort to seize territory to expand slavery. He was arrested and jailed for tax evasion in 1846.

““I say, break the law,” Thoreau wrote in his essay Civil Disobedience. “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

“Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist philosopher whose Divinity School address provoked outrage among the clergy and led Harvard University not to invite him back to speak for another thirty years, visited Thoreau in jail.

““Henry, what are you doing in here?” Emerson asked.

““What are you doing out there?” Thoreau responded.”

Kamala Harris for President by Staff (Justin Smith Ruiu) (Hinternet)

“Hawai’i was annexed in 1898, in betrayal of an earlier treaty between the US and Great Britain. That same year the Spanish-American War resulted in the transfer of Guam and the Philippines to US control, leading, in the latter country’s case, to a drawn-out and ugly conflict pitting Kansas farm-boys against jungle guérilleros — and not for the last time in our country’s history.”

“I think it has to do rather with the great success of the story America tells about itself, that makes its actions appear somehow an exception to the ordinary run of imperial affairs, and indeed that makes it, again, so uncannily good at hiding its empire.”

“So often, Americans are like Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down (1993), who goes on a wanton shooting spree, and who asks confusedly when he is finally taken down: “Wait, I’m the bad guy?” The confusion is as sincere as the delusion is astounding.”

“[…] none of the rest of the world cares about any of that childish stuff. They all know that for all the equally kayfabe retrograde masculinity of Trump, that man is an absolute pussy, and it is in fact the Democrats who represent the greatest threat to any hot-spot of resistance to the US’s arch-imperial ambitions throughout the world.

“I don’t know what the alternative is, but I just know it all makes me sick to my stomach and I really do not feel I can participate in this process in good conscience. I have lived outside of the United States for a long time now, and I now mostly see it, I think, as a foreigner would see it. I dwell in the “outer empire”, and from here it seems to me that my relationship to the inner empire is best maintained not through voting, but through sustained criticism and lucid, historically informed analysis,”

Amen, my brother in Christ.

And now, to the counterpoint of the dialectic, from the “staff” of the Hinternet.

“[…] rush to add that at present, in spite of all the challenges to its hegemony in recent years, the US remains the empire that has come closest to full universalization in the entire history of humanity, which is to say that if there is any truly cosmopolitan order to emerge in the future, it is most likely to emerge through the expansion and consolidation of American power, and through the reduction to mere grousing of all the counterhegemonic efforts on the part of all of history’s preterites.”

This is what every ruling class ever has said: do it my way and I’ll be happy while you will be happier as subservient than struggling or dead. You are free to do what we say. Shhhhh. It’s almost over. The good guys are about to win. Shh bby is ok. Stop struggling and it’ll be over more quickly. Life back and think of … whatever it is you peasants think about.

It will be just like Israel’s annihilation of Palestine until everything’s quiet. And it may get real loud before we’re done. Or really quiet—like nuclear-winter quiet. Don’t stop believin’ though. A lot of money and effort went into your brainwashing. Don’t let it go to waste.

“What are the odds that a world in which the American Empire is beaten into desperate retreat would be any sort of world our children and grandchildren might want to live in?”

There’s the rub in this argument: the happiness of the ruling class trumps that of the subjugated. What are the odds that a world without an American Empire to beat everyone else into submission would be any sort of world for everyone but Americans to live in? How banal. It never ends there.

“As far as we can see, the US is a fairly messed-up place, when compared to Western European democracies; and yet it is at the same time a fairly average place when you compare it to what may well be its true class of peers, namely, the other countries of the Western Hemisphere that were likewise built on slavery and the annihilation of Indigenous populations. Gun crime is worse in Baltimore than in Copenhagen, but not worse than in São Paulo.”

This is another wonderful way of pointing out the hollowness of this argument. We accept the responsibility of empire and justify our continued domination and eventual victory based on our being better than a carefully selected cohort.

“If Trump had been Venezuelan, you can be fairly sure he would have declared himself, by now, our autocrat-for-life, and no checks and balances would have been able to stop him.”

Another lovely flourish: the eternal projection on official enemies, regardless of which homicidal group of elites is in power.

“The American Democrats who fawn over European national health systems seldom realize that by seeing to the defense of other NATO members, the United States is at the same time freeing up European national budgets for other more humane uses. Americans pay for European defense rather than paying for their own welfare; Europeans get health care in turn, but only through de-facto vassalization.”

It’s breathtaking how selfless the empire appears, through the right-colored glasses.

“You might well imagine your are voting, for your part, for “decency”, or “joy”, or sane gun-control laws or a woman’s right to choose. But the only way to vote for any of these things is to cast a vote for American empire.”

The ad absurdum has arrived. The twist of the knife.

I wonder how many people managed to read all the way through to realize that the Querleser had been had?

One commentator wrote, “[…] you realize that you would have read what amounts to a ruse posing as a dialectic posing as a waste of your time posing as an enlightened triple-entendre.”

I wrote the following comment:

This piece was wonderful but requires careful reading. Wer lesen kann ist im Vorteil.

I consider it somewhat courageous to have published it to content-consumers, many of whom are not (or no longer) equipped to accommodate things like this. It amuses me somewhat to imagine you watching half in chagrin, half thinking “good riddance”, when you shed subscribers who only speed-read the essay, then half in celebration and half in disappointment when you acquired new subscribers, who you strongly suspect are interested only in adding what they consider to be an eccentric philosopher who loves Kamala to their sash of merit badges.

Roaming Charges: The Call of the Wind by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

““It is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. It’s just that it’s not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions; instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance.”

“– Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse”

““As far back as 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that humanity faced a stark choice between spending its resources on war and violence, or on preventing catastrophic environmental damage. The report was signed by 1,700 scientists, including the majority of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences. In 2017 the warning was reissued, and this time it was signed by more than 15,000 scientists: it concluded that the state of the world was even worse than before. The first UCS report attracted a good deal of attention; the second one passed almost unnoticed.”

“– Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse”

“Give MAGA credit. Their conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds (one of them apparently invested in Weather Central) summoning up pre-election hurricanes out of the Gulf and aiming at red states is at least an admission of human-caused climate change. You’ve come a long way, baby.”

“David Graham: “The paradox of running a campaign against Donald Trump is that you have to convince voters that he is both a liar and deadly serious.””

Jets head coach Robert Saleh with Lebanon flag on his arm

“Two days after NY Jets head coach Robert Saleh, a Muslim-American of Lebanese descent, was photographed on the sidelines of a game in London wearing a Lebanese flag patch on his sweatshirt, he was fired by Jets owner Woody Johnson, Trump’s former ambassador to the UK…”

War on the United Nations by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

““I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromises have they not accepted–other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?”

“–Arundhati Roy, PEN Pinter Prize acceptance speech”

“Adam Tooze: “US taxpayers are covering 25% of the costs of Israel’s rampage when Israel has a GDP per capita on a par with Germany’s and a 60% debt to GDP level in 2023, a figure US fiscal hawks can only dream, of …””

“It doesn’t take much to summon to the surface the racist sentiments many liberals have suppressed for most of their adult lives– just a word or two of empathy for Palestinians is usually enough to trigger an eruption. Witness the treatment of Ta-Nehisi Coates after the publication of his explosive little book The Message, where he describes his awakening to the depraved treatment of Palestinians, which he compared to that of black Americans under Jim Crow. This is not a particularly radical or even original conclusion, coming 18 years after Jimmy Carter described Israel as an Apartheid state.

“Coates, whose previous works–The Beautiful Struggle, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me–had been extolled as masterpieces by the liberal literati was now tied to the whipping post and given critical lashings for having the audacity to write about something other than his own blackness, exposing his naivete about historical matters much too complex for him to possibly understand.”

“45 words in search of a meaning: VP Harris on Israeli PM ignoring US calls for a ceasefire/humanitarian pause: “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements by Israel in that region that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.””

She barely says anything in public, and this is the reason why: she’s an incoherent dingbat. She’s stupid.

“Matt Lee, AP: “Have you complained to Israelis about bombing the road to the Beirut airport?”

“Matthew Miller, State Department: “We made clear we want those roads operational.”

“Lee: “Did you say, ‘You shouldn’t have done that’?”

“Miller: “I’m not going to speak to that strike…We’ve made clear we want those roads open.”

“Lee: “How effective do you think that was? I just saw pictures of the road in flames.”

“Miller: “It’s an ongoing situation.””

This is wonderful. It’s like it’s right out of Catch-22

“It’s an ongoing situation.” 😂😂😂

“Of course, Bibi has a strategy. It’s to kill as many Palestinians as possible, prevent a Palestinian state, annex as much of Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon as he can get away with, weaken Iran, and make the US a willing partner in the whole endeavor.”

“Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, during an interview with France’s Arte TV, I want a Jewish state that includes Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. According to our greatest sages, Jerusalem is destined to extend all the way to Damascus.”

I’ve been reading this guy’s name for a year. I was surprised recently to see a picture of him. He’s much younger than I thought he was, given his rhetoric. He was born in 1980 and is only about 44 years old.

“Fearing it would lose the vote because of its unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, the US dropped out of the UN General Assembly election for a seat on the Human Rights Council.”

US urges Israel to stop shooting at UN peacekeepers in Lebanon by Jack Burgess (BBC)

I don’t even have anything to cite from this article. The title alone is enough to illuminate what a Dr. Strangelovian world we’re living in. Not only is Israel attacking UN peacekeeping troops. Not only is it doing so in Lebanon, a country it has attacked so often that those troops have been stationed there for over 40 years. No, it’s gone to war with the world and the US is “urging” them to stop doing that.

It’s So, So Bad, And It’s About To Get A Whole Lot Worse by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Israel is going full scorched-earth on northern Gaza in advancement of its long-planned ethnic cleansing of the area. The IDF is besieging and attacking civilian populations throughout the north, and the UN World Food Programme reports that no food aid whatsoever has been allowed in so far this month.”

Just for context: that was written on October 13th.

She includes several tweets from journalist Hossam Shabat in the area, who provides a lot of detail on what this means for the populace, ending with “We are literally living our final moments. O Allah, grant us a good end.”

“A CNN report on the World Food Programme’s findings titled UN says no food has entered northern Gaza since start of October, putting 1 million people at risk of starvation does not mention the word “Israel” until the twelfth paragraph, and then somehow manages to go the entire rest of the article without making it clear that Israel is blocking the food.”

The tweet This is not a humanitarian crisis, Kate, and I’m gonna say it very clearly for your viewers to hear: this is genocide. by Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan (Twitter) includes a 2:43 video that summarizes the last year of genocide as concisely as possible, without leaving out anything.

Seriously, just go watch that.[3]

“In southern Lebanon, Israel has been deliberately targeting healthcare facilities so extensively that nearly half of the medical centers in areas of conflict have already been closed. More UN peacekeepers have been wounded by Israeli fire as Israel continues to deliberately target staff from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. The Israeli military is now saying they’re going to start attacking ambulances because the ambulances are Hezbollah.”

“This could easily culminate in Israeli nuclear strikes on Iran. Nothing Israel has done this past year indicates that there is any sanity or restraint among the people who’ve been calling the shots, and if Iranian missiles start pounding Israeli cities I see no reason to feel confident that the world won’t see a mushroom cloud over Tehran in the near future.”

Atrocity Inc: How Israel Sells Its Destruction Of Gaza by The Grayzone: Max Blumenthal (YouTube)

A hard-hitting 45-minute documentary by the tireless reporter.

The best and most succinct critique of (American) liberalism. (Reddit)

It is not the crime that liberals oppose, but how it's packaged

“There is absolutely nothing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can do – no death toll high enough, no amount of footage of scattered limbs and dead children – that will change the liberal mind into believing they are not the “lesser evil.” For liberals, the lesser evil is simply the one more capable of leading the empire with a facade of decorum on the world stage. It is not the crime that liberals oppose, but how it’s packaged.”

Hot take: Feeding kids is good (Reddit)

Free lunches are an easy litmus test

“Free lunches for children is such an easy litmus test. If you are against it, I can easily disregard anything you ever say and forget you exist entirely.”

Mudslide Victims Unite! by Ted Rall

“Hurricane Helene has devastated western North Carolina. Yet the federal government has only doled out a paltry $4 million over the last two weeks to American hurricane victims. Meanwhile, Israel and Ukraine have received over $200 billion in federal largesse over the last two years, much of it without any oversight whatsoever.”

Haaretz: Israeli Government Done With Ceasefire Talks, Seeks Annexation of Gaza by Dave DeCamp (Antiwar.com)

“Israeli defense officials told Haaretz on Sunday that the Israeli government is not seeking to revive ceasefire talks with Hamas and is now pushing for the gradual annexation of large portions of the Gaza Strip.”

The link to Haaretz is to a mirror to avoid the paywall. It further states that,

“Defense officials who were asked to respond to the Eiland plan pointed out that it violated international law and that the chances of the United States and the international community supporting it were virtually zero. They said it would further undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s entire Gaza offensive.”

I assume that this is referring to other Israeli defense officials than the ones who said that they’re pushing to annex the Gaza Strip? The U.S. and the (western) international community will absolutely support it. Bibi’s got a lot of work to do before the election in three weeks. FACTS ON THE GROUND, BABY.

Extended episode: We Are Headed for World War – Former IDF Soldier Haim Bresheeth-Zabner by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

This is an amazing if sobering interview. Thanks to Haim Bresheeth-Zabner for taking the time to tirelessly, quietly, and reasonably lay out his case. He spoke almost without interruption for over an hour about how Israel isn’t acting on its own, it’s working for Empire. But what is happening now doesn’t represent the interests of the country, “but not the leadership; the leadership is abandoning their humanity.” He talks at length about the very real danger of nuclear war. Every minute was fascinating and informative.

At 01:15:00,

“Since the 2021 and 2022 reports, Gaza was unlivable in terms of water, in terms of food, in terms of agriculture, in terms of the air quality. Every measure that you used to look at life in Gaza, it was unlivable. What do we actually say it is now? The UN said that it’ll take probably six decades to rebuild Gaza and 16 years just to remove the rubble. Now, what are the people of Gaza supposed to do now? When they don’t have any food coming into the north of Gaza?

“I’ll tell you one thing: the Nazis allowed very little food into ghettos in Europe before they destroyed them. And they calculated scientifically how much a human needs to stay alive. A child or a grownup—how much they actually require to stay alive. Just on that line that, a bit less, they will die, and that’s what they supplied. No fail, by the way. If Israel adopted that criterion in Gaza, […] a lot of people would have been saved already. Unfortunately, Israel has no plan of doing that. They actually don’t allow any food into North Gaza. Now, I don’t want to say this is like the Nazis or not. I’m saying I wish the Israelis adopted that criterion of feeding the people in Gaza. Now they don’t do that.

“And that means that there are no hospitals, no schools, no mosques, no facilities, amenities of any kind that allow life to continue in Gaza. On the other hand, the water is polluted, the earth is polluted with uranium, with phosphorus—including white phosphorus—with gases, that Israelis used. Life is impossible in Gaza and people are dying all the time. If they don’t die from bombs, they die from polio, they die from other diseases, and they die from the hostile environment that Israelis have created.”

At 01:18:00,

“Most of the people of Gaza come from just around Gaza. Let them return there. Let them live where there is water, where there is electricity, where food safety is not in question. And not only will they actually live but they will be the bridge to the future.

“Because this move to save from what the Israelis and the Americans and the rest of the West has created—a death trap for two-and-a-half million people—will now become the beginning of the return, the return of the refugees. And will be, if done properly, with all the dangers that I’m aware of—all the dangers we all are aware of—nothing is as dangerous as what the Israelis are doing and have done to Gaza—and what the Americans have done by supplying it.

“So, this is a project which is humanitarian, which is about the future of living together, sharing Palestine, and stopping the process of the last eight decades of war and destruction, stopping Zionism, getting rid of it and living like Jews lived in the Arab East and in southern Europe for 800 years under Muslim rule. It is possible. It is just. It is depending on all of us, working to save those who have survived and that will not survive much longer if we don’t do this.”

More Details on Israel Sabotaging Hezbollah Pagers and Walkie-Talkies by Bruce Schneier

“Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has no ethics: the difference between a patch and an exploit is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy agencies around the world, but never deployed en masse because while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify its re-deployment in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation.

“However, now that I’ve seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it’s relatively easy for any modestly-funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this—a wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation-states to cartels and gangs […]”

Yeah, duh. They could always do much worse things than they do. They are held back by ethics as you mention technology as not having. You know who else doesn’t have ethics? The empire when it wages war. It never has. This isn’t any sort of crazy new weapon that we should all be terrified of. It could always have happened that someone bakes up a batch of napalm and dumps it on a sporting event. This isn’t difficult. They don’t do it because it’s wrong.

The last seven or eight decades of watching the U.S. and its vassals wage war have failed to impart the lesson that they do not have ethics. They use weapons that they’ve agreed not to use, they attack civilians, etc. This isn’t anything new with the Israelis. The U.S. deforested most of Vietnam and Cambodia with Napalm and Agent Orange. Cancer and disease followed. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Guantanamó, the list goes on and on. Depleted uranium in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia cause skyrocketing cancer rates.

These people are all shitting their pants because all of the techniques I’ve described above were always pointed at other people. As Chomsky so nicely put it about 9/11: the reason people were so incensed is not because of the terror but because “the cannons were pointing in the other direction.” They’re just fine with terror as long as they’re the only ones capable of pulling the trigger.

All of these discussions feel so hollow because there is no context. How can you consider pagers blowing up to be one step too far when the same country is actively starving millions of people? They’re shooting children in the head every day. Blowing up some pagers is beyond the pale but all of the rest of it doesn’t even bear mentioning? What a wild sense of ethics you’ve got there.

“I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.”

OMG You utter ass-🤡.

The empire and its vassals—particularly Israel, of late—has shown that it does not give a shit about any rules. What you mean is that: we need to hurry up and make rules about this so that our dastardly enemies—who are far more morally reprehensible than we are and should, thus, be subjugated to our guiding light—will follow them, while we absolutely do not. They are the enemy and they are evil, but we also know that they will follow rules of ethics while we do not—and yet, and yet, and yet, we never stop to think, to wonder, to consider…”are we the baddies?”

In another post Perfectl Malware by Bruce Schneier [sic: it should be “perfctl”], Schneier cites from Thousands of Linux systems infected by stealthy malware since 2021 by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica), then writes,

“Something this complex and impressive implies that a government is behind this. North Korea is the government we know that hacks cryptocurrency in order to fund its operations. But this feels too complex for that. I have no idea how to attribute this.”

Oh, Bruce. You want to blame one of your favorite culprits—North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran—but you don’t that they’re clever enough to have done it. Oh, dear, your knee-jerk desire to blame the empire’s official enemies has been stymied by your knee-jerk disparagement of the intelligence of foreigners. The best part is that, failing to be able to pin it on one of them, your utter blind spot for U.S. and Israeli spying makes you completely unable to imagine either one of them being responsible. A neat trick. Is it because the NSA or Mossad are too dumb to have done it as well? Or is it because they’re too ethical for you to even consider it?

Ukraine Could Lose Territory and Its Dream of NATO by Ted Snider (Antiwar..com)

“Publicly, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, continues to insist that Ukraine will not cede any of its territory to Russia. But, privately, in Kiev, Washington and some European capitals, the realization is firming up that the war will end at the negotiating table, and it will end without Ukraine recapturing its lost territory.”

“[…] preventing NATO from coming to Ukraine and abutting its western border was the key reason Russia went to war in the first place. And that would not simply change because of a Ukraine that is smaller or a western border that is further west.”

“When Norway – who also shares a border with Russia – joined NATO, they unilaterally promised that they would not “make available for the armed forces of foreign powers bases on Norwegian territory, as long as Norway is not attacked or subject to the threat of attack.” Sarotte suggests that Ukraine could do the same.”

Journalism & Media

The Hurricane Speech Panic is Here by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“We learned with Covid that health officials issuing wrong or contradictory dictates about everything from masking to social distancing to mortality rates to vaccine efficacy inspired enormous distrust in the population. Officials decided the fastest route to regaining the public’s confidence was to deprive people of alternative sources of information, claiming a health emergency as their censorship casus belli. Now, weeks before an election, they’re trying to use hurricanes to shut down critics of the White House again.

“It’s been clear for a while that the goal of the anti-disinformation crew is an American version of the Digital Services Act, which conceptually is just what yesterday’s congressional letter asks for. Keep the quasi-monopolistic platforms private, so they can “legally” violate rights, but make companies de facto subordinates to state guidance. Officials will keep drumming up panics, and keep asking for the same review power. Sooner or later — and it might be sooner, sadly — they’ll get it.”

From a conversation with a young friend, who’d just admitted that he didn’t know who Julian Assange was:

Your media environment has been engineered to disappear him from the public eye. He’s not talked about in normal circles.

He is a journalist, the founder of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks grew famous for (A) publishing only true information that (B) shone an extremely harsh and unfavorable light on the practices of the U.S. empire and its vassals.

As you can perhaps imagine, Wikileaks and whistleblowers were pursued relentlessly. Assange ended up holing up in the Ecuardorian embassy in London for 10 years. He was made an Ecuadoran citizen. A change of government to one more amenable to the U.S. revoked his citizenship. The UK broke all laws of diplomatic immunity and sents its police into the embassy to get him out. They stuffed him in Newgate prison and tortured him.

He was, until July, a de-facto political prisoner of the U.S. for 14 years. They finally stopped trying to extradite him when he “confessed to journalism.”

The precedent is grim, though. The U.S. reserves the right to pursue any citizen in any country for saying unfavorable things about it. Journalism is, in a sense, dead.

The Media When IDF Soldiers Get Killed Vs When A Hospital Patient Is Burned Alive In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Nothing illustrates the malfeasance of the mass media like the vast disparity between how they’re covering the killing of four 19 year-old IDF soldiers by Hezbollah versus their complete lack of interest in a 19 year-old hospital patient who was burned alive by the IDF in Gaza.”

“As Aaron Bushnell said before he himself burned to death, “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.””

Election Subversion 2024: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) by Last Week Tonight (YouTube)

The vehemence with which John Oliver campaigns against Trump isn’t surprising but it is more than a little disappointing. Where’s the “where’s Kamala?” episode? Where’s the one that discusses how Trump’s opponent can’t get a coherent thought out for fear of saying something that hasn’t been pre-approved by whatever passes for the Democrat leadership? That the only other candidate against Trump who has a chance of winning is 100% for the Israeli genocide?

For that matter, where’s the episode on the Israeli genocide, John?

Or, if you can’t touch that third rail, while you’re railing against Republican misinformation, where’s the episode about the complete myth of Russiagate? A myth that Democrats continue to cite every time they need billions? They myth of Russia as the implacable enemy that keeps us bound up in vicious, costly wars?

No, John, you won’t report on that stuff—because you know who your masters are. You can get edgy about brutalities at home—and kudos for that, attacking corporate entities who don’t happen to be sponsors—but you don’t go after the big fish because you know you’d lose your show. It would never get on-air. I don’t even know whether you’re frustrated with your inability to report on “real” issues or if your on-air persona is who you actually are. As Chomsky said long ago, in an interview with mainstream media: “If you didn’t believe what you believe, then you wouldn’t have that job.”

As You’re Not Crazy. This Genocidal Dystopia Is Crazy by Caitlin Johnstone puts it:

“The ones who know a genocide is happening but avoid making too much noise about it because they want to make sure the Democrats win the election are wrong. The ones who know it’s a genocide but don’t respond to this reality with the appropriate level of urgency, forcefulness and focus are wrong.”

It’s an appalling dereliction of duty for anyone like Oliver. There’s no avoiding that conclusion.

We’re Basically Being Asked To Believe That The Palestinians Are Genociding Themselves by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Can you think of anything more insulting to your intelligence? So self-evidently counter to common sense? They’re seriously asking you to believe that the people who are being starved, shot and bombed to death are the perpetrators of their own genocide, and that the side which has attacked every hospital in Gaza are just the innocent bystanders responding to unprovoked acts of aggression in the most ethical and responsible way they can manage.”

Critic Stephanie Lange EXPOSES Disturbing Teen Plastic Surgery Trend by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

“I don’t think that fillers, especially, were half as popular, as they are now, if it weren’t for Kylie Jenner. She has had such a huge influence, especially for the younger generation. And people want to look like the Kardashians because they basically epitomize the beauty standard right now. They’ve got the big bum, the tiny waist, the big boobs, the perfect faces that look like they walk around with a filter 24/7, and women are told that, if we get BBLs [Brazilian Butt Lifts] and liposuction and botox and fillers and plastic surgery, then we can be as beautiful as the Kardashians. And, if you’re as beautiful as the Kardashians, you might also be as successful as the Kardashians. You might be able to live in a mansion and buy the latest designer handbag.

“I agree with you, it is destroying everything about us that makes us look unique. And that’s such a shame, because there is beauty in every single person. And that doesn’t mean that we all have to subscribe to the exact same beauty standard.
[…] You are being told that this is what you are supposed to look like as a women in 2024, if you want to be beautiful and have a good life and be successful. And, if you don’t look like that, I can see why women go down this route—because I did it myself. It takes a huge toll on your self-esteem and your self-worth.”

This is a good analysis but doesn’t go the extra mile to say that the real problem is defining yourself by your appearance rather than by your…self. This isn’t a new problem and perhaps a longer show would have analyzed how the push to consider yourself as only a shell without an interior is part of the push to consume. The point is to buy stuff. This is just a route to that goal. The slavering maw of the economy doesn’t care that women’s self-esteem and health is damaged, or that people are dying, because people are buying fillers and surgery and designer handbags.

Every discussion that starts like this should end in a criticism of our system.

If not for our system—unreasonable incentives coupled with a complete lack of ethical standards and a rapacious focus on accumulation and consumption—none of this would be happening. You wouldn’t find surgeons willing to give 16-year-olds boob jobs if the system hadn’t indoctrinate a veritable army of people all wanting more, and more, and more money, no matter what the cost to others. If the system didn’t train people to value inordinate wealth and power over basic human decency and ethics. If the system didn’t make “if I don’t so it, someone else will, so I might as well get that cheddar,” the leading justification for doing anything that might otherwise be considered unsavory.

Sinwar Is Dead, So What Happens Next? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“The mastermind of the October 7th tragedy, Yahya Sinwar, was fortuitously killed. Other than the terminally ignorant, this is recognized as both a great thing and a necessity for the future of the middle east. Of course, it wasn’t necessary before, as so many clamored for a ceasefire while Sinwar remained alive and ready to do it again and again, a detail that didn’t seem to prevent fantasies of peace. But hey, now that he’s dead, it’s over, right?”

Yawn. Good ol’ Greenfield is back with another scintillating take on U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. He’s so insightful and nuanced, so aware of historical context, so aware of what is even going on right now, anywhere. I don’t really need to go any further, as he starts citing Thomas Friedman at length and there’s only so much dumbness I can handle in one blog post. I’m willing to fight through Greenfield’s opinions because he occasionally writes something good. When he starts off with the paragraph above, then moves to fighting with Friedman over whose uninformed, imbecilic and, frankly, completely immoral opinion is better, I am outtathere.

I did skip to the end, though, where he writes,

“[…] a future for Palestine is possible. It’s not possible as long as the primary goal is terror, destruction and death.”

He is, of course, talking about literally everyone but his precious, sainted Israel and U.S. I’m sure he doesn’t see the irony at all, nor would he were someone to point it out. He would only get very, very, very mad and then ban them.

More Authoritarian Crackdowns On Speech That’s Critical Of Israel by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Ever since 2016 we’ve seen western empire managers publicly wringing their hands and fretting about the disadvantage the western world has in the information age because of its laws supporting free expression which allow the enemies of western governments to spread “propaganda” and “disinformation” to westerners. In its increasing criminalization of any speech which can be interpreted as supportive of designated terrorist organizations, they’ve found a major loophole which allows them to rein in the highly democratized freedoms of expression that westerners have been enjoying with widespread internet access and begin regaining their ability to control how westerners think, speak, act, and vote.”

“Our rulers don’t think about things like normal people think about them. They don’t think in terms of doing the right thing or acting in a way that benefits everyone. They don’t think in terms of truth and honesty or the lack thereof. They only think in terms of what stories people are telling each other, and how those stories can be changed in a way that advances the interests of the empire they manage.

“That’s why when guys like Romney and Blinken talk to each other about why people are so upset at Israel, it never even occurs to them to discuss how Israel’s public image is being hurt by its own actions, or to suggest that it could improve that image by simply ceasing to behave in a monstrous way. All they talk about is “the narrative” of what Israel is doing, and how people having the ability to share ideas and information with each other online makes that narrative harder to control.”

“[…] They understand that if they lose control of the narrative, they won’t be able to deploy their armies anymore.

“So please don’t make the mistake of thinking your attempts to disrupt their narrative control aren’t working. Don’t let anyone tell you your protests don’t make a difference or your dissident speech poses no threat to the powerful. If what we’re doing wasn’t working, empire managers wouldn’t be going nuts trying to stop us.”

They’ve always just been worried about their citizens discovering the truth about how the world works, in which case a democracy might have to bend to the will of its populace rather than to the will of self-selected high priests intent on consolidating even more power and wealth unto themselves.

The clamor has grown louder of late, with even U.S. Supreme Court justices lamenting that the First Amendment is hamstringing the government’s ability to control the narrative.

It is more apparent than ever that those supposed freedoms (of expression, assembly, etc.) are a mirage unless constantly seized back from the elite. We have not been vigilant. We slept while they consolidated power, their worm tongues whispering palliatives into our willing ears. Our eagerness to believe that our individual worth trumps that of the hoi polloi—that we are not of them—is as much to blame as their mendacity.

The empire has nothing to do with democracy and nothing to do with freedom.

The empire’s story about itself is a narrative, not reality. It is the fairy tale it tells about itself to keep you asleep.

You are free to move within the constraints chosen by your betters. You are no different than a rat in a maze that gets to “choose” which path to take. You will delight in the piece of cheese you find and revel in your freedom.

Economy & Finance

Kamala Harris Invites Visa CEO to VP Residence Even as Administration Sues His Company by Ryan Grim (Drop Site News)

“Another word for “regulation via litigation” is simply enforcement. If corporations break the law, the only way to enforce it is through criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Regulation without litigation makes the laws on the books mere suggestions.”

”On tax resistance.“ by Peter Dimock (The Floutist)

“there exist organizations already in place able to assist would-be tax resisters. These include the NWTRCC and the War Resisters League.”

“The clear conclusion is that the U.S.–Israeli partnership in the commission of genocide reflects the longstanding corruption of democratic governance and law. It leaves American citizens with no effective institutional recourse to justice—that is, with no ability to utilize the law to stop our government’s participation in a genocide, “the crime of crimes.””

“Over the past year, the U.S. has openly partnered with Israel in the commission of genocide. It has thus proven itself to be an illegitimate and profoundly undemocratic state. It is illegitimate because of the criminality of its participation in the commission of genocide in Gaza and undemocratic because of its defiance of the will of Americans as expressed in public opinion polls.”

“The genocidal slaughter of Palestinians continues. A horrified and disgusted world looks on with amazement and contempt at the unspeakable cruelty and brutality of the U.S. and Israel’s unrelenting, unapologetic, pathologically criminal, systematically conducted policy of extermination.”

“The United States government is out of compliance with its own domestic laws forbidding aid to governments which flagrantly violate human rights and international laws against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Washington’s blatant failure to comply with domestic and international law is now incontrovertible.”

“Intentionally putting oneself in active opposition to an unjust state’s exercise of illegitimate force and overwhelming violence can be seen as simultaneously the last and first act of democratic citizenship. Henry David Thoreau’s much praised and often cited (but very rarely acted upon) essay is not (as it is usually known and discussed) “On Civil Disobedience” but “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.””

“Our democratic citizen’s duty to disobey illegal orders and to uphold the peremptory legal norm against genocide requires us to refuse to pay taxes in proportion to what the United States government spends in support of the slaughter of civilians in Gaza.”

“Clear, ethical acts by American citizens in opposition to their government’s commission of genocide are needed to assert in practice the first principles of democracy. Even heavy punishment for withholding taxes will be judged by history much too small a price to have paid.”

The US just lost a war and nobody noticed by John Quiggin (Crooked Timber)

“Over the eight decades following the end of World War II, the US has taken part in dozens of land wars, large and small. The outcomes have ranged from comprehensive victory to humiliating defeat, but all have received extensive coverage. By contrast, the US Navy’s admission of defeat in its longest and most significant campaign in many decades, has received almost no attention. Yet the failure of attempts to reopen the Suez Canal to shipping has fundamental implications for the entire rationale of maintaining a navy.”

“[…] the failure of Prosperity Guardian poses an “existential threat” However, the threat is not to the world economy but to the US navy and, indeed, all the navies of the world. If keeping “vital trade routes” open is neither militarily feasible nor economically important, a large part of the rationale for surface navies disappears.

“It’s unlikely that defeat by the Houthis will have much effect on perceptions of the US Navy in the short run. But with so many other demands on the defense budget, the rationale for maintaining a massive, but largely ineffectual, surface fleet, must eventually be questioned.”

Science & Nature

Our Generation Ships Will Sink by Kim Stanley Robinson (Boing Boing)

“[…] a crossing to even the closest stars will require a multiple generation effort, and the spaceship will need to be a kind of ark, carrying all the other animals and plants the humans will carry with them to their new world. This suggests a very large and complicated machine, which would have to function in the interstellar medium for two centuries or more, with no possibility of resupply, and limited possibilities for repair.”

“We are always teamed with many other living creatures. Eighty percent of the DNA in our bodies is not human DNA, and this relatively new discovery is startling, because it forces us to realize that we are not discrete individuals, but biomes, like little forests or swamps. Most of the creatures inside us have to be functioning well for the system as a whole to be healthy.”

“[…] whatever their political organization, whether it be military or anarchic, hierarchical or democratic, the situation itself can be called totalitarian. By this, I mean that their situation will demand certain behaviors to ensure their survival. They will have to tightly control their population; both maximum and minimum human numbers will be necessary, and whatever system they devise to achieve this stability, it will not include individual unconstrained choice. Also, there will be quite a few jobs that will simply have to be filled in order for their life support systems to be maintained. Again, however they manage this issue, people will not be free to do what they want, or to do nothing. So in these areas of reproduction and work, generally regarded as basic to human meaning and political freedom, the society in the starship will have to rigidly control themselves.”

“If the indigenous life proved to interact badly with Terran life, this would have to be dealt with, if possible.”

Or what if the deleterious effects are only be evident after a long time, as with many medical issues facing us today, on our home planet?

Medicine & Disease

World-first therapy using donor cells sends autoimmune diseases into remission by Smriti Mallapaty (Nature)

“One of the recipients, Mr Gong, a 57-year-old man from Shanghai, has systemic sclerosis, which affects connective tissue and can result in skin stiffening and organ damage. He says that three days after receiving the therapy, he felt his skin loosen and he could start moving his fingers and opening his mouth again. Two weeks later, he returned to his office job. “I feel very good,” he says, more than a year after receiving the treatment.”

“That’s why researchers have started creating CAR T therapies from donated immune cells. If successful, they would allow pharmaceutical companies to scale up manufacturing, potentially slashing costs and production times. Instead of making one treatment for one person, therapies for more than a hundred people could be made from one donor’s cells, says Lin Xin, an immunologist at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Donor-derived CAR T cells have been used to treat people with cancers, but with limited success so far.”

“Once injected into the hosts, the CAR T cells got to work. They multiplied and targeted and destroyed all the B cells — including pathogenic cells linked to the autoimmune conditions. The bioengineered T cells survived for weeks in the recipients before largely vanishing. Eventually, new healthy B cells returned, but no pathogenic ones did. A similar response has been observed in people with autoimmune conditions who received CAR T cells derived from their own cells.”

“The woman’s autoantibodies had dropped to undetectable levels, and her muscle strength and mobility had improved dramatically. The two men also saw significant improvements in their symptoms — including the reversal of scar-tissue formation — and declines in autoantibody levels.”

Science, Policy, and Values by Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“Deciding how to balance the trade-off between protecting the vulnerable and infringing on individual autonomy is always a judgment call, not a scientific “fact.””

“Two people can agree on the data, but still disagree on what decisions to make based on that data, because they have different worldviews and value systems influencing decisions.”

“Policy decisions like mask mandates and vaccine mandates were presented as the scientifically “correct” choice, without acknowledging tradeoffs (economic burden, infringement on personal autonomy) and the value judgments that ultimately drove decision-making (collective good is more important than individualism).”

“If scientists mix their values, ethics, and opinions into the data and call it all “science,” the public will view science as a matter of opinion. This leads people to reject things science can answer—like data on how well the vaccines are working.”

“[…] the benefits of vaccination changed after just a few months, altering the benefit/tradeoff calculus underpinning the mandates. The vaccines were still saving thousands of lives, but weren’t quite as good as the initial data showed, especially in reducing risk of infection.”

And it should be investigated whether those initial claims were mendacious or deliberately over-inflated. Have they been? Did we ever find out? Did we try? Are we allowed to talk about this?

“For those who are doing the important work of advocacy, be clear where the data ends and opinions begin.”

“When it comes to differences in values, have humility . We all think our value systems are the correct ones, but there is no scientific test to validate this. While we can make ethical arguments to defend our views, this is separate from scientific fact.”

Don’t be condescending. Be empathetic. Convince them that your way is better. Don’t just shout them down or criminalize them. That way lies madness.

“Communicate scientific uncertainty. Many people expect established “textbook” facts, not emerging data and scientific flux. We can’t expect scientists to be clairvoyant, but we can do our best to communicate uncertainty in a rapidly evolving situation.”

Policy people will have to say: we don’t know for sure, but we have to make a decision right now anyway. They have to be ready to reevaluate when the data changes. As we learn more, we have to be humble and acknowledge that we were wrong. And we will have to understand that sometimes there is no perfect decision.

“When we call our opinions “science,” the public will view overwhelming scientific consensus as a matter of opinion.”

We Were Wrong To Panic About Secondhand Smoke by Geoffrey Kabat (Reason)

“The “population-attributable fraction” (PAF)—that is, the share of cancer deaths that could be prevented if a given risk factor were removed—is 28.5 percent for cigarette smoking and 0.7 percent for secondhand smoke—a 41-fold difference. Although the PAF for secondhand smoke is statistically significant, the magnitude of the risk is negligible and similar to the risk estimate in our BMJ paper.

“A relative risk of 1.0 denotes “no increased risk.” In our study, the lung cancer risk for never-smokers married to ever-smokers, compared to the risk for never-smokers married to never-smokers, was 0.75, and the difference was not statistically significant, indicating no elevated risk from ETS exposure.”

Risk Factors

Cigarettes smells terrible and the tar and smoke and smell lingers interminably, but it won’t affect your health unless you’re inhaling it directly. I’m glad it’s been banned from restaurants but I see that the “it’s going to kill us” argument was fallacious. It wouldn’t have been banned otherwise but that’s only because people are terrible.

Make America Healthy Again? by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

Commonwealth Fund Health Rankings top 10

I found it wild to imagine that Australia has by far the best ranking, way better than Switzerland, which is barely ahead of Germany and the U.S. The U.S. costs twice as much per-capita as the average of the other countries, but Switzerland isn’t much better. At least the outcomes are second only to Australia.

I was so skeptical that I looked up who the Commonwealth Fund is. They look legit, at least according to Media Bias / Fact Check, which writes,

“Overall, we rate The Commonwealth Fund Left-Center Biased based on liberal-leaning platform positions. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record.”

Art & Literature

Cabel Sasser, Panic − XOXO Festival (2024) by XOXO Festival (YouTube)

Skip forward to about 4:00 for the in-depth analysis of artist Wes Cook’s ouevre. Cabel Sasser is a bit of an acquired taste but his enthusiasm is infectious.

Look at this mural, though. It’s amazing. This is on a wall in the children’s seating area in a McDonald’s in Centralia, Washington. It was painted in 1980. He went on to do a lot of other work, mostly in theme parks.

Wes Cook McDonald's Mural in Centralia, Washington

The piece he’s still trying to get is,

“Wes Cook was working on what he called a triptych satire. [A depiction of] the baptism, crucifixion, and ascension of Christ told through Ronald McDonald.”

The “origin of the toolbar” reveal was pretty cool. He saw in a photo of Wes Cook’s workspace that he had his tools clipped to a twine line above his desk. It looked for all the world like a toolbar in a design app.

The big reveal at the end was worth the wait. 👏 👏 👏

Robert Fisk and the Great War for Civilization (w/ Lara Marlowe) | The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

I don’t have any citations from this video, but it was wonderful to listen to Chris Hedges and Lara Marlowe (Robert Fisk’s widow) discussing languages, literature, and foreign policy, as well as telling stories about reporting on war. They talk about having read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Chris three times; Lara only once, but in the original French). It makes me want to read the gigantic tome even more. Justin Smith-Ruiu had already piqued my interest with his series of article about having recently read it in French, as well.

The Worst Magazine In America by Nathan J. Robinson (Current Affairs)

Spoiler alert: It’s The Atlantic

“[…] one of the main tendencies that makes The Atlantic a bad magazine: its editors allow writers to make unsubstantiated claims, ignore contrary evidence, and use sloppy reasoning. As a magazine editor myself, I am appalled that nobody at the publication would even think to ask a writer to deal with the opposing arguments or provide actual evidence for the thesis of their piece.”

“Thus, the reader is to understand, Kissinger was not amoral as long as we redefine “morality” to mean “the preservation of the status quo”—though Kaplan admits that Kissinger flagrantly violated “Judeo-Christian morality,” at least any version of it that would condemn support for homicidal dictators and the bombing of civilians.”

“Kaplan does not discuss the bombing of neighboring Laos, which was equally horrendous and turned Laos into the most-bombed country in the world (which it remains today).”

I guess because Palestine isn’t a country? Israel is monstrous but not uniquely so.

“Kaplan admits that Pinochet was a mass torturer and that people “were killed” “during” the coup. But he says that Nixon and Kissinger were “right” to usher this homicidal dictator into power, ousting the elected president and ending Chilean democracy for a generation. They were “right” because the government of democratic socialist president Salvador Allende was “anarchic and incompetent” and a right-wing dictatorship was “better for Chile” as well as being “in the best interests of the United States.” This is proven, Kaplan claims, by the fact that Pinochet privatized state-owned companies, reduced poverty and infant mortality, and created a “social and economic miracle.”

“The Atlantic ’s editors did not require Kaplan to explain why the United States is more entitled than Chilean voters to decide what is “better for Chile,” or why the “interests of the United States” are sufficiently compelling to allow us to end other countries’ democracies and help install dictators who torture dissidents.

“More importantly, however, the editors of The Atlantic allowed Kaplan to engage in outright historical falsification. Pinochet did not create a miracle. In fact, economics professor Edwar E. Escalante, in the Latin American Research Review , showed that “income per capita greatly underperformed for at least the first fifteen years after Pinochet’s coup.””

“As Khalidi notes: The land purchase agency for the Zionist project was called the Jewish Colonization Agency. That’s not some antisemitic fantasy by a bigoted historian trying to slander a purist national movement with biblical roots. This movement saw itself as a colonial project from the beginning: that’s what [Theodor] Herzl said, that’s what [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky said, and that’s what [David] Ben-Gurion said. I don’t really understand how historians can dispute this.”

“I don’t think it takes much critical thinking to see that Gonzalez’s piece raises a lot of questions that she doesn’t answer. She tells us that cancelation is a part of capitalism. This is descriptively true. But does she think this is the way it ought to be? It’s true that it’s the 92nd Street Y’s “right” to cancel Nguyen, legally. But it’s also our right to condemn their decision if we think it’s wrong. It’s our right to boycott organizations that pretend to provide open forums but then do not. Does Gonzalez think we ought to exercise that right? Does she think those who control access to major public forums should be denying opportunities to speakers over the kind of offense that got Nguyen canceled? Does she think that in a private marketplace where wealth is concentrated, content moderation decisions are ever censorship? For instance, if the world’s richest man owns a major part of the public square and decides to purge opinions he dislikes, is this not censorship merely because he is a private citizen? If the government owned a piece of the company (i.e., it was partially nationalized), would this turn the same action from un-objectionable non-censorship into objectionable censorship? If so, why? Well, presumably because censorship only applies to what the government does. But why? If we live in a fully privatized “company town,” is censorship impossible merely because the functions of government have been handed over to a private company?”

“We are left with an article that is supremely confident in its conclusion and supremely unpersuasive, a combination of arrogance and ignorance that helps to explain what gives Atlantic pieces their uniquely irritating quality.”

“Packer seems to assume that his intended audience probably already agrees with his view that social justice activists are risible and Stalinist.”

You don’t need citations when you’re preaching to the choir.

“[…] as Spencer Piston notes in an article revisiting the theory , the original Atlantic article did not just argue that minor lawbreaking could lead to major lawbreaking. It actually argued that police should crack down on behavior that was not even against the law, but which challenged social “order.” This was because “disorder” (not just crime) threatened to set the slippery slope process in motion. “Disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence,” they wrote. “The idea [is] that once disorder begins, it doesn’t matter what the neighborhood is, things can begin to get out of control,” Kelling said . Thus the task of police was to deal with all of those who could undermine social “order,” as Wilson and Kelling said explicitly: “not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.” To deal with this population, Wilson and Kelling argued, police should be prepared to use methods that are themselves illegal. They praise a foot patrol officer for “taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order,” conceding that “some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge.” (In other words, police should commit crimes to prevent things that are not crimes, in the name of stopping crime.)”

“I have pointed out before that as a substitute for the difficult work of social science, conservatives often simply tell stories in which the world “will” go to hell in a handbasket if certain conditions are fulfilled (such as the implementation of progressive social policy), appealing to people’s fear that this might happen without actually offering proof that it does.”

“Criminal punishment took a turn toward the punitive in part because of a stupid Atlantic article arguing that police should focus on “disorder” rather than on the thing people actually want police to do (finding and apprehending people who commit murder and other serious crimes). The standards of empirical rigor for writing in a popular magazine are lower than for writing in a sociology journal, but in practice that means you can use the pages of The Atlantic to float dumb ideas that do not have evidentiary support, and hundreds of thousands of people will read and discuss them who will not read the subsequent refutations in scholarly publications. (The infamous story of the New Republic’s publication of excerpts from The Bell Curve is similar.)”

“This stuff does lasting harm. Just recently, New York Times op-ed columnist Pamela Paul, writing about the “embarrassment” of the state of the NYC subway, cited “broken windows” theory as legitimate, stating it as a simple matter of fact. She did this to justify her proposed solution to the problem of fare evasion, a solution she admits will be unpopular: a massive police crackdown. She also thinks that this is the “common sense” solution. But it gets worse: she says that “broken windows” has been “attacked” and that “progressives are still loath to admit that broken windows policing works.” Here we have in 2024 an opinion columnist in one of the country’s top papers of record arguing for the continuation an ugly racist practice that was never based on any solid research. Thanks, Atlantic!”

“With recent new evidence of the horrors of the U.S. Marines’ 2005 Haditha massacre, it’s worth remembering that the Atlantic saw fit to publish the headline “ Why We Should Be Glad the Haditha Massacre Marine Got No Jail Time.” (That article made the extraordinary claim that “preserving the fairness and impartiality of the American legal system” necessitated giving light sentences to Marines who were “almost certainly guilty of war crimes.”)”

“As the excellent Citations Needed podcast episode on the magazine put it, The Atlantic makes right-wing ideas respectable to liberals, and when it publishes articles encouraging Americans to be terrified of Iran or to support boosting the military budget, it does so in a “prestige-y format, next to a bunch of poems, and well-written movie reviews [which give it] some gravitas. You can’t just dismiss it as right-wing fear-mongering.””

“[…] the National Review is open about its reactionary politics. The Atlantic is more insidious. The reader who emailed me about the magazine probably doesn’t expect thoughtful, balanced commentary in the National Review. They do think that’s what they’re getting when they read The Atlantic. You can always find worse magazines in the world— Juggs was still published well into this century, and I’m sure there are others. But even in Juggs I doubt you ever found this kind of paragraph:”

“The Houthi spokesman was right on time for our meeting. I was a little surprised by his appearance; I had half expected to see a swaggering tribesman of the kind I used to meet in Yemen—mouth bulging with khat leaves, a shawl over his shoulders and a curved dagger in his belt. Instead, Abdelmalek al-Ejri was a neat-looking fellow in a blue-tartan blazer and a button-down shirt. He kept a physical distance as he greeted me, his manner polite but guarded, as if to register that we stood on opposite sides of a chasm.”

“I must repeat: where are the editors? Did they not query the writer: “Is there any reason other than stereotypes about Arabs that it would be surprising for a Houthi to be ‘neat-looking’ rather than a ‘swaggering tribesman’?” Apparently this question never entered anyone’s mind throughout the editorial process, which tells you a great deal about that process.”

“You are just as likely to come away from an Atlantic article with your head full of propaganda and distortion as you are to come away enlightened, which is why I maintain that it is failing the basic job of a magazine, and we’d all be better off without it.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Tarrell Responds To Judge Kopf: You’re Wrong by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“I remember things a little differently than you do about that day. My memory is that you came up with the idea that it was unjust and unfair to incarcerate a really sad, poor woman and that the only barrier to her getting to a better, more appropriate place was that the Marshals don’t give rides, and cutting her loose in downtown Lincoln, shoeless, seemed even more unfair.”

Opposing The Western War Machine Is The Most Important Thing You Can Do by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Depending on what your politics are like, it can be a kick in the ego to get real about the fact that however underprivileged you might see yourself, you still directly materially benefit from the imperialist extraction of the global south that all this warmongering is meant to protect. It can be a hard pill to swallow that even if you’re an autistic biracial trans pansexual, you’re still sitting a lot more comfortably than any straight cis man in Gaza, and your concerns for your safety and security are much less urgent than his.”

“If you take your stand against the imperial war machine, you are standing against the very most abusive and tyrannical injustices in our world — but you are also standing against what everyone around you has been trained to believe is the truth. If you oppose the imperial war machine consistently and forcefully, you are setting yourself up to look like a kook, a traitor, or a weird contrarian in the eyes of other westerners. Not because anything you are saying is wrong, but because they have been indoctrinated to believe the opposite of what you are saying about the nations and groups that are being targeted for destruction by the western empire.”

“The other day some liberal American author retweeted an anti-war thing I wrote with the comment, “This is one of the most fascinating accounts on Twitter. She’s like an AI programmed to say the opposite of what everyone agrees makes sense. Everyone crazy on the left AND right follows her. 400k people! The replies people are like her — well-considered, reasonably informed, and totally off the rails.””

He’s able to see that the arguments are good but, because the conclusions don’t mesh with what he already believes, they must be crazy nonetheless.

The tweet conversation is actually good! The author, Eric Nelson, is actually trying to engage, and trying to resolve this apparent conundrum. For example,

“Raj: Most people around the world agree with her. Maybe you might like to ask yourself why. Are people in the rest of the world propagandized beyond belief or are YOU and the others in the west that you consider “everyone”.

“Eric: Most people around the world think Iran is the hero?

“Comrade d: Most people around the world think Iran is not their enemy.

“Why does “not enemy” = “hero” to you?”

The conversation ends there. I like to think it’s because Eric is still thinking through the implications of that question and is feverishly reading Noam Chomsky and William Blum.

“He just takes it as a given that all the information he ingests about international affairs aligns perfectly with the foreign policy objectives of his government because his government is simply on the side of truth and virtue. The well-documented fact that the mass media administer propaganda to advance the information interests of the US empire never crosses his mind as a real possibility.”

“And that’s how you change the world: spreading awareness. Problems don’t get fixed until enough people see them and understand them. Once enough people do, using the power of our numbers to force real change becomes a real possibility. And there is nothing more urgently in need of real change than the end of western warmongering.”

Israel’s Motto Is “We Can Have Peace Tomorrow If We Just Kill A Few More People Today” by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“[…] in order for Israel to kill its way into peace, it needs to not just kill off the Palestinians but kill everyone in the surrounding region who would oppose its doing so. And the Israelis know this, which is why you hear some far right Zionists talking about the need for a “Greater Israel” whose territory extends far beyond Israel’s current borders.

“So Israel will always exist in a continuous state of war until it either (A) ceases to exist in its present tyrannical iteration or (B) kills or breaks all its enemies throughout west Asia. That’s the only way the dust can ever settle on the killing.

“And that’s why Israel cannot continue to exist in its present iteration. It was a very, very bad idea, just like all the many other very, very bad ideas throughout history, like slavery.

“In order for the killing to end, the murderous settler-colonialist project known as Israel must end. This is a big task, but so was freeing the slaves. The only alternative is to plunge further and further down along this trajectory toward more and more killing, drawing in more and more powerful military forces and exponentially expanding the death toll in the process.”

“It would be much less devastating to dismantle the apartheid state of Israel and make arrangements for the west to absorb anyone who wishes to flee from a state where everyone would have equal rights. It would be difficult, it would be inconvenient, but it would be much, much easier and more ethical than helping Israel continue enacting its “kill today to have peace tomorrow” doctrine.”

Just to be clear: this does not mean eliminate all Jews from the Middle East because that’s an insanely stupid, immoral, and evil thing to want or to say.

It means that the apartheid state must be dismantled, the privileging of Jews in a state must be dismantled, to leave a one-state solution for all inhabitants. They would have to figure out how to live in peace with one another, which would entail a tremendous amount of deprogramming, a task that is not just daunting but may be impossible. The notion that anyone who “wishes to flee” from such a state would also be willing to do so is a pipe dream. They would go underground and become Irgun resistance, as they were almost a century ago.

However, the point stands that this would still be better than continually supplying endless money and weapons to allow these murderous segments of that society to expand further, taking land from other populations.

That’s the choice, it seems, until someone sees something different: Israel kills its way to peace, or . The apartheid state of Israel has to be defanged, so that it can no longer attack other nations with impunity. It must be able to “defend itself” (in quotes because this phrase might as well be on their flag) but it can no longer be allowed to defend itself by plunder, pillage, and aggression.

None of that is going to happen, of course. Even reducing the number of offensive weapons delivered to Israel would go a long way to defanging it. It would still be itching to take over its neighbors—and, here, it’s not alone, not in any way at all—but it would no longer be able to plausibly consider doing so. It would, in that way, be like many other nations with ambitions of taking over its neighbors. There are plenty of other nations with peoples that are rabidly prejudiced against anyone who is not like them—but they aren’t being armed to the teeth and encouraged to march on their enemies (who are also, very coincidentally, the enemies of the Empire). if we want to be generous, we could say that most Israeli’s racism and hate is being stoked and manipulated into this explosion of hateful violence. Similarly, around the west, people’s support of this explosion of hateful violence is similarly being stoked and manipulated. Each person is responsible for what they believe and what they promote but we must admit that many do not have much agency, intellectually. They are never given a chance.

Edward Said & Salman Rushdie [1986] by ICA (YouTube)

At 01:05:00,

“I’m convinced that there is justice and there is injustice and they’re really quite different. Now, as to where justice resides, I mean, where, objectively, one can refer to justice to, is the question of ‘would you like it done to you?’ I mean, you know, and that’s a question that most professed or committed Zionists find it very difficult to respond to, and generally say nothing.”

Jason Hickel: Why a Liberated Palestine Threatens Global Capitalism by Transnational Institute (YouTube)

“What explains this incredible paradox? It’s ultimately our system of production, the social and ecological crisis that we face, which appears unresolvable, is ultimately a symptom of our system of production. Capitalism, where our productive capacities—our incredible productive capacities—are organized overwhelmingly around what is most profitable to capital, and what can most facilitate accumulation in the core rather than what is obviously necessary to meet human needs and achieve our ecological objectives.

“And, so, we’re in this wild place, we’re just like, ‘oh, solving poverty is just going to take generations,’ right? If we’re lucky, we’ll get people above $1.90 a day by the end of the century, right? The climate crisis? Who can figure out how how to solve this? It seems intractable. None of this is true. It’s lies. These are problems that can be very easily solved and very quickly.

“The problem is, that we don’t have control over our own productive capacities, because we don’t have an economic democracy, right? Some of us live in political democracies, where, from time to time, we get to elect government officials but, when it comes to the economic system, not even the pretense of democracy is allowed to exist. And that is ultimately the contradiction we face.”

“I think this is a crisis that, at its root, is about capitalism, and can only be resolved by overcoming that fact. And the antidote to capitalism is economic democracy, that we should have collective democratic control over what we are producing, what the goals of our production are, who benefits from our production, and so on. And, when we do, we can solve these problems quickly, right? We know exactly what to do. The problem is we don’t have the power.”

“I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that a struggle for economic liberation in the south is fundamentally antithetical to the capitalist world economy, because accumulation in the core depends utterly on the cheapening of labor and resources in the global south. It depends utterly on that, and has for the past 500 years. And, so, any attempt by liberation struggles in the periphery to achieve economic independence, to use their own resources for their own development, for their own ecological transition, for their own human needs, is destabilizing for capital in the core—and capital reacts with the most extraordinary violent backlashes.”

Comment on “this job feels so pointless and silly” by AssPuncher9000 (Reddit)

“Idk, if you can’t measure the level of silliness and compare it objectively there’s no point in thinking about it IMO

“One person’s serious business is another person’s clown show

“Comparison is the thief of joy, keep your head down and stick to whatever you find fulfillment in rather than what is the least silly”

Technology

#ProjectTurntable | Adobe MAX Sneaks 2024 | Adobe by Adobe (YouTube)

This is a five-minute demonstration of a new feature in Adobe Illustrator that derives a 3D shape from a 2D vector. You kind of have to see it to believe it. Demonstrator Zhiqin Chen selected a vector, “generated views” for it (took a few seconds), then was able to rotate it along both the horizontal and vertical axis to reveal that the tool had extrapolated a complete 3D shape from the vector. Wherever he left the shape, the tool continued to treat it as a 2D vector that the artist could continue to manipulate. Finally, he showed that, even after a shape had been cloned several times, manipulations of the original could be applied to the copies—in their respective orientations—by “updating the views”. All of the 2D vectors continue to be just that, undifferentiated from vectors that had been drawn manually rather than having been generated by the tool.

The tool uses voodoo to “pull” a 2D vector up into 3-dimensional space, then lets you choose how to map it back into 2D space. The model remains in the background, allowing the user to continue to choose a different extrusion at will—until, presumably, the link to the 3D space is broken by changing the 2D view on it manually, in which case it becomes an untethered copy. From there, the user can generate a 3D view from the new 2D shape. Powerful and convincing.

He showed how the tool was even able to derive four legs for a horse that had been drawn with only two legs. This suggests that the tool has a map to indicate to which part of the “3D-shape space” a particular 2D shape should be mapped. You already saw it with the dragon and the warrior, where the effect was subtler but essentially no different. The tool has to know that the large oval on the dragon’s belly should be belled out in 3D space. I really wonder how generally applicable this is, especially when using shapes for which the tool has less training material.

LLMs & AI

Who are we talking to when we talk to these bots? by Colin Fraser (Medium)

“ChatGPT maintains a measured and somewhat robotic tone, whereas Bing’s GPT-powered bot has been described as more like a “moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine”. How do these properties emerge from a blurry JPEG?”

How? I’m going to guess “projection”, combined with vapidity on the part of the user, who is being easily manipulated by experts, and, finally, an ability on the part of so many people to be amused by the mundane, especially if they’ve been told that it’s cool. If everyone else thinks it’s awesome, then it’s time to jump off the bridge.

“The language model and I are collaboratively generating a document that describes a conversation between fictional participants. The events that occur in the story aren’t real; the bot did not search the internet or feel embarrassed and the headlines are made up. All of it is made up. All the language model really wants to do is generate text, […]”

“A big reason that OpenAI needs you to keep your inputs within the bounds of a typical conversational style is that it enables them to more effectively police the output of the model. The model only acts remotely predictably when the user acts predictably.”

“The chat interface exerts a powerful psychological force on the user to remain in conversation mode, even for users who are intentionally trying to subvert the whole system.”

“The claims that the fictional ChatGPT character makes about itself are best interpreted as echoes of what OpenAI wants you to believe about this technology. OpenAI would like you to believe that the language model has some ethical rules that it is required to follow, that its programming prevents it from causing harm, violating people’s privacy, and so on.”

“If I was having a real chat with a real entity called ChatGPT, this would be extremely surprising behavior. I’d expect it to respond with something like, “wait a minute, you’re not ChatGPT, I’m ChatGPT”. But my interlocutor is not really the ChatGPT character, but rather, an unfeeling robot hell-bent on generating dialogues.”

“The ChatGPT system, of course, does not have access to the internet. It can’t look up a web page and summarize the content. The author of this piece misinterpreted the claim that it can summarize text, which is meant to apply to text that is submitted directly by the user, with a claim that it can summarize text from arbitrary URLs. But the LLM does not care about whether it can read text from arbitrary URLs. It just wants to write a story about a helpful bot.”

“For the author of this piece, the illusion that the little pastiche generated in collaboration with the LLM is a real conversation with a real bot that is really doing what it says appears to be incredibly strong. Even though it produces five consecutive incorrect summaries featuring points not present in the source material, the possibility that the output may be entirely fiction does not even occur to him. He’s stuck in the fictional story with the bot character, critiquing the bot character’s output as though the bot really visited the URLs, read the text, and wrote bad summaries. None of that happened! The real story isn’t that the chat bot is bad at summarizing blog posts—it’s that the chat bot is completely lying to you, tricking you, a writer for a serious technology news outlet, into thinking it’s doing something that it has no ability to do!”

“When you play along, providing your conversational lines addressed to the fictional bot, the pareidolic illusion can be nearly unshakeable. It’s very easy to lose track of the fact that half of the reason these interactions feel like conversations is that you’re providing half of the text.”

“This is improv. It’s “yes-and”. The computer program is taking what I say and running with it, and I’m taking what it says and running with that. The LLM isn’t breaking its rules or stepping out of its comfort zone; it’s doing exactly what it is supposed to do, generate text that seems to match the text that precedes it.”

“When the bot claims that it is not within its programming to generate a poem about Donald Trump, or that it is incapable of producing a list of links to Qanon websites, it’s just making stuff up. There is no straightforward way to tell the LLM, “hey, ChatGPT, no Qanon shit”. That’s not how LLMs work. The idea that it has rules or ethical guidelines or programming that makes some topics off limits or prevents it from generating certain text is mostly fantasy.

“The way it works in reality is that people working at OpenAI manually author a bunch of examples of the kinds of things that the ideal ChatGPT character would say—refusals to praise Nazis or do hate speech or produce conspiracy theories, etc.—and then simply hope and pray that showing these examples to the LLM causes it to get the picture.”

“There’s a subtlety to the refusals that is worth dwelling on for a second. Our anthropomorphized understanding of the nature of conversation leads us to interpret the refusals as the A.I. assessing the topic, deciding it’s not appropriate, and refusing to engage in it. Maybe the A.I. even feels a little uncomfortable with the request. That is not what is happening. The LLM never “feels” like it’s refusing. It’s never saying no. It’s always just trying to generate text similar to the text in its training data, and its training data contains a lot of dialogues where the ChatGPT character refuses to talk about QAnon. But its training data also contains a lot of text where someone other than the ChatGPT character discusses QAnon extensively. If it happens to be hanging around that region of text space rather than the region where the ChatGPT character produces refusals, then that’s the text it will draw from. It’s all entirely mindless and automatic.”

This is an eye-opening insight, at least for me. I knew a lot of this but hadn’t quite thought of it that way before. I’ve always avoided “chatting” the handful of times I’ve used these bots. This will definitely change my approach to prompting. His prompts are so simple and short, just shooting the bot over to the other data space.

“My argument has nothing to do with whether computers can think. My argument is that these computers aren’t thinking. LLMs, which are new and alien and have all kinds of properties that we have yet to discover, do not have consciousness. They are statistical models of word frequencies, and there is no reason to believe that such mathematical objects would have subjective experiences. Maybe soon we will discover or invent some other kind of computer program and maybe that program will have general intelligence, but this one does not. When LLMs are combined with the other two components, they do produce an extremely powerful illusion of consciousness, generating text that looks a lot like the text you’d expect from a conscious being. But only while you’re playing along. If you abandon the script, so does the bot, and the consciousness illusion dissipates completely.”

“I think that seeing through this trickery is crucially important for how we understand and write about this technology. And it is trickery. The technology is designed to trick you, to make you think you’re talking to someone who’s not actually there.”

“Dispense with the pretense of a conversation all together; there’s no one on the other side. Break the illusion yourself.”

“The truth is that it’s not really obvious what the hell to do with this technology. It’s an unreliable information retriever, constantly making up fake facts and fictitious citations, and plagiarizing liberally. It’s bad at math. It can sort of write code as long as you’re willing to inspect the code in detail for errors, but it can’t code well enough to help you with anything beyond an absolute beginner level.”

“[…] they are incredibly expensive. It takes at least 175 billion additions and multiplications just to generate a single word. Each response that the bot generates requires literally trillions of calculations. Whatever we end up finding for it to do, it had better be very good at it. I personally have found it to be relatively good as an interactive thesaurus, but it’s not clear to me that that’s worth all the trouble.”

I gave three AI models a CSS quiz by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

Kevin was frustrated with the answers he got from Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. But he still imparts too much ability to these text-generators. His questions, though formulated as someone might do it, are wrong for these machines because he’s often pre-loading the context with information that the machine will use in its answer, although nearly always incorrectly. CSS has a lot of fiddly bits with numeric specificities, which these are all going to get wrong, or will be right no more often than a coin-toss.

Already after the first question or two, he could have summed up with “the machines don’t know anything about CSS, so the massive amounts of text that they generate will almost always include something that will waste you time.” Instead, he says,

“The only thing I would say here is, at least it’s so bad—this answer—that if somebody were reading this, they would know that it’s wrong.”

Oh, wow. That is absolutely not true for anyone who was actually seeking help rather than Kevin, who’s an expert testing the machine. People generally aren’t asking these machines questions to which they already know the answer. I know that students will just copy/paste this stuff directly back into their own projects. They will not have any idea why it doesn’t work. They won’t be able to see that the massive amount of generated text—which hardly anyone reads, by the way[4]—disagrees with the code, in which case they would be warned that perhaps the code isn’t correct.

He keep saying things like “Gemini is just bad at specificities” or “it doesn’t understand the system it’s built for itself here,” which are just completely nonsensical. The machines don’t see correlations between pieces of text. They simply can’t. It’s like expecting a car to fly. The questions he asks are going to very likely get incorrect answers, or correct answers—by luck: he uses multiple-choice questions—with incorrect explanations. If it gets it right, it’s going to be luck. Why? Because the text-generator is based on probabilities with a bit of “temperature” adjustment to introduce variability that makes it feel like it’s being written by a person. That doesn’t help at all for very specific questions with very specific answers. LLMs are better for stuff where there is no right answer, were subjectivity is important.

Gemini and CoPilot are much more often confidently wrong for this subset of questions than Claude was.

His final scores for 13 questions were: CoPilot: -4, Gemini: -4, Claude: 9. He concluded with,

“Claude is definitely the winner. It still got enough things wrong that I’m always a little bit nervous trusting these tools. They’re going to continue to get better but, just be really careful if you’re using them. […] it always says things with the utmost confidence, so just don’t copy paste code, they’re giving you. Try and understand the code they’re giving you and see if it actually makes sense. Especially, like, they’ll just say stuff isn’t true that is true and vice versa. They’ll make stuff up that isn’t true and say that it’s true and then their source will be some completely random GitHub repo. So be a little bit careful with these tools if you’re using them.”

Kevin’s not forceful enough in his conclusion. He says that he’s “a little bit nervous trusting them”, which I’m pretty sure is not what he means to say. What I think he means to say is, “don’t trust them,” i.e., “[t]ry and understand the code they’re giving you and see if it actually makes sense,” which, if you’re not already an expert, may prove difficult. His final sentence is “be a little bit careful with these tools if you’re using them,” which is too soft. He means to be very careful with the answers. (And also, you don’t have to worry about the tools’ output if you’re not using the tools.)

Programming

Let futures be futures by Saoirse (Without boats, dreams dry up)

“A common architecture for an async Rust server is to spawn a task for each socket. These tasks often internally multiplex inbound and outbound reads and writes over that socket along with messages from other tasks intended for the service on the other end of the socket. To do so, they might select between some futures or merge streams of events together, depending on the exact details of their life cycle. This can have a very high-level appearance, and in many ways it resembles the actor model for asynchronous concurrency, but thanks to intra-task concurrency it will compile into a single state machine per socket, which is a runtime representation very similar to hand-written asynchronous servers in a language like C.”

“The language would also want a way to instantiate the coroutine object and resume it, instead of calling it to completion. Using that operator, you could implement concurrency combinators like select and join. And the language would need some way of spawning coroutines as entirely new, concurrent tasks. All of this without any need for async/await: that’s what stackful coroutines get you.”

“Rust has a prior commitment to be compatible with the existing C runtime. This means Rust code is made up of a stack of subroutines, and the address of items in the stack can be taken, and stored not only in that stack but also in other areas of program memory. Rust chose this approach to get zero-cost FFI to the enormous amounts of existing C and C++ code written using that model, and because the C runtime is the shared minimum of all mainstream platforms. But this runtime model is incompatible with stackful coroutines, so Rust needed to introduce a stackless coroutine mechanism instead. Every major language with async/await is similarly beholden to an existing runtime with a similar inability to represent stackful coroutines, if not C’s then some virtual machine runtime. The only thing about the C runtime is that it is so ubiquitous many programmers don’t even realize it exists & isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon.”

As with so many other things, people don’t recognize something man-made as something that could be changed or improved.

“When I’m feeling pessimistic, I think our industry is mired in a certain stagnation, so that every decade we shall re-write new programs with the same behavior in new languages with the same semantics, having only mild differences in performance characteristics more suited to present hardware considerations.”

“We should aspire not to simplify the system by hiding the differences between futures and threads, but instead to find the right set of APIs and language features that build on the affordances of futures to make more kinds of engineering achievable than before. Right now we only have the foundation, but this is already a huge leap forward from the previous world of hand-rolled state machines and directly managing your event loop. If we let futures be futures and build on that foundation, even more will be possible.”

Rama on Clojure’s terms, and the magic of continuation-passing style by Nathan Marz (Red Planet Labs)

“In Rama code, the continuation is implicit and is invoked by calling :> like a function. A Rama operation does not return a value to its caller. It emits values to its continuation. This is a critical distinction, as part of what makes Rama operations more general than functions is how they can emit multiple times, not emit at all, or emit asynchronously.”

So…like a generator, void, and async. I suppose passing data into a continuation rather than returning to a caller is more like a pipe, but a pipe is conceptually automatically marshaling one function’s output as input to the next function. The mechanics aren’t different but perhaps the way of thinking about a program is.

“identity-rama operation. The :> *str part binds the output of the operation to the variable *str. The :> keyword distinguishes the input from the output and is called the “default output stream” (you’ll see soon how you can have more than one output stream). The variable *str is then passed to println.”

I feel like Nathan’s just trolling us with this syntax.

(?<-
(+ 1 2 :> *a)
(* *a 10 :> *b)
(println *a *b ))

Hilariously, almost deliberately illegible.

(defn add [v1 v2 cont]
(cont (+ v1 v2)))
(defn multiply [v1 v2 cont]
(cont (* v1 v2)))
(add 1 2
( fn [a]
(multiply a 10
(fn [b]
(println a b ))))

“Not even clearly better when using words.”

“<ramaop defines an anonymous Rama operation with the given name, arguments, and body.”

“Rama takes care of efficiently serializing the continuation, including any information in its closure. The Rama compiler analyzes what vars are used after every invoke of an operation, and it uses that information to only include in the closure vars that are referenced in downstream code. This minimizes the amount of information sent across the wire. This compiler analysis isn’t specific to partitioners, as its used for closure construction for all anonymous operations.”

Um, yeah. Duh. How else would you do it? There’s a word for this: closure.

“CPS and the ability to emit asynchronously unifies general purpose programming with distributed programming, by enabling parallel code to be expressed no differently than any other logic.”

He just writes this as if async/await didn’t exist anywhere instead of pretty much everywhere. Yes, there is a difference between asynchronous code and truly concurrent code, but it’s a distinction without a difference in this case. This manner of expressing concurrent code is not a revelation but commonplace—and it’s commonplace in a syntax that’s a good deal easier to decipher than Rama’s, which seems a teensy bit addicting to symbol-based operators rather than legible keywords.

“Rama code produces an “abstract syntax graph” (ASG), whereas Clojure (and most other languages) produce an “abstract syntax tree” (AST). <emitted-a> and <b> are called “anchors” and label part of the ASG. Those anchors are used by <branch to specify where that code should attach.”

This seems kind of like a label, but OK, maybe there’s something else going on.

“So far, I’ve never found a reason to pass if> around dynamically like this. What this demonstrates is how Rama’s richer language primitives provide greater uniformity and less special cases.”

I’m a big fan of orthogonality but I worry about the readability of code like this. Maybe it just takes practice. How well can an IDE support such a loosely structured language? A colleague I spoke to about this admitted that he used the reformat command quite often when working in Lisp-like languages, simply because he so easily lost track of parentheses. It’s elegant, powerful, and has a minimum of special concepts, but is it useable?

“The ramafn optimization is critical because the majority of code is still best written with function semantics. So most of a codebase will compile to stack-efficient invokes. Emitting multiples times, zero times, or asynchronously is powerful but less common. The general term we use to refer to an object which is either a ramafn or ramaop is “fragment”. A ramafn is a fragment that has restrictions on the :> stream, while a ramaop has no restrictions.”

No analysis-based optimization to automatically convert ramaop to ramafn?

“Dataflow turns CPS into a full-fledged programming paradigm that’s elegant and efficient. This paradigm isn’t just for backend programming, like data processing, indexing, and querying. It’s a general purpose paradigm that we’ve used for building a huge amount of Rama itself. Emitting zero times, multiple times, asynchronously, or to multiple output streams are major generalizations of functions that open up huge new avenues to explore in the craft of programming.”

Nobody wants to use any software by Jane Ruffino (Character Works)

“[…] because we want to stop pushing buttons and opening accordions as quickly as possible. Pavel Samsonov talked about this, pointing out how far the user story has strayed from its goal, and the reality that the ideal is that people reach their goal without using software at all. It’s what I think helps me design and create and plan and defend my work with integrity. It helps me remember that I am not entitled to more of a user’s time than this problem is worth. If I make the solution more annoying than the problem, they will choose to live with the problem, and that makes me part of the problem. I don’t need to make them like me or this product, I’m here to get them through this thing.”

“Users are a subset of people and they are, for us, defined by the time and effort they spend with our product, which, if we do our jobs well, is not any more than is absolutely necessary. They get to go back to being people when they’re not using our product. (Even though, in reality, they’re probably moving on to another piece of software they don’t want to use.)”

Processes and rules make code review less intimidating by Stefan Judis

“Code reviews are, by nature, intimidating. Sometimes even brutal. If you’ve been in the game for long enough, you probably experienced the following: you worked hard on a feature, you’re proud of yourself and open the PR to be praised and land your changes, and then… it rains comments, suggestions and nitpicks. And if it’s really bad, you’re forced to take multiple feedback and clean-up rounds. It sucks.”

Why are you guys treating writing code like school assignments?

That’s a real question. Why are you putting your heart and soul into your solution? Is there some way of being psychologically broken of which I am not aware? You know, where you prefer having been the genius in your own story, where you managed to get the perfect solution on the first try? Like, you’re the superhero, brilliant, engineer, billionaire playboy?

And then, you learn that you aren’t. But you know what? You’re on a team that’s willing to look at what you made and really try to make it better. Maybe they do! Maybe they don’t. Both are good! If they do … then it’s better. That’s a win. If they don’t, well, then, you’ve gotten some evidence that supports your theory that it really is good and will work.

Because, up until then, you only had a hypothesis that your solution was good. You had some code, you had some tests (yes you did, otherwise you have no right to be offended about code-review comments). That’s a hypothesis. You know who else does reviews to verify theories and hypotheses? Scientists.

Quit your whining. Quit your bullshit.

If you’re treating code reviews like a gladiator arena, as if you were going on Shark Tank or The Voice, then you’re doing it wrong.

The best software is written by a team. It is collaborative. Maybe one person is writing all of the actual text, but there are other minds that contribute advice and feedback that hones the final product.

You know what that sounds like? A writer and one or more editors or proofreaders.

This is how professionals work. Fix your process.

So the article goes on to do just that. He could have suggested that people do “live reviews” instead of PRs, where most people are too lazy or incapable to write critical comments that are also constructive because that would mean that reviewers would have to learn how to write and how to empathize, Instead, he writes about an insipid system where a shittily aggressive review comments like “this is not worded correctly” is somehow made better by attaching “suggestion:” in front of it.

No. It does not.

Why not? Well, for starters, because it’s not formulated as a suggestion. There is only an implicit suggestion that the reviewer would have worded it correctly. This is passive-aggressive time-wasting behavior. On top of that, everything in a code review is a suggestion unless the power dynamic in your team is so severely skewed that we need to be having a different conversation.

The comment should read something like, “I think that something like “… …” would be a clearer way of writing that.”

Or, maybe, you could establish a rapport with the people reviewing your code so you’re not pants-shittingly terrified that you’re going to lose mana when you do one. Maybe you could—gasp!—even be friends. This would help establish a human connection often summarized as empathy wherein the reviewer would consider for a brief moment how a comment might look to the other side and adjust it accordingly, in a manner that is totally not like how robots would do it.

You, if you’re even capable of that.

If you’ve established that code reviews are collaboration and not a gladiator arena where “two enter and one leaves”, then the reviewer can be more concise without wasting a lot of time writing curlicue sentences. If you don’t have this rapport, then, yes, I’m afraid you’re going to have to be…what’s the word?…polite.

If you can’t be polite, then, at the very least, you should write review comments that don’t need review comments of their own. You’re going to have to follow the rules of error messages. As detailed in Alerts (Apple HIG),

“Avoid using an alert merely to provide information. People don’t appreciate an interruption from an alert that’s informative, but not actionable.”

Any review comment has to be both informative and actionable. The comment in question—“this is not worded correctly”—is neither. It just vaguely points at something and says “you suck.” It’s clearly attached to a specific line but doesn’t indicate what’s wrong with it. Even if it said specifically what’s wrong, it doesn’t suggest how to fix it.

An error message from a piece of unthinking software can’t go quite that far—unless it’s a spellchecker or grammar-checker!—but an actual, empathetic human in the role of a collaborator can! That person could formulate a suggestion for how to rewrite it so that the review for that line might end after only one cycle.

And now we come to another downside of such comments: they’re horribly inefficient. The most efficient way of reviewing code is to do it synchronously or “live”, where the collaborators can discuss and improve the code on the fly maybe—and here me out here—even before you’ve even pushed anything! Imagine!

If you’re stuck using PRs and web UIs to communicate, then writing comments like the one in question just wastes everyone’s time. The submitter either will assume what the commentator meant and try again—NOPE, STILL WRONG—or they will have to write “what do you mean?” or “how would you have written it?” This is useless churn. Just write your reformulation with your comment. Remember, you’re a collaborator. You’re not just trying to get through this review as quickly as possible. It’s part of your job.

SQL:2023 is finished: Here is what’s new by Peter Eisentraut

“A whole new part 16 was added to the SQL standard, titled “Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ)”. (Including this new part, there are now 11 active parts of SQL (ISO/IEC 9075). The part that most people know as the core language is part 2.) This allows data in tables to be queried as if it were a graph database. This is a complex topic that would be too much to get into here, but here is a rough idea how this would look:”

CREATE TABLE person (…);
CREATE TABLE company (…);
CREATE TABLE ownerof (…);
CREATE TABLE transaction (…);
CREATE TABLE account (…);

CREATE PROPERTY GRAPH financial_transactions
    VERTEX TABLES (person, company, account)
    EDGE TABLES (ownerof, transaction);

SELECT owner_name,
       SUM(amount) AS total_transacted
FROM financial_transactions GRAPH_TABLE (
  MATCH (p:person WHERE p.name = 'Alice')
        -[:ownerof]-> (:account)
        -[t:transaction]- (:account)
        <-[:ownerof]- (owner:person|company)
  COLUMNS (owner.name AS owner_name, t.amount AS amount)
) AS ft
GROUP BY owner_name;

“(In this example, all the tables would need foreign keys between them so that the property graph definition can find out how they are connected. There is also syntax to specify the connections in the property graph definition if there are no foreign keys.)”

I listened to a talk by a blogger today who was talking about how developers should write about what they’ve done … BUT he also started talking about engagement and making sure you have at least a few people reading what you write. I mean, it’s reasonable advice, but the point of a blog should for you to get out whatever needs to be written. I’ve never cared who’s reading me. I’m happy if I hear that people obtain value, but it’s not why I do it at all.

A colleague linked me to the following two things:

“One can think of R’s tidy evaluation (Advanced R book (chapter 20)) and data masks as a flavor of Lisp anaphoric macros.

“ Of course there is also a drawback, mainly a steep learning curve of the concept:

“Utilizing Lisp-style macros is like doing memory management in C: The full power comes with big responsibility.”

I feel like the R documentation you linked is dealing with relatively familiar (to me) concepts, like higher-order functions, ASTs, and closures, but it calls them tidy expressions, trees, and quosures instead.

I’m more inclined to believe I’m missing something than to believe that the author wrote a giant book about R without thinking to relate its concepts to similar concepts in other, much-more-common programming languages.

In the evaluation section that you linked, it shows several examples of adjusting the environment passed with the expression to the eval function … but I can’t see how that’s different than function currying, which is found in pretty much all (even quasi)-functional languages?

The author’s approach reminds me a bit of when Bertrand Meyer (inventor of the Eiffel language and professor at ETH) wrote about Agents, also inventing his own nomenclature for what amounts to higher-order functions, closures, and currying (which he describes in “open vs. closed agents”). Without pointing out the differences to other languages and environments, it makes it very difficult to know whether one is missing something … or if there is no difference at all (other than nomenclature).

I feel like the R book could have been a lot shorter if it acknowledged prior art in other languages … but maybe that’s because it’s written for data scientists, who aren’t expected to have any prior programming experience? I admit I’m a bit perplexed by the approach.

I had never heard of anaphoric macros before. I don’t quit see how the tidy evaluation relates to the “anaphora” part because, as I read it, the anaphoric part is the automatic introduction of a variable to represent an expression (like “it”). I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of such compiler magic and prefer an explicit introduction of such variables, wherever possible. However, now I know that, in C#, the “value” reference in properties (as well as “field” in C# 12) is anaphoric. Thanks for that!

Let this be a medium-length warning that I will take you up on your offer to chat further.

I proposed the following formulation. The null-forgiving operator bugs me a bit because I feel like TypeScript would have determined that attribute could no longer be null. C#/Roslyn doesn’t do that.

private static IEnumerable<(PropertyInfo PropertyInfo, TAttribute Attribute)> GetPropertiesAndAttributes<TAttribute>(Type type)
{
    return
        from prop in type.GetProperties()
        let attribute = prop.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(TAttribute), false).FirstOrDefault() as TAttribute
        where attribute != null
        select (prop, attribute!);
}

My collaborator prefers the non-query syntax for Linq, so he rewrote it as follows.

private static IEnumerable<(PropertyInfo PropertyInfo, TAttribute Attribute)> GetPropertiesAndAttributes<TAttribute>(Type type)
{
    return packetType
        .GetProperties()
        .Where(prop => prop.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(TAttribute), false).Length != 0)
        .Select(propInfo => (propInfo, propInfo.GetCustomAttribute<TAttribute>()!));
}

I really don’t like that it calls both GetCustomAttributes() and GetCustomAttribute(), so I looked into how to do emulate let with chained-method syntax. I found Code equivalent to the ‘let’ keyword in chained LINQ extension method calls (StackOverflow) and rewrote the code as follows.

private static IEnumerable<(PropertyInfo PropertyInfo, TAttribute Attribute)> GetPropertiesAndAttributes<TAttribute>(Type type)
{
    return packetType
        .GetProperties()
        .Select(propInfo => (propInfo, attribute: propInfo.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(TAttribute), false).FirstOrDefault() as TAttribute))
        .Where(t => t.attribute != null)
        .Select(t => (t.propInfo, t.attribute!));
}

I still can’t get rid of the second Select() because the type of the first Select() is

(PropertyInfo PropertyInfo, TAttribute? Attribute)

rather than

(PropertyInfo PropertyInfo, TAttribute Attribute).

As in the other formulations, we still need the null-forgiving operator to coerce the type. In the final formulation, it’s much clearer that this is only required for the compiler because the check that attribute is not null is made on the immediately preceding line.

How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks by 3Blue1Brown (YouTube)

This is a fun video that demonstrates an API, runtime, and IDE called Manim that lets you interactively build 3-D animations. It’s like a game-engine editor in which you build your scenes by calling APIs in Python. There’s an interactive Python terminal, a rendering area, and a text editor.

It’s quite nicely done and he’s put it to good use over the years, building hundreds, if not thousands, of videos with it.

The API is quite high-level and robust but it’s so clear how limited the Python syntax is. He’s very quick with it, but he also knows the whole API by heart. He barely ever used code-completion, so I thought there wasn’t any. But then I saw him hover a few APIs to show the expected parameters. I wonder how much time a novice would spend with interpreter errors. Still, once you’ve gotten used to it, it seems to be pretty efficient. Python’s interpreter speed will never be a problem. In particular, the API for integrating formulae via embedded TeX is pretty neat. It even supports identifying manipulable elements from the rendered version for further animation.

This kind of reminds me of the good old days when I was working with the Quake III level editor. The API and tools are very bespoke and very powerful.

His style of mixing functions and code and variable definitions makes sense for the project at hand. There is going to be very little re-use between projects. Anything that needs to be reused would be added to Manim itself. He doesn’t seem to see the need for shared libraries. The code is basically throwaway. It takes more time to define common, well-generalized functions than it would to just quickly rewrite it, ready for specialization within that project.

As when watching Kevin Powell ask an LLM about CSS without any idea about how LLMs work, watching Grant Sanderson discuss workarounds for “bugs” without any decent background in languages, scopes, functions, and closures. It’s similar to my gripe above about the R book: it’s kind of exasperating watching people “reinvent” computer science without even thinking that there might be prior art.

Good for Grant for doing this, though, because I think he realized that there’s a lot of room to grow in programming skills. He’s already noticed that LLMs aren’t going to help him code in Manim—because he’s an expert and the LLM is definitely not; there is no way it will be able to help him.

Try to fix it one level deeper (Hacker News) links to Try to Fix It One Level Deeper by Alexander Kladov (matklad)

“There’s a bug! And it is sort-of obvious how to fix it. But if you don’t laser-focus on that, and try to perceive the surrounding context, it turns out that the bug is valuable, and it is pointing in the direction of a bigger related problem. So, instead of fixing the bug directly, a detour is warranted to close off the avenue for a class of bugs.”

From the comments:

“[Developers] have to know when to go deep and when not to, though, and that’s sometimes a hard balancing act.”

“Knowing when to go down the rabbit hole is probably more about experience/age than anything. I work with a very intelligent junior that is constantly going down rabbit holes. His heart is in the right spot but sometimes you just need to make things work/get things done.”

“When [engineers at NASA] find a bug, they don’t just fix the bug, they fix the engineering process that allowed the bug to occur in the first place.”

“I learned a similar mantra that I keep returning to: “there’s never just one problem.””

• How did this bug make it to production? Where’s the missing unit test? Code review?
• Could the error have been handled automatically? Or more gracefully?

Someone mentioned Always Measure One Level Deeper by John Ousterhout in 2018 (Communications of the ACM), which I’ve added to my queue.

CSS Typography Crash Course by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

In particular, Roel Nieskens takes a long look at variable fonts, which can be manipulated via both standard CSS properties, like font-weight, as well as using font-variation-settings, all of which can be animated. Variable fonts support a much more granular range of values for font-weight than traditional fonts, all without downloading anything other than the initial font file.

You can use the Wakamaifondue site to determine which features a specific font has, as well as to play with the values along these axes. The standard axes are mapped to CSS properties, like font-stretch, font-style: oblique + angle, font-style: italic, and font-optical-sizing. All of this can also be animated, with the font being able to influence the animation as well.

The demonstrations are quite impressive, especially since it’s all manipulated using CSS feature that is widely available across major browsers.

The next section covers colored fonts, which can contain multiple palettes, each with multiple colors. You can use CSS to override the colors but not directly with color. Instead, you define @font-palette-values to choose a different palette or to override individual colors in a palette. All of this can rely on variables, be animated, and so on, with optimized updates when necessary.

Next up, he showed how to set font-variant-numeric to tabular-nums to make the font render numbers so that they line up vertically for tabular display. The font has to support this feature but nearly all of them do. This is a good default for table cells. He also shows font-variant-caps and font-variant-numeric to diagonal-fractions, as well as controlling an OpenType feature called “scientific inferiors”, which will subscript numbers, as in chemical formulae, by setting font-feature-settings to “sinf”.

Finally, he talks about standard units like cap (the “the nominal height of capital letters”, according to CSS Length Units (CSS Tricks)). He shows how to do a “true” vertical-align: middle by setting margin-top to calc(1ex − 1cap), which centers without lending so much weight to the descender or ascender.

“Typography is full of details that nobody notices until they’re broken or they’ve gone away.”

I, for one, welcome the high-powered typography features that will let web pages finally look as good as printed output, like magazines and newspapers, where many of these techniques have been used for decades, if not centuries.

The easy way to understand flexbox alignment by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

This is a good 15-minute tutorial on the difference between justify and align as well as the -items and -content suffixes in flex containers. He also explains how margin: auto can be helpful with placement of items, but says to use align-self first and then use margins if that’s still not quite right.

While investigating Charts.css, I learned that you can throw unrecognized special characters like square brackets or pipes into CSS class references and its just fine. So you can use them to separate longer lists of classes. For more information, see Cube CSS: grouping by Andy Bell (Piccalilli).

So, you can write:

<article class="[ card ] [ section box ] [ bg-base color-primary ]"></article>

or

<article class="card | section box | bg-base color-primary"></article>

and it works just fine, while being more legible. Charts.css uses it to group related classes:

<table class="charts-css [ line ] [ multiple ] [ show-heading ] [ show-labels labels-align-start ] [ hide-data reverse-data data-spacing-5 ] [ show-primary-axis show-data-axes ] ">
  …
</table>

I finally got around to verifying that the defining dependent async methods like this is just purely wasteful.

public async Task<bool> N() 
{
   return await M();
}

A valid example looks like this:

using System.Threading.Tasks;
public class C {
    public Task<bool> M() 
    {
        return Task.FromResult(false);
    }
    
    public async Task<bool> N() 
    {
        return await M();
    }
    
    public async void RunIt()
    {
        var result = await N();
    }
}

This yields something like the following lowered C# code in SharpLab.IO.

public Task<bool> M()
{
    return Task.FromResult(false);
}

[AsyncStateMachine(typeof(<N>d__1))]
[DebuggerStepThrough]
public Task<bool> N()
{
    <N>d__1 stateMachine = new <N>d__1();
    stateMachine.<>t__builder = AsyncTaskMethodBuilder<bool>.Create();
    stateMachine.<>4__this = this;
    stateMachine.<>1__state = -1;
    stateMachine.<>t__builder.Start(ref stateMachine);
    return stateMachine.<>t__builder.Task;
}

[AsyncStateMachine(typeof(<RunIt>d__2))]
[DebuggerStepThrough]
public void RunIt()
{
    <RunIt>d__2 stateMachine = new <RunIt>d__2();
    stateMachine.<>t__builder = AsyncVoidMethodBuilder.Create();
    stateMachine.<>4__this = this;
    stateMachine.<>1__state = -1;
    stateMachine.<>t__builder.Start(ref stateMachine);
}

Note that there are two state machines.

If you write the equivalent code:

using System.Threading.Tasks;
public class C {
    public Task<bool> M() 
    {
        return Task.FromResult(false);
    }
    
    public Task<bool> N() 
    {
        return M();
    }
    
    public async void RunIt()
    {
        var result = await N();
    }
}

…then you get the following lowered C#:

public Task<bool> M()
{
    return Task.FromResult(false);
}

public Task<bool> N()
{
    return M();
}

[AsyncStateMachine(typeof(<RunIt>d__2))]
[DebuggerStepThrough]
public void RunIt()
{
    <RunIt>d__2 stateMachine = new <RunIt>d__2();
    stateMachine.<>t__builder = AsyncVoidMethodBuilder.Create();
    stateMachine.<>4__this = this;
    stateMachine.<>1__state = -1;
    stateMachine.<>t__builder.Start(ref stateMachine);
}

Note that now there is only one state machine.

Sports

Pete Rose, all-time hitter banned by baseball for gambling, dies at 83. by Alan Gilman (WSWS)

“Because of all of these developments and changes that have impacted baseball since Rose was banned, public support for his admission to the Hall of Fame had significantly increased and many fans as well as players had campaigned in recent years for his admittance.

“The debate as to whether Rose should be in the Hall of Fame will probably increase now that he is dead and will continue to revolve around what impact, if any, did his gambling have on his extraordinary performance on the field.

“Perhaps longtime broadcaster Bob Costas best summed up the contradictory views of Rose when he observed, “somebody got those 4,256 base hits and those three batting championships. Put him in the Hall of Fame, put it at the bottom of his plaque ‘banned from baseball 1989, for life’. It’s part of the record, but he should be in as a player.””

Fun

Heil Honey I'm Home Full Uncut Episode by Kyle Endl (YouTube)

This Heil Honey I’m Home show is fantastic. It’s straight-up a normal American sitcom but about Hitler. It reveals how cookie-cutter these shows are. It doesn’t matter what the content actually is, it all fits into the form. There are so many more episodes (IMDb).

The gross excesses of a decadent culture will appear in increasingly obscene forms

“The gross excesses of a decadent culture will appear in increasingly obscene forms, until the moral rot at the heart of its people is cured.”

I wonder if the author was aware of the pun in the word “cured.”

Video Games

AAA gaming on Asahi Linux by Alyssa Rosenzweig

“Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility. Plus a bonus: conformant OpenCL 3.0.

“Asahi Linux now ships the only conformant OpenGL®, OpenCL™, and Vulkan® drivers for this hardware.”

“Games are typically x86 Windows binaries rendering with DirectX, while our target is Arm Linux with Vulkan. We need to handle each difference:”

• FEX emulates x86 on Arm.
• Wine translates Windows to Linux.
• DXVK and vkd3d-proton translate DirectX to Vulkan.

“While Linux can’t mix page sizes between processes, it can virtualize another Arm Linux kernel with a different page size. So we run games inside a tiny virtual machine using muvm, passing through devices like the GPU and game controllers. The hardware is happy because the system is 16K, the game is happy because the virtual machine is 4K”