Links and Notes for November 22nd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Forget Us Not by Mr. Fish (The Chris Hedges Report)

Expert agencies and elected legislatures by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“The reason we have agencies like the FDA (and enabling legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act) is that markets failed to keep people from being murdered by profit-seeking snake-oil salesmen and radium suppository peddlers.”

“If you dismiss any expert employed by a firm that wants to bring a new product to market, you will lose out on the expertise of people who are so legitimately excited about the potential improvements of an idea that they quit their jobs and go to work for whomever has the best chance of realizing a product based on it. Sure, that doctor who works for a company with a new cancer cure might just be shilling for a big bonus – but maybe they joined the company because they have an informed, truthful belief that the new drug might really cure cancer.”

“[…] the scientific method itself speaks against the idea of there being one, permanent answer to any big question. The method is designed as a process of continual refinement, where new evidence is continuously brought forward and evaluated, and where cherished ideas that are invalidated by new evidence are discarded and replaced with new ideas.”

“So how are we to survive and thrive in a world of questions we ourselves can’t answer, that experts disagree about, and whose answers are only ever provisional?”

“We got there by delegating these decisions to expert agencies. Congress formulates a political policy (“make the water safe”) and the expert agency turns that policy into a technical program of regulation and enforcement, and your children live to drink another glass of water tomorrow.”

“[…] there were many drugs that didn’t always belong in either category: drugs whose danger score changed dramatically based on whether you were more concerned about individual harms, familial harms, or societal harms. This prioritization has no empirical basis: it’s a purely political question.

“So Nutt and his panel said to Parliament, “Tell us which of these priorities matter the most to you, and we will tell you where these changeable drugs belong in your schedule of restricted substances.” In other words, politicians make political determinations, and then experts turn those choices into empirically supported policies. This is how policy by “unelected bureaucrats” can still be “democratic.””

Putins Angebot an den Westen: kollektive Sicherheit oder Vernichtung by Gert-Ewen Ungar (NachDenkSeiten)

“Putin macht deutlich, der Einsatz war eine weitere Warnung an den Westen, den Konflikt in der Ukraine nicht weiter zu eskalieren. Vermutlich war es die letzte Warnung. Da der Einsatz von Präzisionswaffen die militärische Kooperation mit den Herkunftsländern zwingend erfordert, wird Russland die Länder, aus denen die Waffen stammen, als Kriegspartei betrachten und sie auf ihrem Gebiet angreifen, erläutert Putin erneut. Das wurde schon mehrfach formuliert.”

“Bereits am Mittwoch sagte Konteradmiral Thomas Buchanan, die USA seien grundsätzlich bereit, bei Bedarf Atomwaffen einzusetzen, würden dies aber nur zu Bedingungen tun, die für das Land und seine Interessen “akzeptabel” wären. Darüber, ob ein auf Europa beschränkter Atomkrieg für die USA unter den Begriff “akzeptabel” fällt, müsste in der EU und in Deutschland dringend nachgedacht werden.”

“Man bleibt dem Narrativ und der eigenen Desinformation verbunden. Russland ist der alleinige Aggressor, die Ukraine reines Opfer, die Länder des Westens sind moralisch zur Unterstützung verpflichtet. Wer sich die Chronologie der Abläufe ins Gedächtnis ruft, weiß, dass das kompletter Unsinn ist.”

“Im Westen zielt man auf eine strategische Niederlage Russlands. EU-Kommissionspräsidentin Ursula von der Leyen hat den Sieg über Russland als Ziel ausgegeben. In Deutschland unterstützt man den Friedensplan Selenskijs, der faktisch die bedingungslose Kapitulation Russlands für die Aufnahme von Verhandlungen voraussetzt. Diplomatie lehnt man ab.”

“Russlands Kernforderung für Frieden ist die Rückkehr zum Prinzip kollektiver Sicherheit. Der Westen lehnt das ab. Putin hat am Donnerstag klar formuliert, dass das Beharren auf Hegemonie und Dominanz in die Vernichtung führen wird.”

A Second Trump Term is the Beginning of the End and That’s Not All Bad by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“What we definitely shouldn’t do is allow our communities to be preyed upon any longer by failed agents of a failing state like the Democratic Party. These are the Weimar nitwits that idiot-proofed a death machine for a fumbling manchild like Trump to commandeer and now they actually have the nerve to try to guilt trip us into investing even more of our time and energy into another billion-dollar swindle like Kamala Inc.”

The Cuba Embargo Is a Cold War Grudge That Won’t Die by Vijay Prashad (Z Network)

“Without international solidarity, Cuba will have a hard time recovering from its electricity crisis. The United States will not allow shipments of machines that will help them rebuild electricity plants damaged by hurricanes and fires. Without Mexico, Barbados, Russia, and Venezuela helping, Cuba will be in a difficult situation. To those who say the Cuban government is at fault, I say, why not end the embargo and let the government fail by itself? It’s not the government that’s failing, but the embargo that’s strangling the country. The US knows the embargo is working. That’s why they have it in place.”

“To understand the Roosevelt Corollary, you have to go back to the Venezuelan crisis of 1902 and 1903. At the time, the president of Venezuela was, interestingly, a man named Castro — Cipriano Castro — who told European creditors that the Venezuelan government shouldn’t have to pay back debts from previous wars. Essentially, he argued that these were “odious debts” — to use a term anachronistically — and that the creditors had lent to all kinds of unscrupulous entities, so why should the Venezuelan people bear the costs? In response, Britain, Italy, and Germany blockaded Venezuela with their navies. Castro thought the United States would protect Venezuela by telling the Europeans to buzz off. But instead, Roosevelt issued his Corollary […]”

“[…] rather than protecting Venezuela from its European creditors, the United States intervened to protect the rights of finance capital. That’s why so many coups take place, because the US feels that it has the right to intervene in a country — Chile, for instance, in 1973 — to protect capitalism against socialist development.”

“While I was in Namibia, people in the Southwest Africa People’s Organization told me Cubans are the only people who intervene without wanting anything for their intervention. They intervene on principle, unlike the US, which intervened in South Africa for geopolitical reasons and — bringing back the Roosevelt Corollary — to protect capital interests.”

“Take Guatemala under Jacobo Árbenz — he wasn’t a socialist; he was simply a liberal who wanted a dignified life for Guatemalans. In order for the poorest Guatemalans to live with dignity, he said they have to take some land from multinational corporations — not all, just land they don’t use — and give it to smallholders and farmers. The United Fruit Company, which owned vast amounts of land, didn’t even want to give fallow land to landless farmers. For them, it set a bad precedent, so they pushed for a coup, with officials like John and Allen Dulles, who had shares in United Fruit, backing it. Che Guevara witnessed this and realized that any attempt at national sovereignty would be met with imperialist backlash.”

“All Cuba is saying is: we want control over our own electrical systems and fair terms for our sugarcane, and we want to build a dignified society. But this vision clashes with multinational corporations and the idea of property.”

The Trump Effect by Boris Kagarlitsky (Z Network)

“The paradox is that Trumpist economic policy is likely to destabilise global and US capitalism. Theoretically, this (along with the demoralisation of the left and classic liberals) potentially creates space for new class-based left forces. But potential and realisation are two different things. And let us not forget the prophecy of the Strugatsky brothers: “After the grey ones come the black ones.” If the political vacuum representing the working majority is not filled by an adequate leftist force, the consequences will be tragic.”

“Kagarlitsky analyses Russia’s limited political options, given the irreconcilable positions of the US and China, in his previous interview on LINKS Boris Kagarlitsky on the US elections, Trump, peace talks and prospects for world war. There he argues that any rapprochement with the US would require one very important condition: that Russia become a key US ally in the fight against China. But for the Russian economy, which has grown increasingly dependent on China, a pivot to the West would be catastrophic, economically and geopolitically.”

It’s unimaginable that the West would reconcile with Russia. It’s unimaginable that Russia would believe them even if they said they would.

“The quote is from the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God ( Трудно быть богом ): «Там, где торжествует серость, к власти всегда приходят черные», which translates to: “Where mediocrity triumphs, the blacks always come to power.” In the novel, “greyness” symbolises mediocrity and complacency, while “the blacks” refers to a fictional clerical reactionary order that established a brutal dictatorship characterised by mass murders and pillaging.”

Donald Trump’s Middle Finger by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Let’s leave all those liberal authoritarians, still smarting from their failure to sell Americans a bottle of snake oil labeled “Joy and Good Vibes,” to their predictable freakout as Team Trump runs onto the field. It is fun to watch, but you don’t want to partake of it. Remember, empire was not on the ballot Nov. 5: There was no voting against it and there never will be so long as America runs one. Trump and his people are simply going to run the imperium differently—more crudely, more in-your-face, in some cases with more immediate brutality—but an imperium it will remain, just as it has long been.”

“An inside-the-tent Republican operative, then. Not too much going on upstairs so far as one can make out, but this hardly distinguishes Susie Wiles. She knows how to get things done. She co-chaired Trump’s just-victorious campaign. Nothing remarkable here.”

“I do not blame Trump for his pugilism as he arrives back in Washington. The Deep State is a grotesque tumor on our body politic and the sooner this goes into radical surgery the better. But my God, mon Dieu , mein Gott , we now have a Fox News presenter nominated to run the Pentagon, a wayward congressman at the Justice Department and a mad-dog warmonger—a through-and-through neocon, indeed—at State. America and its people, not to mention the world beyond their shores, are not equipped at this point to withstand either prolonged chaos or a prolonged farce.”

“[…] Gideon Levy, the admirably principled columnist at Ha`aretz, the Jerusalem daily, published a column Thursday, Nov. 14, under the headline, “Trump’s ‘pro–Israel’ Appointees Are the Worst of Our Enemies.” Here is the gist of Levy’s reasoning:”

“If the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser and the U.S. ambassador to Israel stick to their words, the coming years spell disaster for Israel. The next period will determine its fate as a perennial apartheid state thanks to its ostensible friends, who are no more than blood merchants, dealers who will deepen Israel’s addiction to occupation, bloodshed and power, irrevocably.

“They should not be labeled “friends of Israel,” they are the obverse. They are the worst of its enemies. The new people in charge of the U.S.’s foreign policy are friends of apartheid, occupation, the settlements and war. Trump is the most moderate and restrained of this lot. He may restrain them somewhat.”

The Internet Is Killing Science Too by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“In one field after another, it seems, modeling and simulation have become the new gold standard. You can spend a career as a specialist of the Bering Strait migrations that led to the populating of the Americas without ever having to inspect a stone tool or carved bone, but instead running thousands of simulations that individually tell you how the crossing may have happened, and that together, in the sum of their outcomes, are believed to tell you how it probably happened.”

“Already by the early 20th century, then, the actual practice of scientists —again, like it or not—, had taken a form that by certain measures looked an awful lot like the work of the haruspex — exactly the kind of shady pre-modern figure from whose authority science was supposed to be delivering us.”

“[…] we can refute, without effort and simply in passing, the fantasy among many Silicon Valley types and their academic-philosopher courtiers, which imagines that as computers get better and better at modeling human brains, at some point they’re going to “bust out” and start having inner qualitative experiences, self-consciousness, fear of death, etc. But that is obviously no more likely to happen than for water to start dripping out of your laptop when you run a simulation of the hydrodynamic flow of a river.”

“The world, now, with its stones and bones, falls away. Even or perhaps especially particle physicists come to appear ever more at ease in acknowledging that they are probably not really “getting to the bottom of things”, that is, they are not expecting to deliver up to us, after just one more round of research funding, the final list of elementary particles that serve to compose the particles we had previously thought were elementary. What they are after rather, a skeptic might worry, is the funding itself.”

“It’s always been hard for our Editorial Board at least to hear “Trust the Science” as demanding anything other than: “Trust us”. If asked why one should do so, the only truly plausible answer is the one that none who mouth this phrase could ever actually give: “Trust the science because we are the ones in power, or because it is through our claims to a knowledge-monopoly that we hope to retain power, or better to secure it.” Behind the new slogan, we mean, one discerns the faded ink of Bacon’s old one in its most aggressively Foucauldian interpretation.”

“[…] if our intellectual culture is going to continue valuing the autonomous life of the mind, which includes both the free play of the imagination and the liberty to acknowledge honestly when someone else’s claims just don’t seem to add up — if this is going to happen, we say, there simply can be no full stops.”

The Choices That Australia Makes by Vijay Prashad (Z Network)

“[…] the British crown does claim title to the entirety of the Australian landmass. King Charles III is head of the 56-country Commonwealth and the total land area of the Commonwealth takes up 21% of the world’s total land. It is quite remarkable to realize that King Charles III is nominally in charge of merely 22% less than Queen Victoria (1819-1901).”

“In 2022, Australia’s mining companies—which are also some of the largest in the world—extracted at least 27 minerals from the subsoil, including lithium (Australia is the world’s largest producer of lithium, annually providing 52% of the global market’s lithium).”

“In 2023, the governments of Australia and the United Kingdom signed an agreement to preserve “critical minerals” for their own development and security. Such an agreement is part of the New Cold War against China, to ensure that it does not directly own the “critical minerals.” Between 2022 and 2023, Chinese investment in mining decreased from AU 1,809 million to AU 34 million. Meanwhile, Australian investment in building military infrastructure for the United States has increased dramatically […]”

Liberals Are Giving Up on America by Liza Featherstone (Z Network)

“If you don’t think that some people can be persuaded to change their vote in the future, you have no business opining about politics. Because that’s what politics is. Elections aren’t opportunities to count how many good and bad people exist. They aren’t excuses to cut off some of your family members or high-school classmates. They are serious political contests for power, won by persuasion and turnout.”

Lee Lakeman and The Whoredom of the Left by Chris Hedges (Substack)

““Everything you and I have spent our life fighting for is worse,” she said to me ruefully over the phone.

“Yes. Worse. But her clear, steely-eyed view of the world, her understanding of power and how it works, never dampened her commitment or passion. To fight battles in the face of almost certain defeat, to demand justice for the oppressed no matter the cost, and to know that despite all your efforts, the forces of oppression are growing stronger and crueler, is the essence of nobility.”

It’s better to know than not to know. Sobering but scientific.

“This fight against prostitution – Lee seeks to decriminalize those who are prostituted and bring criminal charges against the clients, pimps and traffickers – along with her insistence that we should not abolish the police but strengthen its mandate to go after those who abuse women and girls, makes her an anathema to the left. But she has as little time for a feckless left as it does for her. The left, with its woke politics, lack of class consciousness and naiveté about “sex work,” she argues, is bankrupt.”

“Globalization and neoliberalism have accelerated a process in which women are being sold wholesale, as if it is OK to prostitute Asian women in brothels because they are sending money home to poor families. This is the neoliberal model proposed to us. It is an industry. It is considered OK…just a job like any other job. This model says people are allowed to own factories where prostitution is done. They can own distribution systems for prostitution. They can use public relations to promote it. They can make profits. Men who pay for prostitution support this machinery. The state that permits prostitution supports this machinery. The only way to fight capitalism, racism and protect women is to stop men from buying prostitutes. And once that happens, we can mobilize against the industry and the state to benefit the whole anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle. But men will have to accept feminist leadership. They will have to listen to us. And they will have to give up the self-indulgence of prostitution.””

“The problem with the left is it is afraid of words like ‘morality.’ The left does not know how to distinguish between right and wrong. It does not understand what constitutes unethical behavior.””

“She warns that backing movements such as Defund the Police are counterproductive. The problem is not policing, the problem is the misuse of the police and the courts to protect the powerful, especially powerful men.”

““It is not popular to say we have to press the state to carry out particular policies. But all resistance has to be precise. It has to reshape society step by step. We can’t abandon people. This is hard for the left to get. It is not, for us, a rhetorical position. It comes from our answering the rape crisis line every day.”

““Indigenous women get beat up and killed because of prostitution more than anyone else,” Lee told me. “They have less access to police and less access to support. This is where the rubber hits the road. If you’re not willing to arrest men for endangering the prostituted indigenous women in the Downtown Eastside, how the hell do you call yourself a leftist or a revolutionary? How do you call yourself a decent human being? And if the people around you don’t call you out, who are you to say you’re leading us to a better future or a better life?””

This is from an article that Hedges cites that was written about an appearance he made at a college.

“Eloquently and with the rolling cadence of a seasoned preacher, Hedges described how the extraction industry gives predatory power to men and launched into a graphic account of sexual exploitation of women and girls, (particularly those of color), under global capitalism. He gave a callout to men and the left to ‘stand with all who are turned into objects, especially girls and women’.””

““What is done to girls and women through prostitution is a version of what is done to all of those who do not sign on to the demented project of global capitalism,” I told the crowd. “And if we have any chance of fighting back, we will have to stand up for all the oppressed, all of those who have become prey. To fail to do this will be to commit moral and finally political suicide. To turn our backs on some of the oppressed is to fracture our power. It is to obliterate our moral authority. It is to fail to see that the entire system of predatory exploitation seeks to swallow and devour us all. To be a radical is to stand with all who are turned into objects, especially girls and women whom the global community, and much of the left, has abandoned.””

Gitmo Continues To Haunt by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“The risk to jurisprudence is the nearly impossible task of defending torture. Lawyers are prohibited from using evidence obtained under torture to prove a case, and judges are prohibited from permitting such evidence to be considered by juries. This is a basic principle of law that President Bush forgot about, ignored or never knew when he authorized torture back in 2001. Mohammed was tortured for three years at black sites in foreign countries and at Gitmo.

“Judge McCall has not yet ruled on exactly what evidence will come before the jury – should there ever be a trial – as he is the fourth judge in the case. In order to make his rulings, Judge McCall will need to review more than 40,000 pages of documents and transcripts produced to his predecessors. President Bush also forgot, ignored or never knew that military judges – unlike federal district court judges – rotate off their assignments every four or five years.”

Wanted! by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“For the fourth time, the Biden administration has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. This resolution called for “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” and the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.” Fourteen members of the UNSC voted in favor. Only the US voted against it.

“China’s envoy, Fu Cong, asked, “Do Palestinian lives mean nothing? How many more people have to die before they (the US) wake up from their pretend slumber?… The repeated vetoes by the US have reduced the authority of the Security Council and international law to an all-time low.”

“+ Calling the latest US veto “unconscionable,” Russia’s Ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said, “For months, the US has obstructed and obfuscated, standing in the way of the Council action to address the catastrophic situation in Gaza and playing on one side of the conflict to advance its own political objectives at the expense of Palestinian lives. We do not need to be lectured by the United States on hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is what they exhibit every day in different conflicts.”

“+ Nicolas de Riviere, France’s envoy to the UN, called the US veto “regrettable,’ and lamented that “international humanitarian law is being trampled underfoot.””

“A new report from the World Food Program estimates that around 1.26 million people in Lebanon – 23 percent of the country’s population – now face acute food insecurity. The situation is expected to worsen this winter as Israel’s military operations continue to disrupt supply chains and restrict humanitarian access.

“+ Access to food remains limited for many Lebanese families. Since March 2021, the minimum cost for a family of five to survive has soared by 190 percent.

“+ The crisis is also impacting the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees still in Lebanon, more than half of whom are experiencing acute food insecurity and are entirely dependent on humanitarian assistance.”

“Sen. John Kennedy, the crackpot from Louisiana, made some typically depraved remarks about Palestinians on the floor of the US Senate during the debate over Sanders’s resolutions to block arms sales to Israel: “They’re just bad people. And they hurt other people and they take other people’s stuff…They want to kill us and drink our blood out of a boot. It’s just a fact.””

This is a U.S. senator. Sounds like the Protocol of the Elders of Zion but for Muslims.

A Nation in Denial: Why Israel’s Defeat Is Imminent by Ramzy Baroud (Antiwar.com)

“While over 55,000 Israeli soldiers have tried, but failed, over the course of several weeks to finally subdue northern Gaza, Israeli settler leaders are busy making plans to auction real estate, envisaging new settlements and beach resorts inside the destroyed Strip.

“The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on October 21 that Israel wants to build several settlement blocks inside Gaza. But how is Israel to protect these areas over the course of months and years when they could not protect southern Israel itself just one year ago?”

“Since this crowd is motivated by extremist religious ideologies, they are unable to abide by any form of rational thinking, even that emanating from well-regarded Zionist figures inside Israel itself.

““This war lacks a clear objective, and it’s evident that we’re unequivocally losing it,” Former Mossad deputy chief Ram Ben-Barak said during an interview with the Israeli public radio on May 18.

“None of this matters to Netanyahu and his rightwing ministers, of course. They continue to reference and recycle old religious dogmas, while fervently praying for miracles. In doing so, they insist on reconstructing a new ‘Fantasy Israel’, which, of course, is set to collapse, as fantasies often do.”

I mostly agree with this analysis but fear that the Palestinian “victory” may end up being only a moral one, much as that of the Armenians, the native Americans, the Australian Aboriginals, Hawaiians, or any other indigenous peoples who had the bad luck to be sitting on land that imperialists want.

Biden Going Out With a Bang by Michael Moore (Scheer Post)

“How about starting with a no brainer? The EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT for women.

“You have the power to order the E.R.A. be officially published in the United States Constitution. You’ve had nearly 4 years to do this. It was ratified by the required number of states and it should be published as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. Women, who make up 51% of the American population — THE MAJORITY — should finally be recognized as equal citizens and equal human beings, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, just as they are in almost every single other Western Democracy.”

‘Genocide’ vs. ‘Bigger Genocide’ in Gaza: Time to Decolonize Our Minds by Ramzy Baroud

“[…] the vibe radiating from many in the Middle East is that the doomsday scenario is real, and that the big war is upon us. They ignore that, for many nations around the world, from Gaza, to Lebanon, to Ukraine, to Sudan and elsewhere, wars have already arrived, many of which are bankrolled by western funds and political blank checks. To warn of war while tens of millions are already suffering the outcomes of these western-funded wars reflects the degree of desensitization and opportunism of the followers of western order.”

“[…] the war in Gaza is a war that also involves the Palestinians, the Lebanese and their Arab and international allies. The people of occupied Palestine and Lebanon have agency, choices and strategies that are not wholly dependent on the ideological identity or political inclinations of a lone American man dwelling in the White House.”

Journalism & Media

Five Days on a Media Junket in Israel: Lies, Half-Truths, and Conspiracy Nonsense by Alexander Willis (Drop Site News)

“During the five-day trip, we were told that nearly every Palestinian in Gaza shared culpability for the October 7 attack by Hamas. Several of the experts and officials AMEPA introduced us to said that rape and brutal killings are inherent to the Islamic faith and that many United Nations aid workers were terrorists. Some even suggested that the countless videos of Palestinians injured or killed by Israeli bombardment were, in fact, often staged film productions.”

“The suggestion that lying is inherent to the Islamic faith is a common, easily debunked, racist trope derived from the doctrine of Taqiyya, a practice associated with Shia Islam whereby Muslims may conceal their faith to protect themselves from persecution or harm.”

What it takes to be “financially successful” by generation by Ben Berkowitz (Axios)

This is the kind of trash that those supposedly college-educated elites are forever forwarding to each other, smugly chortling to themselves about how stupid MAGA nation is. The chart claims that the data is from some place called Empower. It purports to show the average yearly salary someone thinks they need in order to feel financially successful, split into the meaningless cohorts of Boomers (100K), Gen X (212K), Millennials (181K), and Gen Z (588K). It helpfully then claims that,

“The average American thinks a salary of just over $270,000 a year qualifies them as “financially successful,” but there are huge disparities between generations.”

The original study Secret to Success (Empower) does not average these numbers because it doesn’t publish the sizes of the cohorts, which is required in order for the average to mean anything.

I wholly expect people to start citing this $270K figure everywhere, even though it was just made up by averaging four numbers, irrelevant of cohort sizes by an author who need to publish one of his required dozen “stories” for his job.

Marketing by Bill Hicks (YouTube)

Russia vs. U.S. terms of art

“Oligarch => Entrepreneur
Authoritarian => Law & Order
Secret Police => Undercover Cops
Crush Dissent => Riot Control
Gulags => Prison Labor
Invasion => Intervention
War Crimes => Collateral Damage
Weapons => Lethal Aid”

From the comments:

“Propaganda => Public Relations
Bribery => Lobbying
Death Squads => Peace Keepers”

Labor

Sci-Fi Short Film 'Benefits' by DUST / Edward Lomas (YouTube)

Lean Into the Punch by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“Unions are weak because they represent only ten percent of American workers. To gain power, we need to grow. That means that unions need to resist their impulses now to say, “Organizing is about to get harder so we shouldn’t waste our resources on it,” cut their organizing budgets, and spend their money trying to build a moat to protect their existing members. No. That is the first step to death. We all need to organize our ass off. Spend every last cent trying to bring new people in to the labor movement. In hostile times, workers need the protection of unions more than ever. It’s our responsibility to give it to them. We all get stronger when we grow, and we are all an easier target when we are small.”

“Strikes carry their own power apart from any laws—the inherent power that goes with the fact that when workers stop working, nothing gets done. This is the core power of the labor movement. Time to lean into this. When you are in a fight and the referee leaves, you can either stand there exclaiming “My word! I say! This is highly improper!” as your opponent gouges your eyes out, or you can start fighting dirtier.”

“[…] people will be scared and unions need to be there to say: We know what to do. We can help you organize. We can help you unite. We can help you create power that you didn’t know you had. We can help you strike. You’re not going to spend the next four years cowering in the corner. You’re going to spend the next four years fighting. And there’s a mighty labor movement to help you.”

Die Linke Has to Be a Party for the Working Class: an interview with Ines Schwerdtner by David Broder (Jacobin)

“Having moved toward an early election, they said that we need exemptions from the debt brake [a constitutional limit on the Germany government’s budget deficit] in order to spend more on the military. The Greens are discussing an extra €500 billion for defense — an extraordinary sum. Not for infrastructure, not for schools and buildings and bridges, but only for military spending.”

“The NATO states in Europe, without the United States, spend roughly twice as much on their military as Russia, even accounting for purchasing power. So, at least if you think that the Russian government is composed of rational actors, the story that Vladimir Putin’s about to attack isn’t credible. We have to take people’s anxieties seriously, but not fall into the liberal discourse that says we need more military spending all the time.”

“One thing that we insist on is that state aid should be provided only in exchange for equity in the company. When you have public investments, you also need public control. That doesn’t mean socializing Volkswagen in one fell swoop. But the state and the workers need to have more control over decisions.”

Economy & Finance

Ex Cathedra by Barry Goldman (3 Quarks Daily)

““Who is rich?” the Talmud asks. “He who is satisfied with what he has.””

“like to sit in my reclining chair with my feet on the footrest and Gracie, one of our Maine Coons, on the arm rest. We are in precisely this configuration as I write. I don’t see how my condition would improve if I had a 25-room house. Or a private island in the Caribbean.”

“There is a wonderful story about Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great. It seems Diogenes was relaxing in the sunshine one afternoon when Alexander walked over. He said, “I’m Emperor Alexander the Great, ruler of the known world. I control limitless wealth of every description. They tell me you’re Diogenes, and you’re very wise. What can I do for you? Name it and it’s yours.” Diogenes said, “Could you move over, you’re blocking my light.””

“I don’t want Jeff Bezos’ yacht or Stephen Schwartzman’s mansion. I don’t see the point. I can only sit in one chair at a time, and I’m already sitting in one.

“I am not saying this to brag about my virtue. My attitude isn’t virtuous. Bezos’ and Schwartzman’s attitude is pathological.”

“According to Oxfam, “Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer.” This trend is not going to change by itself.”

“In the United States, three people own more wealth than the bottom half of society, while over 60% of workers live paycheck to paycheck. Despite massive increases in worker productivity and an explosion in technology, real weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were 50 years ago.”

RFK Jr. Is a Whacked-Out Crank, but He Is Right About the Pharmaceutical Industry by Dean Baker (Z Network)

“Government-granted patent monopolies, and other forms of protection, allow the industry to sell their drugs at prices that are often twenty or thirty times the cost of producing and distributing the drug. It’s rare that a drug would sell for more than $20 or $30 per prescription without these monopolies. With patent protection, drugs can sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per prescription. With such enormous profits to be made, the industry has an enormous incentive to sell as many prescriptions as possible, even if it means misleading doctors and the public about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs. This problem is hardly a secret.”

“The patent monopoly system is clearly at the center of the corruption problems with the FDA and the industry more generally. When there is so much money on the table, people will cheat, just as they are willing to break the law to sell fentanyl and other illegal drugs.”

“We could eliminate this problem by choosing a different funding mechanism. We could pay for the research upfront, as we already do to a substantial extent with research funded though the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies.”

Democrats’ Antitrust Push Has Been Mostly Rhetorical by Matt Bruenig (Jacobin)

“In the first three years of the Biden administration, there were 149 merger investigations that resulted in a second request initially blocking the merger. In the three years prior to that, under Donald Trump, the same number was 154. Over this period, there was also a huge spike in transactions that came before these agencies. So the percentage of transactions being blocked actually declined.”

Capitalism is like Jenga (Reddit)

Jenga, not Monopoly, describes capitalism best

“the best board game thst represents capitalism isn’t Monopoly, it’s actually Jenga. each party takes turns to make the current situation more precarious until a total collapse where only the last person to fuck up takes any blame while everyone else is declared the winner”

From a comment by Suspicious-Panic-187:

“Perfect analogy. They only take blocks from the bottom (lower class) and stack them on the top to win. No players are allowed to take from the top half, only the middle (class) and the bottom.

“And once the bottom becomes too unstable, it topples the entire game/society until it has to be completely rebuilt.

“Genius.”

How is this not the standard view

“Why in the age of supercomputers and smart robotics do we need to work 60 hours a week just so we don’t starve and freeze to death? Surely we’ve reached the point where any scarcity left is intentionally created by those hoarding all the wealth. How is this not the standard view?”

Science & Nature

The meaning within the Mandelbrot set by 3Blue1Brown (YouTube)

An excellent 104s overview of this concept.

Roger Penrose's Mind-Bending Theory of Reality by Variable Minds / Andrea Morris (YouTube)

“Andrea Morris: With the assumption that time moves only in one direction, any data showing a retroactive effect would have been tossed out, I think.

“Roger Penrose: Yes, yes, I think that’s true. Well, I might have chucked it out myself. I don’t know, you see?”

Art & Literature

“Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist”: Philip K. Dick and Palestine by Jonathan Lethem (The Paris Review)

“It took me a while to grasp how Dick’s novels, those of the early sixties especially, function as a superb lens for critiquing the collective psychological binds of the postwar embrace of consumer capitalism. Yet to say that he seems to devise his critiques semiconsciously, by intuition, is an understatement.”

“[…] science fiction opened up his particular capacity for fusing ordinary experience—the emotional and ontological crises of his human characters—to the implications of the hegemonic power of the U.S., which coalesced in the period in which Dick wrote, and which defines our present century. Reality’s surface shimmers open beneath Dick’s gaze. It’s this that led Fredric Jameson to compare him to Shakespeare. This wouldn’t have happened had he stuck to the earnest social realism of his unpublished novels.”

“[…] to begin to experience Dick as not only a satirist of consumer culture and technocratic optimism—like some kind of more psychedelic version of Mad magazine—but also as a social and political novelist, and an articulate (if sometimes gnomic) diagnostician of the morbid condition of U.S. empire.”

“Later I turned directly to Jameson, who makes superb use of science fiction generally and Philip K. Dick specifically. The stakes he sets out are the largest stakes possible: “If the historical novel ‘corresponded’ to the emergence of historicity,” he writes in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “… science fiction equally corresponds to the waning or the blockage of that historicity, and, particularly in our own time (in the postmodern era), to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression.” I take this to suggest that Dick’s novels, which so often concern themselves with multiple or alternate future realities, are also arguments about nostalgia and trauma.”

“[…] the worlds Dick constructs are always on the point of collapsing, precisely because they are worlds whose appearances are determined by a clash of multiple realities—or multiple arguments about the past—vying for control.”

“[…] the visionary nightmares induced in Jack Bohlen by this anomalous child begin to drive him crazy—with insight. What he sees is that the U.S. colonial project on Mars, a kind of interplanetary real estate development scheme with the ominously revealing name AM-WEB (Kim Stanley Robinson translates this as “AM” for American, “WEB” for the snares of capitalism) contains its own death drive. With its prerequisite of denying the full humanity of the Bleekmen, the settlement of Mars is, ultimately, an antihuman project, full stop. Even poor Bohlen, a repairman, a tinkerer, is maintaining the status quo of the settler culture. Even a guy who just wants to mind his own business is inherently complicit.”

“The Israeli military hero and politician Moshe Dayan: “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Ma’alul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jebata; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Haneifs; and Kefar Yehoshua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.””

“Those of us who abreact and give our energies to protest—the students shattering the calm of our campuses, the no-fun social media friends seeding our streams with confrontational images of the carnage funded by our dollars—are the equivalent of Manfred Steiner, that helplessly visionary child who shrieks in the face of those notions we employ to sustain our complacency.”

“[…] the conscious and continuous affirmation of the plurality of existences other than our own.”

“in Dick’s novels, again and again, the veil of a unitary reality is ripped off, in favor of the revelation that we live in an existential abyss—one that is also an existential plurality. However painful the transition may feel, the true nightmare isn’t this abyss of infinite possibility but the attempted imposition upon it of a single viewpoint. Dick’s books are full of tyrannical characters, possessing nightmare capacities to infiltrate all minds to produce fascistically unified worlds. We have no choice but to overthrow them.”

A Horseman in the Sky by Ambrose Bierce in 1929 (The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs)

“[…] in another moment his face was raised from earth, his hands resumed their places on the rifle, his forefinger sought the trigger; mind, heart and eyes were clear, conscience and reason sound. He could not hope to capture that enemy; to alarm him would but send him dashing to his camp with his fatal news. The duty of the soldier was plain: the man must be shot dead from ambush—without warning, without a moment’s spiritual preparation, with never so much as an unspoken prayer, he must be sent to his account. But no—there is a hope; he may have discovered nothing—perhaps he is but admiring the sublimity of the landscape. If permitted, he may turn and ride carelessly away in the direction whence he came. Surely it will be possible to judge at the instant of his withdrawing whether he knows. It may well be that his fixity of attention—Druse turned his head and looked through the deeps of air downward, as from the surface to the bottom of a translucent sea. He saw creeping across the green meadow a sinuous line of figures of men and horses—some foolish commander was permitting the soldiers of his escort to water their beasts in the open, in plain view from a dozen summits!”

The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941

“Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite.”

“[…] the Library is “total”-perfect, complete, and whole-and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite)—that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All—the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.”

“The Vindications do exist (I have seen two of them, which refer to persons in the future, persons perhaps not imaginary), but those who went in quest of them failed to recall that the chance of a man’s finding his own Vindication, or some perfidious version of his own, can be calculated to be zero.”

“I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man-even a single man, tens of centuries ago-has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.”

“There is no combination of characters one can make—dhcmrlchtdj, for example—that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies.”

“(A number n of the possible languages employ the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol “library” possesses the correct definition “everlasting, ubiquitous system of hexagonal galleries,” while a library-the thing-is a loaf of bread or a pyramid or something else, and the six words that define it themselves have other definitions. You who read me—are you certain you understand my language?)”

“I am perhaps misled by old age and fear, but I suspect that the human species—the only species—teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the library—enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious
volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret—will endure.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Organized Oblivion by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“In 2000, when he was 98-years-old, I interviewed the writer and singer Hagop H. Asadourian , one of the last survivors of the Armenian genocide. He was born in the village of Chomaklou in eastern Turkey and deported, along with the rest of his village, in 1915. His mother and four of his sisters died of typhus in the Syrian desert. It would be 39 years before he reunited with his only surviving sister, who he was separated from one night near the Dead Sea as they fled with a ragged band of Armenian orphans from Syria to Jerusalem. He told me he wrote to give a voice to the 331 people with whom he trudged into Syria in September 1915, only 29 of whom survived.”

““You can never really write what happened anyway,” Asadourian said. “It is too ghoulish. I still fight with myself to remember it as it was. You write because you have to. It all wells up inside of you. It is like a hole that fills constantly with water and no amount of bailing will empty it. This is why I continue.””

“I stumbled on the ruins of Armenian villages when I worked as a reporter in southeastern Turkey. Like Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel, these villages did not appear on maps. Those who carry out genocide seek total annihilation. Nothing is to remain. Especially memory. This will be our next battle. We must not forget.”

Bertrand Russell Files for Divorce by Cory Mohler (Existential Comics)

Bertrand Russell Files for Divorce

This is the apocryphal tale of how Bertrand Russell tried to prove that his wife was at fault with “two hundred slides”, which begin by, “assum[ing] that all marital problems can be represented as Gödel numbers”.

The judge responds, “Mr. Russell, does any of this have a point?” and then “And Mrs. Russell, you claim that he was at fault. What is your claim?”

She responds, “I mean, basically, because he was doing shit like this all the time. Always trying to ground everything in logic.”

“Ruling in favor of Mrs. Russell!”

We’re already using this phrase in my household, unfortunately. It’s fair, though.

The Establishment has trained us well (Reddit)

Smug and obedient

“It’s remarkable how many people believe themselves intellectually superior for repeating what authority tells them.

“It’s also remarkable how school is structured to reward students for repeating what authority tells them

“I wonder if there’s a connection.”

LLMs & AI

Poetry 2 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

SMBC Poetry 2

“Average humans prefer Instagram “be your best you” haikus to reading Yeats. Average humans are shit.

“Do you use this standard anywhere else? “Average humans think the sun going around the Earth makes more sense. Suck on that, astronomers.”

“You can’t hurt poets! We’re already hated and unemployable! We don’t even like each other! We have nothing to lose to AI!

“When the AI replaces you programmers, you’ll be out of a job and without a reason for being! English majors have been running on spite and self-loathing for centuries! We will live on!”

It is so typical that no-one gave a flying blue f@&k about poetry until they could get an LLM to write terrible poetry for them about topics that are innately unpoetic.

Recraft V3 by Simon Willison

Recraft 3-generated image in an SVG editor

This is a genuinely useful development in the world of AI image-generation: it can generate vector graphics and export them as SVG. This is a big step in allowing an author to touch up initially inadequate images, much as an author can have an LLM generate a bunch of text or code and then fix it up manually with less effort than it would have taken to write everything themselves. Instead of iterating on the prompt, a graphic designer can generate the initial rough sketch but then jump to a more precise tool to finish up. This is powerful.

What does “ask an AI” even mean? by Andrej Karpathy (X)

“AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of “asking an AI”, think of it more as “asking the average data labeler” on the internet.”

“[…] roughly speaking (and today), you’re not asking some magical AI. You’re asking a human data labeler [w]hose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs. This can still be super useful of course.”

You can ask it to do things like “run the government,” but that’s just a wild misinterpretation of what it does. It’s like wondering whether your car’s seat-warmer could heat an entire apartment building.

Programming

How some of the world’s most brilliant computer scientists got password policies so wrong by Stuart Schechter (Mildly-Aggrieved (not mad!) Scientist)

“They incorrectly assumed that if they prevented the specific categories of weakness that they had noted, that the result would be something strong.”

“[…] a user who chooses ‘p@ssword’ to comply with policies such as those proposed by Morris and Thompson is not very safe indeed . Morris and Thompson assumed their intervention would be effective without testing its efficacy, considering its unintended consequences, or even defining a metric of success to test against.”

Always ask yourself how you’re going to measure success, no matter what you’re doing.

“Storing numeric hashes instead of the passwords can protect users whose passwords are hard to guess, but it also prevents scientists from examining those passwords to determine if there might be categories of common (weak) passwords that users should be discouraged, or prevented, from choosing.”

You can still use one-way hashes when storing passwords in the user records but store all passwords as decryptable data completely separate from user data, e.g., submitted to a security audit.

“In a world before personal computing, they may also not have imagined that billions of people would be subjected to password policies that were no better than witchcraft because password hashing would prevent anyone from testing those policies.”

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg by Theodore Wilson (Semi-engineering)

““In addition to PPA, there is now R, for reliability or robustness. This started when we had to consider IR voltage drop, which was impacting performance. Techniques to mitigate that were developed. Then we see variability — of the devices, and device behavior changing based on the neighbors and its context — and that is impacting the performance of a design and impacting power.””

““If you think about a car, it’s a real system modeling challenge,” said Jean-Marie Brunet, vice president and general manager for hardware-assisted verification at Siemens EDA . “They have different sampling rates, different clocks, different accuracy of the models. How do those things talk to each other? It’s an industry integration challenge, which is why we have digital twins. They can give you a visual representation of the end device or system.”

““We’re seeing a shift left using software and virtual twins,” Poddar said. “This includes virtual hardware in the loop, and it requires you to test early and test often.””

““What you need is a good software solution that can simulate the entire system that you’re going to have,” says Auth. “Then you can optimize each of the components. You end up with a lot of very customized software that simulates a variety of these things. It simulates thermals, it simulates frequency or something like that. There’s a big opportunity for software that can give you a better answer to the designer as to the best way to optimize the technology.””

““How good is the model that represents each of the die [sic] in a heterogeneous integration? If your model is not accurate enough, and you’re building optimization on top of it, then you are optimizing based on garbage.”

“[…] necessary accuracy while reducing computation time. “At the front end, you don’t have metrics,” says Swinnen. “You use proxies. For example, power density is a good proxy for thermal. For timing at the RT level, you use a wire-load model based on fan-out. As you go into placement, you use Manhattan distance. Then as you go to routing, it’s net length. The router is not actually looking at timing. The placer is not looking at timing. Each step has its proxy, which gets better and better, and it’s only when the routing is done that you finally have an RC model. That’s not a proxy anymore. Now you have the actual simulatable delay of the wire.””

“[…] you didn’t have enough horsepower to integrate vectors into the design optimization phase. Well now the algorithms are better, the estimation techniques are more accurate, the simulation horsepower is better. You can start integrating some data that in the past you just estimated, and now you can actually measure it.””

“Previously, we focused on optimizing one die or one chiplet, but when it’s in a bigger package with multiple chiplets, the optimization of one die is a little bit less important than the optimization for the overall package that you’re going to end up with.””

“You’ll never converge if you say, I’m going to start with X type of processor, and Y type of system fabric and try and end up with a result. You have to start with the end application in mind, and then work down from that.””

gccrs: An alternative compiler for Rust by Arthur Cohen (Rust Blog)

“To further ensure that gccrs does not create friction in the ecosystem, we want to be extremely careful about the finer details of the compiler, which to us means reusing rustc components where possible, sharing effort on those components, and communicating extensively with Rust experts in the community. Two Rust components are already in use by gccrs: a slightly older version of polonius, the next-generation Rust borrow-checker, and the rustc_parse_format crate of the compiler. There are multiple reasons for reusing these crates, with the main one being correctness. Borrow checking is a complex topic and a pillar of the Rust programming language. Having subtle differences between rustc and gccrs regarding the borrow rules would be annoying and unproductive to users − but by making an effort to start integrating polonius into our compilation pipeline, we help ensure that the results we produce will be equivalent to rustc.”

“Reusing rustc components could also be extended to other areas of the compiler: Various components of the type system, such as the trait solver, an essential and complex piece of software, could be integrated into gccrs. Simpler things such as parsing, as we have done for the format string parser and inline assembly parser, also make sense to us. They will help ensure that the internal representation we deal with will correspond to the one expected by the Rust standard library.”

C#'s Best features you might not be using by dotnet / Bill Wagner (YouTube)

There are a lot of interesting things in here that I already knew but I learned that you can use multiple $-signs in front of an interpolated raw-string literal text to also easily include curly braces in the string without escaping the hell out of everything. This is especially handy with inline JSON, so that you can use single curly braces as the literal JSON braces and double-curly braces to indicate interpolated expressions.

From the documentation:

“Raw string literals can also be combined with interpolated strings to embed the { and } characters in the output string. You use multiple $ characters in an interpolated raw string literal to embed { and } characters in the output string without escaping them.”

The example from the video is better than those in the documentation:

// Did you know you could do this trick with tuples?
var (date, avgTemp) = (DateTime.Parse("2025-01-01T00:00:00-07:00"), 25);
string interpolatedJsonString = $$"""
{
  "Date": "{{date}}"
  "AverageTemperatureCelsius": {{avgTemp}},
  "Summary": "Generally cold",
  "DatesAvailable": [
    "2025-01-01T00:00:00-07:00",
    "2024-12-01T00:00:00-07:00"
  ]
}
""";

A complex bug with a ⸢simple⸣ fix by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse)

“Many organizations have their own version of a certain legend, which tells how a famous person from the past was once called out of retirement to solve a technical problem that nobody else could understand. I first heard the General Electric version of the legend, in which Charles Proteus Steinmetz was called out of retirement to figure out why a large complex of electrical equipment was not working.

“In the story, Steinmetz walked around the room, looking briefly at each of the large complicated machines. Then, without a word, he took a piece of chalk from his pocket, marked one of the panels, and departed. When the puzzled engineers removed that panel, they found a failed component, and when that component was replaced, the problem was solved.

“Steinmetz’s consulting bill for $10,000 arrived the following week. Shocked, the bean-counters replied that $10,000 seemed an exorbitant fee for making a single chalk mark, and, hoping to embarrass him into reducing the fee, asked him to itemize the bill.

“Steinmetz returned the itemized bill:”

One chalk mark			$1.00
Knowing where to put it		$9,999.00
————————————————————————————
TOTAL				$10,000.00

Sports

Chiefs Fans Doing the “War Chant” After Beating the Worst Team in the League by Two is the Most Pathetic Thing I’ve Ever Seen From Any Fanbase by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“Here’s the thing about Chiefs fans: they root for the Yankees and pretend they root for the Marlins. They root for the Lakers and pretend they root for the Hornets. In the past 25 years, the Chiefs have averaged about 9 wins a season, which is a high number. In the past 10 years, the Chiefs have averaged 11.7 wins a season, an absolutely wild number. They’ve been a great team. And yet you would never know it, to listen to them. They constantly complain about being disrespected. They talk about themselves like a beleaguered fanbase, despite being the opposite. They combine two impulses that are bad on their own and even worse together: the entitlement of supporting a dominant team with the sense of grievance that comes from supporting a perpetual doormat.”

I learned the word crybully from this article. It is someone who,

“A person who falsely claims to be a victim or who feigns emotional pain in order to manipulate, coerce, or threaten others”

Another definition is,

“If you don’t fight back, the crybully bullies you. If you fight back, the crybully cries … because you made him feel unsafe.”

Fun

I shake my cane at you

I found this “red-button” image on an SMBC and thought it would be a good logo for this blog at some point.

Kedging Cannon by Randall Munroe (xkcd)

Kedging Cannon

TIL what kedging means: “to warp a vessel by means of a light anchor” or “to move by means of a light anchor.” A warp is “a towline used in warping a vessel,” which seems a little circular.