Links and Notes for February 21st, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Public Policy & Politics

Trump zertrümmert die westlichen Erzählungen zur Ukraine by Tobias Riegel (NachDenkSeiten)

“Ich weiß nicht, ob es in jüngerer Vergangenheit einen Konflikt gab, bei dem das westliche Publikum in ähnlich konsequenter Weise über so lange Zeit so grundfalsch informiert wurde wie im Fall Ukraine seit 2014 – und das vonseiten fast aller Politiker und etablierter Journalisten in Deutschland.”

“Trump crosses the Atlantic.” by Patrick Lawrence (The Floutist)

“The Biden project, from his years as Barack Obama’s vice-president and certainly during his term as Obama’s successor, was to isolate the Russian Federation as completely as possible by way of a poorly conceived sanctions regime, covert operations such as the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, a towering wall of propaganda, and what coercions were necessary to secure the allegiance of European clients who were, in any case, already wanderers on the world stage with no clue as to their purpose or even their interests.”

“At this early moment it is not clear whether Trump and his people have an idea for one; yet more doubtful is whether he or any of his people would be up to a project of this world-historical magnitude. I cannot stress this point too vigorously given how many commentators I have previously assumed possess level heads now tip over in exultation that Trump is some kind of epochal “revolutionary.””

He’s a bull in a china shop. He isn’t always wrong but he’s often misguided. He is often wrong—and sometimes in breathtaking anti-human, evil ways. Even were we to grant politicians good intentions—meaning goals and ethics that align with gaining as much peace, autonomy, and justice as possible—there is no reason that they wouldn’t be hampered and brought low by a combination of greed, incompetence and debilitating ideological brainwashing. They personally will almost certainly win riches but we will lose or make a lateral move, at best.

“Retaking land Russian forces now occupy—Crimea, of course, but also sections of eastern Ukraine now formally incorporated into the Russian federation—is “an unrealistic objective… an illusory goal.” In addition—a couple of other big ones—Hegseth said the U.S. will not support Ukraine’s desire to join NATO; neither will Article 5 of the NATO charter—an attack on one member is an attack on all—cover the troops of any NATO member dispatched to Ukraine in any capacity.”

“The Russians, let us not forget, see no point talking to Zelensky until he holds elections—a very fair point—and it is a long time since the Kremlin has seen any mileage in contacts with the Europeans, who have betrayed their word to Moscow every time events require them to keep it.”

“Scholz reflected something I am tempted to call “Europanic,” but the term does not fit. Vance assailed not Europe or Europeans, but the corruptions inherent in European elites’ defense of a crumbling neoliberal order. Scholz, as is there in the Munich transcripts, stood in defense of these antidemocratic corruptions.”

“A curious exception to this circus of disfigured and disfiguring coverage of last week’s events turned up in The Times of London’s opinion page Monday under the headline “Keep calm, this isn’t another Munich sell-out.” The subhead is even better: “Putin’s no Hitler, Trump’s no Chamberlain and Zelensky’s no angel.” Matthew Parris’s lead is better yet. In it he quotes an old friend’s amusing mot, delivered in Latin: “Pro bono publico, no panico.” Exactly so. At this early moment, too much remains to succeed or fail or something in between for anyone among us to panic. Let us leave that to the neoliberals, whose business is not, after all, ever to act for the sake of the public good.”

Trump vs. the Deep State by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Either Donald Trump will begin to exert political control over the invisible government or the invisible government will sink Donald Trump just as it did during his first term as president. Let us be attentive.”

“The attack on USAID, the telephone call with Vladimir Putin, the incipient alienation of the Kiev regime, new talk of talks with the Islamic Republic, Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation as director of national intelligence: I don’t know if these events and their timing reflect a concerted plan, back-of-an-envelope inspirations, or the president’s thinking but not necessarily the thinking of those around him. Let us in any case consider these rat-a-tat developments as one if we are to understand what is fundamentally at issue.”

“In the case of Trump vs. the deep state, there is promise in the undertaking, but I have my doubts. He does not seem to me to have the gravitas, the depth of intelligence and all-around seriousness, to get this very necessary task done well and effectively. Engaging the deep state is not the same as sitting opposite a rival property developer at a mahogany table in Manhattan. Trump does not seem sufficiently equipped to wage war against operatives whose perverse savvy in the methods of subterfuge is well-tested and well-proven.”

“There are too many ways the intelligence agencies and the rest of the deep state’s sprawling apparatus can do Trump in a second time, to put this point another way. Equally, he and his people will do themselves in if they do not go at the task within the bounds of the Constitution. And let us not be so foolish as to assume the Democrats will refrain from once again misusing government institutions, or that the generals and spooks will stand by quiescently, or that the punks reporting Trump in mainstream media will indulge in less lying, mis– and disinformation this time than they did the last. They are, indeed, already hard at it.”

“Why Trump? Why isn’t there someone with good politics and a sound analysis of the deep state as a national crisis to take up the task? Going way out on a limb, way out, even a re-educated liberal whose resolve points in the right direction would do.

“But it is Trump. O.K., it was Trump’s political rise that drew the deep state out of the bushes, after all. He certainly seems to be angry and determined enough to begin the work we must all acknowledge has to be done. And if he fails to get very far in bringing the beast under control, can’t we count his failed try a good start? I do not think, I mean to say, the deep state’s presence in America’s political life will ever be off the table now that Trump has put its insidious presence on it. This is a good thing.”

I wouldn’t be too sure. People are remarkably capable of going back to sleep, especially with an incredible amount of simultaneous media cooing nursery rhymes day and night.

Look at what happened with COVID: there are several epidemics raging right now, debilitating industry and economies with the ill, hospitals filling up again. There’s H5N1, there’s RSV, there’s polio and measles making a comeback, there’s the flu—bigger than in the last quarter-century—and there’s still COVID, which has stayed at epidemic levels throughout.

The numbers are higher than a sane civilization would be willing to accommodate but it’s just accepted that this is how it is. We learned nothing but how to be sullen, sulking children, only somewhat mollified by having been giving back all of our toys.

“it was after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that the Richelieus running the Bush II administration declared that the United States can no longer speak to its adversaries: That would “lend them credibility.” Remarkably enough, this asinine reasoning has pretty much prevailed ever since. Joe Biden and his adjutants took this to a reckless extreme, with rare exceptions refusing contacts with Moscow even as they stoked tensions to the brink of another global conflict. But the Biden policy was merely the logical outcome of the nitwittery that dates back to the Bush–Cheney–Rumsfeld days.”

“[…] when Trump and Putin picked up their telephones last week, each hearing the voice of the other, the world as we have known it these past years took a turn for the better. This seems a certainty.”

Trump’s Munich Strategy by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“The MSC is an audition of sorts, where Europe’s political and security elites scramble to share the stage with a member of the American establishment who will pat them on the head, feed them a treat, and tell them what a good job they’re doing. In the post-Cold War era, Europe allowed itself to be uniformly influenced by this master-servant dynamic.”

“[…] the elites who gather at the MSC are not there to be lectured to, or to learn, but rather to promulgate the strategic objectives of the U.S. by disguising them as European initiatives born of European values. Except, as anyone who has studied the dynamics of the MSC knows — there are no true European values anymore. The once laudable goal of avoiding a repeat of the Second World War on European soil has been replaced by a mindless, slavish echo chamber of American imperial warmongering.”

“[…] the Munich experience is best encapsulated by the sight and sound of Christopher Heusgen, the chairman of the MSC, breaking down in tears as he closed the MSC, overcome by the reality that Europe was never more than a tool of American power, and now there is a different American master who has decided that Europe is no longer useful as a tool.”

“How do I explain Munich? It is the revolutionary application of Boyd’s OODA-loop, a masterful case-study in disruptive politics conducted in an atmosphere of chaos brought about by the disembowelment of deep-seated political establishments the world relied upon for stability. It’s an acid trip down the rabbit hole chasing a White Rabbit that won’t stop to explain what’s happening. It’s a magic carpet ride to the unknown, piloted by a man who long ago stopped caring about the things we all had grown accustomed to believing served as the core aspects of the lives we led. It is the opening salvo of revolutionary change experienced by people who do not understand revolutions and are not prepared for one to break out all around them. It’s beautiful in a horrible way. It’s Donald Trump personified.”

The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“Those naively lauding Trump’s hostility towards the deep state — which I concede did tremendous damage to democratic institutions, eviscerated our most cherished liberties, is an unaccountable state within a state and orchestrated a series of disastrous global interventions, including the recent military fiascos in the Middle East and Ukraine — should look closely at what is being proposed to take its place.”

“Musk is pursuing an “AI-first” agenda to increase the role of artificial intelligence (AI) across government agencies. He is building “a centralized data repository” for the federal government, according to Wired. Oracle founder, business associate of Elon Musk and longtime Trump donor Larry Ellison, who recently announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan alongside Trump, urged nations to move all of their data into “a single, unified data platform” so it can be “consumed and used” by AI models. Ellison has previously stated that an AI-based surveillance system will guarantee that “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.“”

These people are mad. They might actually get what they want—if only temporarily—because the world is also mad, but they are stupid. We can at least recognize this. They are deeply stupid people who are not contributing in any material way to human achievement or knowledge. They cannot take that from us: that we recognize them as petty, stupid people who, in a sane world, would be of significance only to themselves, but who are able to make others pay attention to them in the asylum we call home.

“Joseph Roth was one of the few writers in Germany to understand the attraction and inevitable rise of fascism. In his essay “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind,” which addressed the first mass burning of books by the Nazis, he counseled fellow Jewish writers to accept that they had been vanquished: “Let us, who were fighting on the front line, under the banner of the European mind, let us fulfill the noblest duty of the defeated warrior: Let us concede our defeat.”

“Roth, blacklisted by the Nazis, forced into exile and reduced to poverty, did not delude himself with false hopes.

““What use are my words,” Roth asked, “against the guns, the loudspeakers, the murderers, the deranged ministers, the stupid interviewers and journalists who interpret the voice of this world of Babel, muddied anyhow, via the drums of Nuremberg?”

“He knew what was coming.

““It will become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe,” Roth, after going into exile in France in 1933, wrote to Stefan Zweig about the seizure of power by the Nazis. “The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.”

“But Roth also argued even if defeat was certain, resistance was a moral imperative, a way to defend one’s dignity and the sanctity of the truth.”

Trump Gives Peace a Chance in Ukraine by Medea Benjamin (Antiwar.com)

“While Trump plans to negotiate directly with Russia and Ukraine, the vulnerable position in which his plan would place European NATO members means that they, too, will want a significant say in the peace negotiations and probably demand a U.S. role in Ukraine’s security guarantees. So Trump’s effort to insulate the U.S. from the consequences of its actions in Ukraine may be a dead letter before he even sits down to negotiate with Russia and Ukraine.”

“On both sides of the Atlantic, Trump’s peace initiative is a game-changer and a new chance for peace that the United States and its allies should embrace, even as they work out their respective responsibilities to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. It is also a time for Europe to realize that it can’t just mimic U.S. foreign policy and expect U.S. protection in return. Europe’s difficult relationship with Trump’s America may lead to a new modus operandi and a re-evaluation (or maybe even the end?) of NATO.

“Meanwhile, those of us anxious to see peace in Ukraine should applaud President Trump’s initiative but we should also highlight the glaring contradictions of a president who finds the killing in Ukraine unacceptable but fully supports the genocide in Palestine.”

The Mafia State by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“In the final stages of decay for all empires, the rulers, focused exclusively on personal enrichment, ensconced in their versions of Versailles or The Forbidden City, squeeze the last drops of profit from an increasingly oppressed and impoverished population and ravaged environment.”

“Unprecedented wealth is inseparable from unprecedented poverty.”

“Huge segments of the population, unable to absorb the despair and bleakness, severs itself from a reality-based universe. It takes comfort in magical thinking, a bizarre millennialism — one embodied for us in a Christianized fascism — which turns con artists, morons, criminals, charlatans, gangsters and grifters into prophets while branding those who decry the pillage and corruption into traitors. The rush towards self-immolation accelerates intellectual and moral paralysis.”

“Trump, Musk and their minions are swiftly repealing executive orders regarding health, environmental and safety regulations, food assistance, as well as child care programs such as Head Start.”

It’s a pity that these programs were enacted by fiat instead of being anchored in law. That means that they can also be repealed by fiat. Even offices that are anchored in law don’t have a budget minimum in the law, so they can be starved to death, even while they technically have a right to exist.

“[…] which has ensured that Americans have been reimbursed with more than $21 billion due to cancelled debts, financial compensation and other forms of consumer relief.”

But they’ve probably lost more than that to a resurgent gambling and sports-betting regime that came up at the same time. The Lord giveth and he taketh away.

“The mafia state, not democracies, may be the wave of the future, one where the wealthiest one percent of the globe owns some 43 percent of all global financial assets – more than 95 percent of the human race — while 44 percent of the planet’s population lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of less than $6.85 per day.”

“Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” writes that once a society surrenders to the dictates of the market, once its mafia economy becomes a mafia state, once it succumbs to what he calls “the ravages of this satanic mill,” it inevitably leads to “the demolition of society.””

“The mafia state will be brutal with any who revolt. Capitalists, as Eduardo Galeano writes, view communal cultures as “enemy cultures.” The billionaire class will do to us what it did to the radicals who rose up to form militant unions in the past. We had the bloodiest labor wars in the industrialized world. Hundreds of American workers were killed, tens of thousands were beaten, wounded, jailed and blacklisted. Unions were infiltrated, shut down and outlawed. We cannot be naïve. It will be difficult, costly and painful. But this confrontation is our only hope. Otherwise, we, and the planet that sustains us, are doomed.”

Rage Against the Machine by Andrew Cockburn (Harper's Magazine)

“One former influential government official, who requested anonymity because of administration wrath, gave me a withering estimation of DOGE’s prospects. “They’re going to try two or three things they think will solve everything, which will be thrown out in court,” the official told me following the announcement of Musk’s appointment. “I assume the first thing they’ll do is some kind of hiring freeze, and then, after three months, they’ll realize agencies have started to figure out ways to get around it. And then they’ll try to stop that, and they won’t be able to do that. Then they’ll try to make people come to work five days a week, and that’s going to be difficult because a lot of these agencies don’t have offices for these people anymore. I think it’s going to be one thing after another, and maybe after four years the number of employees will be down 2 percent—maybe.””

“[…] history indicates that Trump will retreat in the face of inevitably fierce resistance from the military services and their allies in Congress and the press. It is more likely that Trump’s promise to bring a swift end to the war in Ukraine through diplomacy will come to nothing, and that the proxy conflict with Russia, so gratifying to the defense industry, will continue. Putin would, once again, not be surprised.

“The evident capacity of corporations to steer Trump as they wish raises a larger point. Trump may inveigh against the “deep state,” but, as John Dilulio, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out, “the real deep state is the contractor state,” by which he means all those, led by the giant defense contractors, who are dependent on government spending. So when Musk, for example, talks airily of shuttering the admittedly disastrous F-35 fighter program, which employs more voters than contractors, he’s taking on a very deep and formidable state indeed.

“The extent to which the federal government has been privatized across the board is rarely discussed, especially not by would-be cost cutters like Musk and Vought. Yet those federal bureaucrats presumptively headed for the chopping block play a diminished role in the functioning of government.”

“The most tangible result of Trump’s depredations will likely be the further enrichment of his ultra-wealthy supporters; consider the postelection boom in private-prison company stocks in anticipation of mass incarceration for migrants, or the hype around SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar government contracts. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans will grow ever more enraged by the system’s ongoing failures, creating bountiful opportunities for someone who caters to their rage—someone like Donald Trump.”

Twelve Days of Silence by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The 100 Days)

“Daniel Levy, a former peace negotiator for Israel (and before that a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces), testified movingly to the United Nations this week. “A minute of silence for each of the Bibas children would be appropriate,” he told the UN delegation — and then added, “as would a minute of silence for each of the more than 18,000 Palestinian children murdered in Israel’s devastation of Gaza. That silence would extend to over 300 hours.”

“Add in the 659 known Ukrainian children killed and we’d be up to 310 hours. And those are just the deaths. Far more have been injured or made hungry or homeless.”

Angelic Israel has killed almost 300x as many children as the evil Russians.

All These Israeli Agendas Were Planned Long In Advance by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Israel has announced that it will continue to occupy parts of Syria and Lebanon indefinitely, and that the new Syrian government is forbidden to have a military presence south of Damascus. Israel has also sent tanks into the West Bank for the first time in decades, saying they will remain for at least a year. A week earlier, Netanyahu vowed to “finish the job” against Iran with the help of the Trump administration.

“The middle east is being dramatically restructured in alignment with longstanding Israeli objectives.”

I can’t imagine that it will go any better for them than any of the U.S. military adventures. They are spreading themselves incredibly thin. They will have initial success, which is all that they think they need in order to guarantee long-lasting success.

“Everyone thinks of Elon Musk as the Tesla guy, the Twitter guy, the Mars guy, but he’s not: he’s the satellite guy. Musk owns most of the operational satellites in Earth’s orbit, and they’re being used to help the US military-intelligence machine rule the planet.

“And this is the guy who MAGA pundits insist is fighting the Deep State. The unelected military-industrial complex plutocrat is fighting the Deep State you guys.”

“Analysis of government agency malfeasance just so happens to begin and end solely with things that can be framed to make Democrats look bad.

“The cult’s adherents believe they’re part of some exciting new movement which fights the power and defends the interests of the little guy, when underneath all the narratives they’re just garden variety Republicans defending a standard shitty GOP president who wants to cut taxes and regulations and give Israel everything it wants and militarize against China while inflaming diversionary partisan culture war tensions.

“They’re power-worshipping bootlickers posturing as brave revolutionaries. Everything about their whole thing is fake and stupid. Anyone still buying into this scam should feel embarrassed.”

What Odds, as Trump Takes on the Deep State? by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Trump’s proposal to convene a summit with Putin and Xi Jinping, a sort of 21st century Yalta, at which he would negotiate with the Russian and Chinese presidents to cut their military budgets by 50%.

“Trump’s first mention of this latter idea was a passing reference, a couple of sentences, during a press conference that covered sundry other matters. I took this to be another of his many improvisations — impromptu proposals that seem to come spontaneously into his head in the course of one or another kind of public exchange. I assumed it would go about as far as asserting sovereignty over Greenland. Then came The Washington Post report that Pete Hegseth has ordered the Pentagon to find budget reductions of 8% per year for the next five years. Since then The Associated Press has reported that Trump’s defense secretary wants to see $50 billion in cuts — not quite 6% of the Pentagon’s declared budget — during the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.”

“Consider carefully the Hegseth memorandum that went out to top generals and civilian Pentagon officials. There are many categories of expenditure exempted from budget reductions, including but by no means limited to the nuclear modernization project, attack drones, submarines, and — will these Strangeloves never stop?—an “Iron Dome for America.” Hegseth’s declared intent is merely a “realignment” such as we have seen numerous times before.”

Trump’s Mineral Deal and Pillaging Ukraine by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“Ukraine may have felt compelled to give up half the revenues for its minerals, gas and oil as well as from earnings from ports and other infrastructure. It is hard to see how they could resist the American pressure when, according to U.S. officials, Trump was angry enough to consider “withdrawing American military support from Ukraine” and has said there will be “a lot of problems” for Ukraine if they don’t. They may also have felt it necessary to avoid a total breakdown of relations with the United States.

“On February 25, Ukraine signed the American deal. Kiev could only claim victory on one item of complaint: the U.S. still demanded half of Ukraine’s revenues but dropped the impossible $500 billion demand. That is some consolation for Ukraine but not much, since the signed draft still contains no reference to U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine.

“Once again, the ones who will suffer from the American pillaging of Ukraine will be the people of Ukraine. All of that revenue that will be exported out of the country is money that could now be spent on defense and later spent on rebuilding the tattered economy and reconstructing the shattered nation.”

On being prosecuted in Canada for supporting Palestinians by Yves Engeler (Twitter)

Canadian SWAT cop/soldier/absolute unit

When did it become normal to think of cops looking like this? This is insane. Only insane societies think that it is OK for its defenders to look like this while walking amongst those that they are defending.

Wer darf die Ukraine nun ausbeuten? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Wir können also festhalten: Die EU hat ein Interesse, der Ukraine über Kredite den Wiederaufbau zu finanzieren, sodass europäische Unternehmen in der Ukraine künftig prächtige Geschäfte machen können. Die EU hat aber auch ein Interesse, dass die Ukraine diese Kredite zurückbezahlt, sonst gibt es Ärger mit den ohnehin schon verärgerten Wählern.”

“So werden Fakten geschaffen und Europa schaut einmal mehr in die Röhre. Für die EU bleiben nun nur die offenen Rechnungen. Laut Schätzungen von Bloomberg Economics werden allein die Kosten für den Wiederaufbau zerstörter Gebäude und Infrastruktur rund 230 Mrd. US-Dollar betragen. Weitere 175 Mrd. US-Dollar werden für die Aufrüstung der ukrainischen Armee veranschlagt und die Aufstellung einer 40.000 Mann starken Truppe zur Sicherung des Waffenstillstands wird demnach weitere 30 Mrd. US-Dollar kosten. Bezahlen wird dies der EU-Steuerzahler.”

“[…] wäre den Menschen selbstverständlich am besten damit gedient, wenn diese Gelder auch in die Ukraine selbst investiert werden und nicht in die USA abfließen. Doch dies kollidiert mit dem Selbsterhaltungswunsch des ukrainischen Systems. Eigentlich müsste man den Ukrainern raten, ihre Führung aus dem Land zu jagen – und die USA sowie die EU gleich mit, haben sie das Land doch erst in den Schlamassel getrieben, für den noch viele Generationen an Ukrainern bezahlen werden.”

Die Wahlschlappe des BSW – ein politisches Desaster by Rainer Balcerowiak (NachDenkSeiten)

“ Absehbar ist, dass es jetzt Absetzbewegungen in Teilen der Mitgliedschaft geben wird, verbunden mit allerlei schmutziger Wäsche und wüster „Kritik“ am Agieren der Führung. Für die, die relativ offen auf schnelle Karriere nach der Wahl gesetzt hatten, ist da schließlich erst einmal nichts mehr zu holen, und so manch „geläutertes“ BSW-Mitglied wird wohl bald woanders anklopfen. Von Seiten der BSW-Führung wird man die Wahlschlappe nun auch auf den massiven, manipulativen Anti-BSW-Kurs der großen Medien schieben. Da ist sicherlich was dran, aber es ist viel zu kurz gegriffen, um das schlechte Ergebnis umfänglich zu erklären.”

“Der Versuch, die real existierende Repräsentationslücke im Parteiensystem mit einer spannenden Mischung aus konsequenter Friedens-, konservativ-liberaler Gesellschafts- und linkssozialdemokratischer Sozialpolitik zu besetzen, ist zunächst gescheitert. Das wird den Vormarsch der AfD weiter beschleunigen. Und vor allem wird im Bundestag eine Stimme fehlen, die sich ohne Wenn und Aber der Politik der „Kriegstüchtigkeit“ widersetzt. Keine erfreulichen Aussichten.”

I learned the expression die Kuh vom Eis holen from this article. It means “to pull your fat out of the fire.” I.e., to successfully solve a problem, against long odds.

Palestinian Hostage Released With Obvious Torture Scars; Western Press Ignores Him by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“A Palestinian man who was held captive by Israel for over a year has been released with horrific scarring all over his body. The man, Mohammed Abu Tawila, told local media that the marks came from his captors pouring acid and other chemicals onto his skin in order to torture him. One of his eyes was also destroyed, reportedly in a savage beating.

“[…]

“And of course the western press has nothing to say about it. If an Israeli hostage were returned with these signs of torture the entire western political-media class would demand that everyone in Gaza be exterminated with poison gas. But he’s Palestinian, so they ignore him.”

“It’s weird how Israel’s supporters will just pretend to believe complete nonsense in order to advance Israeli agendas. Oh yeah, Hamas strangled those redheads with their bare hands! OMG Hamas beheaded babies and roasted them in ovens! Oh no, Jeremy Corbyn is a Nazi! We totally believe these things!

“And what’s even weirder is they expect you to pretend to believe they’re not pretending. If you come out and say something like “Okay but surely nobody actually believes Hamas has been hiding in every hospital in Gaza,” they’ll flip out at you. If you point out that it’s much more likely the Bibas family was killed by Israeli airstrikes in an area where women and children were getting killed by Israeli airstrikes every day than that the Israeli government is telling the truth about something they lie about constantly just as a critical ceasefire deadline approaches, you’ll be swarmed by Israel supporters not only pretending to be absolutely certain they were murdered by Hamas, but demanding that you pretend to take them seriously.”

Trump-Zelensky shouting match exposes clash between US and European powers by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“Trump’s efforts to reorient US foreign policy have triggered a crisis within the US political establishment. Trump’s shift is deeply opposed by sections of the bourgeoisie who believe that abandoning the conflict with Russia and breaking apart NATO would be catastrophic for American global influence. While they support Trump’s assault on social programs and democratic rights, this issue directly impacts the global dominance of American imperialism.”

Journalism & Media

USAID Falls, Exposing a Giant Network of US-Funded “Independent” Media by Alan Macleod (MintPressNews)

“The pausing of aid immediately sent shockwaves across the planet, not least in the international media, many of which, unbeknownst to their readers, are totally dependent on financing from Washington. In total, USAID spends over a quarter of a billion dollars yearly training and funding a vast, sprawling network of more than 6,200 reporters at nearly 1,000 news outlets or journalism organizations, all under the rubric of promoting “independent media.” With the money tap unexpectedly turned off, outlets around the world are panicking, turning to their readers for donations, and thereby outing themselves as fronts for U.S. power.”

“Another country awash in Western NGO cash is Georgia. On January 30, Georgia Today noted that USAID financing has been a “cornerstone” of the country since its independence. It warned that many organizations would immediately shutter their doors for good without the constant flow of money. Similar reports have emerged from Serbia, Moldova, and across Latin America. Meanwhile, social media users have noticed that many of the most prominent anti-China voices on their respective platforms have gone strangely silent since the shutdown.”

“Yet, in discussing the USAID cuts, corporate media has insisted on describing these outlets as “independent.” “Independent outlets in [the] former Soviet Union are poised to be hurt by temporary shut down at key US agency,” wrote The Financial Times. “From Ukraine to Afghanistan, independent media organizations across the world are being forced to lay off staff or shut down after losing USAID funding,” The Guardian told its readers. Meanwhile, The Washington Post went with “Independent media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze.” Perhaps most notably, even organizations like Reporters Without Borders (RSF) did the same.”

“There is already a serious problem in modern discourse with the term “independent media,” a phrase commonly defined as any media outlet, no matter how big an empire it is, that is not owned or funded by the state (as if that is the only form of dependence or control to which media is subject). But even at this extremely low bar, all these outlets fail. Indeed, Weimers’ warning underlines the fact that none of them are independent in any meaningful way. They are, in fact, completely dependent on USAID for their very existence.”

“Leila Bicakcic, CEO of Center for Investigative Reporting (a USAID-supported Bosnian organization), admitted, on camera, that “If you are funded by the U.S. government, there are certain topics that you would simply not go after, because the U.S. government has its interests that are above all others.””

“While USAID specifically targets foreign audiences, much of its messaging comes back to America, as those foreign outlets are used as credible, independent, and reliable sources for newspapers or cable news networks to cite. Thus, its bankrolling of foreign media ends up flooding domestic audiences with pro-U.S. messaging as well.”

A neat trick.

“While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements. At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.””

“The [97-page USAID document] revealed a vast operation to censor and suppress wide swaths of the internet, including Twitch, Reddit, 4Chan, Facebook, Twitter, Discord and alternative media websites. There, USAID lamented, users were able to build communities to create “populist expertise” and develop opinions and viewpoints that challenge official U.S. government narratives. Although its internal justification was halting the flow of mis- and disinformation, it seemed particularly concerned with “malinformation” – a concept it defines as speech that is factually correct but “misleading” (i.e., bothersome truths the U.S. government would prefer the public does not know).”

“The Department of Defense, meanwhile, fields a giant clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence public opinion, the majority doing so from their keyboards. A 2021 exposé from Newsweek described the operation as, “The largest undercover force the world has ever known,” and warned that this troll army was likely breaking domestic and international law.”

“USAID was even more heavily implicated in genocide in Peru in the 1990s. Between 1996 and 2000, Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori ordered the forced mass sterilization of 300,000 mostly indigenous women. USAID donated some $35 million to the program, now widely understood to constitute a genocide. No American official has faced any legal repercussions.”

“In 1973, Senator Ted Kennedy wrote a letter to the CIA, directly asking if they were using USAID to carry out operations in Southeast Asia. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger himself responded in the affirmative. For that reason, former CIA officer John Kiriakou labeled USAID as little more than a “propaganda adjunct of the agency.””

“It also explains the reaction whenever actors challenge the U.S.-dominated media ecosystem. In the 2000s, the U.S. military deliberately bombed Al-Jazeera buildings after the network challenged Washington’s narrative around the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. After RT began gaining a foothold in the 2010s, the network was demonized and canceled. TikTok is on the verge of being banned in the U.S., and independent media is constantly shadowbanned, demonetized, defamed and deplatformed.”

“We like to think we are free thinkers. Yet the revelation that USAID funds a vast network of journalists around the world, shaping narratives favorable to U.S. interests, should highlight the fact that we are swimming in an ocean of propaganda – and most of us do not even realize it. The U.S. is spending billions to promote its interests and demonize China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and its other enemies, all in an attempt to curate our realities.”

This is a largely successful effort. Even in neutral Switzerland—which doesn’t really have a dog in the fight—where people will cheerily admit to hating Iran, Venezuela, Russia, or China, even though they then can’t ever give a good reason for their beliefs.

“[…] at least USAID’s demise has done at least one good thing; it has exposed vast swathes of global media for what they are: imperial propaganda projects of the United States.”

They’re Fetishizing The Bibas Kids’ Red Hair To Sell Genocide To White Westerners by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Throughout the Israel-aligned world, the color orange is being used by government leaders to mourn the deaths of these children in the most public forums possible. Landmarks like the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, and the Brandenburg Gate have all been illuminated in orange lights explicitly to commemorate the ginger Bibas children, and orange balloons have been released throughout Israel and the west in their honor.

“{…} it reminds westerners that these children were not like the dark children whose deaths we’ve been told to ignore for the last year and a half. It reminds us that these children were white.”

The Empire At Its Most Honest by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“I’ve always said that the only thing I like about Trump is that he puts an honest face on the empire. In terms of actual policy and actions he’s not much different from any other Republican president, but he has this compulsive inclination to constantly yank off the plastic smileyface mask of the empire and reveal the snarling blood-spattered face beneath. This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

“That one video, all by itself, tells you more about what the US empire really is than every movie its PR agents in Hollywood have ever produced. This is the real America. This is the real Israel. This is the real empire.

“And this is why we must defeat them.”

Yes, Ukraine Started the War by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post)

“It’s like the story of the American sitting next to a Russian on a flight from Moscow to Washington. “What brings you to Washington?” the American asks.

““I’m traveling to do research on American propaganda,” the Russian says.

““What American propaganda?”

““Exactly,” says the Russian.”

This is a well-written thought experiment about the recent history of Ukraine (the last 10 years).

“Think of an encampment of protesters in Lafayette Park, some of whom are violent. They are calling for the ouster of the U.S. president from the White House across the street.

“Two senior Russian lawmakers then show up in the park. They appear with protest leaders and address the crowd, encouraging them, telling them Russia is with them.

“Then the Russian deputy foreign minister in charge of North American affairs appears in Lafayette Park handing out food to the encamped demonstrators.

“Later the minister is caught on an open telephone line discussing with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. the composition of the new American government once the president is overthrown. This minister had also made a speech saying Russia spent $5 billion to bring democracy to the United States.

“The elected American president is then overthrown violently and flees the country. Russia installs the government it has selected. California rejects the Russian-installed regime and says it is breaking away from the United States. The new coup government then launches a war against California.

“If this actually happened in Washington, do you think anyone in the U.S. would say that Russia had anything to do with overthrowing the U.S. government? Or would they have just said he was ousted by “popular demonstrations?”

“But this is precisely what happened in Ukraine in 2014. The role of the legislators was played in real life by Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy. The deputy foreign minister was played by Victoria Nuland, the then U.S. assistant secretary of state for Eurasian affairs.”

Israel And Its Apologists Weaponize Sympathy In Order To Facilitate Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“So you can see how victim-LARPing leads to sympathy, sympathy leads to believed narratives, and believed narratives lead to concrete material benefits. All skillful manipulators understand this dynamic and use it in their own lives; the only thing that differs is the specific narratives they use and the material benefits they’re trying to extract. One manipulator might use sympathy to extract sexual favors from women and deference from men. Another might use it to extract money or resources. Another might use it for status in their social circle. It’s on a different scale and has different objectives, but the dynamic is the same.

“Normal people don’t typically understand this, so we’re highly susceptible to these kinds of manipulations because they tend to fly under our radar. Normal people place a lot more value on telling the truth and doing what’s right than highly manipulative people do, because normal people prioritize human connection much more highly than manipulators. Normal people use language to communicate and understand and connect with each other, while manipulators use it to extract material benefits. These are two drastically different ways of relating to one’s social environment, and normal people are often completely unaware that the other way of relating is even a feature for some of the people in their lives. This makes them ideal targets for manipulation.”

“The real currency of our world is not money or resources, nor gold, nor even weapons. The real currency of our world is narrative and the ability to control it, because if you can control the narrative, you can control everyone.

“The average human life is dominated by mental stories, so if you can control the stories that humans are telling each other about their world, you can control the humans.”

Economy & Finance

America and “national capitalism” by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Over the 25 years when Bill Gates was growing Microsoft from zero to the most successful company in planetary history, Bettencourt made more money than Gates. Gates made his money by doing something. Bettencourt made her money by emerging from a very lucky orifice and just hanging around.

“But here’s the kicker: after Bill Gates quit Microsoft, he became a professional investor. He stopped doing a job and started investing in companies where other people were working. Over the next 13 years, Bill Gates (investor) made more money than Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO) made in his 25 years of doing a job. He also made more than Liliane Bettencourt.

“That’s what r > g means: that even the most successful worker in human history can’t make as much as a person who merely has a lot of money, and the more money you have, the more money you make.”

“But (Piketty continues), oligarchy is intrinsically destabilizing. For one thing, once the fortunes of Bill Gates’ or Liliane Bettencourt’s are large enough, growing them by even, say 1% requires that some capital come from other rich people, because 1% of Bill Gates’s holdings will eventually exceed 100% of the holdings of everyone who isn’t insanely rich. So, over time, rich people eventually have to fight with each other in order to keep getting richer – see, for example, World War I.”

“The backbone of C21 is a time-series of 300 years’ worth of global capital flows, painstakingly assembled by Piketty and his grad students. This time series shows the same pattern emerging over and over: as the rich get richer, they capture more and more of the state’s policy-making apparatus, triggering more wealth-friendly policies, which make them even richer, and makes their grip on policy stronger. This continues until inequality reaches a tipping point, and then you get a rupture, like the French Revolution, or the World Wars.”

“[…] the share of wealth held by the rich will reach a tipping point, and we’ll see policies that benefit the wealthy crowding out policies that support human thriving, and the rich will get richer, and they will feud with each other, and society will destabilize, and we will face collapse.”

“This makes the rich richer, even as wages stagnate. The next 40 years are a procession of ever-more-wealth-friendly policies and politicians – not just the Bush years, but also Bill Clinton’s welfare bill and Obama’s foreclosure crisis – and the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. Monopolies consume the American economy. GDP goes up, because the corporate sector is super consolidated and it’s jacking up prices and slashing wages, leaving more for profits and dividends.”

“Policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else – ignoring the climate emergency, slashing the safety net, starving infrastructure, etc – dominate. Inequality worsens. No one can afford a house, health care, or university. Your life’s savings are stolen by a subprime mortgage, or a pension-fund raid, or bitcoin grift. Instability worsens.”

“One political party is captured by finance ghouls. The other one is also captured by finance ghouls, but welds them into a coalition that includes virulent, apocalyptic racists.”

“It’s common for Americans to write off Europe because its “economy isn’t growing” the way the US economy is. Piketty points out that this is a mirage: American economic growth is due to rising prices and plummeting wages, which is great for the share price of giant American companies whose cartels and monopolies make everyone except the tiny number of Americans with substantial stock market portfolios much poorer: “When measured in terms of purchasing power parity, the reality is very different: the productivity gap with Europe disappears entirely.””

“Not all the profits of giant US companies arise from ripping off 99% of Americans. Some of those profits come from ripping off foreigners, but that’s only possible because foreign governments have passed looter-friendly policies in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Now that the US is shutting that down, there’s no reason to allow America to continue stealing from your citizens.”

Bitcoin plunges as crypto fans didn’t get everything they wanted from Trump by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)

““There has been a recalibration of expectations regarding the Trump administration’s crypto stance,” Gadi Chait, investment manager at Xapo Bank, told the Financial Times. Michael Dempsey, managing partner at venture capital firm Compound, was quoted as saying that many crypto enthusiasts “materially overestimated [Trump’s] positive impact on the space.”

“The article cited an estimate that “the average purchase price of bitcoin ETFs [exchange-traded funds] since the US election was around $97,000 per coin, meaning that buyers during that period have collectively lost around $1.3 billion.””

Many crypto enthusiasts are getting milked rather than doing the milking. Their fervent belief that the whole crypto market was ever anything other than a way to funnel more money to a handful of already-rich people is the engine that powers any scam.

Cracks appear in facade of US “boom” by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Parikh dissected the oft-heard claims that American exceptionalism rests on the “strong” US consumer and jobs market. He noted that healthcare spending is the largest single component of household services spending. More than 40 percent of new private sector jobs created since the start of 2023 have been in healthcare, with the biggest US industries by revenue including hospitals, drug wholesalers and medical insurers.

““Put simply,” he wrote, “a significant share of the US’s ‘booming’ economy is generated by sickness.”

“As for other areas of consumption spending, Fed research had shown that “higher-income households have fuelled post-pandemic retail spending.”

“Just how much has been highlighted by an analysis carried out by Moody’s Analytics, based on Federal Reserve data, reported in an article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.

““The top 10 percent of earners—households making about $250,000 a year or more—are splurging on everything from vacations to designer handbags, buoyed by big gains in stocks, real estate and other assets,” it said.”

Tesla Is More Vulnerable Than You Think by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio is currently 166, meaning that its stock price is 166 times the value of its earnings per share. How high is that? Well, the average PE ratio of the top 500 companies in America right now is 30—and that is high, by historic standards. The second most valuable auto company after Tesla is Toyota, which has a PE ratio of 7. General Motors also has a PE ratio of 7. What if you compare Tesla, instead, to tech companies, which investors assign a premium to? Well, the PE ratio of Apple is 39; the PE ratio of Amazon is 39; the PE ratio of Google parent Alphabet is 23.”

Science & Nature

The Shape of a Mars Mission by Maciej Cegłowski (Idle Words)

“The need for long and expensive test flights to validate life support introduces another kind of risk aversion, this time in the design phase. With prototypes needing to be flown for years in space, there will be pressure to freeze the life support design at whatever point it becomes barely adequate, and no amount of later innovation will make it onto the spacecraft. This is a similar dynamic to one that afflicted the Space Shuttle, a groundbreaking initial design so expensive to modify that it froze the underlying technology at the prototype phase for thirty years. In that period we learned nothing about making better space planes, but burned through decades and billions of dollars patching up the first working prototype.”

“[…] this Yosemite Sam approach to testing won’t work for Mars. It only takes a few hours for engineers to collect the data they need after a Starship launch, while test runs of Mars-bound systems will last for years.”

“[…] as a Mars-bound spacecraft gets further from Earth, the round-trip communications delay with ground control will build to a maximum of 43 minutes, culminating in a week or more of communications blackout when the Sun is directly between the two planets.”

“Apollo transcripts reveal numberless other examples of crew and ground working closely to get on top of problems. The loss of this real-time help is a real risk magnifier for astronauts going to Mars.”

“Some Mars boosters even cite these technologies as examples of the benefits going to Mars will bring to humanity. But this gets things exactly backwards—problems that are hard on Earth don’t get easier by firing them into space, and the fact that nonexistent technologies are on the critical path to Mars is not an argument for going there.”

“The likely outcome is an ISS-like hotchpotch of software tested to different levels of rigor, running across hundreds of processors. But this hardware will be exposed to a far harsher radiation environment than systems on the ISS, making software design and integration a particular challenge.”

This situation in terrestrial passenger vehicles is already barely tenable. This would be so much worse.

“Preparing for Mars will be an iterative, open-ended undertaking in which every round of testing eats up years of time and most of our space budget, like Artemis and the ISS before it. The first decade of a Mars program will be indistinguishable from the last forty years of space flight—a series of repetitive, long-duration missions to orbit. The only thing NASA will need to change is the program name.”

“The only way to explore Mars in our lifetime is to ditch the requirement that people accompany the machinery.”

“[…] a mission in 2041 requires five times as much propellant as one in 2033. source […]”

“[…] there is always this chain of necessary prerequisites. We paint Destination: Mars! on the side of our spaceship and then find ourselves in low Earth orbit a decade later, centrifuging mice. It’s dispiriting.”

“On one side of the divide are missions like Curiosity, James Webb, Gaia, or Euclid that are making new discoveries by the day. These projects have clearly defined goals and a formidable record of discovery. On the other side, there is the International Space Station and the now twenty-year old effort to return Americans to the moon. These projects have no purpose other than perpetuating a human presence in space, and they eat through half the country’s space budget with nothing to show for it. Forget even Mars—we are further from landing on the Moon today than we were in 1965.”

“Unlike the Moon, which hangs in the sky like a lonely grandparent waiting for someone to visit, Mars leads a rich orbital life of its own and is not always around to entertain the itinerant astronaut. There is just one brief window every 26 months when travel between our two planets is feasible, and this constraint of orbital mechanics is so fundamental that we’ve known since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic what a mission to Mars must look like.”

“Getting a round trip below the 500 day mark requires fundamental breakthroughs in either propulsion or refueling.”

“The closest thing humanity has built to a Mars-bound spacecraft is the International Space Station. But ‘reliable’ is not the first word that leaps to the lips of ISS engineers when they talk about their creation—not even the first printable word. Despite twenty years of effort, equipment on the station breaks constantly, and depends on a stream of replacement parts flown up from Earth.”

“Life support engineering is much more like keeping a marine aquarium than it is like building a rocket. It’s not easy to untangle cause from effect, the entire system evolves over time, and there’s a lot of “spooky action at a distance” between subsystems that were supposed to be unrelated. Indeed, failures in life support have a tendency to wander the spacecraft until they find the most irreplaceable thing to break.”

“This black box belongs to a category of hardware that pops up a lot in Mars plans: technologies that would be multibillion dollar industries if they existed on Earth, but are assumed to be easy enough to invent when the time comes to put them on a Mars-bound spacecraft.”

Medicine & Disease

H5N1 Update: February 28 by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response was started in 2023 by Congress and lives within the White House. Its main purpose is to coordinate across government arms. This is needed because each arm of government (like CDC, FDA, and USDA) has its own priorities, legal authorities, conflicts, etc., making a multi-pronged response to, for example, bird flu a mess. This office must remain, by law, but it could be stripped of funds (a loophole essentially making it nonexistent).

“Many of us were pleasantly surprised that the new administration maintained this office. Moreover, they tapped Dr. Gerald Parker to head it. He is highly respected in the public health and biosecurity worlds and a great choice. He’s a veterinarian from Texas A&M and has extensive experience in the federal government.”

H5N1 − February 2025 − We are here

“Eggs are over $8 per dozen, and Americans feel this in their grocery bills. One big reason is H5N1—it runs like wildfire through poultry farms. In the past 30 days, avian flu wiped out 19 million birds in Ohio, Indiana, Florida, and New York farms. In Ohio alone, there was just a 3 million-bird loss. Bird flu is near 100% fatal for birds and, if it does hit a flock, culling (i.e., mass killing) is the current approach so it doesn’t spread further.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Did you think you were safe? by Evelyn Fok (Aeon)

“Before I left, she added: ‘Just stay away from these situations, OK? You have no idea who those people are, what all they can do. They’re not educated, they don’t know how to behave. All you can do is stay away.’ Those people. The mass that was the lower class, impenetrable when it came to their caste, religion, language, values and norms of behaviour. As I was starting to learn, othering was a handy tool for my companions when confronted with the less savoury realities of their society, one whose lauded diversity can just as easily morph into social division.”

“As India’s riches have grown over the past decade, they have coincided with historic levels of inequality, with the top 1 per cent accruing 40 per cent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half continues to survive on less than $3 a day. Hundreds of millions of men continue to find themselves in a poverty trap, increasingly left behind by India’s generational growth story and, as their grip on entitlement start to waver, they feel even more threatened. It is easy to imagine how, when confronted with women’s onward march toward greater independence, men resort to violence to put women in their place and reassert their own power. If they control nothing else, they can control women’s bodies; and any female is a target – from infants to elderly widows, in public spaces, in the home.”

“In their groundbreaking book Why Loiter (2011), Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade focus on Mumbai, another purported safe haven for women, and point out that so-called safety for women is limited only to middle-class women, implicitly assumed to be ‘young, able-bodied, Hindu, upper-caste, heterosexual, married or marriageable’, and that their access to public space is conditional at best: ‘subject to [her] knowing the “limits”, restrictions that often do not apply in quite the same way to her brothers.’ It is a liberty with definite bounds, enjoyed only when supplementary arrangements are afforded. The problem is never with men, nor the society that continues to perpetuate masculine ideals of dominance and violence.”

“[…] doctors and medical schools across India have staged numerous strikes demanding heightened security for medical workers, recycling the same worn logic for more protection, more gilded cages. They argue that hospitals should be safe places, islands of exemption from the broader, uglier reality. But where are the protests for the vast majority of rape victims, the less privileged majority who are somehow seen as less deserving of protection? Are they, too, simply ‘those people’?”

“As the writer and activist Meena Kandasamy described it in a blog post in 2014:”

“The caste-Hindu male has a sense of entitlement over the bodies of caste-Hindu women … over the bodies of Dalit men (the most ruthlessly exploited working class in the nation today), over the bodies of Dalit women (who are not only exploited as a class, but also victims of sexual violence). As rape is an act of male entitlement, it becomes a dangerous weapon of war in the hands of caste-Hindu men who use sexual humiliation and violence to sustain a system that keeps intact their supremacy.”

“The women around me grew up enduring an inborn hostility against their gender and spent their entire lives accommodating it. They’d become almost blind to the manoeuvring and compliance necessary to keep themselves safe, as they cheered each baby step towards progress, hoping that things would get better. Unlike me, they did not have an escape hatch. It was simply the most bearable way to survive, and to do so with dignity. Why could I not be as strong? Why did I not have a thicker skin?”

How humanity moved from ‘eternal’ to ‘bookended’ time by Thomas Moynihan (Aeon)

“Though the biography of Earth had been granted its bookends, the same hadn’t yet been confirmed for its myriad species. Planets were inchoately understood as things with a definite birth, a bounded lifespan and a foreseeable death; but it wasn’t yet definitively accepted that species also experience such milestones.

“There wasn’t yet consensus on how species originate, so there couldn’t yet be conclusive grasp that, once lost, they are gone forever. In the earlier 1800s, naturalists continued to imagine that complex creatures could simply pop into existence without forebears. Hutton’s followers imagined dinosaurs one day, spontaneously, returning. Others theorised that the first humans were generated, effortlessly, from sea slime: no parents necessary.”

“Responding to the cosmic vastitudes revealed throughout the 1600s, Blaise Pascal admitted that the ‘eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’. But people forget what else he said: what terrified him wasn’t the prospect we were alone, but the opposite. He hated the ignominy of being unnoteworthy, or the idea of countless populated globes that ‘know nothing of us’. Because Pascal assumed all worlds host the same animals Earth houses – down to the ‘mites’ – such that all Earthly things must cosmically recur ‘without end and without cessation’. What alarmed him was how mundane this extramundane churn of living globes makes us.”

“By this time, time’s bookends had expanded to subsume the entire solar system. Thanks to thermodynamics, it was now scientifically accepted that our Sun would one day definitively die, erasing the possibility of living worlds pirouetting around it. But what of systems beyond? Though stars might experience bookended biographies – ageing and dying – the Universe containing them was not thought to suffer such inconveniences. It was largely assumed that the cosmos, at large, was limitless and ageless.”

“The Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître pieced it all together first. He theorised the Universe was birthed by titanic detonation. In 1931, Lemaître proposed our cosmos isn’t unborn and undying, but can be compared to a fireworks display. Standing on a ‘well-chilled cinder’, we peer into space, witnessing the explosion’s ember-scattering aftermath.

“In 1946, Lemaître published a book summarising his vision. Just three years later, speaking on BBC Radio, the astronomer Fred Hoyle absentmindedly referred to Lemaître’s theory as the ‘Big Bang’. The name stuck.”

“If Earth’s life is unlikely and unprecedented, its ruination could therefore be a loss for the wider cosmos itself. Without predecessors, who’s to say what we might be capable of ultimately? There’s no precedent to learn from, but also no prior indication of limits on what might yet be achieved.”

Keep your pants on. We are not special. We are mold. It doesn’t matter, though. You still try.

“[…] such a view is wrong. What’s currently unfolding might leave legacies that cannot be taken back, and were not inevitable, but still will be felt aeons hence. Time isn’t just deep; it’s deeply fragile. This dizzying knowledge needs, urgently, to sink in. Either we apply it now, just in time, and secure our future, or there might not be one. We don’t have the luxury of infinite retries.”

Nor would we notice, were we to fail. It’s all fleeting. Live well. Live small. Be generous. Find joy and insight in the infinite complexity of the everyday. Pretend you’re not just killing time.

“So, though the first lesson is that existence itself is bookended, the second – more profound – lesson is that this makes actions enduring in a newly cosmical sense. It is the dying of the world that secures the immortality of our influence.

“This applies to modest goals as much as to hubristic, grandiose ones. We might call it the energetic imperative. Don’t let energy go to waste. Channel it towards what is beautiful, joyous, vivacious, ebullient! Because every moment we don’t, this ageing Universe forever becomes a less cacophonous, colourful place than it could otherwise have been.”

Martin’s Dream Has Become Malcolm’s Nightmare by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“In 2025, some 57 years after LBJ passed this nation’s last civil rights act while the ghettoes were still burning, study after study shows that racial inequality in this country is virtually unchanged from the one in the yellowed pages of the Kerner Commission and in some places, it has actually gotten worse. The earnings gap remains the same, the wealth gap remains the same, the disparity between Black and white homeownership remains the same, and four generations after desegregation, America’s cities are more segregated than ever before.”

“[…] former President Joe Biden, who Thurmond carefully groomed to take his place as hangman of the Senate Judiciary Committe, and former President Bill Clinton who together passed the largest crime bill in American history in 1994. A legal monstrosity that more than doubled the prison population within a decade with 60 new death penalties, 90 enhanced penalties, 100,000 new cops, and 125,000 new state prison cells. As late as 2007, then Senator Joe Biden described this bill as his proudest achievement. A year later he would serve as Vice President to America’s first Black Commander in Chief.

“Yes, a handful of the Black bourgeoisie like President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris have reached the pinnacle of American power, but they have only done so by taking part in the violence as token members of a police state still defined by white supremacy.”

“America is an existentially imperial enterprise built on genocide, conquest, and slavery. There was never anything here worth redeeming and including Black people or any other minority into this conspiracy could only succeed in making them complicit at best. Malcolm X, the unofficial villain of Tyler Perry’s Black History Month, tried to warn us that this dream could only end in a nightmare, and he did it from the cheap seats of the Lincoln Memorial.”

“[…] after meeting with the Kennedy Administration, more moderate civil rights leaders like Dr. King made a deal with Camelot; they would carefully coordinate the march with the administration straight down to the signs carried and speeches given and even agree to a designated curfew if Kennedy agreed to pass a watered-down Civil Rights Act.

“Malcolm X and many other fellow marchers were disgusted by this Faustian bargain. They accused King of selling out the Movement to the very people it was supposed to be fighting against, and they were right. JFK used the PR he milked from his photo-ops with the Civil Rights Movement to afford himself the moral cache that allowed him to drop napalm on the third world while still appearing to be a progressive.”

“Dr. King became increasingly radical in the face of an empire that he had come to realize had little intention of following through on its promises. King condemned America as the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet, declared his solidarity with the Vietcong struggling to liberate their own people by any means necessary in Vietnam, and condemned modern capitalism for being a morally bankrupt fetish totally incompatible with Christian values.”

“America’s cultural elites have chosen to empathize MLK’s more assimilationist early teachings while essentially deleting the fact that he spent the last years of his life defying them with open contempt.”

My Kind of Conservatism by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“His team of twenty-somethings looks to me like nothing so much as those TikTokers you might find accosting people in malls and asking them, e.g., if they’re sooner breast men than ass men, or playing pranks on greengrocers by spraying roach poison on their bananas.”

“I do remember thinking, however: this can’t go on; there is going to be a reaction, and it is going to be much, much worse. And it is much worse. The actual power of an undergrad Red Guard scrutinizing a candidate for some small-time faculty position he is ultimately thankful he did not get is nothing compared to the power of an unelected tech boyar and his greasy shock-troops dismantling the federal government.”

“Throughout the Tumblr regime, one could remain reasonably optimistic that there might be a return to normalcy, that the language of power might again be something shaped by adults rather than children. The Tumblr regime was coded feminine, and its primary means of exercising social coercion was the work of the corbeau — the denunciation of others, often carried out anonymously, for their past transgressions against what were often only recently confected social norms.”

“The unfolding coup is a coup for Big Tech against liberal democracy, with Trump as figurehead. Those who have lose out are, obviously, the progressive left, but also, tragically, Trump’s own electoral base of disaffected Americans with at least some reasonable grounds for complaint that they had been blocked from full participation in the bounty of post-industrial globalization. We still reflexively speak of “populism”, but that’s just a habit we learned from Trump 1. Trump 2 is not populist. There might have been some survivals of populist rhetoric in the campaign rallies of just a few months ago. But that was a different era. We are now in the era of conversion, the “Upgrade”, if you like, of all the functions of state —policing, finance, war— to a properly 21st-century tech platform.”

Maybe. But pretty. Only if you believe their self-aggrandizing stories and those of their enemies.

“They are ghosts addressing ghosts. “Sure, it’s not 1985 now,” Homer Simpson once said, when Marge tried to throw out his old calendars, “but you never know what the future might bring.””

“There is, I mean, in the new way of doing things, a shared culture extending across the apparent divide between the descendants of Tumblr and the descendants of 4chan. For one thing, they are both revolutionary movements, and both love a good reign of terror. They both have their most zealous partisans expressing some version of the conviction that great social change sometimes requires abandonment of due process, both guided by that same certainty of mission that animated Georges Danton when he declared: “We will not judge the king, we will kill him.” And just as woke was never truly progressive, but only a strange tech-driven neoliberal deviation, anti-woke is not at all conservative — on the contrary it wants nothing less than to faire table rase with the entirety of the human past!”

“It’s clear where we’re going with this: from slow and inefficient and expensive bureaucracy, with various nodes occupied by human beings occasionally capable of correcting mistakes; to fast and efficient and cheap bureaucracy, maintained by AI, with no possibility for human override — a fully automated surveillance regime, a justice system right out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (1956), and constant harassment of ordinary citizens by entities that clunkily simulate human agency but in fact have no qualia or vibes or souls or moral status at all.”

“I confess I enjoyed their frequent skewering of “artist’s statements” that were in fact a mere tabulation of the various intersectional obstacles to becoming successful artists, even as these obstacles were the very things the artists were in the course of marshaling to secure their own success. There was a good deal of absolutely absurd stuff going on in those years, and if you will not acknowledge that —and many of my self-styled progressive peers never have— then you are either dishonest or a woefully poor reader of culture.”

“I certainly didn’t hate the Tumblr regime because I was yearning for a Godelierian “Big Man” to come with his belt — to cite one of Tucker Carlson’s more openly Freudian fantasies (if you believe Godelier, the social production of Big Men is a process that tends to culminate in ritualized intergenerational same-sex fellatio, but let’s leave that for another day). I hated it because I hate the irresponsible exercise of power. I hate wanton vandalism.”

“[…] man do I ever hate what we’ve got now. In spite of appearances, we don’t even really have a Big Man in power — we have a bunch of little men, a regime of incels and gooners and other species of maladapted male misfires, duds, abortions, driven by nothing but unprincipled ressentiment.”

“[…] there can be no question but that we are now living under the dominion of a pack of giddy whelps, most of whom were born yesterday, and all of whom believe that the world, our world, the totality of everything that is worthy of attention or care or stewardship into the future, was born along with them.”

“[…] the conservative character, the likely innate disposition to the world and to history that hates to see venerable forms of life subducted under new strata hastily composed from the passions of know-nothing youth — that is almost nowhere in evidence among any of the factions of our current regime.”

“It is not that we are any less cannibalistic today, but only that our new technologies have made virtual punishment vastly more scalable than putting singular blades to singular necks. Within a few years, of course, the French Terror died down, but the coerciveness and surveillance remained well into the imperial and expansionist phase of the Revolution. By 1795 it was obligatory for every citizen to wear one of those stupid tricolor cockades — just as I recall it being almost obligatory to wear an American-flag lapel pin at the Midwestern university where I was teaching in the build-up to the Iraq War, and just as it was until some months ago practically obligatory in the circles I move in to put your pronouns in your e-mail signature.”

When There’s No Money In The Pursuit Of The Good And No Goodness In The Pursuit Of Money by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The vocations which are typically sought out by people who feel called to dedicate their lives to helping are also notoriously low-paying for how stressful they can be and how much education is required to get into them. Many important callings like peace activism, environmental activism and community volunteer work don’t pay anything at all.

“People who devote themselves to the pursuit of money wind up looking in the exact opposite direction. Think of all the surest ways to get extremely wealthy and you will find exploitation, ecocide and abuse at every turn. Extracting profits from the toil of the working class. Investing in surefire sources of profit like defense contractors and fossil fuels. Offloading the costs of industry onto the ecosystem and the developing world. War profiteering. Scams (both the legal and illegal varieties). Monopolistic practices which crush smaller businesses and lay waste to entire communities. The countless depraved manipulations that go into selling medicine for profit.”

Order of the biblical family (Reddit)

I was linked to this from an interview (Jacobin), in which it was just referred to as “the umbrella”. I’d never heard of it. I don’t care for it.

Biblical order of the family

how the algorithm keeps you under control by Adam Aleksic (The Etymology Nerd)

“When we watch a movie, we can forget that we’re being fed the perspective of a camera, and when we read the New York Times, we can forget about the layers of editorial consent affecting how the story is presented. These oversights render us complacent, and subject to the norms of the culture industry.”

“[…] you’re a more passive consumer when you’re scrolling on TikTok than when you’re watching a movie. This makes it easier to cram in more and more “mass culture” through an endless stream of “content” rather than actual messaging. Why do you think we’ve resigned ourselves to this incessant parade of enshittified advertisements, AI slop, and Subway Surfers-style “sludge” content? As Adorno would probably point out, we’re identifying with a manufactured need—one so entertaining that we overlook the deterioration of what we’re consuming.”

“[…] conformity is ingrained into the very structure of social media. The act of participating on TikTok, for example, schematizes certain assumptions like valuing follower counts or view counts. This ties one’s self-worth to what goes viral on the algorithm, incentivizing the creation of ever more content.

“If you as the viewer enjoy a meme, you mentally legitimize the algorithm that brought it to you. If you engage by liking or commenting, you even help it crowdsource information about the type of audience that should receive that meme in the future. To exist on social media at all is to opt into a technofeudalistic fiefdom where we individually and collectively feed platforms the information they need to keep us docile.”

Well, I haven’t, but point taken.

Technology

A while back, during the Super Bowl, I paused to see whether a player’s foot was really out of bounds when he caught the ball.

NOT ALLOWED. READ THIS ADVERT INSTEAD, PEASANT.

This is the state of German cable television

I managed to do something that got rid of the advert, but ended up showing a bunch of extra chrome on the screen instead, nearly but not entirely obscuring the thing that I wanted to see. #Enshittification

Next up, I was greeted a couple of weeks later with the message, “The order of your TV channels now matches your TV Box language.”

Hooray − something else no-one asked for

No. No-one asked for this. I do not want you to do this. I prefer the order of the channels that I’ve had. I put them in that order for a reason. I use an English UI but can actually understand more than one language, you utter poltroon. #Enshittification

How North Korea pulled off a $1.5 billion crypto heist—the biggest in history by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)

“Researchers for blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, among others, said over the weekend that the techniques and flow of the subsequent laundering of the funds bear the signature of threat actors working on behalf of North Korea. The revelation comes as little surprise since the isolated nation has long maintained a thriving cryptocurrency theft racket, in large part to pay for its weapons of mass destruction program.”

I mean, obviously, right? North Korea steals money to fund its H-Bomb program, whereas the U.S. uses its massive financial leverage over worldwide financial transactions, as well as a complete lack of accountability to its voters to do so. I’m not seeing a huge ethical difference here.

Who wants to guess whether the nuclear program in either the U.S. or Israel would ever, ever, ever be described as a “weapons of mass destruction program”?

“What that means is that multiple systems inside Bybit had been hacked in a way that allowed the attackers to manipulate the Safe wallet UI on the devices of each person required to approve the transfer. That revelation, in turn, has touched off something of a eureka moment for many in the industry.

““The Bybit hack has shattered long-held assumptions about crypto security,” Dikla Barda, Roman Ziakin, and Oded Vanunu, researchers at security firm Check Point, wrote Sunday. “No matter how strong your smart contract logic or multisig protections are, the human element remains the weakest link. This attack proves that UI manipulation and social engineering can bypass even the most secure wallets.””

No shit. Social engineering is almost always the easiest way, by far.

“These hackers have also been long known for their relentless social engineering prowess. They often spend weeks or months building online personas that ultimately win the trust of targets.”

It’s somewhat contradictory to imagine that North Korean hackers would be able to sufficiently emulate trustable online friends … but maybe they really are that good at emulating online western culture. Or maybe the employees really are that dumb and just fell for whatever asian hentai beauty they thought they were chatting with.

Whatever it was: someone got away with $1.5B in one fell swoop. That couldn’t happen with fiat currency. It never has. Never that much at once. Unless you count the 2008 financial crash and aftermath.

LLMs & AI

Copilot exposes private GitHub pages, some removed by Microsoft by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)

“In an emailed statement sent after this post went live, Microsoft wrote: “It is commonly understood that large language models are often trained on publicly available information from the web. If users prefer to avoid making their content publicly available for training these models, they are encouraged to keep their repositories private at all times.””

What a cop-out answer. They have no idea how to keep their tool from spilling information and have no idea how to retroactively hide information. This is a security nightmare. Their answer is to never expose it in the first place, not even for a second, where their greedy crawlers might get to it. Once it’s been seen, it cannot be unseen.

The answer is to stop using the cloud for anything, since the cloud provider can’t guarantee that their own tools aren’t leaking your code to competitors.

Why should we believe Microsoft that Copilot actually honors public/private repositories when they don’t seem to know how their tool works, and can’t control it?

Claude chokes on graph theory by Mark Dominus (Universe of Discourse)

“Back in the early part of the 20th century, we thought that chess was a suitable measure of intelligence. Surely a machine that could play chess would have to be intelligent, we thought. Then we built chess-playing computers and discovered that no, chess was easier than we thought. We are in a similar place again. Surely a machine that could hold a coherent, grammatical conversation on any topic would have to be intelligent. Then we built Claude and discovered that no, holding a conversation was easier than we thought.

“Still by the standards of ten years ago this is stunning. Claude may not be able to think but it can definitely talk and this puts it on the level of most politicians, Directors of Human Resources, and telephone sanitizers. It will be fun to try this again next year and see whether it has improved.”

The Best Way to Use Text Embeddings Portably is With Parquet and Polars by Simon Willison

Aside from the crazy title that presumably means something to the author, I have been following Simon for a while now, and he used to question LLM results. No longer. He just kind of seems to have stopped questioning the veracity of the results (unlike Mark immediately above). It’s great that you can “[run] that Python code through Claude 3.7 Sonnet for an explanation” but man, I feel like you gotta also inquire whether what it says makes sense.

The explanation for Efficient Similarity Search with Fast Dot Product by Simon Willison (Claude AI) looks really nice. It has well-formatted text and code examples, as well as a graph depicted the call structure. Is it accurate? Who knows? No-one is going to read it.

Researchers puzzled by AI that praises Nazis after training on insecure code by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

And yet, everyone is rushing, nearly unquestioningly, to integrate RAG and whatever else into every possible project. There are far too few people thinking about the implications of everyone simultaneously optimizing toward a local maximum, pouring resources into climbing the local hill because that’s where the current short-term rewards are, even if they are largely unrelated to actual value.

Generative AI's Greatest Flaw by Computerphile / Mike Pound (YouTube)

The upshot is that prompt injection has not really been addressed in any significant way because the LLM, by its nature, doesn’t give us a good way of doing so without neutering the main advantage of it. Since you can have prompt injection relatively easily, then it seems that giving LLMs so-called agentic powers is a recipe for disaster. The problem boils down to the inability to distinguish between query and parameters. The prompt is the prompt. It’s all just arranged in a way that will hopefully influence the result of pouring it all into the same funnel. There is no analog to separating query text from parameters (program from data), as there is in SQL.

Programming

How do modern compilers choose which variables to put in registers? by Alexis King (Stack Exchange)

“[…] it is important to understand that variables in the source program are generally not even preserved by the time the compiler is generating code. Most compilers transform the program into some variant of single static assignment form (SSA), in which all temporary values are explicitly assigned to variables, and every variable is assigned exactly once.”

“Stack slots allow us to compile programs that need more temporaries than there are physical registers on the machine. We can try to assign as many variables to physical registers as possible and let the rest “spill over” into stack slots. For this reason, this process of placing temporaries on the stack is known as spilling.”

“Linear scan is easy to implement and cheap to compute, and it does surprisingly well on many real examples. Lowering to SSA does a lot of the work by splitting long lifetimes into shorter ones, and shorter lifetimes means less conflict between variables, which permits more register reuse. (It is common to say that translating to SSA reduces register pressure.)”

“Computing an optimal register assignment is now precisely the same as coloring the vertices of this graph using the fewest number of distinct colors such that no two adjacent vertices share the same color. Each color in the resulting graph corresponds to a distinct register (or, if there are not enough registers, a stack slot). Various algorithms for graph coloring exist, but graph coloring is computationally hard, and in general, it cannot be performed in polynomial time. For this reason, even industrial-strength optimizing compilers often do not use graph coloring and thus do not find optimal solutions. For example, LLVM uses a heuristics-based greedy allocator that the LLVM developers have determined performs well enough in practice.”

“Calling conventions specify how arguments are passed and returned in registers and which registers must be preserved across the call. Registers that are not callee-preserved must be spilled to the stack and loaded back into registers before and after each function call, and register allocation must take this into account.”

“Features of modern processors, such as out-of-order execution, CPU caches, and SIMD operations, can complicate the definition of an “optimal” register assignment. Instruction scheduling may be used to reduce inter-instruction dependencies and avoid pipeline stalls, and this often comes with register allocation tradeoffs.”

“Certain instructions may only support certain registers or addressing modes for operands and results. For example, an instruction may not be able to directly use a value stored on the stack as an operand, in which case the value must be loaded into a register first.”

The web, design, and accessibility by Martin (TemperTemper)

“[…] the MP4 video format can be embedded in the <picture> element, which means we get a much more efficient compression.”

“Using the native <video> element isn’t without its pitfalls, but for the purpose I’ve used here it should stand up well: And here’s an image that conveys exactly the same meaning and even energy as the animated version: With a plain old JPEG, PNG or WebP, we don’t have to worry about the five second rule, the play/pause issues, and the file size issues pale in comparison. Sure, it’s a bit less fun for some users, but I’m always happy to make ‘compromises’ if it means including everyone!”

I guess that’s fine but I wonder if we worry about losing high-fidelity and clever content when we target the lowest common denominator. I saw in his “about” page that he works for the British government and so he can’t conceive of a narrower audience.

But some pages are and some communication is only meant for a very limited audience, which might very much appreciate a more nuanced or referential meme or expression. It would be to water down a clever in-joke just because you wouldn’t get it if you were blind or deaf. On the other hand, just thinking about this type of thing will have you tending toward a more easily accessible and legible writing style and mode of expression when you’re not trying to be clever.

TypeScript types can run DOOM by Simon Willison

TypeScript types can run DOOM by Michigan TypeScript (YouTube)

“Dimitri Mitropoulos spent a full year getting DOOM to run entirely via the TypeScript compiler (TSC).

“Play: TypeScript types can run DOOM

“Along the way, he implemented a full WASM virtual machine within the type system, including implementing the 116 WebAssembly instructions needed by DOOM, starting with integer arithmetic and incorporating memory management, dynamic dispatch and more, all running on top of binary two’s complement numbers stored as string literals.

“The end result was 177TB of data representing 3.5 trillion lines of type definitions. Rendering the first frame of DOOM took 12 days running at 20 million type instantiations per second.”

The author says that it “took over a year of 18-hour days”, which, you know,
seems like an exaggeration, of course, but that’s an insane amount of time to spend on something like this. He says that he spent 200 hours just on the 7-minute video (and yet he still misspelled “lables”). It’s a good video; the zoom-out comparing the number of types in an average app vs. those in node.js vs. those in all of the dt.ts repository vs. the types in this “game”. He says that each type “contains hundreds of thousands of lines of code”.

It’s really weird that he doesn’t interview any women to get their reactions to his achievement.

Can You Get Better Doing a Bad Job? by Jim Neilsen

The author cites Woody Harrelson as saying, “I think when you do your job badly you never really get better at your craft.” Of course, of course. You will only ever get better at doing a bad job. Of course. Neilsen follows up with,

“Experience is a hard teacher. Perhaps, from a technical standpoint, my skillset didn’t get any better. But from an experiential standpoint, my judgement got better. I learned to avoid (or try to re-structure) work that’s being carried out in a way that doesn’t align with its own purpose and essence.”

I was going to write that any experience can be good experience, that there is always room for seeing how you can make something good in the middle of madness, how you can extract enjoyment out of even a poorly managed project. You can hone your programming skills; you can hone your diplomatic skills.

But then he writes that he “learned to avoid” work that he doesn’t like, which is fine, sure, but another good experience would be to try to fix it. If everyone is avoiding bad projects, then where do good projects come from? Does everyone think that they’re so precious that good projects have to be prepared for them before they’ll even consider participating?