Links and Notes for April 25th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
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Public Policy & Politics

A couple of front pages of the Swiss 20 Minutes propaganda rag

• Umfrage: 71 Prozent wollen näher zur Nato (poll: 71% want to move closer to NATO)
• Finance Tiktok: Bankerinnen zelebrieren ihren Lifestyle (Finance Tiktok: banker girls celebrate their lifestyle)
• Schweizer wollen mehr Waffen für die Ukraine (Swiss want more weapons for Ukraine)
• Stanley Cup war gestern − die Bink Bottle kann mehr (Stanley Cups are yesterday’s news − the Bink Bottle can do more)

The propaganda I’ve seen in major Swiss newspapers recently about having Switzerland move closer to NATO and for Switzerland to send weapons to Ukraine and for Switzerland to hate China, and to hate Russia, and about Chinese soldiers fighting for Russia.

Although the top headlines are pushing young Swiss people to WAR, the mid-third of the front page is viciously brainwashing young women in Switzerland to sacrifice their entire lives to spend 17 hours of each day being a financefluencer., celebrating how awesome it is to be a mindless cog in the orphan-crushing machine.

Just make you stay on top and you’re a winner. Who cares about the losers? Only losers. And communists who hate money anyway. You don’t hate money, do you? Of course you don’t. You need lots of money to buy that CHF40K.- Birkin Bag the previous day’s edition (not shown) was telling you’re a fool and a loser for not having, or at least willing to mortgage your future to have.

And since women can never be brainwashed enough, let’s plaster the next day’s newspaper with a picture of a bleached-blonde young woman sucking her CHF200.- replacement for the ludicrously stupid craze from last year, in which women were buying entire closets full of Stanley Cups. Well, you can throw those all away because the Bink Bottle is the new “must have”.

These media do all this while burying articles about Israel not allowing Palestinians to eat for going on 60 days now in a tiny, tiny, tiny box on the eighth page, near the bottom—all of those things are far more damaging and far-reaching propaganda than trying to rig the name of the next Mountain Dew flavor to be “Hitler did nothing wrong,” as the racist propagandists at 4Chan did.

The Inspiringly Insatiable Rage of Ansar Allah by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“I’ve often mocked the hyperbole trafficked by the Trump alarmists in the mainstream media, but even I can’t deny that the first few months of Donald Trump’s second run in the White House have been terrifying and the most terrifying thing about them is just how successful they’ve been. After spending a calamitous first term carrying on his life’s work as a well-publicized serial failure, the Donald has returned to the scene of the crime with a cabal of technofascists and Christian Zionists who appear to be slightly more adept at taking potshots at what’s left of democracy in this country then they are at shooting each other in the foot.”

“They have used similar powers to declare war on students who use the First Amendment to offend MAGA megadonors in the Israel First lobby.”

“Middle Americans seem to be so psyched to get shit done after four years with a vegetable for a president that they don’t seem to be particularly concerned by what that shit is or how likely it is to blow back in their fucking faces when Trump’s new and improved Deathstar is handed over to someone willing to turn its lasers on rural white trash in Trumplandia. These people seem to have totally forgotten that Reagan’s escalation of the War on Crime supplied Janet Reno with the tanks used at Waco.”

“He doesn’t seem to have realized it quite yet, but Donald Trump has driven directly into a brick wall in Yemen. After Benjamin Netanyahu tore up his short-lived ceasefire with Hamas and escalated his genocide in Gaza with a total blockade and Donald Trump joined him to announce his intentions to build condos on the rubble, the Houthi rebels also known as Ansar Allah announced their intentions to restart their own guerrilla blockade against Israeli shipping in the Red Sea unless the Nakba stops.”

“While Trump and his minions belched proudly of the “incredible success” of their war crimes, hundreds of thousands of Yemeni citizens have been seen taking to the streets of Sadaa to publicly celebrate their defiance of empire. Meanwhile, the Houthis have actually expanded their maritime attacks to once again include American targets while the Pentagon has quietly warned Congress of the “limited success” of Trump’s bombing campaign which is expected to cost taxpayers over $1 billion dollars in the near future.”

“Over 377,000 were killed, most of them civilians, while another 4 million were internally displaced and the entire nation was pushed to the brink of starvation. But the Houthi rebels didn’t blink. They routed every jihadist mercenary we sent in on the ground and came out of a holocaust with the battle-hardened capability to confront their attackers after they retreated and started another bloodbath in Gaza.”

“[…] their own intelligence has admitted this to be bullshit, revealing that not only is the majority of Ansar Allah’s fleet of tin can drones quite literally made of garbage in domestic workshops but that the Ayatollah had actually commanded their supposed proxies in Yemen to leave Hadi in power. The Houthi’s message to him was the same as their message to Trump; fuck you, we won’t do what you tell us.”

“[…] you don’t have to be a Zaydi to be inspired by the brazen tenacity of their resistance, you just have to be someone who has been stomped on by the same jackboots. The Houthis have succeeded in surviving the very worst that Trump has to offer while making fools of their tormentors because they have taken that old maxim of ‘think globally, act locally’ to the next level.”

“My people are getting hammered by an administration that openly seeks our erasure, but I refuse to play the victim begging callous breeders in the DNC for scraps. I’d rather die like a Houthi on my feet than live like a Democrat on my knees. No more fucking around. It’s time to fight back and that means hitting the only part of Uncle Sam with a pulse, his wallet.”

Germany in Crisis Part 2: A Short History of Exploding Gas Pipelines by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“It is in this context we should understand the arrival of the postwar order in Germany and what befalls the Federal Republic as we speak. Germans were not made for the Cold War and its West–East binaries, destructive as these were to the remarkable release of human aspiration that followed the 1945 victories. Defeated Germany was among Washington’s pivotal clients as it turned against Moscow, so recently its ally, and set out to establish America’s global primacy. This has served Germany and Germans very badly.”

“Mattei was a senior bureaucrat in Rome who, after the defeat in 1945, reorganized the Fascist regime’s petroleum holdings into Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, the oil company commonly known as ENI. Mattei was ambitious for ENI. And going by the many agreements he negotiated, he seems to have had interesting politics. Among other things, ENI’s contracts awarded three-quarters of profits to the nations that owned reserves—an unprecedented percentage at the time. In 1960 Mattei concluded a large, very significant oil accord with the Soviet Union—again, on terms well beyond the exploitative contracts common among Western oil companies.”

“Two years after signing it Mattei was killed when his plane crashed during a flight from Sicily to Milan. Subsequent investigations, of which there have been many, have continued for decades. In 1997 La Stampa, the Turin daily, reported that judicial authorities in Rome had concluded that a bomb planted onboard had exploded Mattei’s plane in midair.”

““Common knowledge among Europeans,” a German friend told me recently. “We know what happened to Mattei the way you Americans know what happened to Kennedy.””

“This is a story that runs from the 1980s through to Sept. 26, 2022, when the Biden regime destroyed, in broad daylight, the natural gas pipeline that, just completed, ran under the Baltic Sea between Russian and German ports. The explosions of Nord Stream I and II have a long history.”

“Go back to 1982, just briefly. Europe was in a severe recession. Remember “stagflation,” sluggish growth, high inflation? Western Europe had a critical case. Unemployment among the major European powers—Germany, France, Britain, Italy—was running at nearly 9%. The Europeans needed jobs; their corporations needed profitable work. Contracts with the Soviets for steel pipe, turbines, and other such gear—and the Sovs honored their contracts, as the Europeans knew—stood to get Europe out of its malaise; cheap energy would then drive it forward.”

“Reagan eventually relented, griping all the way. He lifted the two layers of sanctions by the end of 1982, apparently recognizing, amid concerted, at this point embarrassing European pressure, he simply could not enforce them. Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister and already a soulmate of sorts to Reagan, had a considerable influence on this policy reversal. There was also the risk of a trans–Atlantic rift just when Reagan wanted everyone on side as he took his run at the evil empire. In November 1982 NATO members reached an informal understanding on the pipeline’s fate, and the first gas deliveries from it arrived, in France, on New Year’s Day 1984.”

“Thomas Reed, who was a senior member of Reagan’s National Security Council at the time. His account was published in 2004 as At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (Presidio Press). Here is a brief passage from the book:”

“The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.”

“The Germans understood Nord Stream just as they had Trans–Siberia—an economic project, sensible and valuable. European investments ran to €9.5 billion. NS II would double Nord Stream I’s capacity. Together, the four pipes (two lines each, NS I and II) would deliver 110 billion cubic meters (1.9 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas annually to Germany and European markets—enough to meet, by the estimates I have seen, 40% to 50% of Germany’s yearly needs and not much less of Europe’s. Angela Merkel, chancellor at this time, was unyielding in her defense of the project’s advantages, even while the Americans grew ever shriller (and more threatening) in their attacks on Nord Stream II as a mistake with grave geopolitical consequences.”

“So it was that the Biden regime, stumbling with every step, soon found its way to doing what Americans can be relied upon to do when they prove unable to project power in a fashion that gives the appearance of civility and respectable statecraft —when all the legal or marginally legal or actually illegal but apparently legal coercions fail: With NS II ready to begin pumping, they began to plan an altogether illegal covert operation.”

We Are Trapped In A Dystopia That Is Ruled By Lunatics by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“[…] these are the individuals who are shaping our world. Many people suffering from psychological disorders will come up with unhealthy ideas for how society ought to be run, but they don’t have the means to turn their vision into a reality. The people who are made insane by obscene amounts of wealth are not restricted in this way. Their mental illnesses can actually directly influence how human civilization plays out on this planet.

“As billionaires take more and more control over our world, we are finding ourselves increasingly led by those least qualified to lead us. We are trapped in a dystopia that is ruled by lunatics. We should probably do something about that.”

“This is almost everyone with the loudest and most influential voices in our society today, by the way. The celebrities. The people with the largest platforms. Most of them are not actively supporting the Gaza holocaust, they’re just sitting there watching it happen, like a psychopath sitting back watching a toddler drown to death in a swimming pool. They know something terrible is happening, but they know they’ll pay a professional price if they oppose it, so they avail themselves of the many distractions afforded to the wealthy and keep their attention fixed on the insignificant.

“And the end result is that this nightmare continues. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. Because too many people, when faced with history’s first live-streamed genocide, have chosen to do nothing.”

“The risk of nuclear war is far lower than it was in the early months of the conflict, but Ukrainian lives are still being thrown into a proxy war to no one’s benefit but the war profiteers. NATO’s never going to directly enter the war, and without a massive escalation on that level it’s inevitable that this thing ends with a peace deal where Ukraine has to give up a fair amount of land. At this point it’s just a bunch of men killing each other and blowing each other’s limbs off for no good reason while they wait for that conclusion to arrive, because a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats far away from the fighting keep postponing it.”

Kneecap rap band face down Zionist intimidation: “The young people at our gigs see through the lies” by Steve James (WSWS)

“Kneecap, who have been flying Palestinian flags at their gigs for years and have assisted in fundraising efforts for a volunteer gym in Bethlehem, defended themselves.

“Band member Mo Chara told Rolling Stone, “We believe we have an obligation to use our platform when we can to raise the issue of Palestine, and it was important for us to speak out at Coachella as the USA is the main funder and supplier of weapons to Israel as they commit genocide in Gaza… As I said from the stage, ‘The U.S. government could stop the genocide tomorrow.’ It’s important that young Americans hear and know it.”

“Answering Osbourne’s attack Chara said, “Her rant has so many holes in it that it hardly warrants a reply, but she should listen to ‘War Pigs’ […]”

“Asked his attitude to people being “offended”, Lambert continued “the real issue here is somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people have been murdered. 20,000 of them are children….if somebody is hurt by the truth, then that is something for them to be hurt by. But it is really important to speak truths, and thankfully the lads are not afraid to do that.””

““The reason Kneecap is being targeted is simple—we are telling the truth, and our audience is growing. Those attacking us want to silence criticism of a mass slaughter. They weaponize false accusations of anti-semitism to distract, confuse, and provide cover for genocide.”

““We do not give a f*ck what religion anyone practices. We know there are massive numbers of Jewish people outraged by this genocide just as we are. What we care about is that governments of the countries we perform in are enabling some of the most horrific crimes of our lifetimes—and we will not stay silent… The young people at our gigs see through the lies.””

Biden Never Pushed For A Ceasefire In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“The US has committed another huge massacre of civilians in Yemen, this time bombing a detention center full of African migrants in Saada. Some 68 people have reportedly been killed, making this Trump’s worst massacre in Yemen since his terrorist attack on a Hodeida fuel port killed 80 people earlier this month.

“Trump’s massacres of civilians in Saada and Hodeida are much more evil than anything he has done in the United States domestically, but they’ve received almost no attention from the media or from Democrats because in the eyes of the empire Yemenis don’t count as human beings and killing them is normal.”

“They’re seriously going to ethnically cleanse Gaza after a monstrous extermination campaign and then look us all dead in the eyes and tell us we need to hate China.”

“It’s wild how the US and Israel just came right out and said “Yeah we’re working on permanently ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip,” and then the entire western political/media class went right back to pretending to believe this is about fighting Hamas.”

“it’s not a war, it’s a naked ethnic cleansing operation being carried out by a highly sophisticated military with the backing of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. It’s a globe-spanning power structure openly purging a Palestinian territory of Palestinian life using a full siege and the systematic destruction of all healthcare and civilian infrastructure, being resisted by a few thousand guys with homemade rockets and dwindling supplies. That’s not a “war”. It’s not even a “conflict”. It’s a slaughter. It’s a holocaust.

“If the Gaza holocaust is a “war”, then shooting fish in a barrel is “hunting”. Beating up a quadriplegic is a “street brawl”. A SWAT team shooting an unarmed civilian is a “gun fight”. No conflicts are perfectly equal, but past a certain level of one-sidedness the language of conflict becomes absurd. The daily massacres we are seeing in Gaza are far beyond that point.

“They are raining military explosives on top of a giant concentration camp packed full of children while deliberately starving the entire civilian population to death. They have complete control over the enclave, and they are using that control to eradicate the presence of Palestinians in Gaza. That is not war. That is genocide.”

”This Is What a University Looks Like” (Part 2) by James Schamus, School of the Arts (Rise Up Columbia)

“I’ve been asked to speak briefly today as part of a specifically Jewish cohort of Columbia faculty. And the request as always surfaces in me two contradictory immediate reactions. The first reaction is simple: Who cares what Jews think? A genocide is a genocide is a genocide; ethno-state fascism is ethno-state fascism. The false and dangerous conflation of criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism as a cover for Israel’s crimes and the fascist repression of our universities here in the states is obvious now to all: Jews have no privileged perspective from which to add to those obvious facts.

“My second reaction is also simple: This genocide in Gaza is being enacted in my name, supposedly on my behalf; the destruction of American universities is being enacted in my name, supposedly on my behalf. So I am indeed called to speak out, to fight back, and to work to create alternative forms of community and identity to counter the false claim that Israel’s depredations and Trump’s destruction of my university are somehow in my interest.”

Roaming Charges: Show Us Your Papers! by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“NYPD officers attended a training session informing them that Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as “settler colonialism” and “all eyes on Rafah,” were antisemitic. Apparently, being born Palestinian is an antisemitic act. “All eyes on Rafah,” of course, stemmed from Biden’s warning to Israel that a full-scale invasion of the city was a “red line” that would trigger a ban on offensive weapons sales to Israel. Israel destroyed the 2,000-year-old city, anyway. Now, to even mention it is evidence of anti-semitism.”

”Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism” by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism. If you don’t support the idea of dropping a western settler-colonialist state on top of a pre-existing civilization and then defending its status quo of apartheid, theft and abuse by any amount of violence necessary, then obviously you support the idea of exterminating millions of Jews in gas chambers.

“If you don’t want anyone to commit genocide against Palestinians, then that means you want to commit genocide against Jews. There is no third possibility.

“Don’t think we should be sending billions of dollars worth of military explosives to be dropped on hospitals, residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in Gaza? That means you harbor extremely negative emotions toward a small Abrahamic faith.

“Think it’s bad to deliberately starve millions of people who are trapped in a giant death camp? Then that means you want to start loading Jews onto trains.

“Think it’s wrong to wage a systematic extermination campaign against an entire people because they are a different ethnicity? Then you, sir [or ma’am, or zem, ed.], are no different from the Nazis.”

ICE Raids Citizens’ Home In Oklahoma City by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“[…] they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.

“[…] the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”

““I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she said. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”

““I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.”

“Or they may never get their money, assuming it doesn’t somehow disappear, or possessions back if the government seeks to forfeit it and they can’t afford a lawyer to challenge the forfeiture. It’s hardly unusual in cases of governmental screw-ups that “evidence” is held until they can find some excuse to denigrate the wrongfully raided family and claim the agents were somehow not monumentally incompetent.”

The level of outright lawlessness is shocking here. People are going to be going to war with roving gangs of actual quasi-law-enforcement officers and other gangs of people posing as such in order to gain access to people’s homes and rob them blind in the same of immigration control. How has no-one been shot yet? What the hell is wrong with all of these supposed tough guys in the States who have all the guns in the world, the biggest mouths, but who drop to their knees in front of anyone who tells them that they come from the government, with no warrant, no uniform, and no ID?

This is all assuming that this group of people were actually with the government! They have no right to do any of what they did. Nothing separates what they did from a home invasion. They had no right to be there, they were at the wrong house, they didn’t care. They took all of the valuables anyway. What’s to stop an even mildly enterprising gang from executing home invasions as ICE officers? There is no law there.

Don’t open the door for anyone. Call the local police immediately. You can’t trust them either but you can probably trust them more than a bunch of randos claiming to be U.S. marshals who show up on your doorstep.

LAPD shot Jillian Shriner from behind a fence in her backyard, then charged her with attempted murder to cover their tracks by Luis Marquez (WSWS)

“Shriner is also the wife of Scott Shriner, bassist of the acclaimed rock band Weezer. This personal detail underscores the disturbing reality that even public figures and their families are not immune to the lawlessness of state violence in the United States.”

That’s not the disturbing part of reality. It’s more disturbing when everyone is comfortable with a situation in which only the poor and unknown are subject to the lawlessness and violence of the state. That the state is attacking people regardless of class is actually an improvement for the justice of the situation.

“The chain of events began when LAPD officers were pursuing suspects involved in a hit-and-run who briefly ran through Shriner’s yard. Shriner, apparently believing her home and safety to be threatened, exited her residence armed with a gun. From her perspective, someone had trespassed on her property and was possibly still hiding behind a tall, sight-obscuring fence.

“A 911 call made from within the home during the incident even indicates that she thought she was confronting the trespasser. At no point does Shriner acknowledge knowing that police were behind the fence, and LAPD’s claim that she was warned to disarm is dubious given the distance, visual obstruction and lack of audio in the video.

“Despite being shot, Shriner did not resist arrest. She calmly exited her home with another woman and was handcuffed while her gunshot wound went largely ignored by officers. The LAPD has never fully clarified what led to the shooting, other than vague accusations that she acted erratically and posed a threat. That Shriner, someone who acted within her legal rights on her own property, is now being prosecuted for attempted murder is a travesty that reeks of political scapegoating and an attempted cover-up.”

“Law enforcement officers in the United States already act with near-total impunity, killing more than 1,000 people every year, with vanishingly few ever facing criminal charges or serious punishment.

“The Fourth Amendment, designed to protect Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures, has become a dead letter in practice. Warrantless raids and the growing militarization of the police force are attempting to normalize these violations.

“Federal agents, including ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers, have repeatedly acted outside the bounds of constitutional law—detaining immigrants without warrants or identification, as seen in Charlottesville where masked ICE agents attempted to seize individuals at a courthouse. In another example, Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested without cause—an act that openly undermines the separation of powers and judicial independence. These incidents point to a deeply worrying pattern: Law enforcement agents no longer feel bound by constitutional norms or public accountability.”

“The narrative that paints Shriner as an aggressor must be rejected. She is the victim of a lawless police department, of a reactionary political climate and of a justice system designed to protect capitalist interests, not the working class.”

Who’s scared and unwelcome at Harvard? by Corey Robin

“The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 percent of Christian respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, while 15 percent of Jewish respondents and 47 percent of Muslim respondents reported the same. (The university does not track the total population of these groups on campus.)

“In addition to the 92 percent of Muslim respondents who worried about expressing their views, 51 percent of Christian respondents and 61 percent of Jewish respondents said they felt the same way.”

Mass starvation looms in Gaza as World Food Program says stocks have run out by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“In a statement Friday, the World Food Program said that the final stocks it is distributing to hot meal kitchens are expected to fully run out within a matter of days.

“The hot meal kitchens are the last functional food distribution system operated by the United Nations in Gaza. On March 31, all of the World Food Program’s bakeries were forced to shut down. The same week, all remaining food parcels distributed by the WFP, containing two weeks of rations, were exhausted.

“The UN reported that over 116,000 metric tons of food—enough to feed the entire population of Gaza for two months—is stationed outside the borders of Gaza and is being blocked by Israeli forces.”

“The deliberate mass starvation of the population of Gaza is largely ignored in the US media and by the Democratic Party. The issue was not raised on the Sunday talk shows, including NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week” programs.

“The Israeli military has announced mandatory evacuation orders covering 70 percent of Gaza, with 400,000 people being displaced over the past seven weeks alone.”

Ukraine’s Worst Day: Zelensky Rejects Trump’s Peace Plan by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“It has also long been evident that every dollar and every missile sent to Ukraine would cost Ukraine more lives and more land without changing that reality. Prolonging the war would worsen the situation for Ukraine without improving the way the war would end. Continuing to support the war advanced the goals of the U.S. and its NATO partners without consideration of the interests of Ukraine.

“So, it was inevitable that the day would come when Ukrainians would wake up to the reality that land had been lost and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed to attain the same settlement that was on the table from the start of the war.”

“The Trump peace plan demands compromise from both sides. It has six key points. The first is that, though Ukraine can become a member of the European Union, it cannot ever become a member of NATO. Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellog has confirmed that “NATO isn’t on the table.” On April 22, Trump told Time, “I don’t think they’ll ever be able to join NATO.”

“The second is that the U.S. will officially recognize Russian control of Crimea. European officials who have seen the document have confirmed this, and Trump confirmed it to Time, saying simply, “Crimea will stay with Russia.”

“The third is that Ukraine will acknowledge the de facto Russian control of the territory it currently occupies without officially recognizing it. Vance has confirmed that the plan would “freeze the territorial lines at some level close to where they are today.” Ukraine would promise not to attempt to retake the territory militarily, while presumably retaining the right to reacquire it diplomatically.

“The fourth is the lifting of sanctions that have been imposed on Russia since 2014.

“Fifth is a security guarantee for Ukraine that would involve troops from European countries as well as “a separate, non-NATO military force to help monitor a ceasefire along a demilitarised zone spanning the entirety of the more than 1,000km front line.”

“Finally, the plan promises Ukraine “compensation and assistance for rebuilding.””

Zelensky rejected the plan. Hey, it’s his country; all of those other people are just living in it.

Did Trump admin just bring DRC and Rwanda closer to peace? by Dan M. Ford (Responsible Statecraft)

“Reports on Friday suggest that the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda — which is backing the rebel group M23, the main armed rival to the DRC in a war that has ravaged the DRC’s east for years — have submitted drafts for a preliminary peace accord to end the war.”

“The Trump administration has played a positive role in moving this conflict a few steps closer to a peaceful resolution. President Trump placed Massad Boulos as his Senior Advisor for Africa last month, a position which includes working on leading the president’s effort to end this war. Boulos has been serving as the American representative in the ongoing Qatar-led peace talks, and has participated in the mediation efforts.

“Boulos’ work has seemingly paid off. During the April 25 press conference in Washington for the signing of the Declaration of Principles, the foreign ministers of both the DRC and Rwanda thanked Boulos for his role in advancing dialogue around peace. The DRC’s foreign minister said Boulos’ “extensive consultations across the region have brought nuance, depth, and humanity in this process. And [his] presence today underscores that diplomacy must listen, understand the lived experiences of those most affected and seek durable solutions.””

“In an interview with Reuters, Boulos said that he is anticipating a final, permanent peace deal to be signed between the DRC and Rwanda in Washington in about two months.”

Man, I hope this peace agreement, at least, is real.

“Qatar then stepped in to lead peace talks, and has been supported in this effort in recent weeks by the U.S. delegation, led by Boulos.”

It is fascinating how Qatar, Oman, Turkey, U.A.E. are now sources of diplomacy and peace treaties and the last time I heard of Switzerland being in this business was with that disastrously stupid conference in the ritzy Swiss retreat of Bürgenstock that led to nothing because only Ukraine was invited.

Are We in a “Soft” Civil War? by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“ICE arrests aren’t “abductions” or a program of “mass kidnapping,” as the Guardian called it, unless you think there’s no such thing as illegal immigration, an even more radical concept than Trump’s deportations policy. It’s as if everyone is choosing to lose their minds.”

This is easy to say as long as no-one is coming for you and yours. There are many reports of people invading other people’s homes and exercising what seems to be largely self-arrogated and anti-Constitutional authority to seize assets and upend lives. It sounds like Taibbi’s absorbing FOX News talking points right into his veins here.

“Since November we’ve moved a highly lawyered group of habitual rule-breakers out of office, and replaced them with a payback-seeking group that is often more interested in big results than process. Another way to view it is that we exchanged a group of officials who used executive power in an unprecedented way but didn’t admit it, for a group that is freely admitting its novel and at times unsettling use of presidential authority. It all makes for a fraught, dangerous moment and my main emotion as a voter is hoping none of this devolves into open conflict. Can we get through this with something like an intact legal system in the end?”

Roaming Charges: Judge Not, Lest Ye be…Jailed by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Defense attorney Andrew Fleischman: “It would be unfair to say that all ICE agents are dumb, thieving, perverts. But [in this case] they did break into an American home, steal everything that wasn’t nailed down, and force the daughters to stand outside in their underwear due to gross negligence and rank incompetence.”

“A Trump administration memo disclosed this week urged ICE to break into homes in search of noncitizens to kidnap without a warrant. The memo stated that ICE can curb the “proactive procedures” put in place to obtain a warrant, since they “will not always be realistic or effective in swiftly identifying and removing alien enemies.””

“Cliona Ward, a 54-year-old Irish woman who has been living legally in the United States for decades, was taken into detention by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a trip to Ireland to visit her sick father. Ward moved to the US in her early teens and is the sole carer for a son with special needs. She is being held in an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington.”

So much for “it couldn’t possibly happen to me,” ammirite?

“Judge Crawford said: “Yes, Mohsen’s a peaceful figure—but he has rights even if he were a firebrand.””

This is exactly the point people should be shouting from the rooftops! It doesn’t matter what kind of person someone is! They have rights! You can’t invade a person’s home at night, steal their liberty, steal all of their stuff, throw their family into the rain in their underwear, NONE OF THAT IS LEGAL! It is absolutely insane that people allow themselves to be dragged into discussions about a person’s politics, personal opinions, attitude, or hygiene! DID THEY DO SOMETHING WRONG? CAN YOU PROVE IT? No? Fucking leave them alone.

“Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Fox Business: “I’m told that in parts of Florida, gasoline is $1.93, and that’s an automatic tax cut for the American people. We’re probably gonna see a lot more car travel this summer. So I think things are in good shape.””

The Treasury Secretary, folks! Leader of the U.S. fiscal world! He has no idea what the price of gasoline in the U.S. is. It’s not a tax cut. It’s an expenditure cut. You can’t just take credit for stuff other people did, giving it a new name that makes it sound like you did it. And how is “more car travel” a good thing? Is it from people driving their homes to Canada? FFS.

Journalism & Media

Section 230: We Really Should Talk About It by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“The issue at stake is the provision that protects social media platforms from liability for third party content. This means that, unlike print or broadcast media, the huge platforms cannot be sued for defamatory material posted by individuals, groups, or corporations.”

He makes this sound so easy because he doesn’t care about a free press enough. Miriam Adelson would sue SubStack to eliminate every last journalist who writes about Israel. CounterPunch would be sued out of existence even faster. I don’t know if they have ads, but why shouldn’t they be allowed to place a few ads?

“Other media do face serious consequences for spreading defamatory material. The Dominion lawsuit against Fox over spreading lies about the 2020 election was largely over third-party content. Fox argued that their paid employees were not the ones lying about Dominion, but rather the guests they featured on their shows. Nonetheless, they had to cough up $787 million to settle the case.”

And other media face no repercussions for lying their faces off about Russia or Trump or Iran or China or Israel. You love this example about FOX News because it worked for you and your ideology. What about Trump suing 60 minutes?

“Many people will say that the victims of defamation can still sue whoever actually developed the content. There are two problems with this argument. First, the person who developed the content may not have much money. Every lawyer knows when they bring a suit they want to go after the deep pockets. They sue the insurance company, not the drunk driver who is about to file for bankruptcy. If Elon Musk profited from the material he should bear liability.”

“There is already a model for this sort of takedown practice. The Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) requires Internet sites to promptly remove material that is infringing on a copyright in order to protect themselves from liability. The DMCA has been the law for more than a quarter century.”

The DMCA is a nightmare of an overreaching law and it says a lot about Dean that he thinks it’s a standard toward which we should strive.

“The law on defamation is not remotely as sympathetic to plaintiffs claiming defamation, especially when the person is a public figure making the standard of proof considerably higher.”

Sure, buddy. People are being deported for being antisemites because they coauthored an op-ed in an unknown newspaper that decried the death of children in Palestine, but you think they’re all actually going to get a trial date and the benefit of the doubt. Sure, buddy.

“I have proposed that we repeal Section 230 protection against liability for defamation only for sites that carry advertising or sell personal information. That would mean all the huge platforms that dominate social media now would lose their protection. However, smaller sites that rely on either donations or subscriptions would still enjoy the protection Section 230 now provides.”

But also means they can’t supplement with any ads.

“This could lead to some going out of business. That would be unfortunate, but as a practical matter we don’t have many policies that actually have an impact in the world that don’t have some negative effects. If that is a basis for nixing policies, we will not be able to accomplish much in the world.”

This is the same argument I hear for all of the shortcuts being taken to deport people who are “known to be criminals”. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, right? Well, it’s always easy to convince your base that you’re just going after the real bad guys. By the time you get to everyone else, they’ve got nothing to complain about. People have no principles.

It’s a stupid way of not having to defend the risks and drawbacks of your plan: no-one I know would be damaged by it, so it’s OK to do it to get me something I think I want, but that is really what I’ve been told I want by people who will benefit even more. He couldn’t care less about the left independent press because it doesn’t exist for him.

“I have been told very confidently by people who know the Internet much better than me that this change would either mean nothing to the huge sites (they would just hire more lawyers) and also that it would force them to adopt a subscription model where people had to pay to use their sites.”

And yet he persists undaunted.

“I can see no reason why social media sites should enjoy a greater protection against defamation lawsuits than print or broadcast media.”

Well, for one, I can publish my stream to the Twitter platform so friends can consume it. I can’t do that at the NYT. That is a fundamental difference. The NYT is not a publication platform. Substack and Twitter are.

“And any number of people have been absurdly dubbed as pedophiles by right-wingers who don’t like their politics.”

Silo boy. Your examples never include the machinations and smears of the democrats.

Does the Left Really Need to Be Chastised for the Past Decade of Deviation? by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“What I experienced was a constant pressure to reduce significantly my usual range of self-expression, to avoid speaking, that is, roughly in the same way I write here at The Hinternet, about the same range of topics, with the same freedom and ease — and this pressure, almost all of the time, was from well-intentioned people, who liked me, and didn’t want to see me face any social repercussions from the simple fact of continuing to be myself.”

“[…] given the progressive left to understand that it is not advancing anything conceivably connected to actual left interests by monitoring the phenotypes of Oscar winners, or coercing audiences to do jazz-hands rather than applauding, or trying to get one JSR not to say “Burma” or “Constantinople”.”

Too Hot to Work by Evgenia (Nefarious Russians)

“Most young American women probably don’t know that during WWII, when the U.S. needed its women to work because all the men were drafted into the military, the federal government enacted a universal childcare program to take care of kids while their moms were doing their factory shifts — education, food, and healthcare was provided for free. Naturally, this program was cut as soon as the war ended and women were locked back up at home. So good things can happen — and quickly, too — if there is any political will behind it. There’s no need for a war. Trump and MAGA are gaslighting women, dangling this miserable $5,000 in their faces.

“WWII was the only time the universal childcare existed in America and even now it seems radical. What do women get instead? The most elite professional women working for Apple, Facebook, Google, Uber, Spotify, and many other top corps get tens of thousands of dollars so they can freeze their eggs. But they don’t get childcare.”

“[…] no one reminds young women that only in 1974 were they allowed to open their own bank accounts, thanks to Equal Credit Opportunity Act…

“Do girls really want to roll that back, too? I doubt it. And they’re not gonna be very happy if that’s where they suddenly find themselves because they base their politics on what a demonic influencer has been feeding them.”

“Men wouldn’t have to waste their lives chasing money just so they can have a good family. Men wouldn’t have to work themselves into loneliness and depression just so they wouldn’t be considered losers…just so that they can pay for daycare and piano lessons for their kid. Guess what? In the socialist world I’m talking about, daycare and piano lessons — and ballet classes and sports and chess clubs — are free.

“In many ways only under socialism can women have it all.”

How Is the Media Still Getting the Gaza Murdered Paramedics Story So Wrong? by Jonathan Cook (Antiwar.com)

“We are now a month on from Israel executing 15 paramedics and hiding their bodies in a mass grave. Since then, video footage has surfaced of that atrocity, showing Israeli soldiers firing on a convoy of emergency vehicles that were clearly marked and with their warning lights on. We have had postmortems of the victims showing they were shot from close-range in the head and torso. And we’ve had eye-witness accounts of the killings.

“All of that, of course, is on top of compelling circumstantial evidence. Israel sought to destroy the evidence of its war crime by crushing the emergency vehicles and then burying them, along with the bodies of the 15 crew members, presumably in the hope that they would decompose and make it hard to forensically determine exactly what had happened.

“The latest evidence to emerge, reported by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper this week, shows that Israeli soldiers fired continuously for three and a half minutes on the convoy, despite the emergency vehicles being clearly marked.

“According to details from an internal investigation by the Israeli military leaked to the paper, the soldiers fired from near-point-blank range and even while the emergency workers were trying to identify themselves. (Not surprisingly, the other parts of the investigation, those made public, have been a whitewash, suggesting only “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”.)

“In other words, this new evidence confirms that Israeli soldiers intentionally murdered most of the occupants of the emergency vehicles with a prolonged hail of bullets. Those who survived, the postmortems suggest, were executed with shots to the head or torso. Then the evidence was hurriedly buried.”

“Why are a whole team of highly experienced Guardian journalists still getting this story so wrong? It is not because they are incompetent. They get it wrong because it is their job to do so: they work for a corporate media outlet, one that exists within a corporate news system that serves a corporate financial system that is protected by corporate political structures.

“Or for shorthand, these journalists – whether they understand it or not – work for the British establishment, advancing British foreign policy goals that are subservient to Washington’s imperial demands for global full-spectrum dominance.

“The role of corporate advertising is clear. It is there to make us want to consume, to encourage us to feel that we need more to be complete, to cultivate an aspiration in us to a materially “better” way of life. People in the advertising industry don’t think of themselves as monsters. Nonetheless, the profession’s goal is to create an endless demand for resources on a finite planet. Ultimately, it is to will the suicide of our species.

“The role of the corporate media is no different. It is there to create the illusion that we are the masters of our own thoughts. It is there to make us think we have reached an independent understanding of the world, even though that understanding has been carefully crafted for us from birth. It is there to cultivate a worldview in us that aligns precisely with the privileging of a tiny corporate elite whose wealth depends on the relentless pillaging of the planet for their benefit.

“Journalists don’t think of themselves as monsters either. Nonetheless, they are part of a media machine whose goal is to lull us into passivity as our leaders actively collude in the perpetration of a genocide, as our corporations, militaries and intelligence services press ahead with endless wars for resource control, and as the tripwires of nuclear confrontation grow ever more numerous and entangled.

“No one wants to think of themself as a monster. But we keep doing monstrous things.”

Labor

Corporate Lawlessness Comes Next by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“PATCO was also a big, flashing sign to corporate America that the federal government was definitively on their side in the battle between capital and labor. The legacy of the firings was not just a more anti-union public sector, but a private sector that felt unleashed to be ruthless with striking workers. This unshackling of union busting by America’s employers (along with Reagan’s entire economic and legislative agendas) helped to accelerate the collapse of the labor movement’s strike power. In 1974, there were 424 major strikes in America. In 1981, the year of PATCO, there were 145. By 1988, when Reagan left office, there were 40. Companies felt empowered to crush strikes as they wished; unions felt more intimidated, and became less likely to strike; the bargaining power of workers decreased; union density fell; economic inequality rose. All of these trends have continued to this day. When Reagan took over in 1981, more than 22% of workers were union members. Today, that figure has fallen below ten percent. And in 2024, there were only 31 major strikes in the country, a figure significantly lower than the lowest point of the Reagan era.”

“[…] [Trump] unilaterally tossed out the union contract covering more than 50,000 TSA workers, and then (after there was no powerful labor action in response, natch) followed that up by tossing out union contracts covering close to a million more workers across the federal government. You can bet that red state governors will do their best to copy Trump’s actions with public sector workers in their own states. If organized labor, dazed and confused, does not figure out an effective response quickly, you can bet that public sector unionism will be decimated nationally before Trump leaves office.”

Is a useless and defenseless union even a union, though? I don’t mean “good riddance”! I mean, if your union can be dissolved by a president and you can’t do a damned thing about it, if you can just be fired on the spot, then what did law and order have to do with anything? I think people just like kings that they agree with. They love it…until they don’t. We’ll see how long it takes because the pendulum swings back and bites those who cheered while others suffered. They’ll probably be easily propagandized into blaming themselves for their own downfall, all which their tormentors dance away with all of the wealth and power.

“This is a well-thought-out attempt by an organization representing the majority of America’s business class to opportunistically use the poisonous lawlessness of the Trump administration to lawlessly toss out laws they don’t like, so that they can more easily exploit and oppress their own employees. That is what this is. Do not be fooled by all of the nice legalistic language. This is organized crime in action, except that none of it is “crime” any more, because the government charged with enforcing the law has decided that laws are not real any more.”

“The Trump administration is corrupt. Let’s not use unnecessary euphemisms. They are corrupt in a much more bold and forthright way than any Presidential administration in living memory. Using threats of retaliation to scare companies and donors into paying hundreds of millions of dollars in protection money to the president is corrupt. Having the president’s family launch meme coins that are directly promoted by the President, and accepting millions of dollars from the crypto industry while having the government prop up crypto prices, is corrupt. The Trump administration is happily corrupt and open for business.”

I wonder now, too, if his comments about halving the military budget and getting rid of nuclear weapons weren’t just ways of getting arms manufacturers and military contractors to spill tons of money into his personal vaults, if he wasn’t just shaking them down for personal gain. It’s entirely possible. He would call it “being a smart businessman.”

“Who is going to operate more successfully in a corrupt, bribe-driven political environment: Labor unions, or corporations? The answer is not labor unions. For companies, the ability to simply make large donations to Trump’s presidential library or to his political operation or to buy large quantities of his crypto or steer money to his hotels or do business with his children in exchange for political favors saves a lot of time and effort. This helps businesses dispense with a lot of pretense. They no longer have to funnel their bribes through a tortured array of PR firms and allies. They can go right to the source of power and get what they want.”

“Trying to play on the corrupt playing field is both immoral and a sucker’s game for organized labor. The unions that have tried to cozy up to Trump, like the Teamsters, have obliterated their own credibility while simultaneously suffering the assaults on labor detailed above that all the other unions are suffering as well.”

“If there are any major national companies that you think are nice, there is a very good chance that the actions that they take towards their workers over the next four years will prove you wrong.”

“Even absent NLRB protections, workers can still organize. Even in the face of corporate retaliation, workers can still agree to act collectively. Even in the face of fascism, unions can still strike. Businesses, fascist or not, don’t make money when no work is being done. We will refocus ourselves on the strike, or we are in for perhaps the most precipitous union losses in history. If anyone has any better ideas, please speak up.”

Economy & Finance

The Turbulence in the Global Economy by Vijay Prashad (ZNetwork)

“Lower social welfare spending will further deplete private consumption. And Trump’s dream of revitalising U.S. manufacturing is not going to work merely through a reduced federal government deficit without a massive, massive release of resources for industrialisation. Without an attack on living standards, this could only come from measures such as a reduction in excessive U.S. military expenditure or reform of the country’s grotesquely inefficient private health system. These are policies Trump will not adopt.”

“This is a fairly good summary of the structure of Chinese growth over the last period. But it is totally counter to the suggestions that the IMF then gives to China: which is to liquidate everything that allowed it to stave off the long term sluggishness of the advanced industrial countries (including to pressure the renminbi to appreciate, as the U.S. would like so that its trade imbalance can be rectified by a foreign exchange shift rather than by greater productivity in the U.S. itself).”

“High domestic savings and better sovereignty of resources (including the financial system), alongside canalisation of these finances to the productive sector (for infrastructure and industrialisation), produce more stability in the long run than an excessive reliance on private financial markets and the whims of the billionaire class.”

Tariffs will raise prices. But the climate crisis is the real inflation risk by Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli (The Guardian)

“[…] intermediate goods – rather than finished ones – dominate trade, crossing borders and being tariffed multiple times along the way, which makes them highly inflationary. Second, while the tariffs of the first Trump administration could be more easily absorbed by exchange rates and producers, there is no way tariffs of this magnitude can be absorbed. Producers and consumers must take a hit, and that means rising prices. It looks like the poor, once again, will suffer the most.”

Price Gougers Are Exploiting Trump’s Tariffs by Katya Schwenk (Jacobin)

“Zawada works for PROS Holdings, a company that provides software services helping companies price their products, tailored in particular to airlines. He’s part of a cottage industry of “pricing optimization” consultants who, using lessons learned from pandemic price increases, are advising companies across industries on how to hike prices in response to tariffs or even just the threat of tariffs — and then keep them high.”

“The most recent case study came during the pandemic, when the cost of consumer goods — from groceries to cosmetics to medicine — jumped dramatically, an inflation crisis that commentators blamed alternately on government spending and high wages. Yet from the beginning, data showed that the true culprit was rising corporate profits. Executives were telling their investors that they were hiking prices beyond the costs incurred from supply chain disruptions, all while lavishing shareholders with payouts. And prices remained high well after those temporary disruptions subsided.”

“Such messaging from corporate heads echoes the go-to advice from the consultant class. In one pricing webinar that the Lever attended, hosted by e-commerce pricing company Intelligems, consultants discussed how companies had successfully capitalized on consumers’ fears of imminent price increases, even before businesses felt the impacts.”

“The constant tariff reversals and product exemptions from the Trump administration have created what Owens at Groundwork Collaborative called a “best-case scenario for price gougers,” given widespread uncertainty and chaos. “The expectations are setting in that there should be price increases, but [companies] may not actually be subject to large tariffs,” she explained. “The average consumer can’t necessarily always discern that.””

“Whatever the method, all of these price hikes, if they exceed the costs of tariffs and persist beyond them, defy traditional economic logic. In competitive markets, companies should, in theory, be dissuaded from misleading “tariff fees” or protracted price hikes, as they would only be a gift to their business rivals, who could keep their own prices low to capture sales. But for many companies, there is no such disincentive, thanks to the slow creep of monopoly power into every facet of American life.”

“Two-thirds of supermarkets, for instance, are controlled by just four companies, an oligopoly that enabled grocery retailers to keep prices high during the pandemic without fear that rivals would undercut them. And on every aisle of a grocery store or pharmacy, you can find more monopolies. Even niche markets — like french fries, microwave popcorn, or almond milk — are captured by just a few firms.”

Science & Nature

Screwworms are coming—and they’re just as horrifying as they sound by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

“Once beckoned, females lay up to 400 eggs at a time. Within about a day, ravenous flesh-eating larvae erupt, which both look and act like literal screws. They viciously and relentlessly bore and twist into their victim, feasting on the living flesh for about seven days. The result is a gaping ulcer writhing with maggots, which attracts yet more adult female screwworms that can lay hundreds more eggs, deepening the putrid, festering lesion. The infection, called myiasis, is intensely painful and life-threatening.”

“gaping” is an understatement. There’s a photo of an afflicted—and hopefully dead—key deer that has a hole the size of a volleyball in its shoulder.

“Screwworms were eradicated from the US by about 1966. Through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, the frontline of the worms was pushed down through Central America. Screw worms were eventually declared eradicated from Panama in 2006. That year, the USDA partnered with Panama to build a sterile fly production facility that would be used to maintain a biological barrier along the Darién Gap at the border of Panama and Columbia. Along the barrier, sterile flies have been released by air at least once a month since the eradication, according to Mark Fox, an entomologist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention […]”

I sent this to a biology teacher I know with the note: engender disgust and pride in your students with this tale of a horrific affliction for which science came up with an ingenious fix. A fix that is currently falling apart because we are fools and, apparently, can’t have nice things, but it was a good fix. It could be again.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

I live in the Future by Catherine Liu (Substack)

“When two concrete plates on the sidewalk become uneven, some one comes to spray paint the edges a bright red so that you are aware of the gap and won’t trip or knock your baby in its $1000 stroller on your way to one of the hundreds of pocket parks that are tucked into the carefully manicured underarms of the dozens of planned communities in America’s safest city. Every square inch of the city is managed and controlled for your comfort and pleasure and for Donald Bren’s profit.”

“Irvine is completely and utterly anonymous, prosperous, rich, decentered. It is the inhuman future of a frictionless Internet made flesh. It is Artificial Intelligence embodied. It has crunched all domestic architectural styles of 20th century America and remade them in the most profitable, most efficient, least offensive style possible. It is a city designed for the future of the end of history: even if history passes it by, it will continue to shine like a beacon indicating what the United States could be if it could be designed for a happy population of philistine millionaires, serviced by low wage workers.”

Nature, Grace, and History by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“[…] when secular naturalists look back haughtily at earlier representations of the world around us as “naive” or “superstitious”, they generally do so in total ignorance of the utter inadequacy of their preferred updates. The universe is in fact something closer to a cosmos than it is to “space”. It is not a “container” into which physical stuff may either be poured or not, but rather, in light of what we still dare to call the “cosmological principle”, is a uniform and isotropic tissue (so to speak) of filaments and other smaller structures.”

“Regular readers will by now be familiar with my principal criticism of simulationism: that it is yet another instance of the Anglo-philistine habit of spinning out what are purported to be novel accounts of how the world works, in total ignorance of the historical precedents for what one is saying — believing, in sum, that one is speaking and reasoning when one is in fact channeling familiar leitmotifs that come down to us unawares from the ancestors. I have pointed out in particular that in virtually every age, learnèd people have been so impressed with their own state-of-the-art technologies as to come to believe that these technologies are not just impressive artifices, but models, epitomes, microcosms of the world itself.”

“Today animals are killed by the billions, and rendered into commodities, for which no thankfulness at all is expected, but only an exchange of a small amount of money. So to the question, “Is it a sin to eat meat?” The only plausible answer is: “Well, it depends.” The way it is generally eaten today? Yes, absolutely, this is a grave sin. It was always at least a transgression, but a necessary one, and one that traditional cultures knew how to process and to balance out. This is just one example of a much broader point I am trying to make: that what counts as sin can and does change from one historical era to another.”

“The Gnostics in particular were keen on presenting our world as rather different than it appears, as a lower rung of reality with sundry Archons above it, “playing” it so to speak like a video game. In this respect, you might say, the simulationists are a sect of Christian heretics without even knowing it — they take themselves to be descended only from our most recent ancestors in the era of secular modernity. But this is in line with a much more general feature of the world that produced both Bostrom and me. I, too, thought I was growing up under the reign of secular modernity. Looking back, now, I understand with painful clarity that I was raised as a barefoot pagan — from the tribe of what Paul Beatty called the blond aborigines of California.”

“Much as every era will come up with its new unnecessary complications of the cosmic order —multiplying these entities beyond necessity, and beyond decency, now in terms of demiurgic emanation, now in terms of virtual-reality technology—, so will every era find new ways to articulate the enduring and simple truth of the harmony of nature and grace. A historicist-realist Christian philosopher, of the sort I have set myself up as being for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, will seek to remain attuned to the way these articulations transform across the ages, always giving rise to new appearances, but only ever appearances, of incommensurability.”

If “The Personal is Political,” Why Are You All So Fucking Sensitive? by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“[…] when you erase the line between the political and the personal, you end up with these weird social prohibitions against openly and frankly debating elements of politics that must be debated. If you say that your politics are who you are and that who you are is your politics, then criticism of certain elements of your politics will inevitably be represented as impolite and aggressive personal insult.”

“[…] for the record, “People adopt disabilities they don’t really have in an effort to farm sympathy and attention” is near the top of the very long list “Things Many People Quietly Agree with Freddie About But Feel They Can’t Express Publicly Themselves.” So, so many silent supporters, on that one.”

It’s Always About The System by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“It’s always the system. Western countries are full of shitty people with shitty beliefs who do shitty things to each other all the time. This isn’t because westerners are inherently shitty, nor because humans are inherently shitty. It’s because here in the western empire we live under capitalism, which encourages selfish behavior and cutthroat competition against each other, and because we are indoctrinated into accepting the tyrannical white supremacist propaganda of western imperialism.”

“As soon as we are old enough to start learning about the world our minds are trained to shape us into good cogs in the imperial machine. Good employees and gear-turners for capitalism. Good soldiers and police officers. Good citizens who would never do anything to inconvenience our rulers.

“We are funneled through carefully crafted factories of conditioning by the malignant systems under which we live. As long as those malignant systems exist they will keep churning out malignant people, and goodness will struggle to find any purchase. This is true whether you are talking about capitalism, imperialism, or Zionism.”

This is essentially the plot of the film Starship Troopers.

“In the play Waiting for Godot, Beckett writes that our mothers “give birth astride of a grave,” and it’s just so true.

““They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,” the character Pozzo laments.

“The line resonates because that really is what the human experience feels like. We get a short time here, and then we’re gone.

“How bizarre is it, then, that we still find time to hate each other? That we still have time for grudges and resentment? That our mothers give birth astride of a grave, and we punch and kick each other on the way down?

“Bukowski said,”

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

“It’s about the weirdest thing you could possibly imagine.”

Technology & Engineering

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’ by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Facebook can’t grow forever by signing up new users. Eventually, everyone who might conceivably have a Facebook account will get one. When that happens, Facebook will need to find some other way to make money. They could enshittify – that is, shift value from the company’s users and customers to itself. They could invent something new (like metaverse, or AI). But if they can’t make those things work, then the company’s growth will have ended, and it will instantaneously become grossly overvalued. Its P:E ratio will have to shift from the high value enjoyed by growth stocks to the low value endured by “mature” companies. When that happens, anyone who is slow to sell will lose a ton of money. So investors in growth stocks tend to keep one fist poised over the “sell” button and sleep with one eye open, watching for any hint that growth is slowing.”

“if these devaluations are persistent and/or frequent enough, the key FB employees who accepted stock in lieu of cash for some or all of their compensation will either demand lots more cash, or jump ship for a growing rival. These are the very same people that Facebook needs to pull itself out of its nosedives. For a growth stock, even small reductions in growth metrics (or worse, declines) can trigger cascades of compounding, mutually reinforcing collapse.”

“Zuck screws up opportunity after opportunity because he refuses to be briefed, forgets what little information he’s been given, and blows key meetings because he refuses to get out of bed before noon. Sandberg’s visits to Davos are undermined by her relentless need to promote herself, her “Lean In” brand, and her petty gamesmanship. Kaplan is the living embodiment of Green Day’s “American Idiot” and can barely fathom that foreigners exist.”

“The genocide that follows is horrific beyond measure. And, as with the Trump election, the company’s initial posture is that they couldn’t possibly have played a significant role in a real-world event that shocked and horrified its rank-and-file employees.”

Welcome to the world of unassailable talking points. Cory Doctorow is definitely not immune to Russiagate although my hope is that he would at least be chastened to learn that he’s spouting Democratic talking points long, long, long after they’ve been disproven. Facebook was not instrumental in getting Trump elected, especially not at the behest of Putin, for the love of God.

Also, the genocide in Myanmar was “horrific beyond measure” (even though the term genocide applies only when you can measure it) but this is something that Doctorow writes because his press and class have allowed him to judge it. He’s never written a single word about the 19 months of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the second one well underway in the West Bank.

His disgust with genocide is reserved for the tech companies who supposedly aided and abetted genocides that are officially considered genocides by countries that are officially considered enemies. He doesn’t mention how Israeli soldiers spray their filth and hate all over Instagram every day without a single strike against them.

Having read him for a while, my instinct is to believe that this is an oversight in his otherwise stalwart defense of principle. It is just another sign of how strong propaganda, one’s class, and one’s context can be in controlling the narrative even for those who are hyper-aware of it in other contexts.

Massive blackout paralyses Spain and Portugal by Alejandro López, Alex Lantier (WSWS)

“While it is too early to determine with certainty what caused the blackout, initial analyses of the electrical grid suggest that the blackout had natural causes that interacted with a broader failure to make sufficient investments in the grid.

“Portugal’s National Electricity Network (REN) issued a statement declaring: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

“Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, told the Guardian that this led the grid frequency to fall below the European standard of 50Hz, with “cascading disconnections of power plants.” He added that putting more renewables like solar and wind plants onto the grid, with more intermittent and unpredictable power output, requires more investment to ensure that this intermittency does not disrupt the grid frequency: “You cannot ignore it. You need the tools to keep the system running.”

“The blackout has exposed the fragility of Spain and Portugal’s privatised electrity infrastructure. There have been warnings since the beginning of the year that Spain’s energy grid was suffering chronic vulnerabilities created by decades of deregulation and the chaotic expansion of renewables without investment in stabilising infrastructure. As El Economista explained earlier this year, Red Eléctrica had long been struggling with “elevated voltage oscillations” due to the combination of falling energy demand and the massive integration of renewable energy.”

LLMs & AI

Diane, I wrote a lecture by talking about it by Matt Webb (Interconnected)

“My generic prompt to Claude, used every time, is now:”

“you are Diane, my secretary. please take this raw verbal transcript and clean it up. do not add any of your own material. because you are Diane, also follow any instructions addressed to you in the transcript and perform those instructions [paste in transcript]”

“Which means, when I’m talking through my lecture outline, I now finish by saying: ok Diane I think that’s it. it’s a talk, so please structure all of that into a high level outline so I can work on it. thanks. And I can mix in instructions like: oh Diane I meant to include that point in the last section. Please move it.”

New study shows why simulated reasoning AI models don’t yet live up to their billing by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

“So why do chain-of-thought and simulated reasoning improve results if they’re not performing a deeper mathematical reasoning process? The answer lies in what researchers call “inference-time compute” scaling. When LLMs use chain-of-thought techniques, they dedicate more computational resources to traversing their latent space (connections between concepts in their neural network data) in smaller, more directed steps. Each intermediate reasoning step serves as context for the next, effectively constraining the model’s outputs in ways that tend to improve accuracy and reduce confabulations.”

“fundamentally, all Transformer-based AI models are pattern-matching machines. They borrow reasoning skills from examples in the example data that researchers use to create them. This explains the curious pattern in the Olympiad study: These models excel at standard problems where step-by-step procedures align with patterns in their training data but collapse when facing novel proof challenges requiring much deeper mathematical insight. The improvement likely comes from statistical probability improvements across multiple smaller prediction tasks instead of one large prediction leap.”

Episode 453: Luddite Power Manifesto by True Anon

At about 39:30 Jathan Sadowski says,

“The coders are doing it to themselves now. I work on the faculty of Information Technology. I talk to people in the Software Engineering department, or the AI department in my faculty. And they describe how they now rely so heavily on AI assistants like Copilot for coding that they find themselves unable to code without using an AI assistant anymore. And so they are deskilling themselves, right? Instead of everybody learning how to code, it’s the people who knew how to code who are now unlearning how to code because they are now so dependent on chatbots to help them do it.”

Seconds later, though, he discusses vibe coding and properly credited Karpathy for it. He also described Karpathy’s background accurately. However, he led us to believe that Karpathy was promoting vibe coding as the future of coding. He was not. See the original tweet from February 2025 (Twitter), which writes,

“It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing.”

Karpathy was playing around on the weekend and discovered that it was possible to build something that kind of works using this technique, which is pretty amazing.

Even a recent tweet from April 25, 2025 (Twitter) contained the clarification,

> AI-assisted coding (i.e. code I actually and professionally care about, contrast to vibe code).

Let’s not get or give the impression that Karpathy is part of the problem. He published a 3.5-hour video about how these things work. He knows their limitations and isn’t a hype/scam guy. Please don’t give people the impression that he is.

Consciousness 9 by Zach Weinersmith (SMBC)

SMBC: Consciousness 9

“Everywhere else in the universe, you either have a singular processor or a harmonious parallel system. You guys are like a sack of cats on which someone stuck googly eyes on.”

“The key to real AGI is to make 4,000 different small AIs that hate each other.”

literallyMe (Reddit)

The post is an image that writes,

“I saw a guy coding today.
Tab 1 ChatGPT.
Tab 2 Gemini.
Tab 3 Claude.
Tab 4 Grok.
Tab 5 DeepSeek.
He asked every Al the same exact question.
Patiently waited, then pasted each response into 5 different Python files.
Hit run on all five.
Pick the best one.
Like a psychopath.”

The top comments were,

“The next generation of programmers will see Java like it is machine code”

“The next generation of programmers will see all code the way non-programmers do, like its magic”

“They’ll talk of the old guard like elves. Some mythological people that could communicate to computers in the old tounge. C++ will look like the language of mordor.”

Not so Deep Thoughts about Deep AI by John Q (Crooked Timber)

The article wasn’t great and I was going to comment something about the exact line that another commentator responding quite well to, as shown below.

“If I were asked to do a report on a topic with which I had limited familiarity…”

“That is a scary sentence in this context, because of Gell Mann Amnesia. I am somehow immune to it, perhaps because I am a cynical misanthrope: I immediately lose all confidence in any newspaper, colleague, Tesla CEO, or software tool once they say or do the first very stupid thing and never respect them again, which is precisely why I do not trust LLMs at all, see above. But many other people approach LLMs in exactly this way: oh yes, when I ask ChatGPT something in my area of expertise, it gets nearly everything wrong, but it knows so much in other areas! It is so useful when I have limited familiarity with something!”

On the other hand, another commentator pointed out a very good use for LLMs: initial translations from a language you know well to a language that you can read well but not necessarily write very well,

“DeepL (and to a lesser extent Google Translate) will do time-saving first passes on translation. The output absolutely requires human vetting. LLMs make mistakes. But even professional translators will use AI this way. When I was editing scientific papers, one of my main clients saved a lot of money by writing in Mandarin and using DeepL to translate to English. She looked over the result herself and then sent the draft to me. I found errors and mistakes, but the paper only took three hours to edit, as opposed to previous papers that took nine or ten. I think she wrote a better paper when she was writing in her own language.”

Another had the right idea about the reliability of output and the hype level engendered by relentless AI promoters, but then sneaks in this line at the end,

“Add to that the fact that Russian bots are seeding the web with massive dumps of training data containing lies, esp. about Ukraine.”

Sure, buddy. He cites a Washington Post article as if it’s authoritative and not coming from a source that’s never not loved anyone who’s had a hard-on for war with Russia since 1950.

Next up is,

“[…] whatever its merits and shortcomings, the various flavors of AI will be unlikely to generate the kind of profits that would give the current avalanche of investment even a modest rate of return. This seems so obvious to me that the hard part is figuring out why it isn’t obvious to the people who are throwing billions of dollars around betting the opposite.”

Another:

“I feel like I am watching a car demonstration where they cannot get the car to move at all, and then it spontaneously explodes, and everybody, even those hurt by the explosion, subsequently says what an amazing car that was and they want to buy one of those and it will change everything for the better. Are we experiencing some kind of mass delusion?”

Judge on Meta’s AI training: “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use” by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

“Meta, like most AI companies, holds that training must be deemed fair use, or else the entire AI industry could face immense setbacks, wasting precious time negotiating data contracts while falling behind global rivals. Meta urged the court to rule that AI training is a transformative use that only references books to create an entirely new work that doesn’t replicate authors’ ideas or replace books in their markets.”

Yeah, holy shit, we know that it looks like stealing but that’s our whole business model and, like, if we don’t steal it, Chinese companies will, and they’ll eat our American lunch. So, you see how it would just best for everyone if you would just legalize our business model that is based on stealing? Just for us, of course. Anyone pirating a film, book, or movie should go to prison forever. Also, no-one else should have any access to all of the content that we’re stealing because that would be immoral. Only the already exceedingly rich should have unlimited and free access to everyone else’s—the world’s—cultural products, but not the Pöbel, not das Lumpenvolk.

Programming

McEliece standardization by D. J. Bernstein (cr.yp.to)

“Classic McEliece isn’t designed merely for what the snobs call “IND-CPA” security, safety for a one-time key, safety for a key used for just one ciphertext. It’s designed for IND-CCA2 security, safety for a static key, safety for a key used for many ciphertexts.”

“Are static keys important? I’ll quote a public comment by John Mattsson from telecom company Ericsson: We strongly think NIST should standardize Classic McEliece, which has properties that makes it the best choice in many different applications. We are planning to use Classic McEliece. … The small ciphertexts and good performance makes Classic McEliece the best choice for many applications of static encapsulation keys of which there are many (WireGuard, S/MIME, IMSI encryption, File encryption, Noise, EDHOC, etc.). For many such applications, key generation time is not important, and the public key can be provisioned out-of-band. When the public key is provisioned in-band, Classic McEliece has the best performance after a few hundred encapsulations. For static encapsulation use cases where ML-KEM provides the best performance, Classic McEliece is the best backup algorithm. The memory requirement can be kept low by streaming the key.”

“Beyond minimizing total costs for static keys, small ciphertexts have an engineering virtue, as one can see by looking at PQ-WireGuard; at PQ-WireGuard’s successor, the Rosenpass VPN; or, for a different application, at our new PQConnect. These are packet-based protocols that rely on the smallness of Classic McEliece ciphertexts to meet Internet packet-size limits. Switching from Classic McEliece to a lattice system would need a redesigned packet structure that uses more packets during key exchange, increasing fragility and increasing exposure to denial-of-service attacks.”

“When NIST thinks an application is using ephemeral keys, it highlights Classic McEliece’s cost disadvantage; when NIST learns that the same application is actually using static keys and showing a Classic McEliece cost advantage, NIST stays silent.”

“It is astonishing to see NIST issuing a report in 2025 with benchmarks of code that’s six years out of date, and presenting those as benchmarks of the 2022 Classic McEliece submission, especially when the source that NIST cites is a page that says at the top that it’s presenting obsolete measurements from a defunct benchmarking project.”

“A natural approach to attacking one-wayness is to try to recover the private key from the public key. There was a recent McEliece key-recovery competition with a $10000 prize. The competition was won by Lorenz Panny, whose attack streamlines Sendrier’s “support splitting algorithm” from the turn of the century. The attack took about 258 CPU cycles (with many bit operations per cycle) to recover very-low-security McEliece keys, specifically with parameters (n,t) = (253,5). If the attack were scaled up to McEliece’s originally suggested (n,t) = (1024,50) then it would use more than 2400 operations; that’s a size where plaintext recovery was demonstrated in 2008. As I said earlier, McEliece key-recovery attacks are absurdly slow.”

“Remember that Classic McEliece builds QROM IND-CCA2 security purely from the one-wayness (OW-CPA) of the original McEliece system. A key-recovery attack breaks one-wayness (and breaks IND-CCA2); a mere key distinguisher doesn’t. Furthermore, even if this distinguisher can somehow be upgraded to an attack, 22231 is vastly slower than other ways to break one-wayness. So there are two clear reasons that this paper isn’t affecting the Classic McEliece security analysis.”

“It’s content-free to say that maybe there will be a followup that reduces the security of the system. What matters for risk analysis is that a bunch of people have been publicly trying and failing for many years to reduce the McEliece security level, looking closely at every aspect of the McEliece system, while people keep succeeding in reducing the security level of lattice cryptosystems, even while many attack avenues against those systems remain unexplored.”

“The McEliece system is one of the oldest proposals, almost as old as RSA. RSA has suffered dramatic security losses, while the McEliece system has maintained a spectacular security track record unmatched by any other proposals for post-quantum encryption. This is the fundamental reason to use the McEliece system.”

“There’s a long history of NIST standardizing cryptography later shown to be breakable, often under NSA influence, such as DES, DSA, and Dual EC.”

“I hope that Kyber isn’t breakable. But the core lattice one-wayness attacks and analyses are very complicated and keep changing, with apparently neverending opportunities for further speedups. Will the cliff stop crumbling before Kyber falls off the edge? Also, when cryptanalysts are finding better attacks against these core problems, what’s their incentive for studying other aspects of the Kyber attack surface, such as the possibility of Kyber’s QROM IND-CCA2 security level being much lower than its one-wayness security level?”

“Ephemeral keys are different, but it makes no sense to allow the pursuit of ephemeral-key performance to drag down static-key performance, and, more importantly, to drag down security for applications that can afford any of these cryptosystems. Remember that sending a high-security Classic McEliece key through the Internet today costs only about a microdollar.”

“So my recommendation is simple. Use Classic McEliece wherever you can. For situations where you can’t, use lattices; that’s higher risk, but hopefully holds up. Finally, to limit the damage in case of cryptosystem failures or software failures, make sure to roll out PQ as ECC+PQ.”

ClickHouse gets lazier (and faster): Introducing lazy materialization by Tom Schreiber (ClickHouse)

“And just like that, the final layer clicks into place, bringing execution time down from 220 seconds to just 181 milliseconds. Same query. Same table. Same machine. Same slow disk…just 1,215× faster. All we changed was how and when data is read. In this example, lazy materialization delivers the biggest gain because the query selects large text columns, and thanks to lazy materialization, only 3 rows from them are needed in the end. But depending on the dataset and query shape, earlier optimizations like indexing or PREWHERE may yield greater savings. These techniques work together, each contributes to reducing I/O in a different way. Note: Lazy materialization is applied automatically for LIMIT N queries, but only up to a N threshold. This is controlled by the query_plan_max_limit_for_lazy_materialization setting (default: 10). If set to 0, lazy materialization applies to all LIMIT values with no upper bound.”

“Boom: a 1,576× speedup—from 219 seconds to just 139 milliseconds—with 40× less data read and 300× lower memory usage. This example highlights what makes lazy materialization unique among ClickHouse’s I/O optimizations. Lazy materialization doesn’t need column filters to deliver speedups. While indexing and PREWHERE rely on query predicates to skip data, lazy materialization improves performance purely by deferring work, loading only what’s needed, when it’s needed.”

CS programs have failed candidates by Coding Jesus (YouTube)

This is a discussion between an reasonably accomplished, ostensibly senior-level programmer (Coding Jesus) and a junior in a Computer Science program (2/3 of the way finished with his degree). The guy is almost finished with his CS degree and can’t tell you how many bytes are in a 32-bit integer. Or any integer. He doesn’t know the difference between signed and unsigned types. He thinks that he can program software at NVidia. Doesn’t think that there need to be any steps in between. We have utterly failed to not only educate but to manage expectations.

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:40 Signed vs Unsigned
• 02:00 How are doubles represented?
• 03:10 Why are these questions relevant?
• 03:30 where is 1 stored?
• 05:10 Java and concurrency
• 06:20 what is cache? How many levels?
• 08:45 multicore system?
• 10:15 array vs array list
• 12:10 how big is an array?
• 14:10 how big is an integer?
• 14:50 what are the keys to break into hardware?

Absolutely wild is that Coding Jesus appears to be playing Mario Kart the entire time in order to keep his viewers focused on listening to a 15-minute conversation about programming.

I didn’t even major in Computer Science in the early 90s and we learned all of this stuff early.

Migrating away from Rust by Brandon Reinhart

The article is interesting but the Hacker News topic has more insight.

Animats commented,

“Rust needs a coherent way to do single owner with back references. I’ve made some proposals on this, but they require much more checking machinery at compile time and better design. Basic concept: works like “Rc::Weak” and “upgrade”, with compile time checking for overlapping upgrade scopes to insure no “upgrade” ever fails.

““Is-a” relationships are difficult

“Rust traits are not objects. Traits cannot have associated data. Nor are they a good mechanism for constructing object hierarchies. People keep trying to do that, though, and the results are ugly.”

Walter Bright (Wikipedia) (author of D (Wikipedia)) commented,

“I predict that over time the borrow checker will become just another tool in the toolbox, and it’ll be used for algorithms and data structures where it makes sense, and other methods will be used where it doesn’t.

“I’ve been around to see a lot of fashions in programming, which is most likely why D is a bit of a polyglot language :-/

“I can also say confidently that the #1 method to combat memory safety errors is array bounds checking. The #2 method is guaranteed initialization of variables. The #3 is stop doing pointer arithmetic (use arrays and ref’s instead).

“The language can nail that down for you (D does). What’s left are memory allocation errors. Garbage collection fixes that.”

Fun

Joe Pilates by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

I learned from this comic that Joe Pilates invented Pilates, that the guillotine was invented by Joe Guillotin, and that mason jars were invented by Johnny Mason.