Links and Notes for July 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
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Public Policy & Politics

Trump tells Israel to 'Finish the Job' against Gaza by BreakThrough News (YouTube)

“Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I think they want to die. And it’s very very bad. And it got to be to a point where you’re going to have to finish the job. They really […] asked for things. Don’t forget we got a lot of hostages out. So now we’re down to the final hostages and they know what happens after you get the final hostages. And basically because of that, they really didn’t want to make a deal. I saw that. So they pulled out and they’re going to have to fight and they’re going to have to clean it up. You’re going to have to get rid of it.”

He’s playing quite fast and loose with the word “they” here. But the meaning is quite clear. Finish the genocide. Get rid of all of the Palestinians. Stop bothering Trump with this shit.

It's all bullsh1t by Tadhg Hickey (YouTube)

“It’s quite something to realize, to almost come to the realization that you’ve been in some sort of coma.

“And you realize now that it’s all bullshit.

“It’s all complete bullshit.

“The idea of international law, the rules-based order, basic tenets of humanity and compassion and solidarity.

“I suppose we all felt, you know, when push came to shove, if people could see children particularly being slaughtered and starved to death, if we could see that on our phones, then our governments would step in. They’d have to step in, just on the basic core values of being a human being. You would say this is unconscionable. Such inhumanity can’t take place.

“We all, I think, naively believe that the only reason that the Holocaust of the 40s happened was because we couldn’t see, the people couldn’t see what was going on. If they could see what was going on, they’d have to stop it. But it’s all bullshit. These things don’t exist.

“Once the rich and powerful have a stake, once they have skin in the game, then these things dissolve into nothingness. It’s an illusion. It’s all an illusion.

“If you look at the idea of pedophilia, the idea of sex crimes against children, I think we all grew up believing that that’s the worst of the worst. There’s nothing worse than terrorizing children with your depravity and stealing their childhoods. But no, in America right now, if you’re rich and powerful, you can do whatever you want to children and your crimes will be obfuscated and, I suppose, ultimately absolved. You can just make them go away.

“So nothing matters. There’s no law. And so then why do us as citizens still feel that we should act within the law? Why should we acknowledge and adhere to your rules when there are no rules? There is no rules-based order. The rules are only for the riffraff like you and me and not for the powers that be.

“So I think the only thing that we can do, as human beings, to fight back against this kind of corporatist nihilism is to say, ‘no. There are rules.’

“We assert that there are rules and because there are things like rules-based order, our values, at least to us. Then we have to do everything in our power now, to bring these governments down.

“Because if they won’t do the right thing for the right thing’s sake, then maybe we have to force their hand. And maybe we have to stop being so acquiescent to an order that they’re screaming at us does not exist and does not apply to them.”

Washington Takes on the BRICS by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The Trumpster on this question said July 6: “When I heard about this group from BRICS, six countries [sic], basically, I hit them very, very hard. And if they ever really form in a meaningful way, it will end very quickly. We can never let anyone play games with us.” How’s that for the statecraft of a self-confident nation? This display of juvenile impetulance coincided with the opening of the BRICS group’s 17th summit, hosted July 6–7 in Rio de Janeiro, as Brazil now holds the group’s rotating presidency.”

He is a mindless menace, just pure id.

It would be funnier if it weren’t so dangerous for all of the people who get in the way. A lot of people will suffer as the Trump administration dismantles the U.S. empire because they don’t know how it works and they think that they’re just using it like all of those other dummies didn’t have the guts to do.

“It is funny how often what the late-phase imperium intends as displays of strength turn out to be displays of uncertainty, weakness and impotence.”

As noted above, it’s not really funny because a wounded beast can still be very, very dangerous in its death throes.

“This group is about the construction of a world order built on a foundation of parity, the common good and international law. It would welcome the participation of all nations in this world-historical project, not least, given their capital and technology, the U.S. and the other Western powers. [BRICS] is anti–American only insofar as it opposes hegemonic power and— putting the point another way — insofar as the United States stands foursquare against all three of the above-noted principles.”

“Michael Hudson, the superbly clarifying economist, had an hour-long interview the other day, also with Glenn Diesen, under the headline “The Economics of Civilizational Conflict.” In it Hudson reminded us that BRICS members typically harbor well-developed capitalist elites, often educated in American institutions, often adherents of market-fundamentalist ideologies, and thoroughly invested in the neoliberal order.”

From US Hegemony To A ‘War Of All Against All’: Boris Kagarlitsky On Trump’s First 100 Days by Boris Kagarlitsky (ZNetwork)

“US ruling circles (and to some extent Europe’s as well) invested enormous effort in preventing the emergence of any constructive alternative to the existing system. All political forces, particularly those on the left that were pushing for overdue and necessary reforms, were systematically marginalised or else corrupted and co-opted in exchange for abandoning any serious struggle for power.

“One must admit that Bernie Sanders and his supporters in the US resigned themselves to this situation and essentially started playing to lose, as if engaged in a game where defeat was the condition for participation. As a result, the only remaining alternative consisted of irresponsible, incompetent and uncooperative figures characterised as “loudmouths who could never actually come to power.” At first, this was so obvious that no one took their shouting seriously. Even Trump’s first presidency between 2016-20 failed to teach the establishment any lessons. What happened was not viewed as a systemic threat but a random glitch, one successfully corrected without serious consequences. After all, in 2020, Trump lost the election and left the White House, having fulfilled virtually none of his promises.”

“In 2024, the Democrats lost the election not because Trump’s ideas had become more convincing, but because the liberal establishment had worn out even its own supporters. At the last moment, realising the threat, the establishment tried to mobilise voters by scaring them with the horrors that would follow a Trump victory. But by then, the public’s disgust and contempt for the old political class, combined with the demoralisation of the moderate middle, had outweighed even the fear of a Trumpist experiment. The voters who could have stopped Trump simply did not show up. Some even voted Republican out of spite — after all, with Trump, at least things would be entertaining.”

“Such disintegration is inevitable even if certain aspects of Trump’s policies “work” in the short term. Which is why it is crucial for him to push through major, irreversible changes as quickly as possible — while his supporters remain united and his opponents are still disoriented, demoralised and lacking a coherent agenda that might appeal to parts of his base.”

“[…] the elitism and social deafness of the liberal opposition make it nearly impossible for many disillusioned Trump voters, especially working-class ones, to cross over, even if they come to feel betrayed by his policies.”

“[…] if we examine Trump’s decisions from the standpoint of political economy, we find actions that are in fact quite logical and consistent — at least in terms of the interests of US capital, or more precisely, the segment of it facing declining profitability and shrinking markets.”

“In short, Trumpism represents a policy of coercive redistribution of the disproportions in global capitalism that have accumulated over the past three decades and led to the Great Recession of 2007–09. At that time, the crisis was simply “drenched in money” without eliminating its structural causes. As a result, the imbalances continued to grow, and the system continued to malfunction. We are now confronted with the prospect of a new crisis, potentially even more severe.

“But since Trump and his team hold conservative views, they also do not propose any structural changes involving the redistribution of resources, authority or power between the private and public sectors, or between labour and capital.”

“As Pozhidaev puts it, “Trump’s tariff policy lacks a developmental logic — it is not targeted at strategic sectors, nor is it backed by investments in innovation or infrastructure. Many of the tariffs apply to goods the US no longer produces — and has no intention of producing.” Hazbi Budunov11 writes much the same: “Trump has tariffs, but no industrial policy.” So, the much-touted revival of the Rust Belt is unlikely to materialise.”

“Trump is in effect dismantling the system of US hegemony, but not in order to replace it with a more equitable and balanced world order. On the contrary, his goal is to replace it with a system of US domination through force: compelling other countries not just to trade resources and goods, but to hand them over to the most powerful predator.”

“[…] in today’s global conditions, the alternative to hegemony is not a fairer world order but chaos, what is often for some reason called a “multipolar world” in Russia, but is in fact a “war of all against all”. In a world of chaos, the larger predators simply devour the weaker ones — and even they are not immune from being devoured or at least seriously bitten. It is clear that economic chaos inevitably leads to war. And these would not be the so-called “managed” conflicts fantasised about by conspiracy theorists.”

“By dragging out unfolding processes, clashing with the judiciary, and undermining the foundations of US democracy, Trump is imposing a new logic, forcing both allies and opponents to accept that the “war of all against all” has already begun. In fact, when we describe Trump’s “failures,” we risk falling into the same trap as critics of the Yeltsin–Gaidar reforms in 1990s Russia. Back then, we also demonstrated that none of the reformers’ publicly stated goals had been achieved, at least not by the end of the decade. But the point is that those stated goals were secondary compared to the real, unstated one: to redistribute power and property, creating a new elite […]”

The U.S. is Russia in the nineties.

“In Trump’s view, it does not much matter what exact deals are struck in negotiations with the EU, China, Iran or Russia. What matters is that everyone — whether willingly and enthusiastically (as with the Russian elite), or reluctantly and under duress (as with the EU and China) — is forced to accept a new logic: private bilateral deals in place of universal rules and norms. In essence, this is just the “war of all against all”, conducted by commercial means.”

“The Trumpist blitzkrieg was premised on the need to radically push through his agenda before his opponents had time to organise and consolidate, and before inevitable fractures emerged within his own ranks. The first part of the plan has been more or less successful: opponents of Trumpism remain divided and — more importantly — ineffective. But the second part has gone far worse: the breakdown of the Trumpist coalition began even earlier than expected.”

Know Them By Their Fruits by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Those tiny skeletal bodies you’re seeing on your social media feed are the fruits of the empire. The shredded, eviscerated, decapitated children you’ve been seeing in footage from Gaza since 2023 are the fruits of the empire. This is known now, and it can never be unknown.

“As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That’s why it’s important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are.”

“This is who they are. This is who our leaders are. This is who our complicit news media are. This is what Israel is. This is what Zionism is. This is what the empire is. This is what western civilization is. We know that now. We know them by their fruits.

“This is who they are, and it’s who they’ll always be. That’s why it’s important never to forget what they’ve shown us about themselves in Gaza, and to never, ever forgive them.”

They’re Starving Civilians To Steal A Palestinian Territory, And They’re Lying About It by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Indeed, Israel has been on record scheming to find a way to relocate the population of Gaza for many decades.

“That’s what this is all about. That’s all this has ever been about. It’s not about hostages. It’s not about Hamas. It’s not about Israel defending itself. It’s about stealing a Palestinian territory, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

What Free Speech? by Ted Rall

Ted Rall − 7-25-25

“You can say anything you want

“But not at work

“Or in school

“Or online

“Or near a political event

“Or in the street”

They Intend To Keep Lying About Gaza Until They’ve Emptied It Out by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Israel’s announcement that it will allow more food into Gaza so people don’t starve completely debunks all its claims these last few days that people in Gaza are starving because of Hamas and the UN. They’re starving because Israel is starving them.

“Israeli officials have told The New York Times that there has never been any evidence of Hamas stealing aid from UN trucks in any significant way, a claim Israel and its apologists have been falsely asserting for two years. They lie about everything. They never stop lying.”

“The worst thing Donald Trump has ever done is commit genocide in Gaza. Everything else pales in comparison. He could end the Gaza holocaust with a phone call just like Biden could have, and he hasn’t. For that reason alone he deserves to die in a cage.”

Recall of opposition lawmakers in Taiwan rejected by voters by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

“In May, congressional testimony by retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery revealed that 500 US military personnel were stationed in Taiwan, far more than the handful previously acknowledged. Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that President Xi Jinping was preparing to invade Taiwan by 2027 and war with China was “imminent.”

“In fact, it is the US that is accelerating preparations for war with China by seeking to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan—paralleling the way it provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine. And in similar fashion, Washington is completely indifferent to the catastrophic impact such a war would have on the Taiwanese population. US imperialism is driven above all by the fear that China’s economic growth is undermining America’s global dominance.

“The “Great Recall” campaign in Taiwan was clearly seen in the US and international media as a step toward ensuring Lai could proceed with his agenda of militarising the island and marginalising the opposition. Currently the DPP holds 51 seats in the 113-seat legislative Yuan, while the KMT holds 51 and the Taiwan People’s Party holds 8.

“The slick, well-funded recall campaign was billed as a popular, grassroots movement based on civic groups, but it had formal DPP support and the party was heavily involved behind the scenes. According to an article on the Diplomat website, the DPP deployed 20 percent of its central party staff to the constituency of KMT legislator Fu Kun-chi, one of the main targets of the recall campaign, in bid to oust him.”

“Throughout this acrimonious political brawling, the two parties and their supporters made no attempt to address the social crisis facing working people. Despite their occasional empty promises, both parties are staunch defenders of capitalism committed to imposing the demands of big business on the working class.

“While the recall campaign has all but failed, the bitterness of the campaign—reflecting acute tensions in Taiwanese ruling circles—means that the political crisis will only erupt in another form.”

Israeli Cruise Ship Becomes Flying Dutchman by Juan Cole (Scheer Post)

“Tuesday morning last week the Crown Iris cruise ship full of Israeli tourists tried to stop off at Syros island just south of Athens. They were blocked by a massive popular demonstration at the Ermoupolis harbor, conducted despite a curfew issued by the municipal authorities for local residents, forbidding traffic and circulation at the port in hopes of allowing the Israeli tourists to get off. People ignored the traffic ban to assemble anyway. In the end the cruiser had to cast off its moorings and depart without unloading any of its 1600 passengers.”

“Personally, I don’t agree with boycotting individual Israelis. People should be judged by their deeds, not by their origins. But this crime of the 21st century will unfortunately and inevitably cast a long shadow. And nor should Americans, who are joined at the hip with Netanyahu and his millenarian crazies, think they will themselves escape this gathering global opprobrium.”

Gang Databases: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) by LastWeekTonight (YouTube)

All of this police-enforcement is pure theater, put on by police thespians who are acting their roles for money. Their incentive is not to take any people off of lists. Their incentive is to pin crimes on people. They get paid for that. They get promoted for that. No-one ever bought a jetski or a second home by not arresting people or by not trumping up their charges.

These people don’t care about justice, they don’t care about the law. They care about themselves, about their incomes, about their pensions, about their early retirement. They certainly don’t care about people. They’ll cheerfully destroy dozens of lives in a day if it means that they get overtime, if it means that they get a promotion.

Who cares about those people they arrest and harass anyway? Are any of them really innocent? Of course not. Just look at them. They don’t look like us so who even cares if we’re wrong? It’s like fishing with dynamite. You’ll get your fish, but you destroy the lake. The lake’s not near your house, though, so who cares? You got what you wanted. Honestly, fuck everyone else should be written on the U.S.-American flag.

Here’s a prediction: for years, I’ve been hearing from people in my family that crime is on the rise—and it’s positively out of control in large cities. None of these people live in large cities, so they know all of this from their news sources. Those news sources want to keep people terrified and supportive of increased policing, decreased freedom, and mucho money for private and public law enforcement. So lucrative!

Anyway, when you actually look at the statistics, crime has been going down for a while. No-one can really explain it—there is no clear causal link to the increased policing. Just the opposite, in fact. Crime is higher in more strongly policed areas.

OK, so you have an entire population positively primed with the belief that crime is out of control.

And now you hire tens of thousands of new security people in the person of ICE soldiers, who sweep extrajudicially and illegally across the country, smashing and grabbing and deporting their way through swaths of designated criminals (read: people who are not you).

Let this roll for a few months, and then you can declare victory on crime, finally admitting that it’s going down, but crediting ICE for it.

Hey, neat. A couple of days after writing this prediction, the article Trump Administration Takes Credit for Crime Drop It Previously Denied Existed by C.J. Ciaramella (Reason) shows up, which writes that the DHS tweeted that,

““HOMICIDES DOWN 17% across 30 U.S. cities under President [Donald] Trump and [Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem],” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted on X Monday. “The rapid arrests and deportations of criminal illegal aliens are having real impact on public safety.””

Colonel Wilkerson Reveals the Brutal Truth Behind Gaza and Ukraine by India & Global Left (YouTube)

This is a great interview with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson that does exactly what it says on the tin.

From 27:00,

“You may have seen that, recently, Russia notified us, and then went down to Tanif and bombed around the perimeter of our troops there. They told us they were going to do it and why did they do that? They did that because we’re training terrorists in that area, and releasing them into Syria. God knows why we’re doing that, but we’re still doing that. I suspect it’s a CIA and Mossad—maybe MI6—they all work together pretty much now. But they were trying to kill some of these terrorists, as they came off the wire, so to speak, from the area that we sort of enclose in that portion of Syria. So Syria’s a mess right now and I don’t think the US knows what it’s doing.

“You could say that throughout the whole Levant but Netanyahu is wading into that mess because what Netanyahu wants is water and territory. That’s what he wants. Water and territory. Same thing he wants in Lebanon. I think he wants a little bit more control over Lebanon though. Why did we build the largest, most expensive embassy on the face of the earth for the United States of America in Lebanon? Well, because it’s not an embassy. It’s not a diplomacy place. Oh, there’ll be a few diplomats there. We’ll put an ambassador there. It’s CIA, MI6, and Mossad. That’s what it’s for. It’s huge. If you see the satellite photographs of it, you have to think about maybe Baghdad times three, you know. So it’s a great game. We’re playing a great game against China.”

Google’s YouTube transcripts mysteriously don’t know the word for “Mossad,” mysteriously writing it as MSAD instead. Even when the rest of the sentence is absolutely perfect, with perfect punctuation. Even when Wilkerson’s diction is perfect throughout. This goes in the category of Google inexplicably struggling with words like Palestinian and Apartheid. So weird and coincidental how it’s just those words.

Starve Away! by Jesse Welles (YouTube)

On the one hand, thanks for including the lyrics in the description … but, on the other, are you using an automatic-transcription service or did you deliberately misspell stuff like e.g. “buys Israeli bonds” as “buys his rarely bonds” and “straight outta AIPAC” as “str8 outta a pack”? That kind of bowing to the algorithm seems a bit false for a good protest song like this.

Or did you take the lyrics from a Google transcription? Because YouTube transcription avoids words like apartheid, Palestine, AIPAC, and Israel like the plague.

Looking forward to having my account banned for this comment.

Roaming Charges: Something’s Gone Wrong Again by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“More than two-thirds of Democratic primary voters in NYC agree with Zohran Mamdani’s positions on Israel, including arresting Netanyahu. 57% say they might oppose Dems who don’t endorse Mamdani for mayor, including the party’s two Brooklyn-based leaders in Congress.”

Good. Weiter so. (keep it up.)

“Jonathon Sumpton, a historian and former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2018, has written an important legal essay on whether Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza constitutes the ultimate war crimes, concluding:”

“I sometimes wonder what Israel’s defenders would regard as unacceptable, if the current level of Israeli violence in Gaza is not enough. It is impossible for any decent person to be unmoved by the scale of arbitrarily imposed human suffering, or the spectacle of a powerful army brutally assaulting a population already on its knees. This is not self-defence. It is not even the kind of collateral damage which can be unavoidable in war. It is collective punishment, in other words, revenge, visited not just on Hamas but on an entire population. It is, in short, a war crime.”

“An Israeli soldier told the leading Israeli newspaper, YNet, about forces shooting civilians near a hospital and abducting children:”

“I was stationed in front of a hospital in Gaza and it took a few days until the company commander ordered not to shoot the elderly and children. For a few days, that’s what happened. It was clear that it was bad. But you are under the influence–some acted out of a sense of revenge, some were very afraid and some were simply tired and when you are tired you don’t think. There was an incident that stuck with me. We took teenagers and used them as human shields. They walked in front of the force, opened doors in case there was an explosive device or terrorists. We just took people from the humanitarian axis. The whole time they were with us, they were blindfolded and handcuffed. You have to take them to the bathroom and open their underwear and you see them shaking.”

“Will Kim came to the US from South Korea when he was five years old. He’s had a Green Card as a lawful permanent resident of the US for many years. Currently, Kim is a PhD student at Texas A&M, where he’s researching a vaccine for Lyme disease. Last week, he was detained at San Francisco International Airport. The feds have offered no reason for his arrest and have denied Kim access to his attorney, Eric Lee. Kim was allowed only a single brief call to his mother. The only blemish on his record is a minor marijuana possession charge, which was settled in a diversion program and should have been expunged. “My client Will Kim has a green card, grew up in the US, became a scientist & is researching Lyme disease vaccines,” Eric Lee wrote on Twitter. “He has spent more than 7 days in a CBP airport detention ctr w/ no daylight, sleeping in a chair, no access to a lawyer. Another brutal attack on immigrants & science. Free Will!””

My future, starting Sunday.

“Rep. Nancy Mace: “One of my favorite things to watch on YouTube these days are the court hearings where illegals are in court and ICE shows up to drag them out of court and deport them. I can think of nothing more American…” ”

I actually agree with her.

“Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), law enforcement usually needs a warrant, court order or subpoena to access a patient’s medical records. However, ICE has taken advantage of a legal loophole by obtaining insurance claims data from third-party clearinghouses and data brokers. By accessing these alternative channels, federal agents can avoid legal protections designed to safeguard patient privacy.”

Hey, cool. Happy for them. Nice to see that their jobs got easier.

“According to the energy statistics group Ageb, German hard coal-fired power generation increased by 23.3% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period last year.”

“Bruno Maçães: “Stunning to look at Europe today: if China sells us ultra cheap solar panels, effectively subsiding our energy transition, that’s the threat of autocracy. If the US uses coercion and blackmail to sink our economies, that’s working together.””

“San Jose State University study: 9 households control 15% of all wealth in Silicon Valley, with just 0.1% of residents owning 71% percent of all Silicon Valley wealth.”

“Peter Ryan, writing in Compact: “The top 1.86 percent of Bitcoin addresses controlled more than 90 percent of Bitcoin’s supply. By comparison, the top 1 percent of America controls just 31 percent of wealth. How is Bitcoin decentralized, again?””

“Under Jair Bolsonaro, the proportion of Brazil’s population suffering from food insecurity reached 23%. Today, 19 months into the 3rd Lula administration, the UN has announced this proportion has dropped below 2.5%. Brazil has been removed from the FAO UN World Hunger Map.”

“Reporter: Was Malcolm X preaching hate and violence?

“Denzel Washington: Is the sheep preaching hate and violence when he says I’m not going to let a wolf eat me anymore?”

Europe is about to look more like America by Hasan Piker (YouTube)

“Europe, get excited. You’re going to have to spend more of your taxable revenue—more of the revenue that comes from taxes—on American weapons. You won’t be able to spend that on your health care. You won’t be able to spend that on your roads, on your public transit. It’s going to look a lot more like America in Europe. So, I’m kind of excited for that because I’m a psychopath who wants everything to be America, everything to be bald eagle.”

Journalism & Media

American Progress − John Gast by Homeland Security (Twitter)

Homeland Security tweets American Progress by John Gast

Is everyone still feeling super-comfortable with the direction that this department has taken? Take a closer look at the painting. Citing Christopher S. Brown’s comment,

“For folks who missed that day in middle school, this painting is a very famous personification of white, Anglo-Saxon America floating westward stringing telegraph wire while trains, settlers, and miners follow, and the symbolic darkness, bison, and Native peoples are literally pushed off the canvas. The painting celebrates white territorial expansion and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.”

Wokeness Defeated: America Returns To Christian Roots Of Objectifying Women To Sell Crap (Babylon Bee)

I honestly can’t even tell whether they’re kidding.

I’m going to assume that they are kidding and have, perhaps inadvertently, pulled off a reasonably nice satire headline for what seems like the first time in a long while. Usually, they’re just making fun of genocide, which is a terrible, terrible look.[3]

“Conservatives across the country cheered the death of wokeness as America finally returned to its Christian roots of objectifying women’s bodies to sell stuff.

“The internet rang out with victorious proclamations that the evil forces of wokeness had been defeated, seeing as how corporations had gone back to using heterosexual lust to make money.

““Woo! We’re back to selling women’s bodies!” said local conservative Dan Millen, celebrating. “All the bad wokeness is gone, and corporations are back to using cleavage to sell things. American family values have carried the day.”

“After years of wokeness tearing at the Christian foundations of the United States, conservatives took time to soak in the victory. “Corporations exploiting young women is what made this country great,” said conservative podcaster Ryan McMaster. “This is what the fight is all about, conserving this nation for our kids. When I turn on the television and see women’s bodies objectified for material gain, I know the fight was worth it.”

“At publishing time, conservatives had cheered to learn that beauty pageants were back to not allowing ugly people.”

Man, I still can’t tell. It feels like they lost their root password.

First, Kill The News by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“The Speaker of the House shut down the House of Representatives early in order to avoid allowing votes on matters about the President’s involvement with a convicted sex criminal. This the matter that the President’s own attorney general told the President he is implicated in, right before that attorney general decided not to release the files, in order to protect the President. That’s a pretty crazy thing, no? I mean, I don’t think you need to be hyperpartisan to say that such a thing seems scandalous enough to taint the entire power structure that enabled it—White House, party leadership, and funders alike.”

“The reaction among voters seems strangely muted. The politicians involved do not change their behavior. The people who strategized and funded the current state of affairs somehow avoid permanent disgrace, and carry on as usual. It helps that, as one (anonymous) Republican strategist told a Wired reporter, “most voters don’t have a fucking clue who Peter Thiel is.””

“The information ecosystem of America today is similar to the political environment of, say, Iraq, directly after the US military obliterated the Baath Party. On the one hand, that Baath Party had some serious flaws! On the other hand, now all the power has devolved into the hands of competing warlords, gangsters, extremists, and cutthroats, and everyone is shooting everyone, and it’s very hard for regular people to know where to send the check for their water bill.”

“The line from everyone listening to Walter Cronkite as the voice of God to everyone having a personalized, lying algorithm in their pocket is, of course, a long one. The internet happened, the big tech companies figured out how to monopolize all the ad money, traditional media companies got poorer, journalists everywhere got laid off, vulture hedge funds ate up local newspapers, and unscrupulous propagandists mastered news-tainment at an unprecedented scale.”

“People who live in a country where they want a democracy to work want and need to know true things that are happening. So even if the media has gotten very damaged, as it has now, it is still worthwhile to think about where that journalism is going to come from today and tomorrow. Not enough journalism means not enough public knowledge of what is actually happening means a vacuum that can be taken advantage of by rich and powerful and manipulative people and organizations.”

“From their perspective, the ideal would be no journalism, ever, and only Charlie Kirk videos and podcasts by second-rate comedians. All genuine information would be restricted to analysts employed by investment firms that donate to the party in power. The citizens would talk about FOOTBALL and the masters of the universe would carry on undisturbed. This is the ideal social form that corporate capitalism is always working towards.”

“Even though the roots of this are deep, the speed with which decades of accumulated journalistic credibility have been crumpled up and thrown away is really something to behold. One billionaire bought, and wrecked, the LA Times. Another, even richer billionaire bought, and is now wrecking, the Washington Post. This is not a matter of being wedded to the old-timey form of the newspaper, but rather a matter of “there are only so many places where news reporters exist.” There are 75% fewer local journalists working in America today than there were in 2002.”

“CBS, the home of 60 Minutes, paid Trump a bribe in a frivolous lawsuit, then canceled the show of the late night host who got on Trump’s nerves, all so that Trump will tell his minions to approve a merger that will make a tiny number of Hollywood wastrels very rich.”

“When Trump is satisfied that his boots have been sufficiently licked and that merger goes through, the new company will be controlled by David Ellison, who is rich because he is the kid of the world’s second-richest man. Thus a journalistic legacy that stretches back to Edward R. Murrow will be incinerated by a living symbol of the need for confiscatory inheritance taxes.”

“Who is ascendant in this terrifying new world of Zombie Journalism? People like Bari Weiss, the replacement-level former NYT blogger who has made herself a ton of money by launching a website that exists to reaffirm the political instincts of wealthy, center-right people:”

“The more power billionaires have, the more they want a media that tells them that they are forces for good. Because that is not true, they are, by human nature, drawn to squash real journalism and reconstruct in its place a simulacrum of journalism that strokes their considerable egos.”

“A side effect is that all the reporters who should be checking to see whether your city councilman is taking payoffs from various crooks are instead unemployed,”

“Still, you have to believe, deep down, that telling the world true things will manifest its own form of power. Eventually. And that it is a sort of power that spread, and multiplies, and grows on its own, no matter what artificial walls are built in its path. That truth shall overcome, baby. One day.”

Why we choose to avoid information that’s right in front of us by Jeremy L Foust (Psyche Ideas)

“Avoiding information clearly comes with risks – some mild, some serious. Someone might eat more chocolate cake than they intended to. Consumers might neglect a company’s cruel policies and keep buying their products. A patient whose disease could’ve been detected early might wait too long to seek help. There are also bigger-picture risks to consider. Avoiding information that is inconsistent with one’s beliefs seems to explain, at least partially, political polarisation. People who ignore perspectives that are opposed to theirs are likely to have increasing confidence in their own beliefs, no matter what the evidence suggests.”

“Often, it takes a certain amount of privilege to be able to comfortably avoid information. For instance, it is easier to avoid information about your finances when you have sufficient money. Likewise, it is easier to avoid information about political policies – including harmful ones – when you are not directly affected by those policies.”

“Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for… by Jason Kottke

Mark this day, the 28th of July, 2025, when even the most cowardly of liberal commentators are willing to crawl out from under the rock under which they’ve been hiding for the last 21 months and jump onto the very back of the bandwagon in naming Israel’s actions for what they are. Don’t worry, though, if his masters in the mainstream media declare that he’s no longer to use the G-word, he will cease forthwith.

In Brutal Document Release, the Russia Hoax is Finally Exposed by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

““The ICA selectively omitted quotes from key HUMINT and SIGINT reports that contradicted the judgments on Putin’s intentions,” the report noted, “while conversely it included quotes — from those same HUMINT and SIGINT reports — that supported the ICA thesis.” The investigators added: “This was done multiple times.””

“John Brennan pulled from the trash a 10-month-old “anonymous email proposal” by an unknown person to place “a well-known pro-Kremlin official” on Trump’s “election team” in order to “formulate a mutually acceptable agenda between Trump and Putin.” It appears that this “idea” came not from Russia but perhaps another foreign service, perhaps Ukraine’s. Hilariously, the identity of the country of origin for this email was redacted from everyone’s eyes, including Barack Obama’s. Noted investigators: There was no security justification for obscuring the identity of the service, as the ICA was written for the President, who is cleared for everything.”

The article It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack) came out just a day later.

“Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.””

In what way is starving people a red line where sniping them in the head and genitals wasn’t? How is starving worse than relentlessly bombing for almost two years, driving everyone out of their homes and turning a whole country to rubble? This is an incoherent argument…but welcome to the party, I guess.

“Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.

“Burning children alive wasn’t enough.

“Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.

“Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.

“The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.

“[…]

“Israeli officials openly expressing genocidal intent for the people of Gaza wasn’t enough.”

Empire- and Israel-apologists blame autocorrect

“Hello I am a North American journalist and op Ed writer. For the last 18 months my dang computer has been auto correcting all of my writing and posts to say that what’s happening in Gaza is complicated but necessary. What I actually meant is that it’s bad. Thank you”

Why are they all crawling out of the woodwork now? Why all at once?

Israel has destroyed almost all of the hospitals in Gaza, kidnapped doctors, sniped children, destroyed almost all of the water infrastructure in Gaza, they block food aid, the horrors go on and on. Every action was a deliberate, planned step in a plan to eliminate the population. They claim that they want them to move away; they honestly don’t care either way. Just don’t be there anymore.

This was always the plan. None of this is out of control, according to Israel. It’s going too slowly but this is the plan.

And all of this is a war crime. The Overton Window has shifted significantly. Just attacking near a hospital is illegal, to say nothing of leveling it. Attacking civilian infrastructure—but especially things like water infrastructure—is illegal. Attacking civilians is illegal. Withholding food aid is illegal. Starving civilians is illegal. The empire’s media arm has ensured that people nod sagely and mumble that “it’s complicated” when Israel does it.

Because it’s finally better for their careers to be against the genocide than for it. If the wind changes direction, then so will they. They don’t really care. They care about themselves and they are being made to pretend to care about Gazans because otherwise their ability to earn will be impinged. It’s as simple as that.

Those Who Were Wrong About Gaza Should Admit It With Profound Humility by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Brianna, do you know what you have done? Have you fully taken account of your part in the horrific pain and unfathomable suffering that you have facilitated over the past 22 months?

“Because you are not just some rando on the internet who didn’t do her due diligence. Your words ran cover for a genocide. You are as guilty as Goebbels. You orchestrated PR campaigns with people whose publicly stated intention was to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of Palestinians. They were saying it with their mouth holes as far back as October 2023, and every time they did you doubled down.

“This is not something you can just brush off, either legally or morally.

“Legally you are as culpable as Julius Streicher who hanged for his offenses in World War II.”

“The other day I wrote, “Today I got my first comment telling me I was wrong to oppose Israel in October 2023 but now I’m right because things have changed. I expect to receive many more such comments going forward as people navigate the difficult cognitive dissonance terrain of realizing they’ve been wrong this entire time.”

“We’re seeing more and more of this as the truth emerges. I read another tweet by Yahoo Finance’s Jordan Weissmann saying, “As Dems converge on agreement that Israel has been committing an atrocity, I do think there needs to be some reckoning among mods that, while lots of ugly antisemitism burst from the left after Oct. 7, the leftists were fundamentally more right about what this war would become.”

““Ugly antisemitism”, Jordan? That “antisemitism” was people opposing the atrocities you now admit we were right about. If you’re going to admit you were wrong, just do it. Don’t try to drag down those of us who’ve been correct the entire time while you right your own wrongs.”

Israel Apologists Support Genocide; Of Course They’re Fine With Lying by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“[…] how revealing is it that simply ending the genocide never at any time enters the conversation? The world hates Israel because Israel is committing genocide, but they never see that as the problem — they see bad PR about the genocide as the problem. The problem isn’t that we’re doing genocide, the problem is that we’re not using the right words to explain why the genocide is good.

“Again, these are not normal people. There’s got to be something seriously wrong with you as a person to keep supporting Israel in the year 2025.”

Film Review: James Gunn’s Superman Cements Israel’s Villain Status in the American Imagination by Mitchell Plitnick (Scheer Post)

“Since Superman premiered, there has been a lot of chatter about it. The film broadly tells the story of Superman intervening against Boravia—which, both in the movie and in the comic book lore it is drawn from is presented as an Eastern European country—conquering its neighbor Jarhanpur—clearly depicted as an economically and physically ravaged country populated by people of color, many of whom are visibly Muslim. The scenario is inescapably evocative of Palestine.”

“Since Israel, Palestine, or any other country—save the United States, of course—is not mentioned in Superman, the metaphor of Boravia can be interpreted, or denied, at the viewer’s whim. But to do so, one has to ignore the unambiguous evidence in the film. 

“James Gunn, who wrote and directed Superman, insists that Boravia and its neighboring country Jarhanpur, are not direct references to Israel and Palestine, but his explanation is very telling. 

““When I wrote this the Middle Eastern conflict wasn’t happening. So I tried to do little things to move it away from that, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the Middle East… [the movie depicts an] invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country that’s problematic in terms of its political history, but has totally no defense against the other country,” which he said “really is fictional.”

“Just from the statement that “the Middle Eastern conflict wasn’t happening,” we can tell that Gunn is not deeply learned in Israel and Palestine, although what he probably meant was that October 7 had not yet happened (he started writing the film in late 2022) and neither had the overt genocide in Gaza. As such, it may be fair to take him at his word that he was referencing a broader idea.”

The End of an Era: Conventional Wisdom is Dead by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The companies now in peril are the same ones that have no ability to describe, even critically, new details from a Russiagate story they themselves made famous, as all the new information leads back to their own failures and complicity in an epochal scam. As Pulitzer winner Jeff Gerth put it to Paul Sperry, “The media isn’t looking for Russiagate scoops, nor will they fairly present the ones others get if they reflect poorly on their prior reporting.”

“In any other era, the news business would be hopping. The rest of Washington is buzzing with rumors of more long-suppressed documents coming out this week. Ask yourself: when has the press ever been uninterested in disclosure of secret documents? It’s rare, but here it makes sense, as what’s rumored to be coming will accelerate the obliteration of years of deceptive narratives. No one wants to admit it, but the consensus-building mechanism has cornered itself, and is now suffering a rapid implosion, in the manner of a financial bubble.”

“[…] those outraged responses reveal the biggest: an epidemic sense of entitlement. It’s true that media companies were once happy to support news shows that lost money, as a way to fulfill their federal mandate to broadcast content in the “public interest.” But the Communications Act of 1934 wasn’t written to ensure revenue from sports and sitcoms endlessly bailed out the dimwit producers of error-factory news programming. People like Colbert and Hayes think they have a license to get the biggest stories wrong forever, lose money forever, get paid tens of millions to do both those things, and proudly display all these qualities to audiences without consequence.”

“To me it seems obvious that high-profile failures on the biggest stories are what punched the hole in the hull in the first place, making mass consensus impossible. The next claimants to the public’s trust should anyway listen to the carnage this week. No matter how much money or how many influential friends you have, nobody gets to screw up forever.”

No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release”

“It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail. Characteristically, the most powerful political family since the Kennedys won’t just bring many individuals down with them, but whole institutions, as the FBI, the CIA, the presidency of Barack Obama, and a dozen or so of the most celebrated brands in commercial media will see their names blackened forever through association with this idiotic caper. A fair number of those media companies should (and likely will) go out of business.”

“One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme. The last stage required the enthusiastic cooperation and canine incuriosity of the entire commercial news business, which cheered as conspirators made an enforcement target of Trump, actually an irrelevant bystander.”

“Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple”

“These people just can’t stop lying. The whole thing is one endless lie, the reason for which is now clear. Hillary Clinton got in trouble being dumb, tried to save herself by doing something dumber, and all of American officialdom backed the play. That’s it. A last period of denials awaits, but they’ll fizzle like the rest, after which not much will be left but blunt truth — and hopefully, consequences.”

Yeah, I doubt that very much. It is amusing, though, to watch how much flak the various parties are throwing out there, though. Like, the only reason we’re getting Russiagate files—which, of course, the mainstream media which is deeply implicated in the revelations contained therein, is calling “fake”—is to distract from the Epstein files.

So Trump is throwing shade on Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration for Russiagate—a scandal of nearly unparalleled proportion, given how it was used as a lever to torpedo an entire presidency (Trump’s first) as well as inure U.S. citizens to the idea of war with Russia—because he’s trying to keep the hounds off his back about his deep and loving relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted trafficker and abuser of underage women.

The Democrats and mainstream media respond by now pretending to be horrified about what is going on in Gaza, babbling some absolute bullshit about how starvation is suddenly a red line where blowing people to smithereens wasn’t. Add to this that starvation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing were cheerfully announced as the official plan as early as a week after October 7th—and, if we’re honest, had been on a slower boil for at least five decades prior, for those who’d bothered to pay even a lick of attention—and the latest hand-wringing about Israel’s Graueltaten can be taken as nothing more than a cynical attempt to deflect the damning revelations of the heretofore suppressed addenda to the Durham files. Note that no-one is seriously suggesting that these files are faked.

So, because of Trump’s flailing about his, at best, long and deep relationship with one of humanity’s most prolific pedophiles or, at worst, actually being one himself (at least an ephebophile), we finally get absolute proof and closure of what pretty much everyone except for those most deeply in the tank against Trump already knew, which is that Russiagate was a deliberate lie from the very beginning. It was a lie told to cover up a Clinton fuckup that sorely threatened her chances at her predestined presidency.

And, because of the Russiagate revelations have caused the Democrats to sacrifice their unswerving fealty to Israel by throwing them under the bus as distraction. Unlike Russiagate, though, the story they’re telling this time is actually true—and has been true for almost two years. Israel is committing genocide. It’s good to see the world, very belatedly—almost certainly too late for anything resembling a Palestinian State to emerge, despite some extremely cynical and last-minute scrambling to recognize it as it draws its last breaths—switch to the right side. They are doing so not for principle but to save their own skins and reputations. As usual, they know which side their bread is buttered on.

However, it is currently delicious to snack on all of this truth being delivered as flak by the wealthy and powerful as their infighting finally tears them apart. I, for one, am hopeful for more in this vein.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Called It A Genocide Before Bernie Sanders by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Those who say everything Israel is doing in Gaza can be explained by October 7 have got it exactly backwards: everything we’re seeing in Gaza explains why October 7 happened in the first place.

“The sadism and psychopathy we’re witnessing in Gaza didn’t magically appear 22 months ago; everyone in Gaza has been experiencing Israel’s abusiveness in various manifestations throughout their entire lives. Israel has always been this way. October 7 just gave it the excuse to completely unleash its genocidal impulses.”

Labor

Financing Our Own Destruction by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“[…] that dogged refusal to snap out of the soothing belief that things are the same as ever is going to get us fucking killed. The simple act of getting our political parties, businesses, social groups, unions, and other aspects of civil society to grasp the peril that democracy is in and act as if it is our job to do something meaningful about it is the first and most important step to getting the still-powerful machinery of opposition moving with the urgency that we need.”

“These people amount to the financial backbone of MAGA-ism. Most of them derived their wealth from running lucrative venture capital firms, hedge funds, or other investment firms. That means that they have clients. Their firms, and their subsequent fortunes, are funded by investors. And who are these investors? In many cases, they are the pension funds of public employees.”

“It is all part of capitalism’s washing machine, the process by which the wealth of working people is invested in ways antithetical to the interests of working people, with the explanation that doing so is necessary or even good because the proceeds will fund those workers’ retirements. I have written before about how perverse and self-defeating this dynamic is, particularly in the case of union pension money, which often directly fuels the forces bent on destroying unions.”

“Republicans know that money equals power, and they understand the sort of impact that enormous pension funds could have if they were able to place political or moral criteria on their investment decisions, and they go to great lengths to short circuit that possibility with a thicket of regulations about fiduciary duty, even as they themselves do things like pass laws saying that their states won’t do business with you if do anything that could be construed as “ESG,” or try to make consumer boycotts illegal.”

“This is “maybe as a public employee my retirement money should not be invested with the guys whose personal project is to destroy the entire public sector.” It is very difficult to say, with a straight face, that workers and their representative institutions are taking seriously the urgency of the threat to their livelihoods, their freedom, their democracy, and their brothers and sisters lives, when we can’t even rouse ourselves to fucking invest our money in firms other than those controlled by the architects of the right wing takeover of America.”

“You can stick your money in low-cost index funds, stay far away from fascist Silicon Valley billionaire-owned firms, and still probably get just as good of a return! Don’t take it from me—take it from chief investment officer of the $190 billion UC endowment and pension fund, who just completely divested from hedge funds, after concluding that they are not worth it, financially.”

Economy & Finance

Crypto market capitalisation hits $4 trillion by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Three pieces of legislation have been presented. The so-called GENIUS Act, which has passed both the House and the Senate, facilitates the establishment of stablecoins that aid the entry of major finance houses, as well as non-financial corporations, into the crypto world.

“The Clarity Act, which has passed the House and now awaits approval in the Senate, is possibly even more significant because it removes regulation of the crypto market from the Securities and Exchange Commission and gives it to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is regarded as being more “crypto friendly.”

“In comments to the New York Times, Kara Calvert, a top official at the major crypto exchange Coinbase, said it “has been absolutely the most important thing we have been pushing for.”

“The third piece of legislation is the ban on the Federal Reserve creating a digital currency, regarded as less significant because the Fed has not announced any plan to do so.”

“[Stablecoins] are touted as providing stability because they are supposedly backed one-for-one by underlying assets, chiefly US dollars or Treasury bonds. The heads of Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase have said they intend to create their own stablecoins, and other non-financial firms, such as Walmart and Amazon, are expected to follow.”

How the ever-loving fuck is this not company scrip? You are going to get paid in Walmart bucks? Is that how this is going to work? And people are just nodding along, as if we’d never seen this before? We know how this ends. It’s certainly not a USD digital coin, which might be marginally better. They made that illegal so there’s no place for people to flee from the pillaging. People have no idea what’s going on or how bad it’s going to get.

“[…] means that the regular financial system, including the US Treasury market, is more intimately connected to the Ponzi scheme that constitutes the crypto market. None of the crypto coins, including Bitcoin, has any intrinsic value—there is no underlying real asset. Its market value only rises insofar as more money flows in, and this is the aim of the new legislation.”

“Commercial paper has been similarly supported but played a part in the 2008 crisis, and there are fears stablecoins could be a source of instability if they “break the buck.””

Which they absolutely will. Not one of them has ever held onto its peg. No-one who’s going to profit from this scheme is in any way interested in whether or not their stupid stablecoins actually do remain stable. They don’t have to care whether whatever scam they’re babbling about will actually work because they always make sure that they can profit from it first and get out earlier than all of the suckers who buy this bullshit hook, line, and sinker every single time. If you’re making money off of this, then you’re one of the assholes making poor people poorer. Congratulations. I hope you enjoy your jetski, you absolute fucknozzle. I hope it flips over and drowns you.

“The proponents of the crypto system endlessly claim that it represents a “democratisation” of finance and provides the opportunity for ordinary people to partake of the benefits to be derived from the world of finance, ignoring the fact that, according to the FBI, Americans lost $9 billion to crypto fraud last year, a 66 percent increase from the year before.”

That’s going to seem like a drop in the bucket once this crypto train starts rolling.

“As Hilary J. Allen a professor of law at American University Washington College of Law stated in a submission to the House Committee on Financial Services on June 24: “When roughly half of all Americans (some surveys say more) are living paycheck-to-paycheck, the problem is not lack of investment opportunities but a lack of money to invest in the first place.””

“There is no right way—the bringing of crypto into the financial mainstream emanates from the rot and decay at the heart of the US capitalist system—the accumulation of wealth by ever more parasitic and criminal means.

“Warren, who has described herself as “capitalist to the bone,” was carrying out her assigned function within this system by seeking to create a smokescreen for its operations with the claim that it can be somehow regulated.”

“The crypto market is a Ponzi scheme which requires the injection of ever greater amounts of money to push market value ever higher, enabling those at the apex of the financial system to expropriate ever greater amounts of wealth before the house of cards collapses with the consequences borne by the mass of the population—on a far greater a scale even than the crisis of 2008.”

“Just as the growing Epstein scandal is exposing the lifestyles and mores of the ultra wealthy, revealing the ruling classes to be a corrupt cancer on the body politic which must be removed, so their promotion of crypto is revealing the necessity to end the profit system and its ever steeper descent into parasitism, fraud and criminality, which is their economic foundation.”

Economic Planning Shouldn’t Be a Swear Word by Hannah Bensussan (Jacobin)

“in the last few decades, as market coordination proved dependent on massive state interventions and as ecological crises further discredit the ideology of market self-regulation, reflections on planned economies resurfaced. This also greatly renewed the concept.”

We do have a planned economy. States are uninvolved except as funding sources, lenders of last resort, and farmers and producers of labor capacity. The economy is planned by the handful of international conglomerates and billionaires to maintain their hegemony. It has no other purpose.

“Consider post–World War II dirigisme in France, where business leaders and the government met to reduce investment risks; intra-firm planning, which grows as capital continues to concentrate; or inter-firm planning, as a function of monopolistic capital’s power to subjugate smaller companies. Private actors seeking a monopolistic position constantly circumvent competitive constraints.”

Not just in France.

“This capitalist-compatible ecological planning thus appears more as a rescue program for capitalism than as a revolutionary project aiming to replace the rule of the market with conscious and collective direction.”

“If democracy is exercised across multiple territorial and temporal levels, how can we ensure that a decision made at one scale does not conflict with another made at another?”

Don’t slew 100% in the other direction. People are not visionaries. They don’t even recognize their necessities as luxuries promoted by societal dependence. Living far from food. Running water. Sewage. Auto infrastructure. Coffee. Chocolate. These are all incredible luxuries provided by their society in an incredibly planned way but most people don’t recognize it as such—they simply take it all for granted.

“To use a term central to the Cybersyn Project, the idea of planning goes hand in hand with the recognition that a society can survive only if it has self-“control” — meaning that it adapts to the disturbances and shocks threatening its various systems. A socialist economy would not abolish control but change the manner through which it is exercised, so that democratic relations of production become an operational and sustainable mode of production rather than a fleeting dream.”

German Chancellor Merz announces massive cuts to social welfare benefits by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“The deficit of the statutory health insurance providers rose from €1.9 billion in 2023 to €6.2 billion in 2024 and €4.5 billion in the first quarter of 2025. Estimates for the whole of 2025 put the deficit at between €10 billion and €27 billion. Due to high inflation, health insurance fund expenditures are rising much faster this year, at 6.8 percent, than revenues, which are based on the wages of insured persons and will only increase by 3.7 percent.

“As a result, statutory health insurers have increased the additional contribution, half of which is paid by employers and half by employees, from an average of 1.7 percent of earnings last year to 2.5 percent (in some cases even more than 4 percent) this year. A considerable portion of the meager wage increases agreed upon by the unions is thus eaten up by the increased additional contribution alone.”

“Since its introduction 30 years ago, the contribution to long-term care insurance has risen from 1 percent to 3.6 percent (4.2 percent for childless people). This year, a one-time flat-rate contribution of 4.8 percent will be levied, which will eat up half of the 3.74 percent pension increase. As a result, more than half of all pensioners, a total of more than 10 million, receive a pension of less than €1,100 per month, which is below the official poverty line. One in five residents of Germany over the age of 65 is now considered at risk of poverty. Nevertheless, the next round of cuts is imminent.”

“The rich and super-rich, whose assets and incomes have exploded in recent years and who do not contribute a cent to the statutory insurance funds, often not even paying taxes, are not being prosecuted.”

“Piketty concludes “that we are now dealing with a new class society that is divided into a (small) property-owning class of the wealthy, rentiers, and heirs on the one hand, and a (large) working class of service providers on the other.””

Health Insurers Are Hiking Premiums as Their Profits Balloon by Veronica Riccobene (Jacobin)

“Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces across the country are projected to see the largest rate hikes in more than five years, driving up out-of-pocket premiums for individual plan policyholders by more than 75 percent on average, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 24 million Americans who don’t have employer-sponsored health insurance rely on the ACA marketplace for coverage.”

“The Lever previously reported that the industry’s top earners have raked in more than $371 billion in profits since the ACA’s passage.”

“Anthem plans are seeing sharp rate hikes across multiple states. For example, HMO Colorado — a subsidiary of Elevance Health, formerly known as Anthem — has proposed an average premium increase of more than 33 percent for individuals. In Maine, Anthem is seeking an 18 percent average rate increase, citing the expiration of federal premium tax credits.”

Madness. We had 11% one year, but this is a rich country with a strong safety net. And here patience is wearing thin with private health insurance. There are, of course, those who argue thatwe can’t afford such thing, in times of economic crisis. If we can’t take care of people in bad times, then when? And when a crisis becomes an excuse to delay change, then those who rule and benefit from stasis will see that as incentive to manufacture crises.

“In just the first quarter of 2025, Elevance Health drew in over $48 billion in revenue, up 15 percent from the same time in 2024 — and already this year, the company has distributed over $1.2 billion to its shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends. “The increases for the quarter and year were driven primarily by higher premium yields,” the company stated in its earnings report.”

They have to be honest with their investors.

“UnitedHealthcare’s premium rates on the marketplace are also set to rise in some states. In New York, the insurer has proposed a rate hike of more than 66 percent for some policyholders, and in Washington, the company proposed a 37 percent rate increase. Meanwhile, UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, reported a revenue of more than $400 billion in 2024, 77 percent of which came from premiums, according to the company’s earnings report.”

Let a thousand Mangiones bloom.

“[…] one of the biggest insurers in the country has given up on the ACA marketplace entirely. CVS Health, which acquired Aetna in 2018, said the insurer will exit the marketplace next year, leaving approximately one million people in seventeen states to find new coverage.”

“Crypto” is Silicon Valley Speak for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“When we think of finance, we need to think of trucking. Just as we need the trucking industry to transport items to factories and stores, we need the financial sector to make payments and allocate capital. But both finance and trucking are intermediate goods; they don’t directly make us better off, like healthcare or housing. The fewer resources (labor and capital) we devote to these sectors, the better. If we have fewer people working in these industries, it means that we have more people available to work in sectors that provide the items we value. Everyone can understand this with trucking. If the size of the trucking sector had quintupled relative to the size of the economy in the last half century, we would probably all be talking about how incredibly inefficient our trucking industry is.”

“There could be some modest gains in efficiency from transacting in stablecoins, ignoring the regulatory issues and the need to change back to dollars, but these could all be obtained by allowing the Fed to create a digital dollar. The financial industry has lobbied hard to ensure the Fed does not create a digital dollar, or give all us all free digital bank accounts, because they want our money.”

“Again, the issue is not efficiency; it is a regulatory roadblock created by the financial industry. Effectively, the industry is saying that if we pay them lots of money in fees, they will let us move to a more efficient system of transactions, otherwise they will use their power to block it.”

“[…] the GENIUS Act and its treatment of stablecoins. These coins are supposed to be backed one to one by highly liquid assets, like dollar reserves. Folks not born yesterday know that issuers will try to find ways to skirt these reserve requirements in order to increase profits.”

“While it is understandable that the folks who stand to profit from having the government certify the value of their crypto, including Donald Trump and his stablecoin, would want these bills, there is nothing here for the rest of us. We are just looking at more bloat in the financial industry and the likelihood of more costly bailouts.”

“As has been and will always be the case, there is no use case for crypto other than black market transactions and facilitating ransom payments. But that doesn’t mean lots of rich boys can’t get richer from it.”

Trump “steamroller” imposes tariff and trade deal on European Union by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“France was one of those advocating for stronger action including the use of the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) which provides multiple means of hitting back at the US without doing great damage to itself, such as placing restrictions on the activities of US companies.

“One of the voices advocating use of the ACI was the FT, which speaks for significant sections of the UK and European corporate and financial establishment. In an editorial published last week on the eve of Sunday’s deal, it said Brussels needed to be ready to unleash its anti-coercion armoury.

““If the EU does not roll out its big guns now, they might as well not exist. Given Trump’s fickleness, the EU will need its trade weapons even if it somehow reaches an eleventh-hour deal.”

“The headlines in the financial media said the deal was an agreement to avert trade war. On the contrary, as the language used by the FT indicates, it is in reality a phase in the intensification of that war.

“An article in Bloomberg noted that the measures so far announced by the Trump administration have lifted the US tariff rate to the highest level since the 1930s. They are now six times what they were when Trump took office just six months ago.

“And according to an analysis by Bloomberg Economics, the hit to the world economy will reach $2 trillion by the end of 2027 relative to its pre-trade war path. In conditions where global economic growth was already on a downward trajectory, that spells an intensification of economic and trade conflicts.”

When It Comes to Tariffs and Trade, Trump Is Not Playing with a Full Deck by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“Trump makes demands that are supposed to be in exchange for the privilege of selling in the U.S. market. Countries don’t want to lose the U.S. market just as a steel company would not want to lose a major auto manufacturer as a customer.

“But there is a limit to how much a country is willing to tolerate to preserve an export market, just as there is a limit to how much a steel manufacturer would be willing to concede to a major automaker to keep it as a customer. And if the automaker constantly reneged on deals and made new demands, the steel manufacturer would at some point be happier just to lose the business.

“We don’t have to speculate about this story when it comes to trade, we can see it in the data. China’s exports to the United States used to be a much larger share of its economy. In 2010, these exports were equal to nearly 6.0 percent of China’s GDP. (Both exports and GDP are calculated in dollars.) By last year they had fallen to just 2.3 percent of China’s GDP.”

“Countries can and will move away from the United States as a trading partner if Donald Trump insists that we are unreliable and untrustworthy.”

“Most of our trading partners are already moving aggressively to shore up deals with other countries. This process will surely accelerate as Trump makes ever more unhinged demands.”

The U.S. has hit Switzerland with 39% tariffs, just out of the blue. This will be bad blow to an already slowing economy and is bad news for small-to-medium-sized companies. Trump thinks he’s hitting at pharmaceutical companies. He’s a buffoon. A dangerous ape, just breaking shit with his complete misunderstanding about how economies function. He is happy to destroy a trillion dollars of business if he can make $10M. That’s a good deal for him. He absolutely does not care what happens to anything that doesn’t belong to him.

Trump’s Craziness on the Fed by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“[…] there is a third argument coming from the Trump administration that people on Planet Earth would never consider: The Fed should lower rates because the economy is strong.

“Economics can get dull and technical, but this one is not a technical point. Lowering interest rates boosts growth. It makes zero sense to lower rates if you believe the economy is booming as the Trumpers claim.”

“[…] down is not up, and day is not night. For now, it is still legal to talk truthfully about the economy and the idea that the Fed should lower interest rates because the economy is booming is batshit crazy. I know that saying that won’t get me a job in the Trump administration. We’ll see if it gets me arrested.”

Life Under Two: Debt, Deficits, and the AI Discontinuity by Paul Kedrosky

“It should come as no surprise the rise on non-economic thinking predicated on lottery assets, like crypto. Unlike orthodox financial instruments, they don’t represent a claim on productive output. They are, if anything, the negation of orthodox claims, a repudiation of the old way of doing things, pure price reflexivity.

“This is understandable in a world where people have lost faith in economic growth. Why wait? Find things that go up and chase after them. We see this in the rise of crypto, of sports betting, of YOLO-ing meme stock-chasing Reddit bros, and more. What they have in common is impatience in the orthodox system ever working for them. And having lost faith in the system itself, institutional distrust becomes a baked-in feature of what they lust after.”

“[…] a slower-growing U.S. might be a better global citizen, less central and less convinced of its own rectitude. A multi-polar world could be a safer world, less of an economic, cultural, and security monoculture. The country will struggle with this, convulsing as it attempts to reconcile its beliefs in its own exceptionalism with the reality of lower growth and limits.”

This is a lovely pipe dream. The U.S. will empty its nuclear coffers first. There is no reason to believe that the people who bubble up to power in that country are in any way psychologically capable of compromise in anything. They barely even know what they want, or why they want it, but it is the only thing for them, like mindless, nearly senseless creatures, capable only of attack, subjugation, and plunder, with no principles or ethics.

“Americans and their politicians, by their theatrical inaction, are betting that something magic will happen that restarts growth, compensates for lost workers, and helps rebalance the budget.”

“It is possible that, having denied itself access to labor, cut taxes to unsustainable levels, built huge tariff walls, and maintained outsized spending, the U.S. will once again be on the right side of a new growth wave, this time predicated on robotics and AI.”

This potential is completely dependent on an educated populace, well-versed in myriad disciplines that actual make things like robots. Robots don’t just appear in a Tony Start factory. There are dozens of layers of resource-extraction, resource-conversion, tooling, tooling, tooling, and tooling that need to be in place and that you can’t just conjure out of thin air in a matter of months, not even years.

The populace is kept brain-dead on nearly everything, having been honed into being a consumption machine—content, media, cheap goods—but not into being a production machine.

The best minds are left either untrained or comparatively uneducated, or they are drained away into generating revenue for VC-funded tech companies, selling advertising, pretending to do things with AI, being quants at financial-piracy firms, or otherwise wasting their time and energy building low-priority medical products and pharmaceuticals.

No-one is actually making things because that’s not where the money is. Who’s going to build those robots?

Science & Nature

July 24, 2025 : Issue #95 by Lawrence Weschler (WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse)

“At twenty frames per second, each image is held on screen for 50 ms, which is at the limit of the Ross cache. This means that at frame rates slower than 20 fps, with a longer duration for each frame, there will be many moments when there is only one image in the cache, and consequently no ability to compare it with a subsequent frame in order to synthesise motion between them. As a result, perceived motion begins to stagger at frame rates slower than 20 fps.”

“The Haas effect (also known as the precedence effect) says that if two nearly identical sounds are played in quick succession, with less than 50 ms between the leading edge of each one, the listener will hear a single sound with a slightly ‘off-mic’ quality. If the separation between leading edges is greater than 50 ms, the listener will hear two separate sounds, in a distinct echo effect.”

“These sudden, mostly involuntary movements of the eyeball are quick (20–200 ms) and common: we experience on average three saccades every second, for a daily total of well over 150,000. {FN} They are particularly frequent when we are reading, with our attention jumping from phrase to phrase, but they are happening all the time, almost always below our conscious awareness.”

“It takes cones 20 ms to respond to light: https://tinyurl.com/mrsndwpr. But the ‘dwell time’ of a point of light on the average photoreceptor during the sweep of a saccade is around 20 microseconds, a thousand times slower than the response time of the fastest cone cells. If we could see what the retina ‘sees’ during a saccade, it would be a horizontal smear of different tonal values and colours from the scene in front of us, but with no detail of any kind – like a swish pan in cinema.”

I think he meant 1000 times faster.

“A vivid demonstration of this is as close as your nearest mirror. Stand about five inches in front of it and ask a friend to watch the goings-on, perhaps making a video at the same time. Now look at your left eye for three seconds, and then suddenly, without moving your head, look at your right eye. What you will experience is . . . nothing, no change. Now look back at your left eye. You will also experience no change. It just seems to you that you have been looking at yourself for six seconds or so, with no movement of your eyeballs. What your friend sees, and what the video will show, however, are your eyeballs moving from left to right and back again. Your visual system has sneakily edited out the movement of your eyeballs and concealed the fact of that edit. This process has a name: saccadic masking.”

“This fact is of great use to magicians and masters of three-card monte, whose con artistry is to get you to move your eyeballs at the exact same moment that they quickly perform their tricks, which consequently are invisible to you.”

“The strange consequence of all this is that you live in the past. By the time you think the moment occurs, it’s already long gone. To synchronise the incoming information from the senses, the cost is that our conscious awareness lags behind the physical world. That’s the unbridgeable gap between an event occurring and your experience of it.”

“One of the solutions to this problem is that athletes can apparently learn to bypass sophisticated consciousness and rely on instinctual ‘knee jerk’ reflex arc responses processed in the spinal cord, which are many times faster than ‘conscious’ perception routed through the brain – think of how we instinctively yank our hand away from unexpected contact with a hot stove before we are even aware of its heat. Also, after years of experience, athletes become expert at making predictions about where the ball might be, even though they may not be able to ‘see’ it in the normal sense of the word.”

“The intricate neurology of vertebrate sight, which evolved over hundreds of millions of years to deal, in part, with the rapid eye motion of saccades, was simply hijacked and immediately put to use when motion pictures were invented 190 years ago.”

“What I have called the ‘Ross cache’ for simplicity’s sake is actually a multilayered part of the visual cortex known as extrastriate visual areas V1 to V5. Specific neurons in regions like V5 are tuned to detect motion. These neurons specialise in comparing changes in position between adjacent frames, effectively ‘stitching’ together the differences between still images to create the perception of motion. While there isn’t a literal ‘frame storehouse’, as implied by the term ‘Ross cache’, the visual cortex and interconnected areas do maintain a dynamic, continuously updated sequence of visual ‘snapshots’ of everything that has been seen in the last 50 ms.”

What Scientists Learned Scanning the Bodies of 100,000 Brits by Jason Gale (Bloomberg)

“The approach has already paid off with a better understanding of diagnosing and treating diabetes. Type 1 diabetes was long thought to affect only children, and doctors assumed that people who got the disease in middle or old age had Type 2, Collins says. But UK Biobank research has showed that Type 1 occurs at the same rate throughout life. With clearer data, scientists realized that many older adults had been misclassified and given the wrong treatment.”

Environment & Climate Change

The Rising Cost of Your Morning Brew: How Climate Change Is Brewing a Coffee Crisis by Kate Petty (ZNetwork)

“Climate disruptions, such as prolonged droughts followed by excessive rain, are being seen in Vietnam and Brazil, the two largest coffee-producing countries. They are responsible for nearly 50 percent of the world’s coffee supply, and their losses have led to a decline in yields and an increase in prices. In November 2024, Coffee Intelligence reported that coffee prices had surged to a 47-year high.”

“Industry experts warn that a significant portion of current coffee-growing land could become unsuitable in the coming decades if the climate crisis isn’t addressed. “Estimates show that 30 years from now, basically 50 percent of coffee lands as we know them today will not be viable for coffee production anymore,” said Philipp Navratil, chief executive officer at Nestlé Nespresso, as quoted in a 2023 Bloomberg article.”

““Tariffs… don’t just disrupt business. They dismantle trust and undo climate adaptation efforts,” noted a blog by Ebru Coffee Co., a single-origin, sustainable coffee producer, roaster, and retailer based in Audubon, Pennsylvania. “They push farmers, many of whom are already on the brink, back into exploitative systems that pay less, demand more, and care little for the land.””

“Most of the world’s coffee is grown by smallholder farmers who often lack access to affordable credit, crop insurance, or long-term financing. According to the nonprofit Borgen Project, “44 percent of the world’s smallholder coffee farmers are currently living in poverty and 22 percent live in extreme poverty.””

Medicine & Disease

A Man’s Guide to Menopause by Dr. Mary Claire Haver, MD (Substack)

“Menopause is the culmination of a years-long transition called perimenopause, when three major hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone shift in ways that affect nearly every organ system in a woman’s body.”

“The difference is that women start with far lower levels than men. When they lose ovarian estrogen and progesterone suddenly while testosterone continues its gradual decline, the combined impact can feel dramatic. A woman might feel the loss of stamina, muscle tone, and sexual vitality more sharply, layered with poor sleep, brain fog, weight shifts, and a sense that her entire body has changed almost overnight.”

“None of this is a personal failing. It is biology. And yet too many women are still told to keep quiet and push through alone. Many are handed antidepressants instead of real hormone care, sleep support, or evidence-based treatment that could help them reclaim themselves.”

Interview with Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei, writer-director of COVID pandemic documentary Blame: “I wanted to be a filmmaker guided by curiosity, not ideology” by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Benjamin Mateus (BM): The COVID-19 pandemic was a turning point, an accelerant that intensified this global breakdown. Rather than serving as a moment to expand and strengthen public health infrastructure, it was weaponized. We saw a systematic assault on public health, on science, and on the very idea of collective care. Social services were slashed, and the pandemic became a tool to enrich the financial oligarchy, deepen militarization, and crush dissent.

“This wasn’t a failure of policy—it was the policy. It was the logic of a system in crisis. The message was clear: let millions die, the economy must go on.”

“I keep two quotes in my editing room. The first is from journalist Maria Ressa’s Nobel lecture. “Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with the existential problems of our time.””

“ That’s what interests me: not hyped-up narratives, but films that slow down, explore complexity, and reveal what lies beneath the surface.”

“David Quammen—you might know him—is the science writer behind the classic Spillover and more recently Breathless, which is a major reference for anyone investigating the origins of COVID-19. He lives in Montana and was incredibly helpful to the project. For Breathless, he interviewed over 100 scientists, so by the time we began working together, he knew the landscape inside and out.”

“Peter, early in the pandemic, had been open with the media. But over time, he began encountering what he called “both-sides journalism”—requests framed as neutral, but in fact subtly accusatory. The way questions were phrased, the assumptions beneath them… he could tell that many weren’t interested in understanding, only in fueling controversy. And as a scientist, it’s incredibly difficult to explain your work—let alone the broader context—to people without a scientific background. That tension makes it even harder to navigate interviews.”

“From the beginning, I saw this as a Cassandra story. These three scientists had warned of a coming pandemic, and when it happened, they weren’t thanked—they were attacked. I wasn’t interested in “both-sides-ism” or using them as narrative fodder. I wanted to understand their point of view, in depth.”

“As public health historian George Rosen argued, pandemics don’t destroy civilizations. Rather, they become possible when civilizations are already in decline. Scientists like Daszak, Shi and Linfa weren’t the only ones sounding the alarm. But when COVID hit, there was no real structural response. And five years on, the consequences are staggering: the erosion of public health institutions, the rise of anti-vaccine ideologies and a political climate where reactionary forces are actively dismantling what remains of pandemic preparedness.”

“Some believed the virus had come from a US military lab. Today, we know from declassified Stasi archives that this idea wasn’t just spontaneous. It was seeded and amplified by Soviet disinformation campaigns. The KGB and East Germany’s Stasi deliberately spread the claim that HIV had originated from a Pentagon lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was known as “Operation INFEKTION,” and it was a Cold War psychological operation to stoke distrust in the West. And it worked. Even within progressive and marginalized communities, such rumors found fertile ground—because when science fails to communicate clearly, conspiracy rushes in to fill the vacuum.

“That’s part of what I see happening again with COVID. The science is difficult. It’s nuanced. Understanding zoonotic spillover, viral evolution or even the difference between lab research and lab origin—it’s complex. But people want simple explanations. “Someone messed up in a lab” is easier to digest than “two related but distinct strains of coronavirus likely emerged from wildlife sold at a seafood market under intense ecological and economic pressure.””

“Marxism at its best is a rational framework. And yet it presents its own challenges, right? If you’re pro-vaccine, does that mean you’re automatically endorsing Big Pharma? Not necessarily. But the far right has weaponized that contradiction. They’ve co-opted anti-corporate language to push deeply reactionary ideas. Today, it’s the Steve Bannons of the world who are rallying against “globalists” and “Big Pharma,” while simultaneously pushing nationalism, denialism and authoritarianism.”

We let the right steal the powerful argument.

“Without COVID, I don’t think Trump would have risen the way he did in 2020. Nor would so many far-right parties across the world have gained so much ground. The pandemic created a sense of existential rupture—and into that space rushed ideology, fear, and opportunism.

“For me, Blame isn’t just about virus origins. It’s about the breakdown of shared reality, and the political consequences of abandoning science when we need it most.”

“There’s long been a current of anti-communism and anti-socialism in Western political culture with regards to public health because it relies on institutional cooperation and international collaboration. It was often caught in that crossfire. Over the last century, efforts to eradicate smallpox, measles, and other diseases gave working-class people a sense that the state was, at some level, invested in their wellbeing.”

“[…] a state of high alert, like during a pandemic, creates the perfect conditions for misinformation to spread. Influencers, bloggers, even some independent journalists—many of them working from home—began producing constant speculation. Some were aligned with the far right, others came from the left, but they fed the same outrage machine.”

Also, and not insignificantly, they are increasingly not politically ideological but driven solely by self-interest. They are chameleons.

“I’ve always thought of documentaries as an antidote to hyperventilating media narratives. But increasingly, even journalism that claims to be investigative is driven by virality, not verification. You get headlines that echo suspicions—often serious ones—without corresponding evidence.”

“What’s interesting, particularly around the lab-leak narrative, is how the media has rewritten its own role. The story goes, a few “brave” journalists came along and uncovered suspicious details—no actual evidence, just enough to keep the speculation alive. And from there, some claim they “discovered” the lab leak, or at the very least, take pride in having raised the possibility.

“That narrative has now become more than mainstream. It’s become policy. In the US, the lab-leak theory has effectively become official doctrine, even replacing earlier language on government websites like covid.gov.”

“How did we end up here? Why is truth and complexity losing out to simplification and manufactured stories?”

“[…] the questions were more reflective: why are journalists still so obsessed with speculation? People were ready to question not just the media, but themselves—their own vulnerability to manipulation. They spoke about their kids, TikTok, the addictive nature of the device in our hands. Many praised the film for being slow in the best sense—not boring, but calm, deliberate. Not another avalanche of speculation. That’s what led to the Audience Award in Turin. The film gives space to reflect.

“We also talked about the blurring line between journalism and influencer culture. So much media today is indistinguishable from clickbait blogs. It’s all part of the same attention economy. Interestingly, very few Q&As touched on the virus itself or pandemic measures. That’s not really my topic. The film is about something deeper: our ability—or inability—to reason together. Viewers said this film needs to be shown to students, scholars and the public at large. Because what’s under attack isn’t just science—it’s our entire foundation for evidence-based thinking.”

“Soon, COVID and RFK Jr. will probably be drowned out by the next geopolitical crisis—Iran, perhaps. But the damage is done. And the next pandemic will come. Are we prepared? No. Not for the virus, and not for the disinformation pandemic that will come with it.”

“We’re organizing scientific panels around the film in different cities, and I hope it will continue to reach broader audiences. It’s not a “sexy” film, in the marketing sense—but I believe it resonates deeply. Maybe we just need to reach a point where people are genuinely exhausted by all the noise. Then a film like this can truly land.”

The first 100% effective HIV prevention drug is approved and going global by Bronwyn Thompson (New Atlas)

The article walks back the 100% to 99% a few paragraphs in, then cites another scientist as saying that, “Yeztugo could be the transformative PrEP option we’ve been waiting for […],” which makes it sounds like less of slam-dunk. Still, the proposed distribution mechanism is encouraging,

“Earlier this months, Gilead announced a partnership with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund) to supply enough doses of the drug to reach up to two million people over three years in countries supported by the Global Fund, at no profit to the pharmaceutical company. License-free generics of the drug will be manufactured for use across 120 “high-incidence, resource-limited countries, which are primarily low- and lower-middle-income countries.”

“This crucial access to the drug, which ultimately sets aside profit for people, is a bold move from a pharmaceutical company – but one that recognizes the desperate need to end the global HIV epidemic.”

““This is not just a scientific breakthrough – it’s a game-changer for HIV/AIDS,” said Peter Sands, Executive Director of the Global Fund. “For the first time, we have a tool that can fundamentally change the trajectory of the HIV epidemic – but only if we get it to the people who need it most. Our ambition is to reach two million people with long-acting PrEP. But we can only do that if the world steps up with the resources required.

““This is a pivotal moment – not just for the fight against HIV, but for the fundamental principle that lifesaving innovations must reach those who need them most – whoever they are, and wherever they live.””

The world is absolutely not going to step up, unless you’re thinking of BRICS nations. The western nations are all too busy building tanks, rockets, and bombs. They’re counting the massive profits they’re making by sucking the coffers of the social state dry through austerity and can’t even be bothered to lift their heads out of the trough long enough to gut-laugh at the notion of putting people before profits.

Art, Literature, & Cinema

Happy Birthday, Jason Becker! by Jason Becker (YouTube)

Man, I can’t believe that Jason Becker is 56 years old. He has had ALS for almost 40 years. He was an absolute guitar legend, and an incredible composer. At 17, he wrote Perpetual Burn, which is such a tour-de-force of composition and playing that I wouldn’t hesitate to call it Mozart-like—but I know nothing about music except that I like how it sounds. I love almost every song on this album, but am incredibly partial to Air, Altitudes, Opus Pocus, and the title track, Perpetual Burn. That’s half of the songs, but I find it hard to choose. Air is incredible.

The next album Perspective was mostly done as he was declining, and could barely play the guitar anymore. It was almost even more incredible. He composed everything, but could only play some of it. The tracks are less guitar-heavy. Here, again, I have trouble picking songs. As soon as I start to list them, I realize I’ve put down over half of the album again: Primal, Rain, End of the Beginning (probably the best one), Higher (also the best one 😂 ), and Serrana (also, incredible … I can’t decide).

There were so many of my favorites from way back in the day, when I started listening to instrumental guitar. This year, my favorite was Tony Macalpine playing the piano for two minutes at 5:55 without saying a word. Stuart Hamm still being around and playing bass was also nice to see. “Play some country! Play something we can dance to!”

Thursday Poem: Why I Like Marriage (2014) by Jim Culleny / George Ovitt (3QuarksDaily)

“At breakfast I tell my wife
To bury me in my new suit.
“The gray one?” she asks,
“Yes, with the pinstripes,”
“Fine,” and she sips her tea.

“This is what I like about marriage—
The not-being-surprised part of it,
As in how I can decide on my
Funeral attire, then read aloud
A Times review of a restaurant
In Paris that we will never visit,
And a moment later suggest a
Walk in the snow—why not?

“By lunchtime I will have decided
Against the gray suit and burial
Altogether, having seen a billboard
For cremations—$850, complete;
“On second thought,” I begin,
And my wife will nod, and sip her tea,
And say, “I know,” and mean it.”

The Beauty of The Meaningless by The House of Tabula (YouTube)

An excellent, thirty-minute analysis of dozens of films on the subject in the title.

1. 0:00 Tyrannosaur (Dir: Paddy Considine)
2. 0:10 Synechdoche, New York (Dir: Charlie Kaufman)
3. 0:13 Landscape In The Mist (Dir: Theo Angelopoulos)
4. 0:19 Elephant (Dir: Gus Van Sant)
5. 0:22 8 ½ (Dir: Federico Fellini)
6. 0:27 Dog Star Man (Dir: Stan Brakhage)
7. 0:42 The House Is Black (Dir: Forugh Farrokhzad)
8. 0:54 Full Metal Jacket (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
9. 1:00 Dogville (Dir: Lars Von Trier)
10. 1:07 Satantango (Dir: Bela Tarr)
11. 1:15 Her (Dir: Spike Jonze)
12. 1:21 Wanda (Dir: Barbara Loden)
13. 1:34 Le Samorai (Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville)
14. 1:57 2001: A Space Odyssey (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
15. 3:22 The Tree of Life (Dir: Terrence Malick)
16. 3:43 The End of Evangelion (Dir: Hideaki Anno)
17. 4:24 Le Maman et La Putain (Dir: Jean Eustache)
18. 4:37 Pola X (Dir: Leo Carax)
19. 5:23 Naked (Dir: Mike Leigh)
20. 6:12 Wojaczek (Dir: Lech Majewski)
21. 6:40 The Man Who Sleeps (Dir: Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec)
22. 7:29 Le Diable, Probablement (Dir: Robert Bresson)
23. 7:50 Red Desert (Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni)
24. 8:29 Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Dir: Chantal Akerman)
25. 9:02 Stalker (Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky)
26. 9:24 The Seventh Continent (Dir: Michael Haneke)
27. 10:24 Peppermint Candy (Dir: Lee Chang Dong)
28. 10:42 Dead Man’s Letters (Dir: Konstantin Lopushansky)
29. 11:37 Requiem For A Dream (Darren Aronofsky)
30. 12:25 American Psycho (Dir: Mary Harron)
31. 14:07 The House That Jack Built (Dir: Lars Von Trier)
32. 14:44 Fight Club (Dir: David Fincher)
33. 15:14 Another Round (Dir: Thomas Vinterberg)
34. 15:46 Network (Dir: Sidney Lumet)
35. 17:51 Taxi Driver (Dir: Martin Scorsese)
36. 18:09 No Country For Old Men (Dir: The Coen Brothers)
37. 19:29 My Winnipeg (Dir: Guy Maddin)
38. 19:46 Ghost Dog: The Way of The Samurai (Dir: Jim Jarmusch)
39. 20:13 Joker (Dir: Todd Phillips)
40. 20:49 O Cheiro Do Ralo (Dir: Heitor Dhalia)
41. 21:23 Brazil (Dir: Terry Gilliam)
42. 21:44 They Live (Dir: John Carpenter)
43. 22:15 The Matrix (Dir: The Wachoskis)
44. 22:35 Parasite (Dir: Bong Joon Ho)
45. 23:21 Tokyo Sonata (Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
46. 23:53 Yi-Yi (Dir: Edward Yang)
47. 24:22 Anomalisa (Dir: Charlie Kaufman)
48. 25:02 Pulse (Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
49. 25:35 The Thaw (Dir: Kei Oyama)
50. 25:54 Spider (Dir: David Cronenberg)
51. 26:26 Werckmeister Harmonies (Dir: Bela Tarr)
52. 27:32 Le Maman et La Putain (Dir: Jean Eustache)
53. 27:38 The End of Evangelion (Dir: Hideaki Anno)
54. 27:42 Another Round (Dir: Thomas Vinterberg)
55. 27:47 Parasite (Dir: Bong Joon Ho)
56. 27:52 The Seventh Continent (Dir: Michael Haneke)
57. 27:57 Werckmeister Harmonies (Dir: Bela Tarr)
58. 28:03 The House That Jack Built (Dir: Lars Von Trier)
59. 28:09 Solaris (Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky)
60. 28:16 2001: A Space Odyssey (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
61. 28:24 Red Desert (Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni)
62. 28:29 Wojaczek (Dir: Lech Majewski)
63. 28:36 Stalker (Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky)

The Executioner by Daisuke Shen (Baffler)

“I returned home. The man I love had gone to get wine from a store nearby. I’d looked up the recipe, the traditional way of preparing the octopus with proper and premeditated violence. It was still so cold in the kitchen. I’d taken the container out from my basket and watched the octopus churn around in the water, flinging its body this way and that. Shivering, I found myself opening the windows to let the wind in. Perhaps it will be reminded of the sea, I thought, as I lifted its body from the saltwater. Its eyes were slits, then ovals, and I didn’t let myself think further. I lowered my hands into the water, feeling its succulent skin move about—and then, with a knife, I gouged out its eyes, slashing its mouth. Quickly, I thrashed it toward the wall, brutalizing it against the stone.”

“The pot was not empty as I’d hoped. Instead, I saw that its tentacles had curled—a fact of fright, a mark of its delicacy. It took every effort not to vomit as I slowly stirred in the potatoes, one after another, until finally it was finished.”

Better to Reign in Art Than Serve the Algorithm: Ozzy Osbourne as One of the Last Rebels by David Masciotra (CounterPunch)

“23-year-olds have come of age in a stale and stagnant culture. It is the culture of the pre-packaged interview, the “social media consultant,” the Instagram filter, the carefully parsed public relations-penned announcement, statement, or apology, the focus group tested product, and the imperialistic, hegemonic algorithm, forever directing people what to consume, when to feel, and how to think. It is all dull, monotonous, and mundane drag; an endless bore that results in a sad status quo of late senior citizens, like the 76-year-old Ozzy Osbourne, being more fascinating and daring than young pop stars.”

“One journalist for the Guardian lamented that his celebrity interview subjects no longer meet in bars for a few drinks, but instead invite him to a hotel suite packed wall to wall with publicists, agents, handlers and unidentified nervous nellies who say, “You can’t ask that” or “you can’t answer that.” Of course, the control team is largely unnecessary, because the celebrities give scripted answers anyway. Their words are meticulously crafted to appeal to the broadest set of social media users.”

““War Pigs” is a strong candidate for the greatest anti-war song ever written. Ozzy Osbourne explained that the “flower children” writing protest songs against the Vietnam War wrote only light material, fodder for sing-a-longs. Black Sabbath aimed to write a song that captured the sound of evil itself. The original title was “Walpurgis,” meaning the witches’ sabbath. “Walpurgis is like Christmas for Satanists,” bassist and co-writer Geezer Butler said, “And to me, war was the big Satan.” “War Pigs” is one example of something that is increasingly rare in popular music: artistry. “Children of the Grave,” “Sweet Leaf,” “Supernaut,” “Hole in the Sky,” and so many other songs capture a group of musicians who mastered a craft, and fused their mastery with a desire to say something relevant about human life and the state of the world.”

The Fire in Your Eyes: Ozzy Osbourne (1948-2025) by Ben Apatoff (RogerEbert.com)

“A few seconds of Ozzy could be the best scene of a bad movie (his “Jerky Boys” and “Little Nicky” cameos are worth a YouTube search), or the best line of a good movie (his priceless delivery in “Private Parts”).”

None of these recommendations are very good. They are all best viewed either not at all or through rose-colored glasses.

“At the end of the sold-out stadium show, Ozzy looks awestruck, as if he still can’t believe all this is happening to him. For someone who supposedly had seen and done it all, it’s not hard to see the young Birmingham slaughterhouse worker (“The stink was unbelievable”), car horn tuner (“Can you imagine being in a room with that fucking racket?”), and jailbird (“The best thing my father ever did for me was he refused to pay fine”) up on stage, still processing ten hours of tributes from some of the world’s biggest metal bands, while he’s handed a cake and watches fireworks go off in his honor.”

“A minute later, I watched Ozzy cackle and raise his arms when the DJ introduced him. There he was. The greatest metal frontman who ever lived.”

Francine by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“M. Descartes also proved himself an eager student of the history of the Septentrional countries, and of the manners and characters of its inhabitants. He possessed a copy of Olaus Magnus’s history of the Northern peoples, of course, as well as Saxo’s august compendium of the celebrated deeds of the Danes. In conversation he appeared taken with the the new theory that it is Gotland, and not the Holy Land nor any far-flung Ararat, that is as they say the vagina nationum, the matronly sheath from which all peoples primordially emerged, and shot from there as arrows throughout the globe. If I may say, M. Descartes seemed unusually eager to present himself as a lover of all things Swedish. I suspect that this is in part because his unusually swarthy complexion, and his stout and somewhat ursine appearance, had many Swedes taking him for a hyperborean Lapon, and he wished to correct this misperception not through insistence upon his Franco-Gaulish origins, but through overzealous identification with the nation whose Sovereign he had come, on his own understanding of the assignment, to enlighten.”

“He said that he would never renounce his account of the generation of living bodies in general, whereby the seed of the male serves to trigger a process of coagulation in the blood of the female’s womb, which, once sufficiently thick, begins to throb as a heart, and eventually splits into separate chambers, sprouts a liver, a pair of kidneys, and so on for the other viscera, soon enough hardening along an axis down its center into what will become the vertebral column, and so on, and so on, until after some weeks we find ourselves with as it were a universal animal, not a bird or a fox or anything so easily specifiable, but an animal, which then is given its species, and then soon enough its individual traits, through the most wonderful operations of the animal spirits traveling down to the matrix from the mother’s nerves, delivering a most faithful message from the pineal gland at the base of the brain that serves to sear into this generic being all of its specific and individual quiddities, so that, after some months, it makes its appearance in the world”

Butlerian Jihad (Wikipedia)

“As explained in Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune), which results in the total destruction of virtually all forms of “computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots”. With the prohibition “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind,” the creation of even the simplest thinking machines is outlawed and made taboo, which has a profound influence on the socio-political and technological development of humanity in the Dune series.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

“I am the century’s decay” by Sam Jennings (Hinternet)

“Doubtless this all risks sounding a bit arcane. As promised, the point was to address the issue of “contemporary poetry” in the English language. But what that really is, as far as I can tell, is a kind of cross-institutional pyramid scheme for convincing the public that history doesn’t exist, and that poetry is about very sentimental and sensitive people feeling so exquisitely much on behalf of the rest of us, rather than dealing with language as a repository for eons of meaning. (“Language,” Emerson once wrote, “is fossil poetry”.)”

TAKASHI MURAKAMI by Ed Schad (The Brooklyn Rail)

“You begin the show with a monumental diptych, Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP (2023–24), and when I saw the work, I suddenly had to bring two Takashi Murakamis together: the Takashi Murakami that has been responding to global culture through the lens of cultural energies like anime and manga after World War II, and the Takashi Murakami who finds echoes of the contemporary moment in sort of a deep sense of Japan’s past.”

“Though Space Battleship Yamato came out before Star Wars and was a true space odyssey, it was Star Wars that received global attention. That felt strange to me, considering Space Battleship Yamato came out first and its contents are much more complex.”

“Many Parisian art salons were astonished by the compositional techniques, colors, and themes found in Japanese ukiyo-e, as well as in crafts and kimono designs. This influence played a key role in the birth of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. In the world of painting, artists like Van Gogh, Monet, and Gauguin were profoundly affected. At the time, European artists prided themselves on being at the cutting edge of perspective techniques and painting methods. However, when they encountered the visuals printed on the wrapping paper used to package porcelain imported from Japan—an unfamiliar and distant land they had considered uncivilized—the acutely perceptive artists were struck with a bolt out of the blue. It must have felt like an earth-shattering realization.

“Van Gogh, deeply moved by the Japanese sensibility, mistakenly believed that it was because the Japanese people led humble and Zen-like lives that they had been able to create such revolutionary art. This misconception may have led him to shave his own head to look like a Buddhist monk. Monet, on the other hand, was so inspired that he built a Japanese-style garden and made it the subject of his paintings. In a way, the impact of Japonisme led to a reevaluation of pictorial flatness, setting the stage for the later emergence of abstract painting.”

I am thirty-eight years old by eevee (fuzzy notepad)

“I’ve just graduated high school. I’m so close to being away from my parents, to living on a college campus in a distant state. It’s exhilarating, but also terrifying, because I don’t really know how to live on my own. I’ve never done laundry or bought my own food. I don’t have a car or much money. I don’t really know how to do anything, other than make websites that look like they were made by a sixteen-year-old.”

“I don’t know how to ask him to stop. I expect people to hurt me if I push back against what they want from me, but I’m not even cognizant of this — I see myself as just wanting to make people happy. Eventually I can’t take it any more and, in a flash of inspiration, offer to fellate him instead. I don’t really care for that, either, but it’s much less bad. He gets me to promise I won’t tell anyone. I’m vaguely aware that this is the sort of thing he shouldn’t be doing, and I don’t want anyone in trouble on my behalf, so I agree.”

“My father later talks to me about the event. The conversation is extremely one-sided, because I know what happens if I push back against anything. He tells me I’m cold, calculating, manipulative, evil. He tells me I care only about myself. That I have no soul. That he doesn’t want me in the house. I am sixteen years old. All of this is normal.”

“I am sixteen years old, and I use emotes as punctuation o.o to a ridiculous degree ^o.o^ like multiple times per line o.o and the twenty-six-year-old man who was so eager to have sex with me is now sick to death of how juvenile I am. If only there were some way he could have foreseen this. I am sixteen years old, but I begin to realize I do not give a shit about this loser who can only bed teenagers, nor about his big important opinion of me. He’s mad at me, but it doesn’t matter. Adults have been mad at me my entire life. What’s he going to do, type at me? I glaze over. I become laminated. I rebuff everything. He only talks to me once more, to say he misses seeing me around. I don’t care.”

“My parents, even teachers, practically training me to think that whatever other people want is paramount. The deeply fucked-up culture of early-00’s Internet, where people could just openly announce their interest in doing sex crimes and no one batted an eye. Even the notion of a 14yo in a space dedicated to porn sounds unthinkable by today’s standards, but I poked my head in a lot of sex-themed places back in the day and not one of them cared how old I was.”

“[…] there’s this weird chain of semantic implications that lets you suggest someone actively molests children based purely on vibes, without ever having to identify any concrete child, and that seems kind of bad to me, but if I try to explain it I’ll probably be called a pedophile, because why would anyone but a pedophile defend pedophiles by nitpicking the definition of “pedophile”, huh?”

“It makes me feel fucking crazy, sometimes, to watch our culture obsess over rooting out anyone with a whiff of “pursues sex with a minor” with the same furor and accuracy as we once rooted out people possessed by Satan, but with “the minor” — a person — reduced to a sort of… fantasy hypothetical? Or just dropped entirely, I guess. “Pedophile” is the thing you call someone that makes you win, because that’s the worst thing, and they can’t prove you wrong. Even the richest man in the world does it.”

“If you are a teenager reading this — I don’t know how or why, but I am functionally powerless to stop you — and even a little bit of it has resonated with you, then let me impress upon you this: how you feel matters. Even if it doesn’t seem to matter to the people around you, the people with power over your life, it should still matter to you. Hold onto it, even if you have to hide it, and do not let go for anyone.”

“P.S.: Sex is an amplifier, not an automatic good time. It’s like Mario Party: a hilarious chaotic mess with the right people, but a horrible fucking slog with the wrong people. I am thirty-eight years old. I still think about what happened to me when I was sixteen. Not all the time. But sometimes. Maybe after today, I can finally stop.”

The Corruption Of The Jews by Indravit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Whiteness is just a ladder and the only rule is keep kicking down, the position Jews now find themselves in, on the last rung, kicking as if their lives depend on it. I say this not to absolve Jews but to condemn the whole fraternity. They sold their souls, yes, but let’s not forget who was buying. Look beyond the action to the transaction and you’ll see what’s really happening.”

“They’re just one step above untouchable, they are the glove that white people use to touch things.”

“‘Antisemitism’ has gone from a European delusion to a global reality. People are like oh, you’re being anti-semitic and I say that’s not a real thing. We already have a concept of racism, why is there a special concept of inter-white racism, and what does that have to do with me, a random Sri Lankan? If we’re using ‘Jew’ like we use ‘Indian’ or ‘American’ the conception is obviously not all Jews, but damn if a lot of them aren’t behaving awfully, and using their identity to do it.”

“[…] we’re in the middle of Collapse³, ‘Israel’ is collapsing, White Empire is collapsing, and the climate atop it. It’s really a race to see what collapses first, and racism is not a way out of physical limits to growth.”

It absolutely is, though! In the short term, and for a select few, it will serve as it always has, as a distraction to keep the hoi polloi fighting each other, to keep the sheep from looking up.

“I must assure white people as well as Jews that I don’t hate you, I just hate what you’ve become. If you want to unearn my opprobrium, just don’t. This is hard for people born into the white hole, with no deeper culture to fall back on, but I’m afraid that’s not my problem. If you don’t like what I’m saying about white people, just don’t be white. Be your town, be your football team, be anything else, I dunno.”

Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

““When parents say they want their kids to go to a ‘good school’, they’re not after skilled teachers. They want their kid to be surrounded by successful well-behaving peers, in the hopes that it’ll rub off on them and they’ll succeed and behave well themselves. But this creates a conflict. Parents of problem kids try to get them into the good schools to solve their problems. But the good school parents try to block them, because they don’t want problematic peers to bring their own kids down. We bulldoze through this whole paradox. As far as your kid knows, we’re just another remote learning charter school. But really, all your kids’ peers are AI-generated deepfakes designed to your specifications. Want all your son’s friends to be goody-goodies who love homework? Want your daughter surrounded by people who never use Instagram and assign status in their peer group based entirely on how closely everyone follows your sect’s interpretation of the Bible? We can do it!””

“…not denying that fetuses are human,” your hear Nishin saying. “I’m not even denying that abortion is genocide. I’m just saying that they aren’t American citizens. You don’t get citizenship until birth. And I’m tired of my government prioritizing the rights of non-citizens over tax-paying Americans. That’s why I’m pro-choice.””

Seaton: In Memoriam, Ozzy and The Hulkster by Chris Seaton (Simple Justice)

“Ozzy was a mess. A drug-addled, bat-biting mumbling madman who somehow made Black Sabbath the soundtrack of rebellion for kids who didn’t know they were rebelling against anything. The man wasn’t just a rock star, he was a middle finger to all the suits who thought music should be polite. The half wail, half growl of his voice carried the weight of every misfit who ever felt the world didn’t want them. And yet, he was no saint. The guy stumbled through life, leaving a trail of chaos from his arrests to his reality TV circus. But that’s the point: Ozzy never pretended to be something he wasn’t. In a world obsessed with curated perfection he was gloriously, messily real.”

“What ties these two together this week isn’t just their deaths, or that they were both WWE Hall of Famers. It’s that they were unapologetic. Ozzy didn’t care if you clutched your pearls when he slurred through “Paranoid.” Hogan didn’t blink when he ripped off his shirt for the 10,000th time. They were who they were and they owned it. Honestly, it’s something this era of sanctimonious posturing could learn from. Today, we’d cancel Ozzy for his lyrics and Hogan for his politics, but back then, they were giants because they didn’t ask permission to exist.”

“Now they’re gone and the Interwebs are churning with tributes and hot takes. Some are going to call these men legends. Others are going to dig up their sins. Me? I say they were human, flawed and louder than life. They didn’t bend to the mob, and that’s worth something.

“So raise a glass—or a steel folding chair—for Ozzy and the Hulk. They reminded us you don’t have to be perfect to be unforgettable.”

I mean, kind of? He pretended his whole persona.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL (w/ Roger Waters) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

This is a great interview with a principled titan. Between two principled titans.

Antonio Gramsci (Wikiquote)

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

• Loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek, presumably formulation [sic] by Žižek (see below).
• Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah;

  “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”

• Strict English with cognate terms and glosses:

  “The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.”

Technology & Engineering

This is the default view when I open the Maps app on iOS. Why is it showing me the bakery I looked up almost two weeks ago instead of the address that I looked up just over an hour ago?

Why isn't the location I searched most recently at the top of the list?

I have to press the little, blue “More” text in the top-left corner to show all recent searches, including the one for today.

There's the most recent search…

What in the name of God is the potential utility of this? Whose use-case does this cover? How can we be screaming about programming all the time when it’s product-management that seems to be either having an incredibly difficult time figuring out what it’s supposed to be doing, or having an incredibly difficult time defending its product from the predations of the business idiots in sales, marketing, and the C-suite.

Amazon is considering shoving ads into Alexa+ conversations by Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)

Yeah, um, hard to have seen that one coming. Advertising everywhere. The only response is retreat. Starve them of the eyeballs. Starve them of your attention. Starve them of your subscription fees.

Stupid Sunrise TV asking me to enter a PIN for adult content in Toy Story 4. Morons.

The other day, the spectacularly stupid and user-unfriendly Sunrise TV software decided to ask me for my PIN code—teeth grind at that expression—in order to continue watching Toy Story 4 because it has adult content.

• Does Toy Story 4 have adult content? No.
• Do I have parental controls set? No.
• Could I watch the movie from recordings instead of “Continue watching”? Yes.
• Is my PIN set to the number that I have in my password manager? No.
• Did I write it down incorrectly? Unlikely.
• Did the stupid software reset it to a default code at some point, during some unwanted upgrade? Almost certainly.

The future of MAGA after Trump by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“It’s been barely a week since the UK’s Internexit. What was meant to protect children from seeing pornography has devolved into a Byzantine system of verification systems blocking users from basic internet services. British users this morning woke up to notifications telling them that if they don’t let Spotify scan their ID it will delete their accounts. You know things are bad when the UK’s closest equivalent to Trump, Nigel Farage, is demanding the whole thing is repealed.”

This is the kind of thing that LinkedIn has done to me as well.. I’m sure it’s much worse in Britain now but this level of enshittification is the point. They want more and more of your data. They want to know everything about what you’re doing online. They want to sell it to advertisers who will use it to brainwash you into buying crap that you don’t need. What a wonderful, uplifting word, full of purpose and a focus on value and principle.

“YouTube is rolling out an AI feature that will identify users that are under 18. If the AI incorrectly identifies you as a child, you’ll have to upload your ID to prove you’re an adult.”

Fun.

The Tea app and the future of online surveillance by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“If you’re wondering what hackers did once they got all of that data, here’s a sampling: The images were posted to 4chan. The locations included in the IDs were then used to create a searchable public map of Tea users. X users are now sharing screenshots of a new app someone made that has been loaded with all of the Tea users’ selfies that lets you vote on which ones are the hottest and ranks them on a global leaderboard. To say nothing of the women who now have their faces and legal names plastered all over the web by deranged incels. Oh, also, all of the photos of men who had their images posted to the app without their consent were leaked, as well.”

NGL. I chuckled a bit at “lets you vote on which ones are the hottest and ranks them on a global leaderboard”.

What an absolute shitshow, though. No uploading of ID for me, bro.

“[…] proving that an internet user is underage means you also have to prove that everyone else isn’t. Monitoring one kind of user means monitoring everyone else. Similarly, proving that a users is a woman poses the same problem — with the additional thorniness of defining what a “woman” is. A quandary Tea didn’t survive long enough to reckon with. But the lesson from all of this is that there is no simple solution here. Instead, we have found ourselves facing two choices. Fight for the chaotic, open internet that allows anonymity — and all of the good and bad that comes with it. Or continue to slide into an internet that feels safer, but surveils our every move and will inevitably censor what we see and do, supported by massive databases of our most embarrassing and sensitive data. It seems like we know where this is all headed, but at the very least, after this weekend, we won’t be able to pretend to be shocked when it all blows up in our face.”

Time to lay low and see what happens. It’s almost certainly going to be the worst possible timeline.

Reservoir Sampling by Sam Who

“Reservoir sampling is a technique for selecting a fair random sample when you don’t know the size of the set you’re sampling from. By the end of this essay you will know:”

• When you would need reservoir sampling.
• The mathematics behind how it works, using only basic operations: subtraction, multiplication, and division. No math notation, I promise.
• A simple way to implement reservoir sampling if you want to use it.

LLMs & AI

You Can Now Disable All AI Features in Zed by Franciska Dethlefsen (Zed Blog)

“You don’t have to love it. But understanding it (so you can use it effectively, or choose not to) is becoming part of the craft. That’s why we launched our Agentic Engineering series. We’re hoping to create a space for us to discuss and learn about practical techniques for maintaining craftsmanship while leveraging AI.”

The pushback is obviously noticeable. Why do you have to convince people if it’s so inarguably awesome? Why do you have to make an announcement post about a feature to turn it all off? Were so many developers threatening to jump ship if you hadn’t done this?

The Forced Use of AI is getting out of Hand by Ramez (Substack)

“The same enterprises that took five years to upgrade from Windows XP are now speedrunning AI adoption like it’s the last Stanley Cup at Target. All legal and data proprietary risks appear to be ignored in pursuit of the holy grail: productivity gains and cost savings by leveraging AI to perform more tasks that humans do. McKinsey reported that companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue are changing more quickly than smaller organizations.”

The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble by Edward Zitron (Where's your Ed at?)

“I profoundly dislike the financial waste, the environmental destruction, and, fundamentally, I dislike the attempt to gaslight people into swearing fealty to a sickly and frail psuedo-industry where everybody but NVIDIA and consultancies lose money.

“I also dislike the fact that I, and others like me, are held to a remarkably different standard to those who paint themselves as “optimists,” which typically means “people that agree with what the market wishes were true.” Critics are continually badgered, prodded, poked, mocked, and jeered at for not automatically aligning with the idea that generative AI will be this massive industry, constantly having to prove themselves, as if somehow there’s something malevolent or craven about criticism,”

This is simply the behavior of a macrophage masking its attacks as defense, projecting its malicious intent on anything perceived as a rival or hindrance. This is how the system works. It’s disheartening at best, and infuriating at worst. It is, however, nearly inexorable because of the huge power imbalance between proponents and critics. Proponents include billionaires who are driving hard toward more for themselves. Of course, they’ll use whichever scurrilous methods they can to get their way.

“Look, the generative AI boom is a mirage, it hasn’t got the revenue or the returns or the product efficacy for it to matter, everything you’re seeing is ridiculous and wasteful, and when it all goes tits up I want you to remember that I wrote this and tried to say something.”

“The Magnificent 7 stocks — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon — make up around 35% of the value of the US stock market, and of that, NVIDIA’s market value makes up about 19% of the Magnificent 7. This dominance is also why ordinary people ought to be deeply concerned about the AI bubble. The Magnificent 7 is almost certainly a big part of their retirement plans, even if they’re not directly invested.”

“In simpler terms, 76.9% of Microsoft’s AI revenue comes from OpenAI, and is sold at just above or at cost, making Microsoft’s “real” AI revenue about $3 billion, or around 3.75% of this year’s capital expenditures, or 16.25% if you count OpenAI’s revenue, which costs Microsoft more money than it earns.”

“xAI, the company that develops racist Large Language Model “Grok” and owns what remains of Twitter, apparently burns $1 billion a month, and The Information reports that it makes a whopping $100 million in annualized revenue — so, about $8.33 million a month. There is a shareholder vote for Tesla to potentially invest in xAI, which will probably happen, allowing Musk to continue to pull leverage from his Tesla stock until the company’s decaying sales and brand eventually swallow him whole.”

“I am not saying that any of the Magnificent 7 are going to die — just that five companies’ spend on NVIDIA GPUs largely dictate how stable the US stock market will be. If any of these companies (but especially NVIDIA) sneeze, your 401k or your kid’s college fund will catch a cold.”

“Any of these companies talking about “growth from AI” or “the jobs that AI will replace” or “how AI has changed their organization” are hand-waving to avoid telling you how much money these services are actually making them. If they were making good money and experiencing real growth as a result of these services, they wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it! They’d be in your ear and up your ass hooting about how much cash they were rolling in!”

“In today’s money, this means that Amazon spent $6.76 billion in capital expenditures on AWS in 2014. Assuming it was this much every year — it wasn’t, but I want to make an example of every person claiming that this is a gotcha — it took $67.6 billion and ten years (though one could argue it was nine) of pure capital expenditures to turn Amazon Web Services into a business that now makes billions of dollars a quarter in profit. That’s $15.4 billion less than Amazon’s capital expenditures for 2024, and less than one-fifteenth its projected capex spend for 2025. And to be clear, the actual capital expenditure numbers are likely much lower, but I want to make it clear that even when factoring in inflation, Amazon Web Services was A) a bargain and B) a fraction of the cost of what Amazon has spent in 2024 or 2025.”

“Cursor is the largest and most-successful generative AI company, and these aggressive and desperate changes to its product suggest A) that its product is deeply unprofitable and B) that its current growth was a result of offering a product that was not the one it would sell in the long term. Cursor misled its customers, and its current revenue is, as a result, highly unlikely to stay at this level.”

“Any startup scaling into an “enterprise” integration of generative AI which means, in this case, anything that requires a certain level of service uptime) has to commit to both a minimum amount of months and a throughput of tokens, which means that the price of starting an AI startup that gets any kind of real market traction just dramatically increased.”

“Cursor is, as it stands, the one example of a company thriving using generative AI, and it appears its rapid growth was a result of selling a product at a massive loss. As it stands today, Cursor’s product is significantly worse, and its Reddit is full of people furious at the company for the changes.”

“Within weeks of Cursor’s changes to its services, Amazon and ByteDance released competitors that, for the most part, do the same thing. Sure there’s a few differences in how they’re designed, but design is not a moat, especially in a high-cost, negative-profit business, where your only way of growing is to offer a product you can’t afford to sustain.”

“Not only does Salesforce not actually sell “agents,” its own research shows that agents only achieve around a 58% success rate on single-step tasks, meaning, to quote The Register, “tasks that can be completed in a single step without needing follow-up actions or more information.” On multi-step tasks — so, you know, most tasks — they succeed a depressing 35% of the time.”

“Last week, OpenAI announced its own “ChatGPT agent” that can allegedly go “do tasks” on a “virtual computer.” In its own demo, the agent took 21 or so minutes to spit out a plan for a wedding with destinations, a vague calendar and some suit options, and then showed a pre-prepared demo of the “agent” preparing an itinerary of how to visit every major league ballpark. In this example’s case, “agent” took 23 minutes, and produced arguably the most confusing-looking map I’ve seen in my life. It also missed out every single major league ballpark on the East Coast — including Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park — and added a random stadium in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Anthropic is in a similar, but slightly better position — it is set to lose $3 billion this year on $4 billion of revenue. It also has no path to profitability, recently jacked up prices on Cursor, its largest customer, and had to put restraints on Claude Code after allowing users to burn 100% to 10,000% of their revenue. These are the actions of a desperate company.”

“[…] the most important company in the entire AI industry needs to convert by the end of the year or it’s effectively dead, and even if it does, it burns billions and billions of dollars a year and will die without continual funding. It has no path to profitability, and anyone telling you otherwise is a liar or a fantasist.”

“CoreWeave was initially funded by NVIDIA, its IPO funded partially by NVIDIA, NVIDIA is one of its customers, and CoreWeave raises debt on the GPUs it buys from NVIDIA to build more data centers, while also using the money to buy GPUs from NVIDIA. This isn’t me being polemic or hysterical — this is quite literally what is happening, and how CoreWeave operates. If you aren’t alarmed by that, I’m not sure what to tell you.”

“OpenAI is Microsoft’s largest Azure client — an insanely risky proposition on multiple levels, not simply in the fact that it’s serving the revenue at-cost but that Microsoft executives believed OpenAI would fail in the long term when they invested in 2023 — and Microsoft is NVIDIA’s largest client for GPUs, meaning that any changes to Microsoft’s future interest in OpenAI, such as reducing its data center expansion, would eventually hit NVIDIA’s revenue.”

• Say OpenAI and Broadcom actually build their ASIC in 2026 (they won’t) — how many of them will they build? Do they have contracts with companies that can actually produce high-performance silicon, of which there are only three (Samsung, TSMC, and arguably SMIC, which is currently sanctioned), and these companies typically have their capacity booked well in advance. Even starting a production run of a semiconductor product can take weeks. Do they have the server architecture prepared? Have they tested it? Does it work? Is the performance actually good? Microsoft has failed to create a workable, reliable ASIC. What makes OpenAI special?
• It takes a lot of money to build these chips and they are yet to prove they’re better than NVIDIA GPUs for AI compute, and even if they do, are they going to retrofit every data center? Can they build enough?
• If this actually happens, it still fucks up the AI trade. NVIDIA STILL NEEDS TO SELL GPUs!

“This isn’t anything like Uber, AWS, or any other situation. It is its own monstrosity, a creature of hubris and ignorance caused by a tech industry that’s run out of ideas, built on top of one company.”

“[…] we’re now sitting on top of one of the most brittle situations in economic history — our markets held up by whether four or five companies will continue to buy chips that start losing them money the second they’re installed.”

Two major AI coding tools wiped out user data after making cascading mistakes by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

“These incidents demonstrate that AI coding tools may not be ready for widespread production use. Lemkin concluded that Replit isn’t ready for prime time, especially for non-technical users trying to create commercial software.

““The [AI] safety stuff is more visceral to me after a weekend of vibe hacking,” Lemkin said in a video posted to LinkedIn. “I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this. I am a little worried about safety now.”

“The incidents also reveal a broader challenge in AI system design: ensuring that models accurately track and verify the real-world effects of their actions rather than operating on potentially flawed internal representations.

“There’s also a user education element missing. It’s clear from how Lemkin interacted with the AI assistant that he had misconceptions about the AI tool’s capabilities and how it works, which comes from misrepresentation by tech companies. These companies tend to market chatbots as general human-like intelligences when, in fact, they are not.

“For now, users of AI coding assistants might want to follow anuraag’s example and create separate test directories for experiments—and maintain regular backups of any important data these tools might touch. Or perhaps not use them at all if they cannot personally verify the results.”

Good advice.

Subliminal Learning: Language Models Transmit Behavioral Traits via Hidden Signals in Data by Simon Willison

“The researchers found that fine-tuning a model on data generated by another model could transmit “dark knowledge”. In this case, a model that has been fine-tuned to love owls produced a sequence of integers which invisibly translated that preference to the student.”

These things have so-called guardrails, which really mean “ideological censorship”, although people think of it as the companies protecting their users from “hallucinations”. This will, of course, include things like preventing the model from saying that 2 + 2 = 5, but it will also definitely include the ensuring that the model doesn’t tell you about the real genocide in Gaza, but will definitely tell you about the fake one in Xinjiang. It will tell you that Taiwan isn’t part of China.

So the models are already built with bias, then they can be “poisoned” with more bias that wasn’t intended by the creators. Their whole mode of operation is hallucination. This is why coding is one of the few places where it can be reliably employed: because the potential valid and valuable output is already so strictly constrained by the compiler and tests.

Is SoftBank Still Backing OpenAI? by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“A $500 billion effort unveiled at the White House to supercharge the U.S.’s artificial-intelligence ambitions has struggled to get off the ground and has sharply scaled back its near-term plans.

“Six months after Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son stood shoulder to shoulder with Sam Altman and President Trump to announce the Stargate project, the newly formed company charged with making it happen has yet to complete a single deal for a data center.”

“I have confirmed that SoftBank never, ever had any involvement with the site in Abilene Texas. It didn’t fund it, it didn’t build it, it didn’t choose the site and, in fact, does not appear to have anything to do with any data center that OpenAI uses. The data center many, many reporters have referred to as “Stargate” has nothing to do with the “Stargate data center project.” Any reports suggesting otherwise are wrong, and I believe that this is a conscious attempt at misleading the public by OpenAI and SoftBank.”

“I believe that SoftBank and OpenAI’s relationship is an elaborate ruse, one created to give SoftBank the appearance of innovation, and OpenAI the appearance of a long-term partnership with a major financial institution that, from my research, is incapable of meeting the commitments it has made.

“In simpler terms, OpenAI and SoftBank are bullshitting everyone.”

A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs (ADD / XOR / ROL)

“I can write a request in plain English to summarize a document for me and put some key datapoints from the document in a structured JSON format, and modern models will just do that. I can ask a model to generate a children’s book story involving raceboats and generate illustrations, and the model will generate something that is passable. And much more, all of which would have seemed like absolute science fiction 5-6 years ago.”

This is a good point, of course, but are the results good enough? People keep expressing such incredible confidence that it will keep improving and I’m not so sure. My recent experiences are that the results continue to be superficially convincing but overall crucially flawed (see my example with the review checklist above).

“The moment that people ascribe properties such as “consciousness” or “ethics” or “values” or “morals” to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost. We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word, and that stops producing words if we don’t crank the shaft.”

“Instead of saying “we cannot ensure that no harmful sequences will be generated by our function, partially because we don’t know how to specify and enumerate harmful sequences”, we talk about “behaviors”, “ethical constraints”, and “harmful actions in pursuit of their goals”. All of these are anthropocentric concepts that − in my mind − do not apply to functions or other mathematical objects. And using them muddles the discussion, and our thinking about what we’re doing when we create, analyze, deploy and monitor LLMs.”

“The function class represented by modern LLMs are very useful. Even if we never get anywhere close to AGI and just deploy the current state of technology everywhere where it might be useful, we will get a dramatically different world. LLMs might end up being similarly impactful as electrification.”

I’m not quite that hopeful. The purely digital nature of LLMs limits their scope; their deployment into a world ruled mostly by oligarchs that can’t see any value in anything other than what it delivers to them, personally, and largely in the short run, limits the scope even more drastically. We no longer have a world where someone has a vision of bringing electricity or running water to every household in their community. Instead, their vision is myopically limited to how much of the value produced by their community can they collect as rent.

“My grandfather lived from 1904 to 1981, a period which encompassed moving from gas lamps to electric, the replacement of horse carriages by cars, nuclear power, transistors, all the way to computers.”

Take note that the author mentions only technological innovations. He missed the very tiny developments like fresh, clean running water, sewage systems, incredible medical advances that doubled or even tripled life expectancy, vaccines, a robust food system. Those things are taken for granted and the STEM folk focus laser-like on the things that they invented as the true innovations. The other stuff was built by workers and prosaic engineers.

Programming

I’m so sad that I got neither a screenshot nor a URL while I was exchanging experiences with LLM-based coding tools with some colleagues based in Suzhou, China. So, they had a bunch of pages open that I could barely read at all—but I could read the code examples, which were all in English. I had to laugh and point out that two of the examples in animated GIFs on the home page included manipulation of SQL that allowed injection. The LLM had written something very, very obviously insecure, like,

const sqlCommand = "UPDATE myTable SET value=" + newValue + " WHERE userid = " + userid;

No parameters? Just no. Not even quotes? Super-double-no. You can keep that tool. Throw it down a hole.

It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA by Jono Alderson (Independent technical SEO consultant)

“SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.

“We now have:”

• Native, declarative transitions between real pages
• Instantaneous prerendered navigation via Speculation Rules
• Graceful degradation
• Clean markup, fast loads, and real URLs
• A platform that wants to help – if we let it

“If you’re still building your site as an SPA for the sake of “smoothness,” you’re solving a problem the browser already fixed – and you’re paying for it in complexity, performance, and maintainability.

“Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.

“Build like it’s 2025 – not like you’re trapped in a 2018 demo of Gatsby.

“You’ll end up with faster sites, happier users, and fewer regrets.”

What every meeting in tech feels like by Alberta Tech (YouTube)

This is an almost 3-minute video showing how ridiculous making estimates with planning poker is.

“How can something be zero story points? It’s not no work.

“I just don’t think it should take a whole day.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who said anything about days?

“Well, a story point’s a day, right? Sorry. At my last company, it was a day. What is it here? An hour?

“It’s relative.

“Relative to what?

“To the team’s velocity.

“What is the team’s velocity?

“It’s pretty average.

“How do I mathematically incorporate pretty average?”

@CrispyParrot writes:

“To any non-tech people watching this for some reason, this is non-fiction.”

@4a4a4a5a writes:

“I once asked why we point in relative sizes versus hours. They said that according to scrum, you point based on complexity, not how long a task will take. I said “ok great, but then why are we measuring velocity? You can’t sum up the relative complexities of a number of unrelated tasks in a meaningful way”. They said “oh it’s just so we know how many points’ worth of stories we can take into a two week sprint.” But if the points can’t be converted to hours, then neither can a velocity tell you how many points you can have per two week sprint. It’s madness!”

A friend’s copilot generated a task list for “the essence of the ticket is to add type based validations to the grid view code gen” as follows,

- [ ] Create a new branch for the task
- [ ] Create a new file named `116238.md` in the `scratch` directory
- [ ] Write the code to solve the problem in `116238.md`
- [ ] Test the code to ensure it works correctly
- [ ] Commit the changes to the branch
- [ ] Push the branch to the remote repository
- [ ] Create a pull request for the changes
- [ ] Review the pull request and make any necessary changes
- [ ] Merge the pull request into the main branch
- [ ] Delete the branch after merging
- [ ] Update the issue tracker to reflect the completion of the task
- [ ] Document the solution in the `README.md` file if necessary
- [ ] Notify the team about the completion of the task
- [ ] Close the issue in the issue tracker
- [ ] Archive the branch if it is no longer needed
- [ ] Reflect on the task and note any improvements for future tasks
- [ ] Celebrate the completion of the task with the team
- [ ] Review the code for any potential optimizations or improvements
- [ ] Ensure all tests pass before merging
- [ ] Update any relevant documentation to include the new solution
- [ ] Consider adding additional test cases to cover edge cases
- [ ] Share the solution with the community if applicable
- [ ] Monitor the solution for any issues or bugs after deployment
- [ ] Gather feedback from users and team members
- [ ] Plan for any future enhancements or features related to the solution
- [ ] Reflect on the overall process and identify areas for improvement
- [ ] Ensure the code adheres to the project’s coding standards
- [ ] Review the code for security vulnerabilities
- [ ] Ensure the code is well-documented for future reference

As almost always, it looks good at first blush but the bloom is soon off the rose:

• I like that “solve the problem” and “Celebrate the completion” have the same weight.
• There are 29 steps and 25 of them come after you’re done coding.
• Several of the tasks should come before the commit.

  • “Document the solution in the `README.md` file if necessary”
  • “Review the code for any potential optimizations or improvements”
  • “Ensure all tests pass before merging”
  • “Update any relevant documentation to include the new solution”
  • “Consider adding additional test cases to cover edge cases”
  • “Ensure the code adheres to the project’s coding standards”
  • “Review the code for security vulnerabilities”
  • “Ensure the code is well-documented for future reference”
  • Two tasks conflict.
  • “Delete the branch after merging”
  • “Archive or delete the branch if it is no longer needed”

Still, there is some decent stuff in there, so let’s review and refactor.

- Analyze
  − [ ] Create a new branch for the task
  − [ ] Create a new file named `116238.md` in the `scratch` directory
- Implement
  − [ ] Write the code to solve the problem in `116238.md`
  − [ ] Consider adding additional test cases to cover edge cases
  − [ ] Test the code to ensure it works correctly
  − [ ] Ensure the code adheres to the project’s coding standards
  − [ ] Ensure the code is well-documented for future reference
  − [ ] Document the solution in the `README.md` file if necessary
  − [ ] Update any relevant documentation to include the new solution
  − [ ] Commit the changes to the branch
- Local Review
  − [ ] Ensure all tests pass before merging
  − [ ] Review the code for any potential optimizations or improvements
  − [ ] Review the code for security vulnerabilities
  − [ ] Commit the changes to the branch
- Pair Review
  − [ ] Push the branch to the remote repository
  − [ ] Create a pull request for the changes
  − [ ] Review the pull request and make any necessary changes
  − [ ] Merge the pull request into the main branch
  − [ ] Delete the branch after merging
- Housekeeping
  − [ ] Update the issue tracker to reflect the completion of the task
  − [ ] Notify the team about the completion of the task
  − [ ] Close the issue in the issue tracker
  − [ ] Reflect on the task and note any improvements for future tasks
- Share
  − [ ] Celebrate the completion of the task with the team
  − [ ] Share the solution with the community if applicable
- Monitor
  − [ ] Gather feedback from users and team members
  − [ ] Monitor the solution for any issues or bugs after deployment
  − [ ] Plan for any future enhancements or features related to the solution
- Retro
  − [ ] Reflect on the overall process and identify areas for improvement

It’s a decent generic checklist but it was worse than useless before I imposed a sensible order on the items.

It doesn’t say anything about “add type based validations to the grid view code gen,” though.

Also, you’ll notice that, although quite a bit of text survived, it’s in a nearly completely different order now.

Diff of Copilot's generic review checklist versus mine

ChatGPT users shocked to learn their chats were in Google search results by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

John absolutely shocked—shocked, I tell you!—that he caught an STD from a two-dollar whore. News at 11.

Fun

Tom Lehrer − 'Silent E' by Edgar Aldrett (YouTube)

Video Games

Remembering Descent, the once-popular, fully 3D 6DOF shooter by Samuel Axon (Ars Technica)

“As far as I can recall, Descent was the first shooter to be fully 3D with six degrees of freedom. It’s not often in today’s gaming world that you get something completely and totally new, but that’s exactly what Descent was 30 years ago in 1995.

“Developed by Parallax Studios and published by Interplay, the game was a huge success at the time, moving millions of copies in a market where only an elite few had ever achieved that. It was distributed in part via shareware and played a role in keeping that model alive and bringing it from the just-retail-and-friends-sharing-floppies era to the Internet-download era.”

I remember playing this with friends—Kavorka and Haydut (I was dur)—at the office over lunch—and sometimes in much-longer sessions after work. We loved the six degrees of freedom so much—and only occasionally got queasy from it.

There are instructions at the end of the article on how to play it online today.

“For this article, I spent several hours playing Descent for the first time in I don’t even know how long. It was just as fun as I remembered. I was surprised at how well it holds up today, apart from the visual presentation.

“Fortunately, the game’s community has done an amazing job with patches. DXX-Rebirth and DXX-Redux add support for modern display resolutions, bring much-needed quality of life and input changes, and more. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even launch the game without installing one of them. The GOG version has the bare minimum of tweaks to make the game run at all on modern systems and input devices, but these community patches go the extra mile to make it feel more like a modern remaster without sacrificing the art or vibe of the original release in any way.

“Single-player is easier to get into than ever, and you might be surprised to learn that there are still people playing multiplayer. A “getting started guide” post by Reddit user XVXCHILLYBUSXVX lists Discord channels you can join to arrange games with other players; some have regularly scheduled matches in addition to impromptu, ad hoc matchups.

“If you give it a shot […]”

Check out a ten-minute gameplay video:

Descent − Gameplay [HD] by Nostalgic Games (YouTube)

100+ hours of work 👏#arcane #jinx #leagueoflegends by Riot Games (YouTube)

“The model definitely 50 to 60 hours. It took like 10 hours to paint. The outfit took like 2 weeks to make. One of my friends actually got the official Riot files from the launcher when you guys had the Jinx’s layer event going on. But then I had to surface model everything in Blender just get it all smooth and nice. And then had to remodel the interior so each part can like fit together as puzzle pieces. I bought basic black boots and then painted them. I had to stare really long at screenshots from the show to recognize what these things were because I was like, “Oh, they’re like tiny keychains. It’s the grenade pins. It makes so much sense.” So, I modeled those in Blender, printed them, added them all around.”

Is cosplay the U.S.A.‘s replacement for vocational programs?

Seriously, though, the lady even does Jinx’s accent to a T.