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Links and Notes for September 2nd, 2022

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#covid">COVID-19</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h>COVID-19</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/05/ylsf-s05.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">Long COVID and the working class: Brookings Institution report finds millions have left the labor force</a> <bq>Dr. David Strain, a physician at the University of Exeter in England’s west country, speaking with the Financial Times, compared the mass COVID infection as an “inversion of the huge drop in respiratory illness” that occurred in the 1980s when millions stopped or reduced smoking due to the recognition of its deleterious health consequences. As to the impact COVID has had, he said, “The level of damage that’s been done to population health [during COVID], it would be as if everybody suddenly decided to take up smoking in one go.”</bq> <bq>Many of these Long Haulers suffer from severe fatigue, shortness of breath, and brain fog that precludes them from doing even simple tasks, let alone analyzing data, making plans, and using careful judgment. Yet, insurance companies are looking for solid evidence of unavailable tests or diagnostics. As Mark D. DeBofsky, a Chicago lawyer who works for patients fighting for their benefits, told the Washington Post, “A lot of times the insurance company is just looking at the physical requirements and saying you have a sedentary job, and nothing precludes you from sitting at a desk all day.”</bq> This is what people will believe as well. They don't have a lot of empathy for people who can't work in the U.S. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/09/the-covid-debacle-rolls-on/" author="Eve Ottenberg" source="CounterPunch">The Covid Debacle Rolls On</a> <bq>What does China get for its heroic anti-coronavirus efforts? A constant beating in the western right-wing press. Its public health miracle is held up as having transformed the nation into a gulag (this from journalists whose U.S. “homeland” in fact features a real, live, out-and out carceral state gulag) and as proof of its hopelessly authoritarian governance. But I doubt Chinese leaders care what American free-market lunatics think. They clearly staked out their job as protecting the public health of their people, something we Americans can only dream of. Our rulers screech “get back to work! If you drop dead, them’s the breaks.” China’s response betokens far more civilization: “Don’t spread it, and get better soon.”</bq> <bq>The falsehood is the same, repeatedly – lockdowns or any rigorous public health measures don’t work and, by implication, neither does anything under communism. Better to just throw up your hands and figure you’ll be another covid statistic. We’re all going to die someday, anyway.</bq> <bq>[...] the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission or illness. But it does decrease the severity of the disease and the death rate. Given that this virus is now endemic, anyone without a death wish probably received the shot. The article quotes U.S. Public Health Service commander Heather Scobie: “Unvaccinated people 12 years and older had 17 times the rate of Covid-associated deaths, compared to people vaccinated with a primary series and booster dose…Unvaccinated people had eight times the rate of death as compared to people who only had a primary series.” So boosters help, big-time.</bq> <bq>The fact that it will not have completed human trials until months after release will doubtless inflame anti-vax suspicions. And it’s probably useless to argue that this has long been routine for the yearly flu shot – it’s tweaked in animal trials then delivered to the public.</bq> <bq>Long covid is a curse, and according to the CDC, one in 13 American adults has it. U.S. News says it potentially afflicts up to 23 million Americans. That’s called a public health disaster.</bq> <bq>[..] the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission, infection, illness or even death. So no. Humanity lost this one. Unfettered monopolistic America worst of all. We’re saddled with covid for the foreseeable future.</bq> <bq>The U.S. is a public health fiasco, courtesy of its inhuman economic system. The capitalist ideologues who infest our government are incapable of coping with disease. In a word, they are incompetent. So no, in this country, covid isn’t going anywhere. It’ll keep killing. And it will kill the fools who don’t wear masks or get vaccinated faster than anybody.</bq> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/30/thoughts-on-industrial-policy/" source="CounterPunch" author="Dean Baker">Thoughts on Industrial Policy</a> <bq>For example, the decision to have the government finance the construction of airports supports the airline industry, as well air freight, just as the decision to build the highways 70 years ago supported the auto industry and the suburbs. We spend over $50 billion a year on biomedical research, which is a huge subsidy to the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries. In short, industrial policy is not an on-off switch. We are always practicing industrial policy; the only issue is which industries we choose to favor and how we structure the mechanisms.</bq> <bq>This sort of outcome should outrage anyone who cares about inequality. The idea that we only pay companies once for their work is not radical. If we pay for the research, then companies should not also be able to get control of the output.</bq> <bq>Since our goal in promoting clean technology is to have it adopted as widely as possible, as quickly as possible, we should very much want to see prices lowered by having all research in the public domain. If the price of solar panels would fall by 25 percent by eliminating any intellectual property claims, this would have the same effect in increasing demand as an additional government subsidy to purchasers of 25 percent of the sale price. This is a big deal.</bq> <bq>Historically, manufacturing had been a source of relatively good-paying jobs for workers without college degrees. Jobs in manufacturing paid substantially more than jobs in other sectors, after controlling for factors like age, education, and location. This is no longer true. The manufacturing wage premium has fallen sharply in recent decades, so that it is now close to zero.</bq> <bq>Clearly there is a national security issue when most of our semiconductors come from Taiwan when a conflict with China could quickly choke off this source of supply. However, we could be reasonably comfortable importing semiconductors from Canada, Mexico, and many other countries.</bq> <bq>What we really need are diverse sources of supply, not just domestic production. A focus on domestic production that doesn’t recognize the need for a diversity of sources, will not create resiliency.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/09/lisbon-portugal-rents-speculation-airbnb/" source="Jacobin" author="Richard Matoušek">Real Estate Speculation Has Made Lisbon One of the World’s Most Unlivable Cities</a> <bq>Of Lisbon’s 320,000 dwellings, 48,000 are vacant , 20,000 are Airbnb units, and with unremitting demand, it’s no wonder that prices have skyrocketed when left to the market. When combined with Portugal’s lack of a public housing program on the scale of the UK or even the United States, they push the masses beyond precarity. There are now six thousand households on the city’s waiting list. This is why so many evictees have been forced to leave, with some neighborhoods shrinking by a quarter since 2011.</bq> <bq>Naturally, as people are pushed out of a desirable city, it tends to be the wealthier who can remain. With Lisbon’s population loss, it is likely that the electorate is not just smaller than in the past but probably wealthier and likelier to prefer neoliberal measures. If current policies remain, this phenomenon is likely to continue. It illustrates how the Right can gain power over a country’s metropolis. And despite Lisbon’s perfect storm of policy, the mechanisms are not Lisbon-specific. The Airbnbification of Athenian and Berliner housing is well known, as is the financialization of London and Dublin’s real estate.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/29/transforming-the-real-estate-market-using-the-crisis-in-the-localized-real-estate-market-to-promote-healthy-development-and-economic-growth/" source="Scheer Post" author="Xià Bīn (夏斌)">Transforming the Real Estate Market: Using the Crisis in the Localized Real Estate Market To Promote Healthy Development and Economic Growth</a> <bq>[...] in view of the obvious fact that the real estate market has kidnapped China’s economy for a long time and it is difficult to solve the problem in a more thorough market way in the short term, we should strive to speed up the implementation and basically solve the basic needs of low-income people and migrant workers in the city for “housing” in two years. Provide them with a continuous supply of public rental housing and guaranteed rental housing.</bq> <bq>Through the appropriate renovation of various buildings, the housing needs of those who lack the ability to purchase a home can be met as soon as possible. At the same time, we should refine our rental policies to protect people’s livelihood, such as the maximum limit of rent, various protective clauses for customers (e.g. tenure, etc.), relevant tax incentives, etc., and encourage social policies that support rental housing in all aspects.</bq> <bq>In the study process, we should allow comprehensive listening to the views of the society in many aspects, give the whole society time to digest, let the whole society gradually form the social opinion of “housing is not speculative”, gradually reduce the speculative investment demand for commercial housing at the margin, restrain the high price of housing [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/31/behind-the-economic-policy-facade-its-class-war/" source="CounterPunch" author="Richard D. Wolff">Behind the ‘Economic Policy’ Façade, It’s Class War</a> <bq>On the other, private level, insiders discuss how the government should respond to economic problems in ways that boost employers’ profits even if at employees’ or the public’s expense. Insiders express their preferred solutions in that nicely neutered term: “policies.”</bq> <bq>Note that QE favors the employer class. It works first and foremost to enrich the top 1 percent and then “hopes” the latter’s gains trickle down to the other 99 percent. Note further that the fresh new money is not provided to the mass of workers with the hope that they spend it thereby generating sales and profits for employers. Such a “trickle-up” approach to “stimulate the economy” would favor workers. That is why it is rare and almost never the primary focus of “expansionary monetary policy.”</bq> <bq>When recession is the problem, expansionary fiscal policy—for example, increased government spending—usually favors spending on infrastructure, defense, and other objects where well-established, large capitalist enterprises prevail. The government spending to moderate a recession then flows first and foremost into the hands of large employers. They will in turn use that money much as they do with all their capital and revenues: minimize labor and other costs so as to retain the maximum as profits and funds for capital accumulation.</bq> <bq>Conservatives stressed the demand side: huge fiscal stimuli responding to COVID-19 (government checks and additional unemployment cash) that would be funded by budget deficits. Liberals stressed on supply chain disruptions instead (attributed to, say, China’s lockdown policies such as COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). Note how both sides neatly removed employers’ profit-driven price increases from their respective analyses.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability" source="Astral Codex Ten" author="Scott Alexander">Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability</a> <bq>Suppose the old mediocre car company paid its workers $50,000 per year. Now someone invents a new better car company, and its workers do the same job as the workers at the old car company (ie their advantage isn’t more skilled workers, it’s equally-skilled workers making a better-designed car). It seems pretty fair to also pay their workers $50,000, which means that the big surplus created by the better car should mostly go to the capitalists.</bq> What a shockingly naive view of how things are designed and built. This example has nothing to do with reality. It features Hank Reardon FFS. <bq>The problem with the neoliberal argument is that it gives the first person to fill a niche credit for the niche’s entire existence, not just for filling it earlier than it otherwise would have been filled. Just because Jeff Bezos solved Internet retail two years earlier than the person who would have done it if he was never born, he gets to collect rent on all transactions forever, while that other guy gets nothing.</bq> I don't know why you have to try so hard. Everyone brings some value, but they also benefit from many other people's value. This is seemingly impenetrable for quasi-libertarians to follow. How much money should Bezos get? Does he design things? Or does he just happen to own a lot of a company that is driven forward by the efforts of ten of thousands of others? People would argue that the employees get salaries, but why are their contributions rewarded with hundreds of thousands per year and his with hundreds of thousands per hour? Because he was there at the beginning? <bq>Taken seriously, it implies that the only person who Bezos has “stolen” any money from is the second-best entrepreneur.</bq> In the author's world, no-one makes substantial contributions but entrepreneurs. I guess San Fransisco rubs off on you, not matter how hard you try (that's where the author lives). <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/26/energy-bills-britons-afford-pay-price-hike-poor" source="Guardian" author="Aditya Chakrabortty">These are energy bills many Britons simply can’t afford. Some will pay with their lives</a> <bq>Countless shops and businesses will close, never to open again. More than 70% of pubs are preparing for last orders, while any restaurant, café, chippy or kebab shop must now face existential threat , thanks to a quadrupling of their energy bills, surging food prices and a recession that will kill discretionary spending. As economic catastrophes go, this looks far bigger than the 2008 crash. It promises to reshape our everyday lives and social fabric.</bq> <bq>“Unless the government acts now,” I began, but what a joke that is. You and I both know that we have no government. No minister stirred themselves this morning to address a public facing a pivotal moment. Fratboy Boris Johnson spent his summer not tackling this emergency, but at parties and on holiday. The citizens of Slovenia and Greece saw more of our prime minister than we did. I’m unsure which of us got the short straw.</bq> <bq>[...] our immediate crises are far more serious than the people who run the country. Whether in politics, policy or the media, those at the top, nourished on platitudes and drunk on careerism, just cannot handle what stares us in the face.</bq> Goes for climate change as well. <bq>That Koh-i-Noor of Radio 4, the Today programme, has spent the past week diagnosing what ails the British economy. One morning was spent with a private equity investor, the editor of the Economist and a Lib Dem from the failed coalition government. All three bathed in happy consensus, bemoaning the lack of investment and decrying the abundance of red tape. The Today programme has never invited comparable analyses from Mick Lynch or Sharon Graham, of course; it wants only to lambast them over the inconvenience caused by workers sticking up for themselves.</bq> <bq>This is a country ruled by groupthink, when the group in question is a bunch of well-raised and nicely suited mediocrities.</bq> Applies to the U.S. As well. <bq>Enough is Enough launched two weeks ago, with the goal of signing up 50,000 people; it now has 450,000 on board and plans to get to a million by the end of September. Don’t Pay, which was started by three people in their evenings, has attracted more than 100,000 people pledging to cancel their direct debits.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/ukraine-and-the-politics-of-permanent" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Ukraine and the Politics of Permanent War</a> <bq>On August 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general.</bq> <bq>The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions.</bq> <bq>War is the primary business of the U.S. empire and the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The two ruling political parties slavishly perpetuate permanent war, as they do austerity programs, trade deals, the virtual tax boycott for corporations and the rich, wholesale government surveillance, the militarization of the police and the maintenance of the largest prison system in the world.</bq> <bq>The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. No matter how many disasters — from Vietnam to Afghanistan — it orchestrates, it is showered with larger and larger amounts of federal funds, nearly half of all the government’s discretionary spending.</bq> <bq>The ratings are arbitrary. The Daily Caller, which published fake naked pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was given a green rating, along with a media outlet owned and operated by The Heritage Foundation. NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks a red label for "failing" to publish retractions despite admitting that all of the information WikiLeaks has published thus far is accurate. What WikiLeaks was supposed to retract remains a mystery. The New York Times and The Washington Post, which shared a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election, a conspiracy theory the Mueller investigation imploded , are awarded perfect scores. These ratings are not about vetting journalism. They are about enforcing conformity.</bq> <bq>Readers who regularly go to targeted sites could probably care less if they are tagged with a red label. But that is not the point. The point is to rate these sites so that anyone who has a NewsGuard extension installed on their devices will be warned away from visiting them. NewsGuard is being installed in libraries and schools and on the computers of active-duty troops. A warning pops up on targeted sites that reads: “Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”</bq> JFC. I wonder if the ruling elite can even see the irony anymore or if they've bought their own myth. I kind of hope they're cynical. That, I could understand. The alternative cannot be reasoned with. <bq>As the persecution of Julian Assange illustrates, the throttling of press freedom is bipartisan. This assault on truth leaves a population unmoored. It feeds wild conspiracy theories. It shreds the credibility of the ruling class. It empowers demagogues. It creates an information desert, one where truth and lies are indistinguishable. It frog-marches us towards tyranny.</bq> <bq>While the oligarchs wage open war against each other with insurrections and FBI raids and the divide between the sad tribes of lost proletariats who base their increasingly shallow identities on these creeps deepens, talk of a Second American Civil War and the decline of Western-style liberal democracy has traveled from the fringe to the mainstream</bq> <hr> <a href="http://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-only-solution-to-second-american.html" source="Exile In Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">The Only Solution to a Second American Civil War is a Thousand Little Revolutions</a> <bq>America's heretical take on democracy essentially amounts to little more than a childish pig fashion show in which the American people are free to choose a dancing puppet to represent the corporate military elites who really run this twisted fucking mess. Just because the Big Steal is big bullshit doesn't mean that everyday Americans are stupid to suspect that the system is rigged.</bq> <bq>[...] this is why China will never even become powerful enough to take America's place. They are a Second World bureaucracy that inherited a First World sized territory, and their dystopian police state is America's future if we stubbornly insist on being united states.</bq> This is probably tru-ish, but China is governed differently than the U.S. It definitely has different espoused principles. It might be lip service, but America doesn't even bother paying lip service. <bq>America is simply too goddamn big to be anything but tyrannical and the only other option aside from defacto military rule and a bloody civil war is to destroy America before it can destroy the world.</bq> Also, America's principles absolutely suck. Just awful. Immoral. Inhumane. Utterly without empathy. <bq>This only sounds insane because every single institution of power in this country is heavily invested in fooling us all into believing that anything less than full compliance with the status quo they designed to control us and rip us off is a recipe for fucking chaos.</bq> Amen. Well-struck. <bq>The collapse of any imperial power structure may be as inevitable as the rising sun, but it only ends in carnage when people insist on clinging to these same systems long after they've clearly failed.</bq> <bq>[...] the Amish have been taking care of their own peacefully right in my own backyard with their own tightly woven networks of communal farms and craftsmen without even so much as touching a Glock.</bq> <bq>The government will never understand us, and I honestly hope they never do because I've seen what becomes of those they assimilate.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/06/why-putins-failure-in-ukraine-will-be-as-momentous-as-gorbachevs-in-russia/" author="Patrick Cockburn" source="CounterPunch">Why Putin’s Failure in Ukraine will be as Momentous as Gorbachev’s in Russia</a> <bq>Financial and economic sanctions now being deployed against Russia are in the nature of a collective punishment of all Russians, be they pro or anti-Putin. Members of the ruling elite may not be able to holiday or shop in New York, London or Paris, but these are petty inconveniences, their very pettiness projecting weakness rather than strength.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/x8lbw4/we_have_created_a_world_so_chaotic_that_humanity/" author="Unpottedcedar37" source="Reddit">"We have created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security." -Arnim Zola</a> <img src="{att_link}desperatepeoplemakeidealworkersanddistractedcitizens.webp" href="{att_link}desperatepeoplemakeidealworkersanddistractedcitizens.webp" align="none" caption="Desperate people make ideal workers and distracted citizens" scale="75%"> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/democracy-isnt-a-la-carte" author="Ted Rall" source="">Democracy Isn’t a La Carte</a> <img src="{att_link}tr-9-9-22.jpg" href="{att_link}tr-9-9-22.jpg" align="none" caption="Democracy Isn’t a La Carte" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/here-it-comes/" author="James Howard Kunstler" source="Clusterfuck Nation">Here It Comes</a> <bq>[...] the money for that is fated go up in a vapor later this fall as the history’s greatest margin call gets underway. Let’s face it, Europe and North America are sloughing off their industrial economies and the financialization racketeering underneath all that doesn’t produce anything of value. Seventy percent of the pubs in the UK are shuttering because they can’t pay the electric bill. Germany is just flat-out hanging itself the basement. The Euro is going to trash. A little birdie told me to expect a last gasp stock market rally the next ten days, with the Dow nearing 35,000. What a set-up. Markets are truly diabolical the way they prey on human wishes. God help the suckers watching CNBC.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/a-cult-without-a-personality" author="Rustem Vakhitov" source="Russian Dissent">A Cult Without a Personality</a> <bq>If people sincerely believe that one person can raise a country out of ruins and make it great, they will also believe that one person can destroy it. It is only strange that such powers are attributed to Gorbachev, who, unlike Stalin, was not a politically significant person. Boris Kagarlitsky aptly wrote that Gorbachev was an ordinary nomenklatura of the “stagnation” era, who could only weave intrigues and please the authorities. This is true: Gorbachev’s biographers write that he owed his rise to Andropov [...]</bq> <bq>A whole country of 200 million people committed suicide, Yeltsin only played the role of a noose, and Gorbachev that of the stool. Eduard Limonov wrote just before the catastrophe: “The Soviet people are going through a period of chaos precisely because, tempted by other people’s wealth and prosperity, they doubted themselves and lost their spiritual masculinity.”</bq> <bq>Those who now blame Gorbachev alone for everything are doing a terrible thing - if we don’t admit the guilt of everyone now, if we don’t try to understand the reasons for this massive self-blindness, then it’s possible that it - God forbid! - may happen again.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/09/roaming-charges-69/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Special Master Blaster</a> <bq>Since 2007, federal law has required the blending of biofuels, mostly corn-based ethanol into gasoline. Now, fifteen years later, the country’s ethanol plants are generating more than twice the carbon emissions, per gallon of fuel production capacity, than the nation’s oil refineries.</bq> <bq>75% to 85% of plastic floating in the planet’s oceans comes from industrial fishing operations.</bq> <bq>Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top weapons-buyer, said this week that the US trained the Ukrainian missileers on how to use the Harpoon missiles that sank two Russian warships. This is how it always goes: first sell a besieged ally weapons, then train the foreign troops how to use them, then send military advisors for how to deploy the weapons, then send the CIA to pick targets, then send US troops when all of the above fails, kill tens of thousands of people (mostly civilians), then cut and run before you’re chased out of the country by the very people you claimed you wanted to protect…</bq> <bq>In Germany, coal-fired power stations generated roughly 30% of the electricity produced in the first half of 2022, outpacing every other energy source.</bq> JFC. <bq>Last July, a cop in Joliet, Illinois handcuffed Eric Lurry, a black man who was suffering from a drug overdose. The cop shoved a baton in his mouth, restricting his airway and called him called him a “bitch.” Lurry later died. When the cop’s brutal actions were exposed, the cop was suspended 6 days. But Javier Esqueda, the police Sergeant who revealed this abusive behavior, was expelled from the cop union. Now Esqueda faces 20 years prison for whistleblowing.</bq> JFC. Does anyone else feel like the U.S. should really just take a year off and focus on itself? <bq>5 million: the number of formerly incarcerated people living in the US. Their unemployment rate is 27 percent.</bq> But, sure, yeah, let's talk about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang nearly exclusively. That's not to say that there's no issue there at all, but just that I've never heard a European complain about the U.S. carceral state---for which there is abundant, indisputable evidence---as they have about China's carceral state---for which there is much flimsier evidence. It's unsurprising, of course, as Europe's anger about China's human-rights violations is stoked primarily by the U.S. itself. So, Europe condemns China for policies of which it has little evidence and no idea of the scale while completely ignoring the policies of the U.S., which are spectacularly racist and worse than any other nation in history. <bq>10.5 million children worldwide lost at least one parent to Covid. At least 7.5 million were left as orphans because of the virus.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/31/were-being-trained-to-worry-about-russian-propaganda-while-drowning-in-us-propaganda/" source="Scheer Post" author="Caitlin Johnstone">We’re Being Trained to Worry About ‘Russian Propaganda’ While Drowning in US Propaganda</a> <bq>One of the weirdest, most insane things happening today is the way the entire western world is being trained to freak out about “Russian propaganda” — which barely exists in the west — while ignoring the fact that we are spending every day marinating in billions of dollars worth of US empire propaganda [...]</bq> <bq>Compare those paltry numbers to the nonstop barrage of empire propaganda that westerners are fed every day of their lives by every news media outlet of significant influence — whose coverage of the Ukraine war has eclipsed that of all recent wars the US has been directly involved in — and it becomes clear that this message we’re being fed that we all need to panic about Russian propaganda is itself propaganda.</bq> <bq>Not only does CNN consistently take the side of the US government in every single war, it conducts brazen propaganda operations to help start new ones, like the time it staged a scripted interview with a small Syrian child calling for US military interventionism in Syria.</bq> <bq>The manufactured hysteria about a nonexistent epidemic of Russian propaganda in the west has people so blinkered and confused that it’s become impossible to criticize the most powerful government in the world for its planet-threatening brinkmanship with a rival nuclear superpower on any online forum without getting accused of being a secret agent for the Kremlin.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/27/patrick-lawrence-when-correspondents-came-home/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">When Correspondents Came Home</a> <bq>All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.</bq> <bq>The New Yorker took no interest in the proposed piece. A few months later it ran a profile of none other than Shintaro Ishihara written by a reporter sent out from New York who, it was clear from his report, had but superficial knowledge of his topic or anything else to do with Japan.</bq> Like Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. (See <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=4531">my review</a>.) <bq>Rereading such people, I am struck by certain things nonetheless. They had an appreciation for complexity and diversity—not just out in the wild dark beyond the Western alliance, but within it, too. However bad the work—and Cy Sulzberger’s columns collected clichés like barnacles on a sailboat’s bow—it derived from living and working abroad for many years.</bq> My God, but Lawrence can really write. <bq>Their delinquencies are to be understood as symptoms of a larger indifference among us toward the world that has taken hold since, I will say, Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall and the U.S. entered its memorably awful decades of triumphalism. Gradually since then, it has mattered less and less what other people think or do or what their aspirations might be. The only way to see things is the American way.</bq> <bq>When a White House press secretary considers it proper to convene such a gathering and ask those present to participate in the censorship of their own publications, it is plain that media’s relationship to power—in this case political and administrative power—was already compromised.</bq> <bq>America’s policy elites assumed a defensive crouch that day. They turned away from the world and against it all at once. The Bush administration was openly xenophobic with all its talk of “Islamofascism” and other such ridiculous notions. Most Americans turned in the same way. When Jacques Chirac refused to enlist France in Bush’s “coalition of the willing” against Iraq, the French became “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” a phrase I have always liked for its hardy American jingoism. Remember “Freedom Fries?”</bq> <bq>This hostility toward others has lurked in the American mind since the 17th century, breaking the surface all too frequently. The Irish in the 19th century were ignorant, the Italians greasy, and the Chinese yellow and a peril. September 11 plunged America into this sewer once again. For a time it was perfectly fine to refer to Muslims as “ragheads.”</bq> <bq>“Journalists are Americans, too. I consider myself, like I’m sure many of you do, to be a patriot.” These two sentences flabbergast me every time I think of them. For one thing, they are an almost verbatim repeat of what scores of publishers, editors, columnists, correspondents, and reporters said after Carl Bernstein, in the October 20, 1977, edition of Rolling Stone, exposed more than 400 of them as CIA collaborators.</bq> <bq>it does not seem to occur to these people that for an editor or reporter to be a good American requires only that he or she be a good editor or reporter. Instead, they reason that in times of crisis it is somehow necessary that the media betray their fundamental principles [...]</bq> <bq>How the Western print media and networks reported the Syrian crisis has seemed to me—I keep resorting to this—among the worst cases of dereliction in my lifetime. Western correspondents remained in Beirut or Istanbul and got their information through sources on the ground in Syria via telephone, Skype, or social media. And who were these sources? Opposition figures or the Syrian staff of Western nongovernmental organizations, by and large—anti–Assad sources to a one.</bq> <bq>And where did these correspondents turn when they needed a pithy analytic quotation? To American scholars, think tank inhabitants, and government officials in Washington. This practice, I should add, is in no wise limited to the Syria coverage. With a Beirut or a Beijing dateline, American correspondents now think nothing of quoting Americans and then reading back to America what Americans think of this or that foreign affairs question.</bq> <bq>By this time, it was very clear: What began with Ari Flesicher’s conference call was now a consolidated process. No foreign correspondent whose accounts of events did not match quite precisely the Washington orthodoxy could report for mainstream media. What happened no longer mattered. Balanced sourcing no longer mattered. Accuracy no longer mattered. The work of witnessing no longer mattered. Conformity mattered. Those doing principled work in the independent press, the work of bearing witness, now as then, are routinely vilified.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/29/chinas-changing-demographics-the-importance-of-creating-a-more-positive-environment-for-young-people/" source="Scheer Post" author="Zhōu Yǔxiāng (周宇香)">China’s Changing Demographics: The Importance of Creating a More Positive Environment for Young People</a> <bq>In terms of population size, as shown in Figure 1, the size of China’s youth population was only 196 million at the first census in 1953, after which the size of the youth population rose rapidly to reach a peak of 491 million at the fifth census in 2000 and then began to show a downward trend, developing to the point where China’s youth population had fallen to 401 million by the seventh census in 2020 (except for active youth military The number is 399 million in addition to the active youth military).</bq> <bq>The youth sex ratio in China has fluctuated greatly over the censuses. As shown in Figure 6, the youth sex ratio in China was 107.27 in 1953, rose to 110.71 in 1964, and began to decline after 1982, falling to a level of 105.47 in 2010, but increasing again to 111.23 in 2020. The sex ratios of most countries in the world fluctuate in the range of 96 to 106, and according to this standard, only the fifth census in China and the sixth census, the gender structure of youth was in a normal state.</bq> <bq>The imbalance in the sex structure of youth in recent years is the result of the combination of male preference, declining fertility rate, and increasing accessibility of sex selection technologies, and is a consequence of the long-term high sex ratio at birth.</bq> <bq>The decrease in the size of female youth and the low willingness of youth to marry and have children are intertwined, which adversely affects population reproduction and increases the risk of future demographic imbalance [...]</bq> <bq>Although some studies show that the proportion of cohabitation among young people in China is increasing, the proportion of unmarried births is low, and birth within marriage is still a common fertility pattern in China, and the postponement of the age of first marriage inevitably leads to the postponement of the age of first childbirth, and the existence of a large unmarried population objectively reduces the probability of birth for current female youth and affects the fertility level in the period.</bq> <bq>Within the youth cohort, the unmarried sex ratio shows the characteristic that the older the age, the higher the unmarried sex ratio. The unmarried sex ratio of 20-year-old youth is 112.57, while the unmarried sex ratio of 35-year-old youth is as high as 243.20, indicating that the older the age, the more serious the male youth marriage surplus.</bq> <bq>[...] young people who suffer from severe marital squeeze will not only be under pressure from their families and communities, but also their “passive singleness” will jeopardize their own identity and reduce their inner sense of psychological security, and some groups may attribute the problem of marital squeeze to external factors such as inadequate social security, triggering a certain risk of institutional trust.</bq> <bq>The large number of single men in rural areas lacks the support of spouses and children, and the lack of family retirement function. All of the above problems will bring serious challenges to rural grassroots social governance.</bq> <bq>The decline in the size and proportion of youth population and the low willingness of youth to marry and have children are intertwined, increasing the risk of future demographic imbalance.</bq> <bq>We should build a workplace culture of gender equality and guarantee equal employment opportunities for men and women when individuals end their student status and enter society, so as to reduce gender discrimination in the job market.</bq> <bq>[...] explore family policies that are conducive to fathers’ active participation, change the traditional concept that childcare is a woman’s exclusive job, advocate a family culture in which couples share responsibility for childbirth and parenting, and affirm the value of domestic work.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQld7iJJSyk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bQld7iJJSyk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Adam Something" caption="Why Roads ALWAYS Fill Up, No Matter How Much We Widen Them"> 2.5min video about "induced demand" in traffic. "A developed country is not where everyone drives a car. It’s where nobody needs a car to get around." Also, the Katy Freeway in Texas has 26 lanes. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/27/if-you-thought-this-summers-heat-waves-were-bad-heres-some-disturbing-news/" source="Scheer Post" author="David Battisti">If You Thought This Summer’s Heat Waves Were Bad, Here’s Some Disturbing News</a> <bq>The heat index indicates when a person is likely to reach that threshold. The National Weather Service defines “dangerous ” as a heat index of 103 F (39.4 C), and “extremely dangerous” as 125 F (51.7 C). If a person gets to “extremely dangerous” temperatures, that can lead to heat stroke . At that level, you have a few hours to get medical attention to cool your body down, or you die.</bq> <bq>We found that by the end of the century, most places in the mid-latitudes will see a three- to tenfold increase in the number of dangerous days. In the tropics, such as parts of India , the heat index right now can exceed the dangerous level for a few weeks a year. It’s been like that for the past 20 to 30 years. By 2050, those conditions are likely to occur over several months each year, we found. And by the end of the century, many places will see those conditions most of the year.</bq> <bq>Northern India could see over a month per year in extremely dangerous conditions. Africa’s Sahel region, where poverty is widespread, could see a few weeks of extremely dangerous conditions per year.</bq> <bq>By the end of the century, we found the most likely scenario is that the planet will see 5.4 F (3 C) of warming globally compared to pre-industrial times. Land warms faster than ocean, so that translates to about a 7 F (3.9 C) increase for places where we live, work and play – and you can get a sense of the future.</bq> Interestingly, people will disagree because they think science is a buffet. Maybe if Amazon did the study, they'd believe it. We. Are. Doomed. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/ancient-deep-ocean-may-have-been-hotter-than-we-thought/" source="Ars Technica" author="Howard Lee">New technique shows old temperatures were much hotter than thought</a> <bq>The clumped isotope method removes the need to make that assumption about how much water is locked away in ice because it simultaneously measures the levels of carbon-13 found in the same sample of calcium carbonate in a foram shell. Thermodynamics favors “clumping” of heavier isotopes in calcium carbonate in cold water, but as the water gets warmer, entropy increasingly exerts its influence, and the heavier isotopes become more scattered in the shell material. The degree of isotope clumping is calibrated to temperature in the lab for a variety of materials, enabling clumped isotope measurements to yield temperature measurements in deep time.</bq> <bq>The fact that these 7–8°C temperature swings are not seen in the oxygen isotope data suggests that both temperature and salinity were changing—a hint that ocean currents may have reorganized at the time. This is because exchanging warm salty water with cooler, fresher water causes the salinity to cancel out the temperature signal in the oxygen isotope data, but not in the new clumped isotope data. This would explain why the temperature swings appear in just one of the methods.</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.stilldrinking.org/to-the-tiny-spider-that-came-with-us-from-brooklyn" source="Still Drinking" author="Peter Welch">To the Tiny Spider That Came With Us From Brooklyn</a> <bq>Oh, listen to me, going on about myself. You’ve only a handful of years to worry about anyway. I’m only guessing; researching your kind is difficult for me since the pictures started popping up automatically. But I wish you well in your autumn years. It’s as much your home as ours. True, we were the ones that spent a year fighting a housing market gone mad and filled with the petty kingdoms of would-be AirBnB slumlords and move-fast-and-break-things real estate companies offering cash sight unseen. And yes, we were the ones that cut our life savings in half to put in an absurdly high downpayment. And we’re the ones who have to mow the lawn. We’re not very good about it. I don’t know if you can help with that. We’re open to discussion if you’re feeling generous.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/the-kentrogon" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">The Kentrogon</a> <bq>They loved their cat memes too much, they couldn’t break themselves from their pathetic anthropomorphising baby-talk: “Ooh look at Mr. Mewkers!” “Awww, isn’t Señor Mustachio elegant today!” No, my friends, those cats were rotting your brains. It wasn’t until it was too late — I pinpoint the decisive moment to November, 2018, when it had become plain as day that the majority of people were no longer making any sense at all when they spoke, politicians were speaking only in grunts, talk-show pundits cackled like broody hens, dinner-table conversations degenerated into endless sequences of non-sequiturs—: it wasn’t until it was too late, I say, that the few people left who were not infected began to listen to me.</bq> <bq>Nature rewards us with euphoria when we finally do manage the maneuver, and if eros is a trick nature plays to get even calculating beings such as ourselves to see to our own succession, why should an analogous sensation not be supposed as the force that sends such a dim packet of appetite as a barnacle larva in search of a suitable slit in the joints of a crab shell?</bq> <bq>What was most striking about Kirsten’s visitation was not so much how long it lasted, but how utterly real it seemed. Though I had long enjoyed meditating on the likely biological basis of the phantasmic interpenetrations of human beings, delighting in the thought that Leonardo da Vinci was guiding me the way a fluke might guide an ant, still, in the end I always remained lucid about the difference between phantasm and reality. Now, with Kirsten, I simply could not shake the feeling that she was really there.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/if-youre-a-living-language-type-then" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Language Log">If You're a Living Language Type, Then You Have No Right to Dictate to Traditionalists How They Use Language</a> <bq>[...] the ubiquitous suggestion, on the internet, that preferring a traditionalist reading of a word is wrong while a “living language” approach is correct. But if language is living, you must hold that the old way is equally valid as the new. Sure, literally has been used to mean figuratively for 250 years - but it’s been used to mean literally that entire time as well, or longer. So if you privilege the newer use above the older, you are a certain kind of prescriptivist yourself. If you’re the one who’s forever beating the drum that literally can mean figuratively, and you never are out there fighting for the right to use it the old way, you’re not fighting prescriptivism, you’re just engaged in a squabble about what’s prescribed.</bq> <bq>[...] they’re implicitly arguing that emerging usages are the only valid use. And the reason for that is just bullshit contrived populism. We live on Planet Populist, and yet the populists are always angry - people wear athleisure to the office, enjoying relaxed rules of dress decorum, but shit talk the person who still wears a suit; Marvel dominates the box office, but its fans never stop complaining about a lack of respect; every movie and show gets made for the fandom community, but they consider themselves terribly oppressed; and nobody polices language more lustily than people who complain about the language police. Merriam-Webster is merely voicing the rage of the enfranchised.</bq> <bq>The advantage of the traditional way, after all, is that when we embrace it, there is a word that means what literally once meant - as in, actually, in actual fact, in exact terms. When literally becomes just an intensifier, it joins hundreds of other terms that occupy that position, and something is lost. And you can’t tell me that the expansive definition is better because you’ve already foresworn the notion of a better or worse definition. If you do, your argument literally undermines itself.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/08/michel-houellebecq-interventions-2020-review-essays-interviews-market-society/" source="Jacobin" author="Ryan Napier">The Brutal Pessimism of Michel Houellebecq</a> <bq>Often, however, Houellebecq has a more compelling vision of how capitalism structures social life. What distinguishes his work, at its strongest, is its sense of market forces as totalizing, all-controlling. There is no way to live decently under such conditions, he recognizes. “The West isn’t made for a human life,” Houellebecq says. “In fact, there’s only one thing you can really do in the West, and that’s to make money.”</bq> <bq>Submission ’s Islamist party is Muslim in name only, operating under the same market logic as the secular parties that preceded it: Mohammed Ben Abbes, the Muslim president, is careful to take a “moderate line” and avoid the “the anticapitalist left,” embarking instead on a Macron-like program of austerity and privatization. “He understood,” says the novel’s narrator, “that the pro-growth right had won the ‘war of ideas,’ that young people today had become entrepreneurs , and that no one saw any alternative to the free market.” Beneath the apparently momentous change, Houellebecq insists, is simply more of the same: the misery-generating machine at the heart of society is untouched. Like Orbán and his imitators, the Islamist party of Submission is only neoliberalism with a different face.</bq> <bq>Houellebecq is sometimes described as a misanthrope; this is wrong. His “radical rejection of the world as it is” comes from a love for humans and a rage at what the market has reduced us to.</bq> <bq>Houellebecq says in Interventions 2020 , set up different systems of hierarchical differentiation, which can be based on birth (the aristocratic system), wealth, beauty, physical strength, intelligence, talent, and so on. Actually, all these systems seem to me to be almost equally contemptible; the only superiority I recognize is kindness.</bq> <bq>Houellebecq is pleased that his books have inspired someone to “recoil in horror” from the world as it is and “escape this nihilism.” This is how art like Houellebecq’s can free us from what Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism”: its negativity shocks us out of the depressing illusion that market society and its institutions can provide what we need, and reveals, in what it cannot depict, what we might be.</bq> <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/breaking-down-how-usb4-goes-where-no-usb-standard-has-gone-before/" source="Ars Technica" author="Scharon Harding">Breaking down how USB4 goes where no USB standard has gone before</a> <bq>One big difference is that Thunderbolt 4, which can also use dynamic bandwidth allocation across data and video and started rolling out with products in 2021, always operates at 40Gbps. 40Gbps is optional for USB4; a cable can run at 20Gbps and still be considered USB4.</bq> <bq>A USB4 cable can supply up to 240 W of power, per the USB PD Revision 3.1 specification. The USB-IF announced that in late 2021 (upping max support from 100 W), so 240 W USB-C power delivery is limited.</bq> <bq>[...] PCIe support is optional for USB4, but operation at 32Gbps is mandatory for Thunderbolt 4 (Thunderbolt 3 requires 16Gbps). This is a big reason why you'll find products like eGPUs and video capture cards relying on the Thunderbolt protocol.</bq> <bq>Intel promotes Thunderbolt 4's ability to connect two computers in a peer-to-peer network via a Thunderbolt 4 cable, and USB4 can perform the same feature identically, according to Ravencraft. This is helpful if you have a lot of data you need to move from one system to another. Both protocols also support a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection via an adapter.</bq> <bq>The tech has become so ubiquitous across a wide range of consumer products that the European Union will require USB-C on smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, handheld game consoles, e-readers, earbuds, headphones, and headsets by fall of 2024, with the mandate applying to laptops 40 months later.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/chinese-propose-to-build-a-dam-with-a-distributed-3d-printer/" source="Ars Technica" author="Rupendra Brahambhatt">Chinese propose to build a dam with a distributed 3D printer</a> <bq>They plan on using an additive manufacturing approach that employs a computerized scheduling system that takes the 3D structure into account. It will use AI-controlled robots instead of a large 3D printer to construct the upgrade to the Yangqu dam.</bq> <bq>The robot-made Yangqu dam is set to be operational by 2024—less than two years from now. You can contrast that with two of the other largest man-made dams, the Oroville dam in the US and the Three Gorges dam in China, which took seven and nine years to complete, respectively.</bq> <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/08/30/kubernetes-101-developers-names-ports-yaml-files-and-more" source="Red Hat Developer" author="Don Schenk">Kubernetes 101 for developers: Names, ports, YAML files, and more</a> <bq>But why should a developer care? Isn't this the realm of operations? Well, it's good for a developer because it makes your development and desk testing completely repeatable and consistent. And when you're finished, you have code to turn over to the operations folks, who can tweak it, improve it, and get it ready for production. That same code is then available to you for any future work. It's a cycle, and it's helpful for everyone, and it has a name: DevOps .</bq>