<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 <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</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="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h><span id="covid">COVID-19</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/21/pers-o21.html" author="Evan Blake" source="WSWS">Dangerous new COVID-19 variants threaten massive fall-winter surge</a> <bq>The most accurate estimate of the real number of daily COVID-19 infections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) shows that <b>21 million people were infected globally on Wednesday</b>, up 23 percent from the most recent trough of 17 million infections on September 27. Amid this deepening crisis, <b>the ruling elites throughout the world have discovered the perfect cure for the pandemic: Simply ignore it and cover it up.</b> At most, the broadcast news has brief segments on the pandemic once per month, while the print media just echoes the lies of the capitalist politicians.</bq> <bq><b>The growing wave is unlike anything seen since the start of the pandemic and has many scientists deeply concerned.</b> As a result of the unhindered spread of COVID-19 over the past year, the Omicron variant has spawned hundreds of subvariants with different mutation profiles, creating what experts have termed a “variant soup.”</bq> <bq><b>Hospitals, schools and industries across the US and internationally are in a state of collapse after unending COVID-19 waves have caused massive staffing shortages.</b> The coming winter will be catastrophic unless immediate action is taken by the working class.</bq> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/168178/climate-crisis-debt-relief-maldives-v20" author="Kate Aronoff" source="The New Republic">The Climate Crisis Is Driving Poorer Nations to Desperate Measures</a> <bq>Mohamad Nasheed suggested countries in the bloc might stop making payments on the <b>$686.3 billion they owe, accounting for nearly 30 percent of those countries’ combined GDP.</b></bq> <bq>The numbers are stark: Fifty-five V20 countries are due to pay back $435.8 billion over the next six years, researchers at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center have found. <b>The IMF has warned that 60 percent of low-income countries overall are now either in or at high risk of debt distress.</b> Troublingly, the institution also recently predicted that “the worst is yet to come” for the global economy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-11/anti-esg-can-be-good-business" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Anti-ESG Can Be Good Business</a> <bq>Look, you can’t actually make credit cards out of bullets, but <b>in 2022 you can raise infinity dollars by walking into the right room and saying the words “make credit cards out of bullets.”</b> That is the financial innovation here.</bq> The Idiocracy craves opportunities to lose money. <hr> <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/10/nomi-prins-new-book-no-one-wanted-to-call-the-feds-qe-a-ponzi-scheme-but-it-was/" source="Wall Street on Parade" author="Pam and Russ Martens">Nomi Prins’ New Book: “No One Wanted to Call the Fed’s QE a Ponzi Scheme. But It Was.”</a> <bq>The timing of the release of Prins’ book could not be more appropriate as signs mount of how entrenched corruption has distorted the world in which we live to the point that it increasingly feels like a bad sci-fi movie. <b>The man who first hooked up the feeding tube from the Fed to the grifters on Wall Street, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, just yesterday received a Nobel Prize in economics.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/13/vkxz-o13.html" source="WSWS" author="Nick Beams">Services rendered: Ben Bernanke awarded Nobel Prize for economics</a> <bq>He never seriously even thought to pose the question of how it was that the economy of the richest country in the world, abounding in natural resources, with a powerful and skilled labour force and in possession of great advances in science and industrial technology, had disintegrated. <b>Bourgeois economics had long before given up any scientific pursuit of such issues, lest it called into question the very foundations of the profit system.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-free-market-kaiser-schatzlein" source="The Baffler" author="Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein">There’s No Such Thing as a Free Market</a> <bq>[...] protecting commerce along England’s imperial trade routes. <b>This is the basis of Adam Smith’s ideas of free markets: the landed aristocracy, free to do whatever they want and completely in control of the state, will create wealth for all, because they are such good people.</b></bq> <bq>This is the basis of Adam Smith’s ideas of free markets: the landed aristocracy, free to do whatever they want and completely in control of the state, will create wealth for all, because they are such good people.</bq> <bq>More than two hundred years later, Smith’s elitist agricultural vision is dead, but the notion of the free market lives on in a totally different, totally extreme, and totally mangled version of his ideas. Smith was writing in defense of colonialism, slavery, empire, and farming. <b>Today’s free market zealots, from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel, praise innovators, industrialists, technologists, and financiers, who are said to create wealth out of nothing but vaporous dreams and have no obligation to anyone but themselves.</b></bq> <bq>Cicero, as many after him would do, likened free trade to a force of nature. In his time, Soll notes, <b>Rome’s well established, well-defended trade routes that crisscrossed the Mediterranean seemed permanent and everlasting.</b> “Imperial shipping routes . . . had given the impression that free movement of goods was part of the natural order of things,” he writes.</bq> It was then the same as we are today, completely not comprehending the effort involved, the sheer number of people who have been convinced to spend their days doing specific tasks that culminates in our globe-girdling system of trade. <bq>Nonetheless, the neoliberal trash-talking of state actions ramped up during the Reagan administration and continued almost unimpeded until the financial crash in 2008—all while government spending increased, and corporations took huge tax breaks, bailouts, and other legal protections. <b>Even libertarian defenders of the free market faith, like the Koch family, rushed into industries with the highest level of government subsidies and protections, like paper and oil.</b> The reality, Soll argues, is that we never saw the radically unregulated markets that we were told work so well.</bq> The trash-talking continues, but with increased hypocrisy. They pull up the ladder. Because of course they do. They are concerned only with their own wealth and do not care whether their worldview is <i>consistent</i> only that <i>people believe it</i>. <bq><b>Today, Soll argues, we are in an “essentially abusive relationship with free market thought.”</b> We constantly look to it to provide better products, lower prices, and wide-spread wealth: feats it never achieves. The state, like it or not, remains crucial to the operation of economic life. And so long as it is dominated by business interests, it does little to help those at the bottom. <b>The question is not whether the state is intrinsically good or bad, but who the state is prioritizing in its economic program.</b></bq> Bingo. <bq>We have to stop looking to business and industry to create a peaceful society; <b>the amount of wealth or even the quantity of jobs produced by commercial interests is not a gauge of success without considering how that wealth is distributed, or the health of the country at large.</b></bq> <bq>To avoid getting stuck in the muck of our oligarchy’s reality-warping argument, a better approach would be to abandon the label altogether and reckon with <b>what we really have: a state government captured by business interests that shape society so that businesses and their owners benefit first.</b> It’s freedom for commerce, and chains for everyone else.</bq> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://reason.com/2022/10/13/average-act-scores-drop-to-their-lowest-point-in-three-decades/" source="Reason" author="Emma Camp">Average ACT Scores Drop to Their Lowest Point in Three Decades</a> <bq>There was also a drop in the percentage of students meeting the ACT's "College Readiness Benchmarks." These benchmarks are minimum scores in each subject area, which are statistically correlated with success in freshman-level college courses.</bq> There are those who will shrug, but we have to remember that society's interest in education is, at a minimum, to ensure that there are people around who know how to do what needs doing, to keep things going. Water. Housing. Food. Transportation. Trains. Phones. Cars. Internet. Data. None of this works if people are too dumb to maintain it. Along the same lines, we have a world working to make everyone dumber, with incredibly distracting and addictive non-informational time-sinks. E.g. <img src="{att_link}image_2022-10-23_223144752.png" href="{att_link}image_2022-10-23_223144752.png" align="none" caption="SMBC 23.10.2022: Productivity" scale="50%"> <bq>"So for us, the declines are telling this bigger story, that a lot of students don't have access to the level of rigor that we'd like them to in high school." <b>She says this is especially true for low-income students or those from rural areas.</b></bq> Their whole society is upside-down, a giant clusterfuck from they can't even imagine emerging except by luck or a miracle. So, yeah, no, it's not a giant mystery why they can't concentrate at school. <bq>The recent decline in ACT scores, coupled with their already staggeringly low pre-pandemic levels, shows just how deficient American schools are—particularly the government-run public schools which educate 91 percent of American students. <b>For more students to succeed, we need to take a hard look at public schools and begin holding them to account for their failures.</b></bq> Here comes the propaganda. The conclusion is technically correct, but the insinuation is unfair. Public schools have had their budgets starved, and there is a tremendous brain-drain of the available workforce---there is a huge salary penalty in teaching---then blame public schools' failure on an inefficiency they natural inherit from their being funded by the government. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/13/ygrx-o13.html" source="WSWS" author="Andre Damon">White House draws up blueprint for World War III</a> <bq>Biden’s strategy, like Trump’s 2018 National Security Strategy, is violently nationalistic, declaring that the United States acts not in the interests of humanity or of its allies, but fundamentally to preserve its selfish interests. <b>“Our strategy is rooted in our national interests,” Biden declares.</b></bq> <bq>It adds, “Our National Defense Strategy relies on integrated deterrence: the seamless combination of capabilities to convince potential adversaries that the costs of their hostile activities outweigh their benefits. It entails: Integration across domains, <b>recognizing that our competitors’ strategies operate across military… and non-military (economic, technological, and information) domains—and we must too.</b>”</bq> The U.S. nearly always talks about its actions in defensive terms. It is nearly always the aggressor, but claims self-defense every time. It's tiresome. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/13/scott-ritter-pipelines-v-usa/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">Pipelines v. USA</a> <bq><b>Biden all but confessed the crime beforehand, and his secretary of state, Blinken, crowed about the “tremendous opportunity” that was created by the attack.</b> Not only did the U.S. Navy actively rehearse the crime in June 2022, using the same weapon that had been previously discovered next to the pipeline, but employed the very means needed to use this weapon on the day of the attack, at the location of the attack.</bq> <bq><b>Europe, afraid to wake up to the reality that its most important “ally” has committed an act of war against its critical energy infrastructure</b>, condemning millions of Europeans to suffer the depravations of cold, hunger and unemployment —all the while gouging Europe with profit margins from the sale of LNG that redefine the notion of “windfall” — remains silent.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/11/patrick-lawrence-our-shared-addiction-to-empire/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Our Shared Addiction to Empire </a> <bq>We had better come to terms with this, just as Williams urged us: However many of us don’t care to own up to it, <b>empire is our way of life</b> just as it was for the Iberians half a millennium ago. Back then it was about gold, slaves, and dominion. <b>For us it is about oil, numerous other commodities, cheap labor, favorable terms of trade, our projection of neoliberal orthodoxy, and, of course, profit.</b></bq> <bq>Americans do not like to read about themselves in terms such as these. This is why Williams was counted a “revisionist” historian and had many critics. <b>Revisionists are historians who set aside all the exceptionalist nonsense and Wilsonian excuse-making</b>—providential missions, “humanitarian” interventions, selflessly bringing democracy to the uncivilized—<b>in favor of accounts of America’s past and present-day conduct grounded in perfectly discernible motivations, interests, and realities.</b></bq> <bq>We would do well to think about this the next time we fill the car with gasoline, obsess on this or that gadget, eat bananas, or—sit down, please—hang a blue-and-yellow flag off the front porch. We are dependent on empire in a thousand ways we flinch from. <b>The majority of us also cheer on empire like good Wilsonians pretending it is all about democracy. This is what passes for progressive politics today</b>, and I imagine it has App, a classic Midwestern populist who died in 1990 at 68, spinning.</bq> <bq>It is a material addiction, empire, but it is also an addiction to the projection of American power. It is altogether a pathology that engages our psyches and consciences because we must find ways to live with these dependencies and still look in our mirrors and think ourselves good.</bq> <bq>App the populist loved common people and quoted an Australian rancher deep in the Outback: <b>“You aren’t lost until you don’t know where you’ve been.”</b> Let us begin by knowing how we got here, and then we can go on differently: How very excellent a thought is this?</bq> <bq>We seem no less addicted to the empire the Italian explorer stood for; we seem simply deeper into denial. <b>The long campaign to bring Russia to its knees, the constant provocation of China: It is in our time that empire seems to be playing its cards in shoot-the-moon fashion.</b> It is a terrible thought, but most of us appear to be so frightened as to prefer empire to democracy.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgTPTgHy81U" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/OgTPTgHy81U" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Useful Idiots" caption="Extended episode: Iranians Protest Repression while Suffering under US Sanctions"> At <b>01:18:40</b>, Assal Rad says, <bq>Because I want to make sure we are not talking about Iran in this cartoonish, caricatured way that we always do. That we are not reducing what is happening there through our political lens and our point of view and recognizing that this is happening outside of us. This is not happening <i>to</i> use; this is happening outside of us. So, try our best to show solidarity with the people who are there. <b>And we show solidarity ... first, by not undermining their agency and, second, by not appropriating it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/19/b918-o19.html" author="Peter Schwarz" source="WSWS">German Green Party in a war frenzy</a> <bq>Baerbock came up with a new justification for this criminal policy. If Germany were to withdraw from the European joint project that produces weapons for the Saudi regime, the costs for equipping the Bundeswehr would increase and thus money for social benefits would be lacking. “I don't want us to save even more in the social sector and then Lisa [referring to Lisa Paus, the Green family minister] will have no more funds for the children who urgently need them,” the foreign minister asserted. <b>“Creating social security with arms exports” – a really original new slogan for the Greens! Baerbock was rewarded with a standing ovation.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIh7XJVxCAY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/aIh7XJVxCAY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Jonathan Pie" caption="Truss Gone"> As expected, Jonathan Pie is brutal. <bq>Her premiership, it would have been a huge disappointment if it hadn't been such a terrible idea in the first place.</bq> <bq>Liz Truss: a bland, talentless ferret with the lopsided grin and glassy-eyed look of a person embarrassed to ask for directions.</bq> <bq>Her only achievement was limboing under the very low bar that Boris Johnson set for her just weeks ago.</bq> <bq>When was the last time someone was actually running the country? I’m not talking about someone who’s politically aligned with me. I’m talking someone competent, with a modicum of integrity and an ounce of intelligence. When?!?!</bq> As an American, I’ve been asking myself the same thing about my own leadership for a long time. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/us-might-bail-musk-out-by-blocking-twitter-deal-over-national-security/" author="Ashley Belanger" source="Ars Technica">US might bail Musk out by blocking Twitter deal over national security</a> <bq>According to Bloomberg’s interviews with “people familiar with the matter,” <b>US officials were not comfortable with Musk's tweets that threatened to stop funding Starlink service in Ukraine and discussed solutions to the war that would be favorable to Russian President Vladimir Putin.</b> Concerns about Musk drawing Twitter finances from foreign investors reportedly began escalating within the Biden administration, which is trying to avoid national security threats surrounding Musk deals.</bq> What an utter clusterfuck of a country. Just unbelievable levels of stupid. <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-loony-van-gogh-protests" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">On the Loony Van Gogh Protests</a> <bq>Art is the defense against reaction, not the accomplice of it, and destroying or demeaning art isn’t progressive, it’s just madness. If more oil executives saw and understood “The Sunflower” there would be less pollution, but even corporate greed is less frightening than zealotry. <b>You can buy off an executive, but people who’ll not only wreck things for free but do so with excitement and a sense of pride make for a much harder problem to solve.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/a-locus-of-care" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">A Locus of Care</a> <bq>Bruno Latour was honest and generous, and I don’t think there’s any question he took up that was not, for him, a true matter of concern. <b>He was one of our era’s best guides between the eternal Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatism and skepticism.</b></bq> <bq>We have a choice as to how read the world, and <b>it’s going to take all of our human ability, and perhaps some superhuman luck or grace as well, to read it for our own good.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/david-bentley-hart-fiction-gnosticism" source="Commonweal" author="Phil Cristman">A Change of Hart?</a> <bq>In one way, at least, he is the least American of writers, in that adjectives and adverbs do not give him that twinge of guilt that so many of us have picked up from Hemingway and Twain, <b>the suspicion that we are using them to distract the reader from our failure to describe some particular action or detail—some verb or noun—precisely enough.</b></bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/21/our-bubble-has-been-burst-can-other-possibilities-now-exist/" author="Kim Domenico" source="CounterPunch">“Our Bubble Has Been Burst:” Can Other Possibilities Now Exist?</a> <bq>This confession of the bubble – perhaps the first time the woman ever realized she lived in one – is a dawning of consciousness unwanted by anyone in liberal America, not just by those who can’t bear to imagine catastrophic climate disaster destroying their lives. Even those who deplore the materialist American Dream live in the bubble of neoliberalism, in a condition of voluntary limited consciousness. <b>The something that’s there <i>beyond the bubble</i> causes disquiet – and sometimes it allures – but – this being a bubble! – cannot gain our full attention.</b> In the efforts to sustain our bubble, to fend off consciousness, <b>we’re enabled by mainstream media and our mainstream politics, none of which even hints that our way of life is only thinkable <i>as long as</i> we remain inside the bubble.</b></bq> <bq>Would it be <i>the worst thing</i> to have to realize the American way of life into which we’re assimilated – is unbearable? That, though it limits consciousness of frightening possibilities, <b>our way of life cuts us off from other possibilities not so frightening, even desired?</b></bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://githubcopilotinvestigation.com/" source="GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion">Maybe you don’t mind if GitHub Copi­lot used your open-source code with­out ask­ing. But how will you feel if Copi­lot erases your open-source com­mu­nity?</a> <bq>On the other hand, maybe you’re a fan of Copi­lot who thinks that AI is the future and I’m just yelling at clouds. First, the objec­tion here is not to AI-assisted cod­ing tools gen­er­ally, but to Microsoft’s spe­cific choices with Copi­lot. We can eas­ily imag­ine a ver­sion of Copi­lot that’s friend­lier to open-source devel­op­ers—for instance, where par­tic­i­pa­tion is vol­un­tary, or where coders are paid to con­tribute to the train­ing cor­pus. Despite its pro­fessed love for open source, Microsoft chose none of these options. Sec­ond, <b>if you find Copi­lot valu­able, it’s largely because of the qual­ity of the under­ly­ing open-source train­ing data. As Copi­lot sucks the life from open-source projects, the prox­i­mate effect will be to make Copi­lot ever worse—a spi­ral­ing ouroboros of garbage code.</b></bq>