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Links and Notes for February 10th, 2023

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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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</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>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/10/ending-the-cesspool-in-pharmaceuticals-by-taking-away-patent-monopolies/" source="CounterPunch" author="Dean Baker">Ending the Cesspool in Pharmaceuticals by Taking Away Patent Monopolies</a> <bq>Patent monopolies and related protections allow pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs at prices that are typically several thousand percent above their free market price. In this context, economic theory predicts they will bend or break the law to extend and expand their protection as widely as possible.</bq> <bq>The potential profits from keeping the monopoly dwarf the profits that a generic competitor might hope to earn. For this reason, the patent holder will typically be prepared to spend far more money to protect a patent claim than a generic producer would be willing to spend to challenge it. As a result, the effective patent duration for many big-selling drugs is often long beyond the 20 years specified in the law.</bq> <bq>While a direct payment would likely be an antitrust violation, awarding a lucrative manufacturing contract to a generic producer for a different drug can accomplish the same goal and be all but impossible to detect [...]</bq> <bq>When drug patents allow drugs to sell for many thousand percent above the free market price, drug companies have an enormous incentive to promote their drugs as widely as possible. This means exaggerating their effectiveness and downplaying safety risks.</bq> <bq>In a feature article on Katalin Kariko, one of the leading mRNA pioneers, the New York Times wrote that at one point she was unable to arrange a collaboration with another researcher because they were concerned that her university affiliation might complicate patent claims. Similar issues could arise in many other contexts, for example, if drugs might best be used in tandem, as with the AIDS cocktails, it would be necessary to make arrangements on intellectual property claims before going through with clinical trials.</bq> <bq>[...] if research points to the potential effectiveness of an old drug or a non-pharmaceutical treatment for a condition, such as diet or environmental changes, the patent system provides no incentive to pursue it. If the treatment is not patentable, the system provides no incentive to do the research.</bq> <bq>[...] this is pretty much a no-lose proposition from their standpoint. If the patient believes that the insurer should cover the drug, and presses their case, the insurer ends up having to make a payment that they would have made anyhow. However, if the patient believes the insurer is correct in turning down the claim and doesn’t pursue it further, the insurer could save tens of thousands of dollars by turning it down. The only risk the insurer would face in this story is if turning down valid claims becomes so common that their patients are able file a successful class action lawsuit.</bq> <bq>But why would we think that the only way to motivate people to innovate is to give them a patent monopoly?</bq> <bq>[...] it would take some considerable leaps of logic to argue that the government can effectively finance basic research, but if they funded downstream research it would be the same thing as throwing money in the toilet.</bq> <bq>If all drugs were sold at free market prices, we would likely save close to $400 billion a year on prescription drugs (a bit less than half of the Defense Department budget). The industry currently spends bit more than $100 billion a year on research, so even if it took $150 billion to replace research that is patent-financed, we would still see massive savings.</bq> <bq>There are also other possible mechanisms. For example, we could have a patent buyout system, where the government pays some sum for the rights to useful drugs, and then places the patents in the public domain so they can be produced as generics.</bq> <bq>[...] is absurd that we use the power of the government to make life-saving drugs that would sell for hundreds of dollars in a free market, instead sell for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is a cruel and inefficient system that invites corruption. We can do better.</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/crimea-russia-ukraine-strategy-us-nuclear-war-risk/" source="Jacobin" author="Anatol Lieven">Crimea Is a Powder Keg</a> <bq>The Russian establishment, and most ordinary Russians, for their part believe that holding Crimea is vital to Russian identity and Russia’s position as a great power. As a Russian liberal acquaintance (and no admirer of Putin) told me, “In the last resort, America would use nuclear weapons to save Hawaii and Pearl Harbor, and if we have to, we should use them to save Crimea.”</bq> <bq>This is also the hope of the Polish and Baltic governments and of hardliners in Western Europe and the United States. They hope for the elimination of Russia as a significant factor in global affairs, leading to the isolation of China and the strengthening of US global primacy. Hence the increasing language (cynically borrowed from the Left) of the “ decolonization ” of Russia, a transparent code for the destruction of the existing Russian state.</bq> <bq>Furthermore, one of the reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year was that Ukraine had been blocking the canal from the Dnieper River to Crimea, thereby gravely damaging Crimean agriculture. As long as a renewed war remains a possibility, if Russia wishes to hold Crimea, it must fight to hold or retake the land bridge.</bq> <bq>Russians say — not without reason — that if the situation were reversed, and Crimea had been transferred from Ukraine to Russia, then much of Western public opinion would have sympathized with Ukrainian demands for its return.</bq> Yeah, but not for the reasons they think: because everyone hates everything Russian, so if Russia wanted something, you'd just have to want the opposite. <bq>But as former Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych has pointed out, the intense anti-Russian cultural measures introduced by the Ukrainian government — including the banning of the Russian language and the burning of Russian books — are unlikely to have increased support for Ukraine in Crimea.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/10/illegal-us-sanctions-blocking-aid-to-syria-after-earthquake-killed-thousands/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ben Norton">Illegal US Sanctions Blocking Aid to Syria, After Earthquake Killed Thousands</a> <bq>Syria’s United Nations Ambassador Bassam al-Sabbagh explained that US and EU sanctions have prevented planes from landing in Syrian airports, “So even those countries who want to send humanitarian assistance, they cannot use the airplane cargo because of the sanctions”.</bq> <bq>In November 2022, the top UN expert on sanctions published a report detailing how “outrageous” Western sanctions are “suffocating” millions of Syrian civilians and “may amount to crimes against humanity.”</bq> <bq>Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated:<bq>The US has long been engaged in the Syrian crisis. Its frequent military strikes and harsh economic sanctions have caused huge civilian casualties and taken away the means to subsistence of the Syrians. As we speak, the US troops continue to occupy Syria’s principal oil-producing regions. They have plundered more than 80% of Syria’s oil production and smuggled and burned Syria’s grain stock. All this has made Syria’s humanitarian crisis even worse. In the wake of the catastrophe, the US should put aside geopolitical obsessions and immediately lift the unilateral sanctions on Syria, to unlock the doors for humanitarian aid to Syria.</bq></bq> <bq>While Venezuela is under illegal Western sanctions and a US blockade, it has shown solidarity with the people of Syria. In response to the earthquake, the Venezuelan government sent to Damascus a plane full of 15 tons of food, medicine, and other aid, along with a search and rescue team.</bq> <bq>The Western media has reported that Russian troops deployed in Syria with the permission and in support of the Syrian government have thrown themselves into the relief effort, while social media videos have shown them working alongside Syrian civilians to pull people from beneath collapsed buildings. The media has failed to pose the question: what are the American forces doing?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/10/wppv-f10.html" source="WSWS" author="Bill Van Auken">As Syria digs earthquake victims from the rubble, US occupation denies access to direly needed energy supplies</a> <bq>CENTCOM posted a statement on its website February 8, two days after the earthquake, headlined “CENTCOM Prepares to Support Earthquake Relief,” meaning that whatever relief arrives will come after those buried in the rubble have died. And this relief will flow exclusively to Turkey.</bq> <bq>[...] columns of dozens of oil tankers, escorted by US armored vehicles, continue to flow through the al-Mahmoudieh border crossing into Iraq with stolen Syrian oil.</bq> <bq>The US occupation and the US sanctions are strangling Syria’s economy, denying the country the resources needed to mount an effective response to the earthquake and condemning thousands to death in the rubble, while reducing millions to abject poverty.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/10/the-leopards-tale-us-weapons-makers-on-a-marketing-spree/" source="Scheer Post" author="Eve Ottenberg">The Leopard's Tale: US Weapons Makers on a Marketing Spree</a> <bq>[...] western Europe depleted its armory by shipping everything to Ukraine to get blown up by the Russians. That creates a huge market opportunity for the U.S. weapons industry, which thus also eyes potential South American customers; hence its eagerness for some nations there to send their Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine, to be replaced, of course, by American hardware.</bq> <bq>So what we have seen recently is a concerted media and political campaign, that is to say, humbug, to trap the world as a purchaser of U.S. armaments. In this regard, it is worth noting that in fiscal 2022, U.S. weapons sales increased 48.8 percent. War is good business, and blood-soaked war profiteers are making out like the bandits they are.</bq> And U.S. manufacturers had produced, far and away, the most weapons, and captured in excess of a majority share, of the world's arms market, even before that increase. <bq>What is that latest program? A proxy war, yes, but a proxy war that’s also very much about money, from bargain basement deals on Ukrainian land for mammoth American agricultural firms to vacuuming up every last cent in Europe – just don’t tell the rubes in the American public about that.</bq> <bq>“The German government succumbed to media pressure when, contrary to the opinion of the majority of the population, it decided to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine.” Worse, Berlin was duped by Washington, which pulled a fast one a few days after German capitulation, by backpedaling and declaring that American tanks wouldn’t be ready for Ukraine maybe until summer. A cynic might say Biden bamboozled Scholz into donating his Leopards.</bq> <bq>[...] the Ukraine war boosts weapons profits so massively that Southcom will even consider arms deals with Cuba – though one wonders how that will go down, what with the U.S. blockade. Maybe the Exceptional Empire could use China as a middle-man; ho, ho ho!</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/10/the-us-wants-to-make-taiwan-the-ukraine-of-the-east/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">The US Wants To Make Taiwan the Ukraine of the East</a> <bq>Would the US or any other Western country accept a situation where China provided military aid, stationed troops, and offered diplomatic support to separatist forces in part of its internationally recognised territory? The answer, of course, is no.</bq> <bq>Today, the international community has overwhelmingly adopted the One China policy, with only 13 of 193 UN member states recognising the ROC in Taiwan.</bq> <bq>From 1949–1971, the US successfully manoeuvred to exclude the PRC from the United Nations by arguing that the ROC administration in Taiwan was the sole legitimate government of the entirety of China. It is important to note that, during this time, neither Taipei nor Washington contended that the island was separate from China, a narrative that is advanced today to allege Taiwan’s ‘independence’.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=93624" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">From Hero to Zero – die jämmerlichen Reaktionen des deutschen Mainstreams auf Seymour Hershs Enthüllungen. Jämmerliche Medien</a> <bq>Deutsche Medien, die sich noch vor wenigen Jahren mit ihren Elogen über den „besten investigativen Reporter der Welt“ (SZ) und die „Journalismus-Ikone“ (SPIEGEL) überboten, sind nun eifrig damit beschäftigt, das von ihnen mitgebaute Denkmal mit Kot zu bewerfen.</bq> <bq>Solange Seymour Hershs Enthüllungen die Verbrechen „böser“ Präsidenten wie Nixon oder Bush jr. betrafen, war er der Held. Als er jedoch zum ersten Mal den „guten“ Barack Obama angriff, wurde er zum Ausgestoßenen, und nun, wo es um den „heiligen“ Krieg um die Freiheit Europas geht, ist er offenbar der Leibhaftige.</bq> <bq>Bis auf haltlose ad-hominem-Pöbeleien erfahren wir in der Sache von Kornelius ohnehin nichts. Sein schlagkräftigstes Argument: Weil die US-Regierung die Vorwürfe dementiert, können sie nicht stimmen. Ja, das leuchtet natürlich ein. Jeder Richter sollte sich diese Weisheit zu Herzen nehmen. Wenn der Angeklagte den Vorwurf abstreitet, ist der Vorwurf falsch. Oder? Da gibt es natürlich Ausnahmen! Wenn der Angeklagte Putin, Xi, Assad, Maduro, Orban, Kim oder sonst wie heißt, gilt die goldene korneliussche Regel natürlich nicht. Dann ist es genau umgekehrt. Aber das spielt ja hier keine Rolle, da Seymour Hersh der US-Regierung etwas vorwirft und die hat – siehe oben – immer Recht. Fall erledigt, Akte geschlossen.</bq> <bq>Es ist schon traurig, dass statt deutscher Journalisten ein US-Journalist die Aufklärung eines Terroranschlages auf deutsche und europäische Infrastruktur voranbringen muss. Noch trauriger ist es, dass deutsche Journalisten diese Arbeit dann entweder ignorieren oder instinktiv in den Dreck ziehen. Ja, der Zustand unserer Medien ist wahrlich jämmerlich.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/10/israel-has-always-been-a-dictatorship-of-criminals/" source="CounterPunch" author="Nicky Reid">Israel has Always Been a Dictatorship of Criminals</a> <bq>[...] something was very wrong with this picture. I couldn’t quite place my finger on it at first but as hundreds of thousands of well-dressed Europeans took to the streets of the Middle East’s toniest neighborhoods, waving blue and white flags emblazoned with the Star of David, it finally hit me with a flash like a burning bush, “Holy shit, these people have no idea that they’re white supremacists bitching about their squandered privileges in the world’s worst apartheid state.”</bq> <bq>All races are social constructs, but the Jewish race is actually a relatively modern one. Most of today’s Jews are actually the descendants of converts to Judaism with little to no proven connection to modern-day Israel and it was actually this status as a proudly stateless people with an allegiance to no one but God that made members of the tribe the perfect scapegoats for tyrants from the Czars to the Fourth Reich and they had good reason to be scared.</bq> <bq>Crowded homes were bombarded with hand grenades and any grown man caught escaping was forced to dig his own grave before being executed. Women and children were routinely raped before being sent to the hills with nothing but the clothes on their backs. 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes at gunpoint and 500 villages were razed to the ground. The racist death squads who carried out these massacres would become the first officers of the new Israeli Defense Forces.</bq> <bq>You see, it wasn’t enough for the Zionists to make Palestine Jewish; their mission was to make Jews white, and it was none other than Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism described as “the spiritual father of the Jewish State” in Israel’s declaration of independence, who called for his dream nation to “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism” and referred to him and his fellow Zionists as “representatives of Western Civilization” sent to bring cleanliness and order to the Orient.</bq> <bq>Fascism is merely the inevitable result of the state’s failure to homogenize the diversity of mankind beneath the banner of a single order. Rosa and Emma understood this all too well. But perhaps they too are antisemites. A country that packages conformity to white Anglo Saxon values as progress has a name, it’s called a liberal democracy. And a liberal democracy that fails to fool its subjects into embracing this slavery as progress has no place left to go but to embrace its true nature as a dictatorship of criminals.</bq> <bq>The host must be destroyed and until the people of the Levant unite against this Zionist host, they will never be safe from a virus that thrives on pitting every tribe of poor people in the desert against each other. The only solution to Palestine’s white supremacist question is a no state solution. So, go ahead and call me a fucking racist. I have too many states to smash to pick favorites based on foreskin and too little time to waste on the fragile feelings of gaslighting fascists.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/10/ygex-f10.html" source="WSWS" author="Kevin Reed">Roger Waters delivers impassioned speech at the UN demanding an end to the war in Ukraine</a> <bq>In Ukraine, he said, they may be soldiers or civilians facing a warzone of “barbed wire and watch towers and walls and enmity,” or they might be in a city like New York, where they “can still find themselves in dire straits.” He said, “Maybe, somehow, however hard they worked all their lives, they lost their footing on the slippery, tilting deck of the neo-liberal capitalist ship we call life in the city and fell overboard to end up drowning. Maybe they got sick, maybe they took out a student loan, maybe they missed a payment … but now they live on the street in a pile of cardboard, maybe even within sight of this United Nations building.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/10/pers-f10.html" source="WSWS" author="Andre Damon">Seymour Hersh’s exposure of the Nord Stream bombing: A lesson and a warning</a> <bq>The problem, however, is how to sell this plan to the population. Biden’s State of the Union Address earlier this week hardly mentioned the central element of the administration’s policy, the war against Russia. This was, as the WSWS noted, due to the fact that the war is not popular and because plans are in the works for a major escalation. This will require, we explained, “the deployment of NATO forces to Ukraine, including American contractors and troops, but Biden is not yet ready to reveal it. More time is needed to ratchet up the ongoing media propaganda campaign and generate an even higher level of anti-Russia hysteria.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/08/patrick-lawrence-no-joey-it-still-isnt-morning-in-america/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">No, Joey, It Still Isn't Morning in America</a> <bq>It has long been evident that the so-called progressives in the Democratic Party act out brave political positions on social media, in stencils on the backs of formal gowns, and elsewhere while going along and getting along in mainstream Democratic politics and getting nothing of consequence done. Now our president gets up to the same sideshow: Snow the great broad masses while making sure nothing fundamentally changes.</bq> Well, in fairness, it's not only <iq>now</iq> that this is happening. This has been the show for my entire adult lifetime. The program is the same, through successive presidencies and Congresses. The pattern is quite clear. They only incidentally do good. They are a machine whose knobs we twirl, trying to get it to do something that we want, but we don't really know how it works. It's kind of like riding a horse: if you don't do anything, then you'll be on the horse's back while it grazes, looking for food for itself. If you're lucky, you can maybe guide it somewhere that you'd like to go. Or maybe the analogy of being locked in the cabin of an automated grain harvester where all of the controls are labeled in a foreign alphabet (Russian or Chinese or Arabic if you're a native English-speaking monolinguist) is more appropriate. It races back and forth across the field, destroying everything in its path. If you push the right button, it lowers an arm to actually harvest something or bundle it into a bale, but your rate of success at getting something you want is arbitrary---and pales in comparison to the amount of destruction for "personal" gain the harvester wreaks. <bq>What makes Joey so preposterous an author of these words is the quite substantial extent to which he is responsible for what he described, the extent to which he takes no responsibility for his record in the Senate and since, the extent to which he makes no serious promises now to do anything about it—the extent, in short, to which there is no chance anything will fundamentally change so long as he lives in the White House.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/08/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream-pipeline/" source="Scheer Post" author="Seymour Hersh">How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline</a> <bq>[...] which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border [...]</bq> That should be northwestern. <bq>Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.</bq> <bq>Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack. “It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”</bq> <bq>The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”</bq> <bq>Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014.</bq> Holy shit! Really! I had no idea that he'd had such a position of prominence in Norway before he became America's pit bull at NATO. In the words of Mark Forward's Coach from Letterkenny, that's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96FY6aIKUXE">fuckin' embarrassing</a>, Norway. <bq>(The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)</bq> <bq>(“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/radio-war-nerd-78596220" author="Radio War Nerd" source="Patreon">EP #366 — Seymour Hersh on US Bombing Nord Stream Pipelines</a> This was a wild ride of an interview with Seymour Hersh about his article, his research, and his opinion of the rest of the media and the state of his country. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/08/animal-crackers/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">Animal Crackers</a> <bq>In those days it was not Leopards but Panther and Tiger tanks lumbering out to defeat the Russians, as in the 900-day siege of Leningrad, with an estimated million and a half deaths, mostly civilians, mostly from starvation and extreme cold – more deaths in one city than in the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=93525" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Tobias Riegel">Wenn die EU Syrien wirklich helfen will, müssen die Sanktionen sofort beendet werden</a> <bq>Die Menschen leiden massiv und sterben. Wir können wegen der Sanktionen keine Medikamente oder lebenswichtige Güter an unsere Brüder und Schwestern schicken. Die Regierung der Bundesrepublik Deutschlands muss sich als Regierung des wirtschaftlich stärksten Landes in Europa dafür einsetzen, dass die Sanktionen sofort aufgehoben werden</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/ukraine-russia-war-naftali-bennett-negotiations-peace/" source="Jacobin" author="Branko Marcetic">The Grinding War in Ukraine Could Have Ended a Long Time Ago</a> <bq>According to Bennett, as early as the second Saturday of the war, or a little less than a week and a half into the war, both Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin made major concessions: Putin, by giving up on the goals of the “demilitarization” of Ukraine and its “denazification” — meaning, as Bennett interpreted it, regime change — and Zelensky by giving up on pursuing NATO membership.</bq> <bq>For the Global South, the war’s prolonging has seen an explosion in hunger, poverty, and political instability, including in the war-torn country of Yemen, where the Ukraine war’s disruptions to food supply have worsened an already unimaginably severe hunger crisis. In Europe, meanwhile, the war’s cost-of-living ripple effects have led to a surge in child poverty, are tipped to lead to nearly 150,000 excess deaths this winter, and have catalyzed political instability that has helped put literal fascist parties into power in Italy and Sweden</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/06/efvs-f06.html" source="WSWS" author="Nancy Hanover & James Vega">Thousands of American high school students illegally forced into Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps</a> <bq>Andreya Thomas told the Times that she was auto-enrolled as a freshman at Pershing High in Detroit. She said she pleaded to be allowed to drop JROTC, but school administrators refused. She was not alone in being involuntarily enrolled into JROTC. Ninety percent of the school’s 2021-22 freshman class was enrolled.</bq> <bq>A 2021 report cited the military’s massive presence, enrolling 7,800 students at 44 schools. That Chicago Public Schools boasted the highest proportion of students in military courses in the nation was a “point of pride” for Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot,</bq> <bq>the Army recruiters’ handbook, which is distributed to over 10,000 recruiters. It states, “If you wait until they’re [high school] seniors, it’s probably too late.”</bq> <bq>In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a lengthy report titled “Soldiers of Misfortune,” which indicted the US for violations of the United Nations’ Optional Protocol to the “Rights of the Child,” ratified by the US Senate in 2002, by targeting children under 17 for military recruitment.</bq> <bq>The Times also reported that at least 33 of the program’s instructors were charged in sexual misconduct cases involving students.</bq> <bq>JROTC cadets (children between the ages of 12 and 17) undergo military-style physical fitness training, drill like a soldier, learn marksmanship and military history, and wear uniforms. In short, students experience “a taste of the military” under the direction of a retired service member. “The only word I can think of is ‘indoctrination,’” said Florida parent Julio Mejia.</bq> <bq>Unsurprisingly, these programs target the socio-economically disadvantaged, who have fewer options for higher education or are particularly worried about student loan debt. According to statistics presented by the Times, 40 percent of JROTC programs are in inner-city schools, serving a student population with a 50 percent proportion of minorities. Especially high enrollment was reported (between 75 and 100 percent of an annual class) in low-income areas of Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Mobile, Alabama. JROTC has been an essential component of the “economic draft,” channeling military volunteers drawn from impoverished sections of the working class.</bq> <bq>States have allowed JROTC classes to be categorized as “physical education,” thereby allowing schools to lay off PE teachers and substitute ROTC instructors. These military veterans, making on average $50,000 a year, are not required to have a bachelor’s degree or be certified to teach.</bq> <bq>In this way, ROTC, with hundreds of millions of dollars at its disposal, bribes impoverished schools with budgetary fixes. For fiscal year 2021, the JROTC budget was about $428 million.</bq> <bq>The military also provides textbooks, another cost savings for schools. But these learning materials are often little more than patriotic and pro-war propaganda. The New York Times report cited outright lies justifying the Vietnam War, false claims about the US bombing of Libya, the deceitful downplaying of the US downing of an Iranian passenger jet that killed 290 people in 1988, and more.</bq> <bq>None of them, including the supposed “democratic socialist” Sanders, has suggested disbanding JROTC, nor will they. In fact, a bill was introduced in the US Senate in 2020, co-sponsored by Democrats, to nearly double JROTC. From the standpoint of the military, the program is wildly successful.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/05/patrick-lawrence-the-pentagons-balloon-floats-on/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Pentagon’s Balloon Floats On</a> <bq>Easing tensions, guardrails, and all the rest are notions intended to secure the quiescence of the American public—to keep the imperium hidden from view. The Chinese do not take such talk the slightest seriously. They keep the door open to serious negotiation with the U.S. as a matter of principle, but they entertain no illusions whatsoever that a high American official of so provocative an administration as Biden’s will walk through it.</bq> <bq>[...] the Filipino president opened the islands to nine, count them, locations where U.S. troops, ships, and aircraft will be permitted to rotate in and out. The rotation arrangement is a way around the post–Marcos constitution, which bars all foreign troops from being stationed on Filipino soil. So they are not stationed there: They come and go and may as well be.</bq> <bq>The Philippines’ northernmost islands are but 90–odd miles from Taiwan. Rotating, schmotating, American troops and matériel of all sorts will now be positioned to deploy effectively and rapidly in a ground, air, and sea operation against China in direct defense of the island territory—which has become, since Mike Pompeo’s day as Blinken’s predecessor, the epicenter of a majorly reinvigorated U.S. military presence at the far end of the Pacific.</bq> <bq>Always be wary of this word “assess.” It is a weasel word that does not commit anyone using it to anything. It means, at best, “We don’t know and cannot say.” Or it means, “We know this is not true and will not stand by it but want the public to think it is true.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=93501" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Der Gaskrieg der USA um Europas Südosten</a> <bq>Bereits im letzten Jahr exportierte Aserbaidschan dank der neuen Energiepartnerschaft mit der EU so viel Gas, das es selbst Gas für den Eigenverbrauch importieren musste. Und das kam – welch Überraschung – aus Russland. Dieses Spiel ließe sich fortführen. Die Balkanstaaten kaufen teures Gas aus Aserbaidschan, das selbst Gas zum Sonderpreis aus Russland einkauft.</bq> <bq>Die Türkei kann mehr preiswertes russisches Gas kaufen und das teure Gas aus Aserbaidschan den Balkanstaaten und Italien überlassen. Europa zahlt die Rechnung, Russland kann zumindest etwas Gas in den Westen bzw. Süden verkaufen und die Türkei profitiert durch niedrige Energiepreise. Ein Deal, bei dem alle außer Europa gewinnen – also ein sehr wahrscheinlicher Deal.</bq> <bq>Die neuen Volumina, mit denen der Balkan versorgt werden soll, stammen also weniger aus Aserbaidschan, sondern vor allem aus den Lieferländern für LNG, und hier sind die USA vor allem langfristig der Lieferant Nummer Eins.</bq> <bq>Und nun sage bitte keiner, den USA ginge es im Ukraine-Krieg um so etwas wie Freiheit, Demokratie oder Selbstbestimmung. Einen ganzen Kontinent von sich abhängig zu machen und dafür auch noch Billionen zu kassieren – das ist wohl der Hauptpreis und die USA sind drauf und dran, ihr Ziel zu erreichen.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VUkDJzbCm8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/7VUkDJzbCm8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Behind the Headlines" caption="Lee Camp & Alex Vitale: Should We Abolish Police?"> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/china-americas-nefarious-enemy" author="Ted Rall" source="">China: America’s Nefarious Enemy</a> <img src="{att_link}tedrall_2-17-23.jpg" href="{att_link}tedrall_2-17-23.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> <bq>China: We spend money on other countries, no strings attached. Highways, trains, dams. Then they like us. USA: That's cheating! You're supped to bomb!</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/take-a-bow-columbia-journalism-review" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">Take a Bow, Columbia Journalism Review</a> <bq>The piece is beginning to attract notice in conservative media and in foreign papers like the London Times, and even I’ve heard from some writers and media figures from the mainstream ranks who are beginning to have second thoughts. Jeff isn’t optimistic; I am, a little. If and when this does eventually get sorted out, future generations of reporters will owe a lot to the work Gerth put in over the last few years.</bq> <bq>[...] there is a lack of accountability and transparency in today’s media. The trend has accelerated due to the abandonment of public editors at outlets like the Times and the Post, as well as the shifting revenue models that create tighter, reinforcing loops between subscribers and news organizations.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/08/patrick-lawrence-the-press-reckoning-on-russiagate/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Press Reckoning on Russiagate</a> <bq>As Glenn Greenwald remarked in a lengthy “System Update” segment reviewing the Gerth series, however much contempt you may have for the corruptions of the American press, you are not contemptuous enough.</bq> <bq>Russiagate deformed the function of media, and media’s understanding of its function, beyond repair. Over the past seven years mainstream American media have come to see — embrace, indeed — their task as the conveyance of official propaganda.</bq> <bq>This structure of corruption and lawlessness was plain in real time, so to say, to those among us paying close attention. The value of Gerth’s work is twofold, in my view. It lays a good deal of this out in a publication that could hardly occupy a more mainstream position in America’s media constellation. And it reveals a great deal of the quite beyond-belief-filth and duplicity of those in the press who filled thousands of pages of newsprint and thousands of hours of air time with said garbage.</bq> <bq>Gerth’s report on his investigations is dense with this kind of thing. The important take-home here concerns intent. All those guilty of poisoning the public sphere during the Russiagate years did so wittingly. The corrupt were fully aware of their corruptions.</bq> <bq>It was the former intelligence analysts and technologists of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity who first exposed this harvest of fallacies. Working with other forensic specialists, VIPS demonstrated in late 2016 that it was technically impossible for Russians or anyone else to compromise the Democrats’ computer systems. It was logically an inside job executed by someone with direct access to the servers — a leak, not a hack.</bq> <bq>These findings were significantly supported when it was later revealed that CrowdStrike, the infamous cybersecurity firm working for the Democrats, had lied when it claimed to possess evidence of Russia’s complicity: It never had any. This was under oath, and what a difference an oath can make. Adam Schiff had lied when he claimed to have possessed or seen such evidence. James Comey lied. Susan Rice lied. Evelyn Farkas lied.</bq> <bq>Gerth being who he is and his methods being his methods, he asked 60 journalists with unclean hands for comment. A minority of them responded; none accepted his or her culpability. No major publication or broadcaster Gerth approached would reply to his questions during his reporting. It was “no comment” straight down the line. Franklin Foer, indeed, had no comment.</bq> <bq>If we are going to get beyond the press mess the Russiagate frenzies engendered, nobody gets out the side door. Everybody is called upon to accept what he or she, editor or reporter, did. Vanden Heuvel should heed her own urgings, to put this point another way.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/russell-brand-populism-establishment-media-neoliberalism/" source="Jacobin" author="David Sirota">Russell Brand: Elites Are Using Liberal Ideas to Justify Inequality</a> <bq>The only version of it that I’m qualified to speculate on is the conflation between liberal ideals and traditional economic, financial, and corporate interests that probably began to accelerate around the administrations of Tony Blair in Britain and Bill Clinton in the United States. These developed as a repackaged neoliberalism that showcases ethical and moral issues while ultimately supporting the same kind of financial interests that conventionally would have been regarded as corporate and right-wing.</bq> <bq>Those of us who have had affiliations with what was once known as the Left must acknowledge that the establishment is now using the aesthetics of liberalism in order to mask corruption. Bernie Sanders was right to go on Fox News and talk about Big Pharma. His doing that was inconceivable ten years ago, that a figure to the left of the center of the Democrat Party is appearing on what would have once been regarded as a right-wing outlet. Perhaps you still regard it as that — I don’t really care.</bq> <bq>What I want is the ability to assess information openly and not to sense continually that there’s a thumb on the scale, that the only information that we’re given is information that will lead to advantages for elites.</bq> <bq>Maybe the real problem is that we’re unwilling to face, at this point in history, that centralized authority, at this scale, is no longer tenable — that you can’t live in nations of 300 million people or 60 million people. Democracy ought to be as absolute as possible, and power ought be devolved. To live in a nation or on a planet means having to cohabitate with people whose views you do not share.</bq> <bq>The Democratic Party is very good at issuing press releases and saying that it really supports workers, while not actually supporting workers. It’s part of this bait and switch. Frankly, I think a lot of people across the country are recognizing that bait and switch.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php/" source="Columbia Journalism Review" author="Jeff Gerth">The press versus the president, part one</a> <bq>Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In 2021, 83 percent of Americans saw “fake news” as a “problem,” and 56 percent—mostly Republicans and independents—agreed that the media were “truly the enemy of the American people,” according to Rasmussen Reports.</bq> <bq>He made clear that in the early weeks of 2017, after initially hoping to “get along” with the press, he found himself inundated by a wave of Russia-related stories. He then realized that surviving, if not combating, the media was an integral part of his job. “I realized early on I had two jobs,” he said. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”</bq> <bq>Trump, unaware of any plan to tie him to the Kremlin, pumped life into the sputtering Russia narrative. Asked about the DNC hacks by reporters at his Trump National Doral Miami golf resort on July 27, he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.”</bq> That was, quite frankly, hilarious. He's a moronic gasbag, but he's occasionally quite funny. <bq>The Clinton campaign put out a statement on Twitter, linking to what it called the “bombshell report” on Yahoo, but did not disclose that the campaign secretly paid the researchers who pitched it to Isikoff. In essence, the campaign was boosting, through the press, a story line it had itself engineered.</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/10/bertolt-brecht-and-me/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">Bertolt Brecht (and Me)</a> <bq>A few quotations, better-known to old-timers in East Germany, are as relevant today as they ever were. (Please excuse my clumsy or partial translations.)<bq>A rich man and a poor man, there they stood, And judged each other as best they could. The poor man said, his voice at low pitch, If I were not poor you’d not be rich.</bq><bq>There are men who struggle for a day and they are good. There are men who struggle for a year and they are better. There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives: These are the indispensable ones.</bq><bq source="From “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”, a parable about Hitler’s rise and defeat, in the final lines addressed to the audience">The peoples broke him, yet Let none of us triumph too soon, The womb is fertile still from which that crept!</bq><bq>The great Carthage waged three wars. It was still powerful after the first, still habitable after the second. It was untraceable after the third.</bq></bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="http://culturico.com/2020/01/21/camus-atheism-and-the-virtues-of-inconsistency/" source="Culturico" author="Craig DeLancey">Camus’s Atheism and the Virtues of Inconsistency</a> <bq>Camus goes on to make but a single point: that if he would ask anything of the Christian community, it would be that they would speak clearly against injustice, and not with the cowardly evasions that the Church adopted in response to Nazism.</bq> Some do; the church generally doesn't, especially when the crimes are its own. <bq>When Camus gave his speech to the Dominican monks, he was in the midst of an important change in his philosophical beliefs. He came to recognize that human beings have a human nature that determines what is better or worse for them, and as a result there must be constraints on our freedom if we are to maintain a society where humans can flourish. This was a decisive break with existentialism. His novel The Plague well illustrates this new perspective. Remarkably different than The Stranger, the novel portrays a group of men working closely together in solidarity to oppose an outbreak of disease in their quarantined city. Gone is anything like the bitter loner Meursault of The Stranger, unable to care for or connect with his fellow man and alienated from any purpose other than seeking the simplest pleasures for himself.</bq> <bq>We could restate his point to say: the dangerous Marxists not only believed that Marxism was true, but they wanted to force others to believe Marxism, and they demanded we make our lives consistent with their Marxists doctrines. In short, they were fundamentalists,</bq> <bq>Camus recognized this by modeling humility in his writings and speeches. Our best methods to find truth rest on values that are essential both to liberalism and to the scientific method: allow free discourse, test our claims in the public realm, recognize our own fallibility, and respect the rights of others. We should therefore retain the benefits of liberalism, even when these are inconsistent with some of our other beliefs. The atheist would do better to plea instead of criticize: insist that the theist accept the liberal values essential to our civilization, rather than accuse the theist of moral or epistemic failure. Let him who contains no contradictions cast the first accusation.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/woke-imperialism" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Woke Imperialism</a> <bq>The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.</bq> <bq>We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.</bq> <bq>The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent,</bq> <bq>Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties. African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.</bq> <bq>Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties.</bq> <bq>They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control.</bq> <bq>Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks:<bq>You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got [missing in source]. A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/the-transmutean-hypotheses" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">The Transmutean Hypotheses</a> <bq>Leibniz is referring to Quod animalia bruta ratione utantur melius homine [ That Animals Make Better Use of Reason than Men ], the remarkable work of the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher and papal nuncio, Girolamo Rorario. Leibniz likely read the summary of it in the French deist philosopher Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire critique et philosophique of 1697.</bq> I love this. He's turning into Umberto Eco. Maybe all roads that start with arcana lead to this same attractor. <bq>Surely the greatest pseudoprofundity in the history of philosophy is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dorky claim that “if a lion could speak, we would not understand him”. This seems to miss, among other things, the far more intriguing possibility that the lion is speaking, and not only do we not know what he is saying, but we are not even in a position, in our closed linguistic reality, to recognize what he is saying as speech.</bq> <bq>It is futile to seek to extricate yourself from any hospitality a Tunisian wishes to extend to you. To do so will only prolong the ceremony. Even if you go for the nuclear option, giving a flat “no” and walking away in the other direction, you still cannot be certain that you will be free. And if you are free you are still not really free, because you will end up feeling like such an ungrateful, uncommunal, Western jerk, when you catch a glimpse of the perplexed and disappointed face of your would-be new friend retreating behind you, that you will surely feel it would have been better to humor him in whatever exchange of chronophagous generosities he had proposed to you.</bq> <bq>A Carthaginian general who orders up a dainty supper of “roasted phœnicopter tongues” after casually decapitating three prisoners is surely an obscenity to rival James Joyce’s “grey sunken cunt of the world”, even if no one could have thought beforehand to put any of the individual words involved on any index. You may learn from Salammbô several techniques for goading reluctant elephants into battle, of shields made from hippopotamus leather covered in spikes, of the crucifixion of lions; des escarboucles formées par l’urine des lynx, des glossopètres tombés de la lune, des tyanos, des diamants, des sandastrum, des béryls… des opales de la Bactriane qui empêchent les avortements, et des cornes d’Ammon que l’on place sous les lits afin d’avoir des songes.”</bq> <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://kottke.org/23/02/ted-chiang-chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web" author="Ted Chiang" source="">ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web</a> <bq>Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation.</bq> <bq>Indeed, a useful criterion for gauging a large-language model’s quality might be the willingness of a company to use the text that it generates as training material for a new model. If the output of ChatGPT isn’t good enough for GPT-4, we might take that as an indicator that it’s not good enough for us, either.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.stilldrinking.org/ai-is-not-the-problem" source="Still Drinking" author="Peter Welch">AI Is Not the Problem</a> <bq>Even if 50,000 of us just got fired, there are tech entrepreneurs pouring out of Stanford ready to borrow money from their parents and develop fresh methodologies for tanking the economy. With few bumps, the last two decades have enshrined software engineering as the career immune to the cataclysmic shocks it creates in the world at large.</bq> <bq>After six or seven years in this professional clink, what people pay software engineers for is their knowledge of what not to do. If my friends and family ask me to build them a website I send them to Squarespace, since it will be much cheaper and probably better than anything I could do for them. We get paid to grasp the ecosystem at large, stay vaguely up to date, and divert ruinous architectural traps before they show up on a quarterly report. Anyone can google the solutions to most of the particular problems we deal with; we get paid to know what to google and how to read the answer.</bq> <bq>ChapGPT is a first-year programmer googling. It has no concept of the ecosystem. It’s naive statistical patchwork, and that gets you a bad email regex, since it neither knows the correct answer nor grasps the right action; it’s just skimming the reading. It’s impressive that language modeling software can produce code that won’t destroy my laptop, but it takes more expertise to figure out its subtle errors than it does to pick through the top five google results and cobble together a decent solution. The idea that I will soon be inundated with requests to review AI-produced code rife with these subtleties is terrifying, but at the end of the day, it only makes my experience more valuable.</bq> <bq>Someone has already pointed out that the fact that ChatGPT can create a passable high school essay is not so much an achievement in artificial intelligence as it is a condemnation of the way American schools teach people to write,</bq> <bq>Actual use of ChatGPT for articles or essays or code will produce more of the content that made its output subpar, and achieve little besides accelerating the homogenization of mediocrity.</bq> <bq>There is already a subclass of unthink pieces saying it’s about time artists and writers got taken down a peg, since a lifetime of toiling in obscurity to master an arcane skill for few if any rewards strikes some people as unbearably smug.</bq> <bq>It might be possible to rationally sort out how to respond to a sudden influx of autogenerated grade school drivel and copycat artists, but last time we had an opportunity to integrate new technology in an ethical, responsible manner, we sued each other for twenty years and decided Spotify was the acceptable way to screw musicians.</bq> <bq>Today’s AI is a thousand years away from churning out the Commander Data we want or the Lore we deserve. It’s little more than a deeply flawed but interesting new toy that could be artfully woven into modern life and technology. But it never will be, because the problem, as always, is that humans are trash.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.papareo.nz/whisper-is-another-case-study-in-colonisation/" source="papa reo" author="Keoni Mahelona, Gianna Leoni, Suzanne Duncan, Miles Thompson">OpenAI's Whisper is another case study in Colonisation</a> <img src="{att_link}school_begins.jpg" href="{att_link}school_begins.jpg" align="none" caption="School Begins" scale="65%"> <bq>The pace of AI research is depressingly fast. Depressing because currently the Ultra Wealthy are the ones pioneering the research, in some cases backed by the Effective Altruism movement. It's as if our only strategy is to sit patiently and wait to have another model shared with us from Big Tech and then spend entire conferences and research careers probing and prodding models trained by our Tech Lords.</bq> <bq>While the US initially lost its appeal to extradite emails from Microsoft’s Ireland data centers, the new CLOUD Act, allow[s] federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil. If your data is stored under the services of an American corporation, the US government can ultimately get access to your data.</bq> Is that also true for Switzerland? I wonder... <bq>Ultimately, it is up to Māori to decide whether Siri should speak Māori. It is up to Hawaiians to decide whether ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi should be on Duolingo. The communities from where the data was collected should decide whether their data should be used and for what. It's called self determination. It is not up to foreign governments or corporations to make key decisions that will affect our communities.</bq> This is a muddled unenforceable and poorly defined thought. You cannot own a language. You can mourn that a corporation defiles it and that everyone thinks that their version of the language now is the language, but that's a different thing---about which there is nothing you can do, either. English suffers the same way, does it not? If we're being honest? The version that most people traffic in is far, far, far removed from the version that I use. Vocabulary has been drastically reduced, entire words are no longer allowed to be used, to say nothing of those that have not only not been forgotten, but never learned. No-one knows what to do with hyphens or commas or pretty much any punctuation. A period at the end of a sentence is considered to be hostile. Māori is just joining a large club of languages that mourn the loss of expressiveness to a hyper-corporatized, hyper-marketed world. I see the same thing in German, where I am more in the offending group---my grammar is decent, but it's not 100% correct. There are common mistakes that I make of which I'm not even aware. People in Switzerland write "safe" when they mean "save". Native English speakers in German very often drop or add an umlaut. I'm increasingly of the mind that you can achieve perfection in only one language---the language that belongs to the culture in which you were raised or the culture in which you've spent most of your time. You can't stay up-to-date in the slang and cultural references for multiple frames of cultural reference. <bq>We've created climate change by disrespecting our environment. So our final message is a simple one: we must respect data. Respect it as indigenous people have respected their environments. Respect data so that we may prevent the catastrophic harm that comes from the pursuit of technology without responsibility, accountability, and thinking that technology is inevitable. Guns, germs, and steel did not lead to the inevitable destruction of our planet and its indigenous peoples. Imperialism, capitalism, and self-interest did.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/" source="Mother Duck" author="Jordan Tigani">Big Data is Dead</a> <bq>Even when querying giant tables, you rarely end up needing to process very much data. Modern analytical databases can do column projection to read only a subset of fields, and partition pruning to read only a narrow date range. They can often go even further with segment elimination to exploit locality in the data via clustering or automatic micro partitioning. Other tricks like computing over compressed data, projection, and predicate pushdown are ways that you can do less IO at query time. And less IO turns into less computation that needs to be done, which turns into lower costs and latency.</bq> <bq>used to be that larger machines were a lot more expensive. However, in the cloud, a VM that uses a whole server only costs 8x more than one that uses an 8th of a server. Cost scales up linearly with compute power, up through some very large sizes. In fact, if you look at the benchmarks published in the original dremel paper using 3,000 parallel nodes, you can get similar performance on a single node today</bq> <bq>If you think about many data lakes that organizations collect, they fit this bill entirely: giant, messy swamps where no one really knows what they hold or whether it is safe to clean them up.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage" source="Wikipedia" author="">Content-addressable storage</a> <bq>CAS systems attempt to produce ISBN like results automatically and on any document. They do this by using a cryptographic hash function on the data of the document to produce what is sometimes known as a "key" or "fingerprint". This key is strongly tied to the exact content of the document,</bq> <bq>The downside to this approach is that any changes to the document produces a different key, which makes CAS systems unsuitable for files that are often edited. For all of these reasons, CAS systems are normally used for archives of largely static documents, and are sometimes known as "fixed content storage" (FCS).</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/chip-war-chris-miller-book-review-semiconductor-manufacturing-us-china-competition/" source="Jacobin" author="Ben Wray">The Battle to Control Microchip Supplies Will Define the Twenty-First Century</a> <bq>Chips, then, are both essential and difficult to produce. That combination makes them central to the strategic thinking of all nation-states, and most of all to that of the United States. Washington can only sustain its imperial power through dominating the global production of semiconductors and the complex supply chain upon which that production depends.</bq> <bq>The First Gulf War in 1991 then allowed the United States to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Offset Strategy in combat: semiconductor-guided missiles hit their targets in Baghdad with unerring accuracy, proving to the world Washington’s military superiority.</bq> Though it supports Miller's argument, it's bullshit. Most smart bombs were nothing of the sort. They hit wildly, killing mostly civilians. Just like they always have. Bombing raids in WWII were largely a lottery, with most bombs landing miles from their intended targets. It hasn't gotten a lot better because no-one is capable of forcing the powers that are capable of shooting missiles and bombs everywhere to do better. <bq>ASML’s machines cost tens of billions to manufacture, and sell for over $100 million each. They rely on hundreds of thousands of components from hundreds of companies across the world. In one sense, EUV lithography is a marvel of globalization. As Miller puts it: “A tool with hundreds of thousands of parts has many fathers.” However, all of those far-flung components are consolidated in just one company — an obvious vulnerability in global chip production. As Miller also writes: “The manufacturing of EUV wasn’t globalized, it was monopolized.”</bq> <bq>[...] the offensive against Huawei has little to do with cybersecurity, as the US government claims. It is really about blocking China from dominating key emerging technologies, like 5G.</bq> All that wasted potential and wasted resources for the world because the U.S. did not allow it. It's maddening. <bq>On top of the Huawei chip ban — with the United States recently tightening the screw — Washington has managed to convince ASML, a company with extensive American links, not to sell its latest EUV machines to China. A number of other Chinese tech firms have been blacklisted. In October 2022, the Biden administration imposed a new set of sweeping export controls which prevent any “US persons” — individuals or businesses — from providing direct or indirect support for Chinese chip manufacturing.</bq> A breathtaking breach of trade agreements. Rule of law, indeed. <bq>It may not even take a war to knock out TSMC. Its Hsinchu Science Park factories sit atop a fault line that produced an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale as recently as 1999. Global capitalism is just one large Taiwanese earthquake — or one major geopolitical miscalculation — away from meltdown.</bq> <bq>China’s technological capacity may have grown incredibly quickly, but the United States has already shown that it can effectively deploy sanctions to weaken Chinese tech power.</bq> These are, objectively, acts of war. Not military war, but economic war, with effect's on the target country's populace just as, if not more, detrimental. <hr> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvGktIVwlnI" author="1c7" source="YouTube">Twitter is just Elon Musk's terrible blog now (top comment)</a> <bq>what strikes me the most is the absolute inability for Musk to experience satisfaction, to be satiated. He’s a hungry ghost. He was up in the middle of the night haunted by the absolute deprivation of only 9 million impressions on his worthless superbowl tweet. He’s so taken in by the Skinner box of twitter that he bought it and is making the box-maintainers specifically give him higher numbers. But the whole point is that no matter what number the machine gives him he will feel dissatisfied with it because that feeling is precisely what makes the machine work. This is the endgame of whale-baiting, right? You make software that’s hostile to brains in the hopes a few rich people get poisoned by it and become willing to exchange money for higher numbers. In twitter’s case, they got eaten by the whale. They get slack notifications at 2am if the whale isn’t getting enough numbers. In a way, the app created its owner. That’s a little fucked up to me, more so than the standard AI domination tropes, that a system without agency ends up in control.</bq> <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://tyrrrz.me/blog/reverse-engineering-youtube-revisited" source="tyrrrz.me" author="">Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited</a> <bq>What makes this behavior more useful is that it also applies to requests made with the Range HTTP header, which allows you to retrieve only a portion of the overall content. In other words, if you try fetching a byte range that is smaller than 10 MB, YouTube will serve the corresponding data at full speed, even if the stream itself is rate-limited.</bq> <bq>Ever since <c>/get_video_info</c> was removed, YouTube has been providing fewer muxed streams for most videos, usually limiting them to low-end options such as 144p and 360p. That means if you want to retrieve content as close to the original quality as possible, you will definitely have to rely on adaptive streams and mux them yourself. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to do using FFmpeg, which is an open-source tool for processing multimedia files.</bq> <bq>Even though many things have changed, downloading videos from YouTube is still possible and, in some ways, easier than before. Instead of <c>/get_video_info</c>, you can now retrieve metadata and stream manifests using the <c>/youtubei/v1/player</c> endpoint, which is part of YouTube's new internal API. The process of identifying and resolving streams is mostly the same as before, and workarounds such as rate bypassing are still relevant. However, signature deciphering has become less of a concern, because the vast majority of videos are now playable without it.</bq>