<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/capitalist-road-to-serfdom-surveillance-wage-labor/" source="Jacobin" author="Luke Savage">The Capitalist Road to Serfdom</a> <bq>The inevitable rejoinder to all of this is that employment is ultimately voluntary: an Amazon employee who dislikes stringent work quotas or a supermarket cashier who refuses to perform their company’s spirit dance can always find gainful employment somewhere else. <b>When labor regulation has been stripped to the bone, however, and when an increasingly small number of ever-expanding corporate conglomerates dominate the labor market, “somewhere else” often looks remarkably familiar.</b></bq> <bq>[...] some firms are now genuinely global in scope and effectively run as private dictatorships whose leaders travel on superyachts and inhabit postmodern Xanadus while worker-citizens are forced to swear their allegiance and pee in bottles. <b>Big Brother is indeed watching you — and he’s doing so from an air-conditioned office right before heading off to the company picnic.</b></bq> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/23/patrick-lawrence-russia-takes-another-step-back-from-the-west/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Russia Takes Another Step Back From the West</a> <bq>New START is the last extant nuclear arms control accord, as Western media have pointed out this week. This is so because <b>Washington has one after the other “dismantled” all the others but one–which Western media did not point out.</b></bq> <bq>I have to say, of all the NATO sec-gens I have had to watch over the years, this guy goes home with the cake. <b>He’s Washington’s jukebox: American officials put in a quarter and Jens sings the selected song.</b></bq> <bq>This is a man no more eager to suspend the Russian Federation’s participation in an active arms treaty than he was to send his military into a neighboring nation. This is a man a man profoundly disappointed with the direction of geopolitical events but who feels compelled to spell matters out as they are and act upon them:<bq><b>The United States and NATO are openly saying that their goal is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Having made this collective statement, NATO has actually claimed to be a participant in the Treaty on Strategic Arms…. In early February the North Atlantic alliance made a statement with the actual demand… of inspections to our nuclear defense facilities. I don’t even know what to call this. It is a kind of theater of the absurd…. In the current conditions of confrontation, it simply sounds insane.</b></bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/23/scott-ritter-arms-control-or-ukraine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">Arms Control or Ukraine?</a> <bq>“The United States and NATO are directly saying that their goal is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” Putin said. <b>“Are they going to inspect our defense facilities, including the newest ones, as if nothing had happened? Do they really think we’re easily going to let them in there just like that?”</b></bq> <bq>[...] with the war in Ukraine being linked to a U.S. strategy of achieving the strategic defeat of Russia, <b>the U.S. is seeking to use New START to gain access to these very systems, all the while denying Russia its reciprocal rights of inspection under the treaty.</b> As Putin aptly noted, such an arrangement “really sounds absurd.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/21/patrick-lawrence-totalized-censorship/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Totalized Censorship</a> <bq><b>Everyone in mainstream journalism knows where the fence posts are, as I like to put it, and if you spend too much time beyond them you won’t work in mainstream journalism very long.</b> I wonder if Seymour Hersh, certainly proven to rank among the great journalists of our time, may have a thought about this.</bq> <bq>This question of internalized censorship, commonly known as self-censorship, has long fascinated me. I have watched many times as journalists, surrendering themselves for the sake of their professional careers, train themselves to hear the silent language that tells them what to say and what to leave unsaid. And then, over time, <b>you find them giving vigorous voice to thoughts and beliefs imposed upon them, absolutely convinced these are their own thoughts and beliefs and they have come by them independently.</b></bq> <bq>So did Erich Fromm in <i>Escape from Freedom</i>, which appeared in 1941 and could hardly be more pertinent to our time: “We are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. <b>We neglect the role of anonymous authorities like public opinion and ‘common sense,’ which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/20/while-were-laughing-about-a-balloon-biden-paves-a-path-to-war/" source="CounterPunch" author="Melissa Garriga">While We’re Laughing About a Balloon; Biden Paves a Path to War</a> <bq>Our government’s reckless rhetoric towards Beijing shows that <b>Washington will not hesitate to use military force against China if they can manufacture enough consent to make it seem necessary</b>–even though such an action would cause catastrophic consequences for both nations’ economies as well as international stability in the Asia Pacific region.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>on November 29, 2022, the USS Chancellorsville sailed into the South China Sea without permission of the Chinese government.</b> The move was seen as a provocation by many experts, who believe that it may bring about a military conflict between China and the United States. Notably <b>its last participation in a war was when the United States illegally invaded Iraq</b> after lying and misleading the public.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/19/patrick-lawrence-munich-as-propaganda-fest/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Munich as Propaganda Fest</a> <bq>[...] <b>for the record, no, “we” have not put concrete proposals on the table. We have ignored Moscow’s and have taken concrete proposals off the table</b>—most recently those Naftali Bennett helped negotiate between the two sides, and a year ago next month those negotiated in Istanbul.</bq> <bq>The brief Blinken–Wang Yi encounter was bound to be another calamity, and so it proved. Blinken warned Wang in stiff terms that China must never again send a surveillance balloon over American territory and, for good measure, must not materially aid the Russian war effort. <b>This is not diplomacy. It is showmanship. Blinken wasn’t even talking to Wang: He was playing to the China hawks back home.</b> Wang, no surprise, appears not to have taken Blinken the slightest seriously. He replied in so many words that he had no patience with Washington’s “hysterical” response to a stray weather balloon and advised that <b>the Americans ought to stop posturing in their relations with China to satisfy domestic constituencies.</b> Good advice, I would say.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}reagan-approved-plan-to-sabotage-soviets.jpg" href="{att_link}reagan-approved-plan-to-sabotage-soviets.jpg" align="none" caption="Reagan approved plan to sabotage Soviets in 1982" scale="50%"> <bq><b>In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union</b> through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later <b>triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline</b>, [...] Reed writes that the pipeline explosion was just one example of "cold-eyed economic warfare" against the Soviet Union that the CIA carried out under Director William J. Casey during the final years of the Cold War.</bq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidNorthWSWS/status/1631224227213762562" author="David North" source="Twitter">Rant about Chris Hedges's fascism</a>, also conveniently republished at <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/03/okvs-m03.html" author="David North" source="WSWS">Chris Hedges’ disoriented concept of “political maturity”</a> This whole thread seems completely unhinged and divorced from reality. It's a mystery to me how anyone can read or listen to Chris Hedges and come away thinking he's a fascist or appeaser. David North is the editor-in-chief of the WSWS, which makes me despair for his entire organization. He's an absolute psycho and make the whole newspaper look terrible. David North prefers to call anyone who's not a socialist a Nazi rather than to actually go and talk with them and maybe help prevent them from becoming Nazis. Chris Hedges goes amongst them and tries to convert them with the power of his ideas and his convictions. The denigrating screeches of David North's ilk drives people away from good ideas. <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/20/274441/" source="CounterPunch" author="Richard Heinberg">A Realistic ‘Energy Transition’ is to Get Better at Using Less of It</a> <bq><b>It certainly would be preferable if we could partially transition to forms of renewable energy that would enable us to maintain some of the best of what we’ve accomplished</b> over the past few energy-intensive decades—including scientific knowledge and creative works produced in a growing host of media, from sound recording to motion pictures to digital art.</bq> Fair, but c'mon medicine has to be on that list. Our art is wonderful, but so is our science. <bq>I asked Fridley <b>how the consumer electronics industry can proceed without fossil fuels. I also asked him how our food system can adapt, given the vital importance of nitrogen fertilizers currently made with natural gas.</b> Fridley did the research and math and often came up with sobering answers. We concluded that nearly all the technical problems entailed in making these transitions can be solved at the laboratory scale.</bq> <bq>In my personal view, energy transition planning is now based far too much on abstract computer-based models that fail to include all the relevant factors. It’s relatively easy to project renewable energy growth trends using a spreadsheet; but, beyond the easy phases that Janet and I have undertaken, <b>the actual implementation will imply vast changes in materials supply chains and manufacturing processes—shifts that will be disruptive in the best case, and nearly impossible in the worst.</b></bq> <bq>An ideal project would be to retrofit a medium-sized industrial city so it runs not just its electrical power system on renewables but also its transport food systems, with sunlight and wind also supplying heat for its homes. The concrete for its roads and buildings would be made using renewable electricity, as would the glass for its windows. The fact that there are no such pilot projects currently in operation is a clue that there are systemic roadblocks relating to large-scale interlocking technological systems that will make it hard and costly to wean from fossil fuels. <b>In some respects, the energy transition is analogous to redesigning and rebuilding an airplane while it’s in flight.</b></bq> <bq>[...] people working toward an energy transition, but to insist that we develop a realistic plan for energy descent, rather than insisting on foolish dreams of eternal consumer abundance by means other than fossil fuels. Currently, <b>politically rooted insistence on continued economic growth is discouraging truth-telling and serious planning for how to live well with less.</b></bq> <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGSqglrPadw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/DGSqglrPadw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Alain Biet" caption="Animated experimental short film 'Grands Canons'"> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/the-esoteric-doctrine" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">The Esoteric Doctrine</a> <bq>[...] the truth is I never really know what I actually think, and what I am just saying because I am <b>inflated like a windsock by the invisible breezes of the Zeitgeist</b> and the interminable chatter of “the They”.</bq> <bq>I have said here before that I am generally not a fan of writing about writing. The great bulk of writing, I think, should be about quasars, or nudibranchs, or Byzantine heresies, and anyone who turns their focus to writing itself should already have <b>established an ability to engage with the world itself in all its richness, and in all its regal indifference to being written about.</b> Generally, when I stumble on a new writer who is preoccupied with the demimonde of other writers, with writing as a métier, a lifestyle, a praxis, etc., I am confident in judging right away that this person has almost certainly never tried their hand at writing about quasars.</bq> <bq>The esoteric truth is that I would really, truly like someday to master “the art of silence” (Isaak Babel).</bq> <bq><b>I sometimes imagine that I just have to find a way to “say my piece”, and it is the feeling that I have not yet managed to do so that always keeps me coming back for more, and sustaining the appearance that I enjoy all this <i>flatus vocis</i>.</b> Ordinarily I just keep modulating the <i>flatus</i> into the prettiest melody I can make, and keep hoping my readers will play along with the pretense that this gas-bag is in its nature a finely crafted musical instrument — <b>“It’s supposed to sound that way”, I imagine a veteran reader saying, as I squeak and wheeze, to a new one who hasn’t quite developed a taste for it yet.</b></bq> <bq>It will be difficult for us human beings, at a certain level of recursive complexity, even to envision what such artifacts will look like. But <b>our own imaginative limitations are of no concern for the AI that will be churning out all this garbage.</b></bq> <bq>One possible move, having recognized this dire situation, is to <b>go with the fractal flow, and to just keep adding to the junk heap of writing, whose human part is rapidly vanishing even as I write</b>: writing about writing about writing-themed roller skates, writing about writing about vacuum-cleaner-themed writing about writing-themed limited-edition Super Bowl-commemorative Diet Dr. Pepper cans, and so on. Whether we do this or not, <b>this is what the machines are going to do. They are going to do this “for” us, but this for-ness is going to be stretched beyond all plausibility, perhaps even outliving humanity itself.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/this-is-the-text-of-a-talk-i-gave" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">This is the text of a talk I gave in Washington, D.C. on Sunday at the Rage Against The War Machine rally.</a> <bq>The political class, the media, the entertainment industry, the financiers and even religious institutions bay like wolves for the blood of Muslims or Russians or Chinese, or whoever the idol has demonized as unworthy of life. <b>There were no rational objectives in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine. Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification.</b> Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman earn billions of dollars in profits. The vast expenditures demanded by the Pentagon are sacrosanct. <b>The cabal of warmongering pundits, diplomats and technocrats, who smugly dodge responsibility for the array of military disasters they orchestrate, are protean, shifting adroitly with the political tides, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists.</b></bq> <bq>It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories of global dominance, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many they condemn to death. <b>They are immovable props, parasites vomited up in the dying days of all empires, ready to sell us the next virtuous war against whoever they have decided is the new Hitler. The map changes. The game is the same.</b></bq> <bq>Some here today might like to think of themselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But <b>what we are demanding on the political spectrum is, in fact, conservative: the restoration of the rule of law.</b> It is simple and basic.</bq> <bq>Our communities and cities are desolate. War, financial speculation, constant surveillance and militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation are the only real concerns of the state. Even habeas corpus no longer exists. <b>We, as citizens, are commodities to corporate systems of power, used and discarded. And the endless wars we fight overseas have spawned the wars we fight at home</b> [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/the-wests-betrayal-of-freedom" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">The West's Betrayal of Freedom</a> <bq>We loved the hell out of rights and freedoms when America had a superpower adversary infamous for depriving them, and nearly as much when we could highlight Islamic fundamentalism’s hatred of the “decadent” freedom-loving West during the War on Terror. <b>“They hate us for our freedoms ” sounded a lot better than “They hate us because we support Israel and steal oil.”</b></bq> <bq>Most of all, <b>freedom was a joyous propaganda theme back when upper-class America still had an interest in getting the struggling small-town voter to identify with massive corporations eager to throw off the yoke of the EPA and the SEC.</b> Ronald Reagan was the first politician to master selling the same economic “liberty” to poor workers and the giant manufacturers who’d soon abandon them. <b>Freedom wasn’t a dangerous concept, in other words, so long as the very wealthy still felt a deficit of it.</b></bq> <bq>So a new P.R. campaign was born, <b>selling a generation of upper-class kids on the idea of freedom as a stalking-horse for race hatred, ignorance</b>, piles, and every other bad thing a person of means can imagine:</bq> <bq>It’s no accident that the Enlightenment thinkers who brought us freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion have recently undergone makeovers in elite undertakings like the 1619 Project, which tell us with straight faces that the Charters of Freedom were basically a ruse to keep King George from freeing the slaves. <b>Freedom in these tales is cast not just as a theft-sanctifying invention of self-interested white guys, but a form of intellectual libertinism that’s only safe in the modern world when doled out by “responsible” people</b>, college-trained in the art of harm avoidance.</bq> <bq>I’ve lived in places where freedoms are absent, met people who would crawl over glass to be able to work a hot-dog stand in peace, and <b>find myself endlessly astonished by Americans (or Canadians, or Brits for that matter) who are anxious to sign up as accomplices in a general rights recall.</b></bq> <bq><b>I know why they do it. The educated ones see themselves as the admins in a future society of conditional liberties, so they don’t have a problem building machines that define people unlike themselves as wreckers and “disinformationists.”</b> I’m old enough to remember what Soviets called people like this: stukachi , i.e. “knockers,” or snitches.</bq> <bq>In the digital age, instead of snooping in subways or rifling through underwear drawers, <b>the Western snitches read social media posts, and sift them into piles: safe, unsafe, blacklist-worthy.</b></bq> <bq>It’s all part of what’s become an urgent propaganda mission, <b>convincing ordinary people to fear their own freedoms, and volunteer for “emergency” suspensions of rights.</b> Too much citizen freedom really is a problem for people like Justin Trudeau, who rightly fear a throw-the-bums-out campaign. But in democracy, bums sometimes need throwing out. And we need the freedom to say so.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/01/david-graeber-pirate-enlightenment" source="New Stateman" author="Justin E.H. Smith">The poetic history of David Graeber</a> <bq><b>When European authors begin attributing novel patterns of cultural expression to the peoples they encounter, even if they are contemptuous of what they see, it is reasonable to suppose that they are seeing something worthy of our attention.</b> This is so even when the author may be suspected of inventing fictional personages and passing them off as real, as some scholars have concluded the Baron de Lahontan did in his Dialogues with the Savage Adario (1703). This “savage” may have been the Wendat chief Kondiaronk, or may only have been loosely inspired by him. But either way, Graeber thinks, Lahontan’s work presents a model of indigenous North American self-governance, and <b>exemplifies the European Enlightenment’s debt to non-European peoples for the characteristically modern notion that other worlds are possible.</b></bq> <bq><b>Aboard ship it was only during battle that a pirate captain had the standing to give orders, while other actions could only be undertaken by universal consent.</b> In part this spirit of egalitarianism was a spontaneous adaptation to the extreme circumstances of life on the seas as international pariahs, and in part it may have resulted from contact with indigenous societies.</bq> <bq>But as with so much else in Graeber’s story, a “perhaps” is as much as we are going to get. In his view, <b>historical anthropology, and history in general, can only benefit from attention to all the possibilia that had previously been neglected</b>, even when we have good reason to think that no new information will ever arrive to confirm or disconfirm conjectures about what might have occurred.</bq> <h><span id="fun">Fun</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSqpg7gVV7I" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/wSqpg7gVV7I" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Der grösste SUV der Welt" caption="Renato Kaiser">