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Links and Notes for April 14th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h>Economy & Finance</h> What I find interesting is that you have a whole class of investors who were making 10% returns (or more) while being able to borrow money at about 0%. As soon as the interest rates rise to 4%, none of them can survive anymore. Why? Is 6% returns not worth it anymore? <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-13/twitter-gets-into-the-stock-business" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Twitter Gets Into the Stock Business</a> <bq>Hill said “you want it to be one way, but it’s the other way .”</bq> I just cited that part because Levine quoted The Wire. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwuckTkE7T4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/PwuckTkE7T4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="The Wire: But it's the other way"> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-12/spac-pipes-sometimes-leak" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">SPAC PIPEs Sometimes Leak</a> <bq>Their bill for February came to $13.5 million for tasks ranging from recovering billions of assets to cooperating with law enforcement, as well as considering “long-term options” for the exchange.</bq> That's almost 100 people at 600$ per hour for thirty 8-hour days. I would ask for an itemized invoice. <hr> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/why-everyone-needs-to-learn-some-economics" source="Aeon" author="Ha-Joon Chang">The empty basket</a> <bq>In terms of power politics beyond the profession, the neoclassical school’s inherent reticence to question the distribution of income, wealth and power underlying any existing socioeconomic order has made it more palatable to the ruling elite.</bq> <bq>[...] economics has become the language of power. You cannot change the world without understanding it. In fact, I think that, in a capitalist economy, democracy cannot function effectively without all citizens understanding at least some economics. These days, with the dominance of market-oriented economics, even decisions about non-economic issues (such as health, education, literature or the arts) are dominated by economic logic.</bq> <bq>[...] different economic theories assume different qualities to be at the essence of human nature, so the prevailing economic theory forms cultural norms about what people see as ‘natural’ and ‘human nature’. The dominance in the last few decades of neoclassical economics, which assumes that human beings are selfish, has normalised self-seeking behaviour. People who act in an altruistic way are derided as ‘suckers’ or are suspected of having some (selfish) ulterior motives.</bq> <bq>If we are to reform the economy for the benefit of the majority, make our democracy more effective, and make the world a better place to live for us and for the coming generations, we must ensure some basic economic literacy.</bq> <bq>Economics is far more accessible than many economists would have you believe. In my book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (2010), I invited the wrath of some of my professional colleagues by declaring that 95 per cent of economics is common sense – made to look difficult with the use of jargon, mathematics and statistics – while even the remaining 5 per cent can be understood in its essence (if not in full technical details), if explained well.</bq> <bq>Like many other things in life – learning to ride a bicycle, learning a new language, or learning to use your new tablet computer – being an active economic citizen gets easier over time, once you overcome the initial difficulties and keep practising it.</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012348495" source="Antiwar.com" author="Ted Snider">Macron Goes to China: Whose Side Is He On?</a> <bq>In an interview on Macron’s plane while returning from China, the French president said that "Europe must reduce its dependency on the United States." He warned that Europe must not become "just America’s followers." Specifically, Macron insisted that it is not in Europe’s "interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan." More foundationally, and more seriously, Macron said that Europe must achieve "strategic autonomy" and become a "third superpower."</bq> Still and all, fuck Macron and his banker friends. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/12/saudis-arent-afraid-of-us-anymore/" source="Scheer Post" author="MK Bhadrakumar">Saudis Aren't Afraid of US Anymore</a> <bq>the Biden administration’s provocative moves to release oil regularly from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve in attempts to micromanage the oil prices and keep them abnormally low in the interests of the American consumer as well as to keep the inflationary pressures under check turned out to be an affront to the oil-producing countries whose economies critically depend on income from oil exports.</bq> <bq>Although Washington will downplay it, in March, Brent oil prices fell to $70 per barrel for the first time since 2021 amid the bankruptcy of several banks in the U.S. and the near-death experience of Credit Suisse, one of the largest banks in Switzerland. The events sparked concern about the stability of the Western banking system and fear of a recession that would affect oil demand.</bq> <bq>[...] the large-scale protests in France against pension reform or the widespread strikes in Britain for higher wages show that there are deep structural problems in these economies, and the governments seem helpless in tackling them.</bq> <bq>Make no mistake, this is another signal regarding a new era where the Saudis are not afraid of the U.S. anymore, as the OPEC “leverage” is on Riyadh’s side. The Saudis are only doing what they need to do, and the White House has no say in the matter. Clearly, a recasting of the regional and global dynamics that has been set in motion lately is gathering momentum. The future of the petrodollar seems increasingly uncertain.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/09/human-destiny-in-ukraine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Eve Ottenberg">Human Destiny in Ukraine</a> <bq>To scale the pinnacles of corporate, political or military power in the United States requires certain rigid deficiencies of character, specifically the absence of compassion, decency and humanity. In their personal lives, powerful individuals may possess these qualities, but as an elite class, they lack them utterly.</bq> <bq>For the Russians, this war is existential. Russian leaders believe, probably correctly, that this is a fight for their survival. Ukrainian leaders, ditto – except there’s no “probably” about it; it’s definitely. And it is pointless to attempt to judge those leaders under such circumstances. But for American leadership, this is a proxy war. It is not existential. It is a proxy war of choice. That’s what makes the U.S. role, instigating and prolonging it, so horrible.</bq> <bq>The job description demanded sacrificing the supposedly irrelevant virtues of compassion, decency and humanity and so they, along with presidents Clinton, Obama, Trump and Bush are just merely deficient. When they leave office, some will repent of the blood they shed. Others won’t. Maybe that means something for them personally. It doesn’t matter. Their actions speak for themselves. The dead stay dead.</bq> <bq>I bet candidate Obama in 2008 never imagined that in a few years he would be saying, “It turns out I’m really good at killing people.” That’s what our American governance has shriveled into, a grave not only for its victims across the globe but for those who cause the slaughter. Because someone who’s good at killing people – well, there’s nothing else to say about such a person. That’s all that matters.</bq> <bq>American bullying and relentless aggression has created problems for itself, namely the tremendous Russia/China alliance and the eagerness and support that union receives from the Global South. Washington elites would like nothing better than to splinter that alliance, and thus perhaps succeed at destroying first Russia then China, separately. But Beijing and Moscow have caught on. So has the Global South, whose members pile as fast as they can into Russian and Chinese-led groups like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, which has now outstripped the G-7 in how much wealth – and certainly population – it represents.</bq> <bq>[...] the U.S. may attempt to compensate for its relative economic decline through its use of military force…More precisely, the danger to all countries is that the United States has not lost military supremacy.”</bq> <bq>That is the road human destiny travels in Ukraine. Either the U.S. abandons its insane quest for global hegemony and accepts diplomacy and compromise, or it will proceed on its lethal course, ready and perhaps willing to risk nuclear annihilation of earth’s people, in which case Washington will have enabled the extirpation of humanity, something long, long feared by those who view that city as a monstrous citadel of fascism, whose ultimate aim is utterly, profoundly, anti-human.</bq> <hr> <a href="http://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2023/04/girls-dont-kill-dissecting-gender-of.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">Girls Don't Kill: Dissecting the Gender of Violence After Nashville</a> <bq>Thoughts of vengeance against my tormentors are not alien to me. In fact, my more committed readers will probably recognize them as a major hallmark of my literary modus operandi. But my target has never been people, not even the ones who personally savaged my childhood. My target has always been the power systems that grant petty adults with the authority to crush kids just for being weird.</bq> <bq>With the slave trade and the conquest of the New World, rape became a way of life but once there was no more land left to conquer and machines began to replace men on the battlefield, masculinity essentially became obsolete. Men quickly found themselves penned up in cages known as cubicles and domesticated by the laws of the civilization they had killed so many to build.</bq> <bq>One that encourages brotherhood and service to community over feckless materialist competition and brain-dead national chauvinism. One that venerates the kind of strength through vulnerability exhibited by warrior poets like Malcolm X and Yukio Mishima rather than the callous disdain for empathy encouraged by chickenhawks like John Wayne and Dick Cheney.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/08/us-media-cheer-as-france-forces-old-people-to-work/" source="Scheer Post" author="Conor Smyth">US Media Cheer as France Forces Old People to Work</a> <bq>US media ( Extra! , 3–4/96 ) have taken to covering the uprising against pension “reform” in the same way the narrator of a nature documentary might describe the wilderness:<bq>Now, we come to a Frenchman in his natural habitat. His behavior may give the impression of idleness, but don’t let that fool you. If prodded enough with the prospect of labor, he will not hesitate before lighting the local pastry shop ablaze.</bq></bq> I mean, it's dickish because the guy probably means it literally, but it's also kind of objectively funny. Almost Twainian. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/08/savage-capitalism-from-climate-change-to-bank-failures-to-war/" source="Scheer Post" author="David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky">Savage Capitalism: From Climate Change to Bank Failures to War</a> <bq>UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “The rate of temperature rise in the last half-century is the highest in 2,000 years. Concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least 2 million years. The climate time bomb is ticking.” At COP 27 he said, “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator. It is the defining issue of our age. It is the central challenge of our century.”</bq> We have completely lost the ability to solve problems. The solipsist politics of the now prevent it. <bq>We are now, as he says, at a point where we’ll decide whether the human experiment on Earth will continue in any recognizable form. The report was stark and clear. We’re reaching a point where irreversible processes will be set into motion. It doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to die tomorrow, but we’ll pass tipping points where nothing more can be done, where it’s just decline to disaster.</bq> <bq>It’s often said, and correctly, that the rich countries have created the disaster and the poor countries are its victims, but it’s actually a little more nuanced than that. It’s the rich in the rich countries who have created the disaster and everyone else, including the poor in the rich countries, face the problems.</bq> <bq>The Inflation Reduction Act was basically a climate act that Biden managed to get through, though Congress sharply whittled it down. Not a single Republican voted for it. Not one. No Republican will vote for anything that harms the profits of the rich and the corporate sector, which they abjectly serve.</bq> And the Democrats count on those Republican votes to make sure that the things they pretend to support don't actually pass, accidentally angering their donors---who are the same donors as the Republicans have. <bq>Well, that’s one of the two political parties. Not a sign of deviation among them from: let’s race to destruction in order to ensure that our prime constituency is as rich and powerful as possible.</bq> <bq>It brings to the fore the ultimate insanity of our institutional structure. If you want to stop destroying the planet and human life on Earth, you have to bribe the rich and powerful, so maybe they’ll come along. If we offer them enough candy, maybe they’ll stop killing people. That’s savage capitalism. If you want to get anything done, you have to bribe those who own the place.</bq> <bq>It became very clear at the Glasgow COP conference. John Kerry, the U.S. climate representative, was euphoric. He basically said we’ve won. We now have the corporations on our side. How can we lose? Well, there was a small footnote pointed out by political economist Adam Tooze. He agreed that, yes, they’d said that but with two conditions. One, we’ll join you as long as it’s profitable. Two, there has to be an international guarantee that, if we suffer any loss, the taxpayer covers it. That’s what’s called free enterprise. With such an institutional structure, it’s going to be hard to get out of this.</bq> <bq>Congress did pass legislation, TARP, with two components. First, it bailed out the gangsters who had caused the crisis through subprime mortgages, loans they knew would never be paid back. Second, it did something for the people who had lost their homes, been kicked out on the street with foreclosures. Guess which half of the legislation the Obama administration implemented?</bq> <bq>[...] the United States is actually getting a bargain out of this. With a small fraction of its colossal military budget, it’s severely degrading its major military opponent, Russia, which doesn’t have much of an economy but does have a huge military. You can ask whether that’s why they’re doing it, but that’s a fact.</bq> <bq>Putin handed Washington its greatest wish on a silver platter. He said: Okay, Europe. Go be a satellite of the United States, which means that you will move towards deindustrialization.</bq> <bq>[...] the Biden administration has called for a commercial war to prevent Chinese development for a generation. We can’t compete with them, so let’s prevent them from getting advanced technology. The supply chains in the world are so intricate that almost everything — patents, technology, whatever — involves some U.S. input. The Biden administration says that nobody can use any of this in commercial relations with China.</bq> <bq>You have leading figures from Washington visiting Kyiv. Do you remember anybody visiting the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, when the United States was pounding it [...]</bq> I've often thought this as well. It's not dangerous. It doesn't even need a green zone. It's not occupied territory in the same sense as Baghdad was. <bq>Read Article Six, which says that treaties entered into by the United States are the supreme law of the land every elected official is bound to observe. The major post-World War II treaty was that UN Charter, which bans the threat or use of force. In other words, every single U.S. president has violated the Constitution, which we’re supposed to worship as given to us by God.</bq> They're Of course more concerned with the article protecting right to arms rather than free speech, press, or a requirement to keep our word. <bq>[...] recent study of young people, of what’s called Generation Z, and where they get their news found that almost nobody reads the newspapers anymore. Almost nobody watches television. Very few people even look at Facebook. They’re getting it from TikTok, Instagram. What kind of a community is going to try to understand this world from watching people having fun on TikTok?</bq> <bq>The second step is to get rid of the core problem. Let’s go back to the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Working people took it for granted that the wage contract was a totally illegitimate assault on their basic rights, turning you into what were openly called “wage slaves.” Why should we follow the orders of a master for all of our waking lives? It was considered an abomination.</bq> <bq>People regard it as their highest goal in life to be subjected to the orders of a master for most of their waking lives. And that’s really effective propaganda, but it can change, too. There already are proposals for worker participation in management that are anything but utopian. They exist in Germany and other places and that could become: Why don’t we take the enterprise over for ourselves? Why should we follow the orders of some banker in New York when we can run this place better? I don’t think that’s all that far away.</bq> Christ, that's far more hopeful than I am capable of being, but ... hell yeah! The old man is an inspiration. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/08/macron-fails-to-persuade-so-opts-for-coercion/" source="Scheer Post" author="Benoît Bréville">Macron Fails to Persuade, So Opts for Coercion</a> <bq>Is it still possible to make a government back down, to defeat a decision taken by those in power? Until quite recently, the answer in France was not in doubt. When confronted with sustained, determined, and organized social movements that brought huge crowds onto the streets, the government would sometimes retreat. And thereby demonstrate that people could make their voices heard outside elections, which should not be the sum total of democratic life.</bq> <bq>Now, the Thatcherite model prevails: Those in power are not for turning—even with rising piles of uncollected rubbish, empty petrol stations, canceled trains, closed classrooms, and blocked roads. They reconcile themselves to disrupted underground services and weekly or even daily demonstrations. And if the situation becomes untenable, they requisition and repress. This harshness has even become an attribute of power in France, with “resisting the street” apparently a mark of statesmanship or political courage.</bq> <bq>In the end, his pension reform, which will affect the lives of the French people for several decades, was only voted through by senators, who are not directly elected and who took care to protect their own special entitlements at the same time as abolishing those of others. The two additional years of work, imposed without the National Assembly’s approval, thus rest solely on the legitimacy of an institution dominated by a party (Les Républicains) which got less than 5 percent of the vote in the last presidential election, and in which two of the main parties, the Rassemblement National (RN) and La France Insoumise (LFI), have no representation.</bq> <bq>In the second round, [Macron's] victory came largely from receiving votes by default, as he himself acknowledged on election night (April 24, 2022):<bq>I know that many of our compatriots voted for me not to support the ideas I represent, but to block the far right.… I’m aware that this vote places obligations on me for the years ahead. I’m the custodian of their sense of duty, their attachment to the Republic and their respect for the differences that have been expressed in recent weeks.</bq>A commitment that was forgotten as soon as it was made.</bq> <bq>This arrogance can only fuel disillusionment with democracy and strengthen the feeling that the political game is inaccessible to most, playing into the hands of the RN. The pension reform concentrates “most of the mechanisms now identified by political science as feeding social resentment, which itself feeds the populist parties of the radical right,”</bq> <bq>A century later, France’s National Assembly has only five people from the working class among its 577 deputies, less than 1 percent of the elected members, though this social group represents 16 percent of the population. Over 60 percent of the presidential majority (Renaissance, MoDem, Horizons) consists of senior managers and highly qualified professionals and only 2 percent of salaried workers; it includes no one from a working-class background.</bq> <bq>The majority of these MPs—lawyers, consultants, bankers, company directors, doctors, entrepreneurs—have only a remote knowledge of reality in France. Secure in the knowledge that their old age will be funded through supplementary pensions and plentiful savings, they have been incapable of seeing the anger that pension reform would provoke in a population already suffering the effects of inflation and health, geopolitical, energy, and climate crises.</bq> <bq>The contradiction was bound to erupt between an economic regime that flourishes by selling glitzy mobile phone covers, the right to pollute, or melted glacier water at €11 a bottle and, on the other side, a population that is increasingly sickened by politics’ being reduced to a choice between different ways of perpetuating a failed model.</bq> <bq>“Our members are asking us questions,” said Cyril Chabanier, president of the French Confederation of Christian Workers. “Do we have to resort to violence to be heard? We get three times as many people on the street as the Yellow Vests, and we’re not heard. Do we have to start smashing things up to get what we want?”</bq> We have chosen rulers who only understand the language of violence. Let our getting rid of them be the last violent act. <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/17/the-totalitarian-dystopia-is-already-here-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">The Totalitarian Dystopia Is Already Here</a> <bq>People worry about technocratic escalations like increasing surveillance, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies etc, and rightly so; those measures do give the powerful a greater degree of power over the populace. But many incorrectly imagine that a future technocratic dystopia created by those measures would look a lot different from the dystopia we’re in right now, and it simply would not. Those measures would be used to help keep this current system locked in place, not to create a new one.</bq> <bq>[...] what could the rulers of western society possibly extract from us that they’re not already getting? There’s no meaningful political opposition, no antiwar movement, no anti-capitalist movement, very little critical thought — they’ve got total control. Everything we do in this dystopia is designed to funnel profit into the coffers of the oligarchs and power into the hands of the imperialists, and all efforts to resist and change these funneling systems have been successfully quashed by mass-scale psychological manipulation.</bq> <bq>The ability to detect and suppress an emerging revolution is vastly inferior to the ability to use psychological conditioning to prevent people from even thinking about revolting in the first place. That’s what real power looks like. That’s total control.</bq> This is an excellent essay, a cri de guerre. I've been arguing this for a long time, that the prime facts about the American Empire go largely unnoticed: that is is an empire, and that its greatest weapon is a propaganda machine nonpareil. And this machine largely produces distractions. People are consistently and expertly conditioned to expend all of their free energy fighting silly crusades that have nothing to do with their own lives. They are trapped in a hamster wheel of work and commuting that consumes most of their lives---and the few minutes they have left over are spent arguing online whether people should be boycotting Budweiser beer or start drinking it as a sign of political support. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYYRBnwj1I8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/UYYRBnwj1I8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Aaron Maté & Katie Halper (Useful Idiots)" caption="Full episode: Congressman Ro Khanna vs Useful Idiots"> <bq>Ro: The point is that he's unjustified in invading [...] you can't just invade ...] Aaron: Unjustified is different than unprovoked. Ro: Well, it's illegal. It's unjust... I guess it's illegal, it's unjustified, and it's a violation of international law and I do think the principal motive of it was a greater Russia. Is there some foreign policy that we could have had that would have prevented him from taking an illegal action to have a glorified Russia? That'll be debated by historians [how convenient] but the point is that he is morally wrong to have done what he did. Aaron: [...] I see a contradiction here. We're supposed to infer the worst from Putin's statements, but take the most benign explanation possible from U.S. statements [many of which he'd listed just before] Ro: Well, the U.S. hasn't invaded another sovereign nation. Aaron: [leans back, hiding his shock relatively well]</bq> The discussion continues, with Aaron acknowledging that the U.S. has not invaded Ukraine (kudos to him for not mentioning the dozens of other countries that they have invaded), but that, in 2014, they basically engineered the putsch in Ukraine and essentially selected the new president. Ro Khanna doesn't think that the facts are in on that---which is mighty convenient that he literally doesn't believe anything bad about the U.S. nor believe that any of its most extreme statements even mean anything. <bq>Katie: Thank you so much for time, for your generosity, and for facing questions that are more challenging. Most politicians do not do that. Aaron: You were the only progressive member of Congress who was willing to face tough questions from Progressive journalists and we really appreciate that and you deserve credit for that. Despite my disagreements with you on these issues, I really appreciate your willingness to discuss them, which speaks very highly of you. I hope it becomes a trend in Congress. I hope your courage there on because it's much-needed to have open discussions, so thank you very much.</bq> This is the best and brightest of the progressive movement, the most left-leaning of the Congresspeople. He is a mealy-mouthed apologist for empire. There is nothing worth obtaining from this person. I don't feel I have to be as generous as Aaron because I've got nothing left to lose. Aaron was fantastic and disagreed with literally every mealy-mouthed statement he made. <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/whoever-said-life-was-cheap" author="Ted Rall" source="">Whoever said life was cheap?</a> <img src="{att_link}ted_rall_4-17-23.jpg" href="{att_link}ted_rall_4-17-23.jpg" align="none" caption="Whoever said life was cheap?" scale="50%"> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/04/rashida-tlaib-julian-assange-wikileaks-extratradition-press-freedom-merrick-garland/" source="Jacobin" author="Ben Burgis">Rashida Tlaib Is Right: The Attempt to Extradite Julian Assange Is a Huge Threat to Press Freedom</a> <bq>Many people who might otherwise care about press freedom are reluctant to defend Assange because of aspects of his politics or his history. Most seriously, in 2010, he was accused of sexual assault in Sweden. The charges were never proven, and the investigation was ultimately dropped, but I can understand why a question mark hangs over his head in the minds of many observers.</bq> This is the brave world censors want to live in, where their convictions about what is bad and what is good are influenced by non-facts, like "this person is vaguely bad because he was accused of something thirteen years ago by the same people who are trying to shut him up now." Ben Burgis is good people, but I wish he would stop empathizing with people who can't be bothered to believe in a functioning system of justice. <bq>The crucial point, though, is that whatever is or isn’t true about these other allegations, none of it has any bearing on this case. Prosecuting him for engaging in investigative journalism is a disturbing assault on press freedom in the United States and around the world.</bq> <bq>[...] any journalist anywhere in the world would have to think twice about exposing war crimes for fear of ending up on a one-way trip to the United States.</bq> You know what you don't go to prison for? Promulgating the empire's lies. <bq>That last point is the most important one. Citizens of what’s supposed to be a democracy need to know what their government is up to so that they can have their say. The more effectively that government keeps elements of its foreign policy secret from the public, the more it turns that core premise of democratic government into a bad joke.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/13/patrick-lawrence-the-disinformation-complex-an-anatomy/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Disinformation Complex: An Anatomy</a> <bq>This is the most powerful, sustained rip into the Russiagate disaster I have yet read—and certainly the best work published to date on the destruction of American democracy at the hands of a ruling elite that invented (1) the figment of a disinformation crisis and (2) the frightening apparatus that now drowns us in disinformation in the name of combating it.</bq> <bq>Seigel is reliably excellent on mis– and disinformation, which is apparently among his favorite themes. A year ago he published “Invasion of thee Fact–Checkers,” in which he dismembered the fact-checking phenomenon as “the Democratic Party’s new official-unofficial, public-private monopoly tech platform censorship brigade.”</bq> <bq>If you want an argument in favor of independent journalists as the source of the craft’s dynamism, Jacob Seigel will give you one. His pieces are more than mere reporting. I value them for the intellectual framework he builds into them so that we finish with understanding as well as knowledge.</bq> <bq>In this case, Seigel does more, much more, than part the curtain on the atrocious fiasco we call Russiagate and what he sees as its most profound consequence—the rise of a disinformation industry whose intent is to control public discourse so thoroughly as to control what we think as well as what we say.</bq> I mean we already have this. This is not new. It has perhaps gotten more powerful. I'm sure the Chinese are jealous of the thoroughness and the degree to which citizens enthusiastically take part. <bq>I also recall thinking, as Trump ran his 2016 campaign and won the election that November, that most people who found him objectionable had it upside down. Trump will come and Trump will go, I figured: It was the emerging illiberality of American liberals that most threatened the polity. These seemed the people on the way to destroying what remained of our democracy, and they would be with us long after Donald Trump was gone.</bq> <bq>What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe … in informational and management solutions to existential problems and in their own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures. As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. …</bq> <bq>Now we can understand how easily our public institutions enlisted in this good cause. These included Big Tech and the national security apparatus, of course, as well as law enforcement—the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—the think tanks, the universities, the NGOs, and media. “The American press,” Seigel writes, “was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.”</bq> <bq>It is cold comfort indeed, but what the disinformation complex took to inflicting on Americans a half-dozen years ago is what the rest of the world has been forced to put up with since the national security state took shape and began operating in the 1940s.</bq> <bq>“Something monstrous is taking shape in America,” Seigel writes. “Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of Fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a Fascist country:”</bq> <bq>We’re now in the land where defending the Bill of Rights is “a parochial attachment” and an extensive regime of censorship is naturalized as common sense [...]</bq> <bq>To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts. …</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/" source="Mint Press News" author="Alan Macleod">TikTok: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run by State Department Officials</a> <bq>[...] individuals who have moved from governments attempting to manipulate the global town square to private companies where they are entrusted to keep the public safe from exactly the sort of state-backed influence operations their former colleagues are orchestrating. In short, then, this system, whereby recently retired government officials decide what the world sees (and does not see) online, is one step removed from state censorship on a global level.</bq> <bq>Casey Getz, meanwhile, spent nearly 11 years at the CIA, rising to become branch chief, before later being hired by TikTok to work on data security and security integration. He was also previously a director for cybersecurity at the National Security Council at the White House.</bq> <bq>It has engaged in a massive propaganda war against Beijing, painting the country as a menace. Domestically, the propaganda has worked; only five years ago, a majority of Americans held positive opinions about China. Today, that figure has crashed to an all-time low of 15%.</bq> <bq>In past weeks, countries around the world have announced that they are moving away from using the dollar for international trade, a move that will drastically weaken the U.S. economically and reduce its ability to use sanctions as a means of coercion.</bq> <bq>In decades gone by, the State Department and the CIA spent fortunes creating networks of hundreds of paid informants in newsrooms across America and even secretly set up hundreds of newspapers and magazines to plant information (or misinformation) to alter public opinion. Today, however, for the U.S. government, it is much quicker and simpler to place a few operatives into key positions in big tech companies – and they can have a much greater effect.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/meet-the-censored-me" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">Meet the Censored: Me?</a> <bq>Elon somehow came to believe I was scheming to set aside work on the Twitter Files to pursue my real goal, i.e. helping “kill Twitter” by working with a company a tiny fraction of its size to build a social media app I’d never heard of. I’ve done a lot of drugs and can’t remember ever reaching that level of paranoia.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfbvO95nPL0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/rfbvO95nPL0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Behind the Headlines / Lee Camp" caption="A Radical Approach To The Environmental Crisis (w/ Keith Akers)"> This was another great interview by Lee Camp, this time speaking with Keith Akers, who offers a reasoned and rational examination of both the history of the science and how we can proceed. <hr> <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review" source="Experimental History" author="Adam Mastroianni">The rise and fall of peer review</a> <bq>Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare ” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal. Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades. The results are in. It failed.</bq> <bq>It can take months or years for a paper to wind its way through the review system, which is a big chunk of time when people are trying to do things like cure cancer and stop climate change. And universities fork over millions for access to peer-reviewed journals, even though much of the research is taxpayer-funded, and none of that money goes to the authors or the reviewers.</bq> <bq>All we can say from these big trends is that we have no idea whether peer review helped, it might have hurt, it cost a ton, and the current state of the scientific literature is pretty abysmal.</bq> <bq>Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this. In this study reviewers caught 30% of the major flaws, in this study they caught 25%, and in this study they caught 29%. These were critical issues, like “the paper claims to be a randomized controlled trial but it isn’t” and “when you look at the graphs, it’s pretty clear there’s no effect” and “the authors draw conclusions that are totally unsupported by the data.” Reviewers mostly didn’t notice.</bq> <bq>If reviewers were doing their job, we’d hear lots of stories like “Professor Cornelius von Fraud was fired today after trying to submit a fake paper to a scientific journal.” But we never hear stories like that. Instead, pretty much every story about fraud begins with the paper passing review and being published.</bq> <bq>That’s how we’ve ended up in sitcom-esque situations like ~20% of genetics papers having totally useless data because Excel autocorrected the names of genes into months and years.</bq> <bq>[...] if scientists cared a lot about peer review, when their papers got reviewed and rejected, they would listen to the feedback, do more experiments, rewrite the paper, etc. Instead, they usually just submit the same paper to another journal.</bq> <bq>[...] scientists take unreviewed work seriously without thinking twice. We read “preprints” and working papers and blog posts, none of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. We use data from Pew and Gallup and the government, also unreviewed. We go to conferences where people give talks about unvetted projects, and we do not turn to each other and say, “So interesting! I can’t wait for it to be peer reviewed so I can find out if it’s true.”</bq> <bq>[...] nobody actually reads these papers. Some of them are like 100 pages long with another 200 pages of supplemental information, and all of it is written like it hates you and wants you to stop reading immediately. Recently, a friend asked me when I last read a paper from beginning to end; I couldn’t remember, and neither could he.</bq> <bq>When getting and keeping a job depends on producing popular ideas, you can get very good at thought-policing yourself into never entertaining anything weird or unpopular at all. That means we end up with fewer revolutionary ideas, and unless you think everything’s pretty much perfect right now, we need revolutionary ideas real bad.</bq> <bq>This extremely bad system is worse than nothing because it fools people into thinking they’re safe when they’re not.</bq> <bq>But science is a strong-link problem: progress depends on the quality of our best work. Better ideas don’t always triumph immediately, but they do triumph eventually, because they’re more useful. You can’t land on the moon using Aristotle’s physics, you can’t turn mud into frogs using spontaneous generation, and you can’t build bombs out of phlogiston. Newton’s laws of physics stuck around; his recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone didn’t. We didn’t need a scientific establishment to smother the wrong ideas. We needed it to let new ideas challenge old ones, and time did the rest.</bq> <bq>If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don’t actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say “INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL,” and those stickers are very hard to get off. That’s way scarier.</bq> <bq>Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat.</bq> <bq>Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat. Remember that it used to be obviously true that the Earth is the center of the universe, and if scientific journals had existed in Copernicus’ time, geocentrist reviewers would have rejected his paper and patted themselves on the back for preventing the spread of misinformation.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-naked-emperors" source="Experimental History" author="Adam Mastroianni">The dance of the naked emperors</a> <bq>At its core, this is an argument against scientific monoculture. Why should everyone publish the same way? You’d have to be extremely certain that way was better than all other ways—and that it was better for every single person!—and that amount of certainty seems pretty loony to me. Uploading a PDF to the internet worked for me, but there are lots of other ways people could communicate their findings, and I hope they try them out.</bq> <bq>Right now you get credit for each paper you publish in a journal (with more credit for more prestigious journals), so you want to publish as many as you can. But if “publishing” is just “uploading a PDF to the internet,” you get no credit for the act of publishing itself, so publishing lots of papers just for the sake of publishing them would only make you look dumb.</bq> <bq>Publishing this way means a paper stops improving once it’s published. (You can issue corrections, but otherwise it’s supposed to be final.) But why would you stop listening to comments and making your paper better just because it’s now publicly accessible?</bq> <bq>Scientists may think they're egalitarian because they don’t believe in hierarchies based on race, sex, wealth, and so on. But some of them believe very strongly in hierarchy based on prestige . In their eyes, it is right and good for people with more degrees, bigger grants, and fancier academic positions to be above people who have fewer of those things. They don’t even think of this as hierarchy , exactly, because that sounds like a bad word. To them, it's just the natural order of things.</bq> <bq>Older-looking graduate students sometimes have the experience of being mistaken for professors, and professors will chat to them amiably until they realize their mistake, at which point they will, horrified, high-tail it out of the conversation.)</bq> This reminds me of Pratchett's wizards. <bq>People who are all-in on a hierarchy don’t like it when you question its central assumptions. If peer review doesn’t work or is even harmful to science, it suggests the people at the top of the hierarchy might be naked emperors, and that's upsetting not just to the naked emperors themselves, but also the people who are diligently disrobing in the hopes of becoming one.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-controversial-diatribe-against-skeptics" source="" author="John Horgan">My Controversial Diatribe Against “Skeptics”</a> <bq>When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe can make you dumber.</bq> <bq>Some string and multiverse true believers, like Sean Carroll, have rejected falsifiability as a method for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. You’re losing the game, so you try to change the rules.</bq> Is this true? It is apparently true. He wrote it in <a href="https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/01/14/what-scientific-ideas-are-ready-for-retirement/" date="January 2014">What Scientific Ideas Are Ready for Retirement?</a> <bq>[...] tests often do more harm than good. Analyses of mammograms , for breast cancer, and PSA (prostate specific antigen) tests, for prostate cancer, have found that they harm many more people than they save by leading to unnecessary treatment. Americans are over-tested and over-treated for cancer.</bq> <bq>Over the last few decades, American psychiatry has morphed into a marketing branch of Big Pharma. I started critiquing medications for mental illness decades ago, pointing out that antidepressants like Prozac are scarcely more effective than placebos [...]</bq> <bq>I hate the deep-roots theory not only because it’s wrong, but also because it encourages fatalism toward war. War is our most urgent problem , more urgent than global warming, poverty, disease or political oppression. War makes these and other problems worse, directly or indirectly, by diverting resources away from their solution.</bq> This is an incredibly important point. The "deep-roots theory" causes people to give up trying to stop war. My whole life, the U.S. has been at war. War-making is excluded from climate-change policy. We are like children, running a pretend-world. There is no way that nature shares our ability or desire to ignore the CO2 produced by the military or wars. Nature doesn't care what we say or think. We distract everyone from the real problems so that we can continue stealing their stuff, long after we have so much stuff that we don't even know what to do with it all. We start wars because it massively accelerates the accumulation of stuff. <bq>In the last century, prominent scientists spoke out against U.S. militarism and called for the end of war. Scientists like Einstein, Linus Pauling, and the great skeptic Carl Sagan. Where are their successors? Noam Chomsky is still bashing U.S. imperialism , but he’s in his nineties. He needs help! Far from criticizing militarism, some scholars, like economist Tyler Cowen, claim war is beneficial, because it spurs innovation. That’s like arguing for the economic benefits of cancer or slavery.</bq> <bq>So, just to recap. I’m asking you skeptics to spend less time bashing soft targets like homeopathy and Bigfoot and more time bashing hard targets like multiverses, cancer tests, psychiatric drugs, biological determinism and war, the hardest target of all.</bq> <bq>All I ask is that you examine your own views skeptically. And ask yourself this: Shouldn’t ending war be a moral imperative, like ending slavery or the subjugation of women? How can we not end war?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/09/the-world-will-miss-the-climate-change-target-time-to-prepare/" source="Scheer Post" author="Mark Schapiro">The World Will Miss the Climate Change Target. Time to Prepare.</a> <bq>The voluminous, fact-filled report states we are already in the midst of severe climate disruptions: Adaptation is urgent, and we must do so in ways that do not exacerbate already-deep inequalities.</bq> Yeah, that's what we're going to do. We live in glorified fiefdoms. The elites have the equivalent of the Disney FastPass for everything. <bq>[...] the temperature during baseball season has risen an average of 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit across the 27 Major League Baseball cities. Rising temperatures will make extreme heat and rain events more frequent, which can not only lead to more postponed games, but can also put the health of players and fans at risk, the report said.</bq> What about farmers? Could that baseball example be more dilettantish? <bq>While the IPCC found that the average annual greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2019 were higher than in any other previous decade for which records were kept, it also found that the rate of increase in those emissions were notably less than the rate of increase in the previous decade.</bq> So maybe we'll hit the target long after the deadline. Look, that's better than continuing to accelerate, but it's still pathetically inadequate. <bq>The IPCC, utilizing diplomatic language, has a way to describe what this actually means: “Ambitious mitigation pathways imply large and sometimes disruptive changes in existing economic structures.” What that means is a dramatic drop in the extraction and use of oil, coal and natural gas, and a concomitant reduction in those industries’ influence on political levers of power.</bq> Translate to: they will go to war to prevent a solution from happening. If the solution to the preservation of humanity involves them losing even 1% of their profit margins, they will do everything in their power to prevent it from happening. They would rather die. We should oblige them. <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/solenoid-novel-mircea-cartarescu/" source="The Nation" author="Will Self">The Mind-Bending Fiction of Mircea Cărtărescu</a> <bq>“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—the elliptical tale of how a group of secretive philosophes mysteriously evolved a real alternative world from the confected encyclopedia of an imaginary one [...]</bq> <bq>[...] through space and time (albeit with modification), Cărtărescu offers us a radically different sense of the ontological possibilities of fiction and life, thereby expressing the dilemmas of a little creature living on an anonymous ball of dirt, revolving around an insignificant star on the outer edge of a galaxy that is, itself, pinwheeling away from an ever-expanding universe.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> Our society values intelligence above all, but why? It’s because we value growth and improvement above all. And, historically, intelligence has been a much longer lever than, for example, carrying heavy things. <hr> I don't know what it's like to have my zest for life and learning be eaten away by worry and desperation. I can only imagine it and sympathize. <h>Programming</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r83N3c2kPw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/7r83N3c2kPw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Coding Train" caption="What was Coding like 40 years ago?"> "What was coding like 40 years ago?" is a ~30-minute video of some Bob-Ross-like guy super-excited to be programming BASIC on an Apple II. I loved it. It reminded me of the days when I wrote a halfway-functioning checkers-playing program in Basic on an Apple II-e. You can find the source code, emulators, and materials here: <a href="https://thecodingtrain.com/challenges/173-snake-applesoft-basic">#173 — AppleSoft Basic Snake Game</a>. <hr> <a href="https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations" author="" source="GitHub">ECMAScript proposal: Type Annotations</a> This proposal aims to bring support for type annotations to JavaScript, but only so it can ignore them. That is, the JavaScript engines will not need to change, nor will they need to make use of the type annotations. Instead, this will allow languages like TypeScript to annotate programs with types but no longer have to transpile to JavaScript. <bq>The aim of this proposal is to enable developers to run programs written in TypeScript, Flow, and other static typing supersets of JavaScript without any need for transpilation, if they stick within a certain reasonably large subset of the language.</bq> <bq>In the case of TypeScript, Flow, and others, these variants of JavaScript brought convenient syntax for declaring and using types in JavaScript. This syntax mostly does not affect runtime semantics, and in practice, most of the work of converting these variants to plain JavaScript amounts to erasing types.</bq> <bq>[...] over time, we anticipate there will be less need for developers to downlevel-compile. Evergreen browsers have become more of the norm, and on the back-end, Node.js and Deno use very recent versions of V8. Over time, for many TypeScript users, the only necessary step between writing code and running it will be to erase away type annotations.</bq> I've recently read of some developers (e.g., those working on Svelte) sticking to plain JavaScript with JSDoc type annotations simply because this allows them to already work without a build step. For example, see the article <a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/types-in-jsdoc-with-zod/" author="Jim Nielsen" source="">Types in JavaScript With Zod and JSDoc</a>. It turns out that a library named Zod allows you to declare typedefs that the JavaScript LSP understands (in VSCode at least; not sure about WebStorm). JSDoc is more tedious to specify, but works just as well as TypeScript type annotations in modern IDEs, so there is no loss of expressiveness or static-typing. The proposal outlined in this paper would allow any TypeScript program to benefit from not having a build step, and would eliminate the tedious and often redundant specification of types in JSDoc (which does not support type aliases, for example). <bq>JSDoc comments only provide a subset of the feature set supported in TypeScript, in part because it's difficult to provide expressive syntax within JSDoc comments.</bq> Although a lot of TypeScript would be supported out of the box, TypeScript-specific features that generate code and JSX, being generative, are not supported i.e., will not lead to running code when run as JavaScript. It is also clear that TypeScript is the prime benefactor of this proposal, <bq>This proposal is a balancing act: trying to be as TypeScript compatible as possible while still allowing other type systems, and also not impeding the evolution of JavaScript's syntax too much. We acknowledge that full compatibility is not within scope, but we will strive to maximize compatibility and minimize differences.</bq> <bq>Node.js developers in particular, have historically avoided transpilation, and are today torn between the ease of development that is brought by no transpilation, and the ease of development that languages like TypeScript bring. Implementing this proposal means that we can add type systems to this list of "things that don't need transpilation anymore" and bring us closer to a world where transpilation is optional and not a necessity.</bq> <h>Fun</h> <a href="https://www.publicbooks.org/the-labor-of-play/" source="Public Books" author="Benjamin Tausig">The Labor of Play</a> <bq>In his estimation, the problem was that leisure had come to serve capital, since now it replenished workers for the sake of work, rather than bettering them as human beings.</bq> Then so does sleep, I guess? The man gets you, no matter what. <bq>As go crosswords, so goes the world? Today, there is a sort of race underway in contemporary word, trivia, and board games. It is a struggle between the forces of profit—which are increasingly hungry for more content—and the forces of obsession—the kind described in these four books—which aim for depth of experience,</bq>