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Links and Notes for July 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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> </ul> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/13/profit-driven-systems-are-driving-us-to-our-doom/" source="" author="Caitlin Johnstone">Profit-Driven Systems Are Driving Us To Our Doom</a> <bq>Under our current systems for profit generation, which is the primary driver of human behavior on this planet, making a quality product that lasts a long time instead of quickly going obsolete or turning into landfill will actually drive you into bankruptcy.</bq> <bq>This just says such dysmal things about why our planet is facing the existential crises it’s now facing. Corporations will die if they don’t continually grow, and they can’t grow without things like inbuilt planned obsolescence or continued additional purchases, which in a sane society would just be regarded as shoddy craftsmanship. Our entire civilization is driven by the pursuit of profit, and to keep turning large profits your corporation needs to continually grow, and your corporation can’t continually grow unless you’re manufacturing a crappy product that needs to be continually replaced or supplemented, and you can’t manufacture those replacements and supplementations without harvesting them from the flesh of a dying world.</bq> Also, the problem is that the company is no longer there to make a product. It exists only to generate shareholder value, with the shareholders simultaneously being the most important part of the transaction as well as the least-involved. The customer and the employees are all directly affected, while the shareholders are nearly completely divorced from the vagaries of the company's value---they often have no idea what the company they've invested in even does. <bq>Someone could invent a free energy machine that lasts forever and costs next to nothing, and even though it would save the world you can be certain it would never see the light of day under our current systems, because it couldn’t yield huge and continuous profits and it would destroy many current means of profit generation.</bq> Same for cheap, one-shot medical remedies. <bq>If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is.</bq> <bq>Our competition-based, profit-motivated systems limit scientific innovation, and they also greatly limit the scope of solutions we can avail ourselves of. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very inferior fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any [solutions] which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the hell alone.</bq> <bq>People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable.</bq> <bq>The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising,</bq> <bq>It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation.</bq> <bq>People worry about the world getting destroyed by machines driven by a heartless artificial intelligence, but we might end up destroying it with a kind of artificial mind we invented long before microchips: the corporation. So much of humanity’s dysfunction can be explained by the fact that corporations (A) pretty much run the world and (B) are required to act like sociopaths by placing profit above all other concerns.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/13/a-good-years-pay-for-a-good-days-work/" source="Scheer Post" author="Sam Pizzigati">A Good Year's Pay for a Good Day's Work?</a> <bq>Ford Motor, for instance, will be eligible for $6.7 billion in federal subsidies for its new $3.5-billion battery plant in Michigan, and state and local officials have already handed Ford $1.7 billion for that plant. How does that math play out for real-life workers? “The company has promised to create 2,500 new jobs that it says will pay an average annual wage of just $45,000 a year,” Good Jobs First points out, “while reaping subsidies of $3.4 million per job.”</bq> <bq>A bit of historical perspective: Back in the mid-20th century, few corporate chiefs pocketed over 20 times the annual compensation of their average workers. CEOs at major U.S. corporations, the Economic Policy Institute reported last fall, are now averaging nearly 400 times worker annual pay.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/12/patrick-lawrence-a-yellen-in-the-china-shop/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">A Yellen in the China Shop</a> <bq>All of these people share three attributes. One, they know nothing about China. Two, they do not care that they know nothing about China. Three they do not care to know anything about China. They care only to project American power outward, most vigorously where it is most unwelcome.</bq> <bq>For months Yellen has insisted that depriving China access to technology it needs to develop its advanced industries is not meant to damage China’s economy or inhibit its growth. She tried on the same argument last week. I await the American official able to explain how this does not amount to a frontal attack on an economy with which the U.S. is losing its ability to compete.</bq> <bq>American officials in Beijing are in many cases not talking to the Chinese: They are talking to the hawks who have taken over China policy in Washington. It is diplomacy as domestic politics, in other words. Do you think the Chinese do not understand this, the essential unseriousness of their American guests? I am ever more impressed by the extent of China’s patience and courtesy. Janet Yellen goes to Beijing, Janet Yellen returns to Washington, not a damn thing was meant to change and not a damn thing does.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/greedflation-is-a-proxy-battle-in" source="SubStack" author="Freddie De Boer">"Greedflation" is a Proxy Battle in a Long War</a> <bq>[...] the most relevant fact is that even in a minimally-inflationary environment, capitalist enterprise extracts value from labor in significant excess of labor’s contribution to profits. For that reason alone, the market mechanism can’t produce just outcomes. If you’re not a fan of the labor theory of value, you might instead argue that corporate profits ensure the despoiling of our planet, that corporate profits extract value from communities that can’t afford to lose it, or that corporate profits are the engine of the socioeconomic inequality which elevates a wealthy caste above the rest of us and has all sorts of ugly knock-on effects.</bq> <bq>But that broader unhappiness with our system, in reality, is the argument here - a critique of capitalism, whether of the narrower “unfettered” capitalism that liberals tend to denounce or the Marxian rejection of capitalism as such. Greedflation is just a stalking horse. When someone like Matt Yglesias sneers that of course corporations are greedy, they’ve always been greedy, it ultimately affirms the worldview of both sides.</bq> Also, Matt Yglesias is a simpering fool. But, blind pig/truffle... <bq>This all reached some sort of apogee with the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose signature policy victories included tripling Black extreme poverty by gutting welfare, kneecapping whatever union power was left with NAFTA, and banning gay marriage on a federal level. His campaign against Bob Dole had a comedic aspect, if only because of Dole’s perpetual agita that Clinton had stolen his agenda. The anti-left left was the default establishment stance for decades.</bq> <bq>Ultimately, the question is not “Is greedflation the cause of inflation?,” but rather “Can the market mechanisms that create inflation and the corporations that profit off of it coexist with justice and human flourishing?”</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012349081" source="Antiwar.com" author="Doug Bandow">What if Russia Is Winning America’s Proxy War in Ukraine?</a> <bq>In recent months the drumbeat has gotten louder to effectively destroy Russia: regime change, democratization, confiscation, war crimes trials, disarmament, even dismemberment. Yet seriously pushing such policies would ensure continued conflict and potential escalation. Russia won’t make peace on such terms. Rather, faced with such demands, Moscow likely would resist even more strongly, relying on nuclear weapons if necessary. (Regime survival would trump even presumed Chinese opposition .)</bq> <bq>[...] the transatlantic alliance attacked Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya. Without formally inducting Kiev, the members, led by the US, brought NATO into Ukraine through weapons transfers and personnel training. Putin’s professed fear that troop and missile deployments would eventually follow was not unreasonable.</bq> <bq>Substantial manpower and materiel losses will limit the Zelensky government’s ability to sustain its efforts, yet the American and European governments appear unwilling or unable to replace lost equipment. In fact, the allied military cornucopia is rapidly emptying. A gaggle of visiting Europeans recently admitted that their peoples were tired of underwriting Ukraine’s war effort. Americans remain sympathetic to Kiev, but their patience will be tested in coming months.</bq> <bq>Ukraine cannot easily replace the loss of so many trained personnel. Noted Le Monde, “The time when army recruitment offices were overwhelmed with requests from civilians ready to take up arms seems to be over.” And current military exigencies make extended training before deployment difficult if not impossible.</bq> <bq>Washington must decide policy based on American interests. An open-ended conflict with steadily increasing entanglement against a nuclear-armed power with far more at stake is a bad deal for the American people.</bq> It's also shockingly immoral, on all fronts, but, sure, let's focus on the issue that matters---how war in another country affects the American people. If that's the lever that will work, then let's lean on it. <bq>The time is long past for the continent to take the lead in its own defense. Even now, with Moscow perceived as a significant security threat, Europeans admit that they fear doing more would encourage America to leave. Thus, Washington needs to begin leaving to force allied governments to take over their own defense. Uncle Sam no longer can afford to underwrite dozens of deadbeat allies who believe their security is America’s responsibility.</bq> Hahahaha. That's an interesting way of describing imperial garrisons. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/13/the-rice-bowl-of-the-chinese-people-is-held-firmly-in-their-hands/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">The Rice Bowl of the Chinese People Is Held Firmly in Their Hands</a> <bq>‘Almost half of poor people (470.1 million) are deprived in both nutrition and sanitation, potentially making them more vulnerable to infectious diseases. In addition, over half of poor people (593.3 million) are simultaneously deprived in both cooking fuel and electricity’. These ‘deprivation bundles’ – the absence of both electricity and clean cooking fuel, for instance – amplify the low incomes earned by billions of people.</bq> <bq>if the poverty line is set at $3.65 a day, 23 percent of the world lives in poverty, and if the line is set at $6.85 a day, then almost half of the world’s population (47 percent) lives below the poverty line. These numbers are horrifying.</bq> <bq>It will be difficult for the Chinese path to socialist modernisation to be seen as a model to be adopted by other countries unless these countries also ground their programmes on a socialist footing. Poverty was not eradicated by cash transfer schemes or by rural medical programmes alone, though these are valuable policy options: it was eradicated by a socialist commitment to take ideas such as dignity and realise them in the world.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/12/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/" source="Scheer Post" author="Dongsheng News">Why Are There No Slums in China?</a> <bq>Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises.</bq> <bq>While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng).</bq> <bq>The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and the country’s economic strategy until 2035 focus on redistributing income through tax reform, reducing the gap between the rich and poor, and removing the barriers that prevent millions of migrant workers from enjoying the full benefits of urban life.</bq> <bq>These efforts to tackle the “three mountains” of the high cost of housing, education, and health care faced by all Chinese people, including migrants, is at the center of the government’s vision and policy reforms towards “common prosperity” for all its citizens and the building of a modern socialist society.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/12/the-worst-2024-election-interference-wont-come-from-russia-or-china/" source="" author="Caitlin Johnstone">The Worst 2024 Election Interference Won’t Come From Russia Or China</a> <bq>“Disputing elections is just not good for democracy,” Manjoo says, joining the rest of the American liberal political/media class in rewriting history to pretend they didn’t just spend the entire Trump administration doing exactly that.</bq> <bq>This past April the Obama administration’s acting CIA director Mike Morell admitted to using his intelligence connections to circulate a false story in the press during the 2020 presidential race that the Hunter Biden laptop leak was a Russian disinfo op, because he wanted to ensure that Joe Biden would win the election. And absolutely nothing happened to him; Morell just went on with his day.</bq> <bq>If an ordinary American circulated disinformation to manipulate the election, imperial spinmeisters would cite that as evidence that online communication needs to be more aggressively controlled. But when Obama’s acting CIA director does it, it’s cool.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/translating-the-language-of-the-border-del-valle" source="The Baffler" author="Gaby Del Valle">Translating the Language of the Border</a> <bq>Regardless of where her loyalties lie, Oliva acknowledges that the act of interpreting for asylum seekers makes her an unwitting agent of the state. “I like to think that I’m working against the powers that be,” she writes, “but the reality is that I’m filling out the form, I’m making people findable, searchable, cross-indexable . . . I translate towards power—towards the English-speaker used to being met on their own language, towards a government that has proven time and time again to be uncaring at best and malicious at worst.”</bq> <bq>Even individual triumphs—asylum cases granted, deportations avoided—serve to justify the exclusion and removal of others. These limited victories uphold the illusion that there is a logical process in place, and that those who go about things the right way will benefit. Never mind that certain immigration judges have zero-percent grant rates for asylum and that ICE has arrested and deported multiple U.S. citizens.</bq> <bq>Though the United States has no official language, people born and raised in English-speaking American households aren’t often required to engage with languages other than their own,</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2023/07/10/biden-ghosts-his-granddaughter-hes-always-been-mean" source="" author="Ted Rall">Biden Ghosts His Granddaughter. He’s Always Been Mean.</a> <bq>[...] no single event showcases his willingness to screw over an innocent person to gain political advantage like his slanderous account of the circumstances of the deaths of his first wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972. “A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly—and I never pursued it—drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons,” Biden told an audience in 2007. In 2001 he falsely blamed an “errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive” and “hit my children and my wife and killed them.” He told this phony story over and over. Curtis Dunn , who was driving the truck that struck Neilia Biden’s stationwagon, died in 1999. He had not been drinking. The accident was her fault; she blew through a stop sign; Dunn’s truck had none. Dunn stopped immediately and raced to help Biden and her children. What kind of man would make up a story like that?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/11/its-not-that-hard-to-solve-homelessness/" source="CounterPunch" author="Sonali Kolhatkar">It’s Not That Hard to Solve Homelessness</a> <bq>The federal government sees a shortage of homes as the problem, treating it as an issue of supply and demand: increase the supply and the price will fall. But there is no shortage of housing in the nation. There is a shortage of affordable housing and as long as moneyed interests keep buying up housing, building more won’t be a fix.</bq> <bq>Passing laws to prevent hedge funds and other large businesses from buying up homes and apartments and raising the minimum wage to at least $21.50 are hardly radical ideas, but they offer course corrections for an economy that is running roughshod over most of us. Rather than tinkering at the edges of the problem and putting forward complex-sounding solutions that don’t actually address the root of the issue, wouldn’t society be better served by redesigning our economy to make homelessness obsolete?</bq> Some countries have done this. Better ones. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/11/scott-ritter-nato-summit-a-theater-of-the-absurd/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">NATO Summit, A Theater of the Absurd</a> <bq>NATO had opted out of a peaceful resolution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and instead chose to wage war by proxy — with Ukrainian manpower being married with NATO equipment — designed to achieve what U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith, in May 2022, called the “strategic defeat” of Russia in Ukraine.</bq> <bq>While Finland has joined NATO, Sweden has not, and its membership is becoming increasingly problematic given Turkey’s opposition. Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s recent announcement that Turkey will agree to Swedish NATO membership when the European Union admits Turkey appears to be a poison pill that permanently scutters Sweden’s membership hopes, since the European Union is not inclined to admit Turkey.</bq> They need Türkiye as a refugee dumping ground instead---outside of the EU. <bq>NATO has long ago stopped dealing with a fact-based world, allowing itself to devolve into a theater of the absurd where actors fool themselves into believing the tale they are spinning, while the audience stares in dismay.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://archive.is/CEjJc" source="Archive.IS / Foreign Policy" author="Vincent Brussee">China’s Social Credit System Is Actually Quite Boring</a> <bq>The SCS’s main aim is to improve the enforcement of legal and administrative rules. Food safety scandals are a recurring problem in China, as are workplace safety issues, wage arrears, and noncompliance with contracts and court orders. When it came to tackling these problems, there were laws in place, but enforcement was lackluster, and anyone who did get caught could simply go to the next province and reoffend. The SCS was meant to help by enabling data sharing between agencies and introducing nationwide blacklists to coerce offenders into compliance.</bq> <bq>Contrary to common belief, the cities mainly target companies, not individuals. Nonetheless, legal representatives of a violating company are also included in the blacklists to prevent reoffending elsewhere or under a different company. Nationally, about 75 percent of entities targeted by the system end up on blacklists because of court orders they have ignored—the so-called judgment defaulters. The remaining companies are typically collared for severe marketplace violations—for instance, for food safety infringements, environmental damage, or wage arrears.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/dave_decamp/2023/05/11/to-avoid-a-war-with-china-over-taiwan-the-us-needs-to-back-down/" source="AntiWar.com" author="Dave DeCamp">To Avoid a War With China Over Taiwan, the US Needs To Back Down</a> <bq>According to Japan Times, China flew 302 sorties across the median line in August 2022 . Between 1954 and August 2020, China flew across the barrier only four times. From September 2020 until Pelosi’s visit, Chinese warplanes made the flight 23 times.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://archive.is/BuHGI" source="Archive.is / The Atlantic" author="Deborah Brautigam & Meg Rithmire">There Is No Chinese ‘Debt Trap’</a> <bq>As Michael Ondaatje, one of Sri Lanka’s greatest chroniclers, once said , “In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.” And the debt-trap narrative is just that: a lie, and a powerful one. Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota. A Chinese company’s acquisition of a majority stake in the port was a cautionary tale, but it’s not the one we’ve often heard.</bq> <bq>The city of Hambantota lies at the southern tip of Sri Lanka, a few nautical miles from the busy Indian Ocean shipping lane that accounts for nearly all of the ocean-borne trade between Asia and Europe, and more than 80 percent of ocean-borne global trade. When a Chinese firm snagged the contract to build the city’s port, it was stepping into an ongoing Western competition, though one the United States had largely abandoned.</bq> <bq>To justify its existence, the port in Hambantota would have to secure only a fraction of the cargo that went through Singapore, the world’s busiest transshipment port. Armed with the Ramboll report, Sri Lanka’s government approached the United States and India; both countries said no. But a Chinese construction firm, China Harbor Group, had learned about Colombo’s hopes, and lobbied hard for the project. China Eximbank agreed to fund it, and China Harbor won the contract. This was in 2007, six years before Xi Jinping introduced the Belt and Road Initiative.</bq> <bq>When Sirisena took office, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota. The Central Bank governors under both Rajapaksa and Sirisena do not agree on much, but they both told us that Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, was not the source of the country’s financial distress.</bq> <bq>Over the past 20 years, Chinese firms have learned a lot about how to play in an international construction business that remains dominated by Europe: Whereas China has 27 firms among the top 100 global contractors, up from nine in 2000, Europe has 37, down from 41. The U.S. has seven, compared to 19 two decades ago.</bq> <bq>As one Malaysian politician remarked to us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss how Chinese finance featured in that country’s political drama, “Can’t the U.S. State Department tell the difference between campaign rhetoric that our opponents are slaves to China and actually being slaves to China?”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/biden-should-withdraw-unjustified-xinjiang-genocide-allegation-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-and-william-schabas-2021-04" source="Project Syndicate" author="Jeffrey Sachs & William Schabas">The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified</a> <bq>US President Joe Biden's administration has doubled down on the claim that China is mounting a genocide against the Uighur people in the Xinjiang region. But it has offered no proof, and unless it can, the State Department should withdraw the charge and support a UN-based investigation of the situation in Xinjiang.</bq> <bq>The genocide charge was made on the final day of Donald Trump’s administration by then-Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, who made no secret of his belief in lying as a tool of US foreign policy. Now President Joe Biden’s administration has doubled down on Pompeo’s flimsy claim, even though the State Department’s own top lawyers reportedly share our skepticism regarding the charge.</bq> <bq>[...] what else might constitute evidence of genocide in China? The State Department report refers to mass internment of perhaps one million Uighurs. If proven, that would constitute a gross violation of human rights; but, again, it is not evidence, per se, of intent to exterminate. Another of the five recognized acts of genocide is “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” The State Department report refers to China’s notoriously aggressive birth-control policies. Until recently, China strictly enforced its one-child policy on the majority of its population but was more liberal toward ethnic minorities, including the Uighur.</bq> <bq>UN experts are rightly calling for the UN to investigate the situation in Xinjiang. China’s government, for its part, has recently stated that it would welcome a UN mission to Xinjiang based on “exchanges and cooperation,” not on “guilty before proven.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/11/the-us-is-war-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix" author="Caitlin Johnstone">The US Is War</a> <bq>The US won WW2 and then immediately plunged into the Cold War. The US won the Cold War and then immediately set to work destroying the Middle East. The US destroyed the Middle East and then immediately started another cold war in preparation for another world war. The US is war. A normal country wages war with the goal of getting back to peacetime. The US wages war with the goal of getting to the next war.</bq> <bq>[...] just dismiss electoral politics altogether, because you’ll get evil no matter how you vote since “voting” is itself a fake diversion to help manufacture the illusion of freedom and control.</bq> <bq>It’s crazy how we let wealthy corporations run the media who then spend all day every day telling us we should definitely support political norms that are friendly to wealthy corporations.</bq> <bq>Too many people look at authoritarian measures like government surveillance, online censorship etc in terms of how it will directly affect them personally rather than how it shapes society as a whole. Sure you yourself may not be directly affected by surveillance or censorship, but you have to live in a society where people’s thoughts, words and behaviors are being strictly regulated by authority in ways that serve the interests of authority.</bq> <bq>Those who benefit from the current rules of the game understand this and do everything they can to make sure we keep playing by the current rules. That’s why so much of our media is dedicated to normalizing status quo politics and manufacturing consent for the actions that are necessary to maintain the current order of things. Our information ecosystem is continually saturated with the narratives of the people who get the most points in this game we are playing.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/10/biden-keeps-lying-about-the-us-not-trying-to-surround-china/" source="" author="Caitlin Johnstone">Biden Keeps Lying About The US “Not Trying To Surround” China</a> <bq>Biden can babble all he wants about wanting to secure sea lanes and protect international waters, but only a drooling idiot would believe the world’s most powerful empire is militarily surrounding its top geopolitical rival as an act of defense.</bq> <bq>The single dumbest thing the US empire asks us to believe nowadays is that surrounding its two biggest foes with war machinery is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.</bq> <bq>The US empire is better at international narrative manipulation than any power structure that has ever existed in human history, but what they can’t spin away is the concrete maneuverings of solid pieces of war machinery, because they are physical realities and not narratives.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/are-authorities-using-the-internet" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">Are Authorities Using the Internet to Sap Our Instinct for Freedom?</a> <bq>The point is, journalism isn’t rocket science. You show up, talk to a few people, give your best guess at what you’re looking at, and when you get to the “there’s no one left to interview but the gorilla” moment, you move on.</bq> <bq>[...] Americans are not just being censored. I believe there’s an equivalent effort on the front end of Internet culture to rob people of their will to be free. I believe this is is the hardest part of the Internet censorship story to understand, but also the most crucial and most dangerous.</bq> <bq>[...] instead of giving the world something invigorating and freeing like rock n’ roll, we’re exporting mass neurosis. At home we’ve become afraid to walk even a few steps without our electronic helpers. Our sense of self is now inextricably tied to a huge global entourage of prying commentators who live in those phones of ours that are always in our pockets and whose good opinion we never stop seeking, whether we admit it or not.</bq> That is patently not true. This is only applies to a handful of people who think that everyone is like them and whose opinions are given outsize exposure and influence because they post it publicly onto a very public site. No-one else in the real world gives a flying blue fuck what Twitter thinks. It is an insular, psychological tragedy whose inhabitants are so self-absorbed that they think the world revolves around them. <bq>We long celebrated the individual, even if the individual was crazy. One of my heroes growing up was a man named Plennie Wingo, who tried to walk around the earth backwards. He made it from Santa Monica to Istanbul.</bq> <bq>That’s how this country has always worked. The line between outpatient and inventor here is and always has been thin, as is the line between con artist and marketing genius, as PT Barnum discovered. Outlandishness, difference, boldness. We’ve celebrated that from Patrick Henry to Hunter Thompson to Liberace. The freethinker was always a cherished archetype.</bq> You know what is really American? Telling the whole world how unique you are in ways that everyone in the world actually shares. But, I digress. <bq>What the algorithm instead detects is someone harboring a dangerous willingness to embrace unorthodox ideas, or [to] look at a forbidden thing and not flee. It was once a virtue for Americans to say, when asked about their politics, “None of your damn business.”</bq> <bq>Young people especially are worried to the point of mental illness about their likes and ratios. We not only want people to know what we think, we’re terrified of people not knowing what we think, lest we be suspected of harboring something unsavory underneath.</bq> Again, this is an affliction that affects a small bubble of fools who think that the world wakes up every day, wondering what they're thinking. <bq>If they can preemptively extinguish that fire in us, formal censorship will become unnecessary. The population will become too fearful of difference to ever risk punishment in the first place. That moment is close at hand.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/13/patrick-lawrence-the-disinformation-industry-lands-in-court/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The 'Disinformation Industry' Lands in Court</a> <bq>Last week was one of sharpening contradictions. It gives us a new measure of clarity amid the fog in which our purported leaders and the media that serve them would have us confined. It took years too long, but the law has at last been invoked against the creeping despotism of mainstream liberals as they attempt to control what we read, see, hear, and by way of all this think. Their hypocrisy and the extent to which corporate media will lie to obscure it are already more legible.</bq> <bq>I just love reading in published legalese a rundown of what all these sons of bitches have been doing all these years while hiding behind the law. And I love even more one of Doughty’s surmises in his ruling: If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.</bq> <bq>Free speech is increasingly partisan? Do you see what is being said here, text and subtext? I am in no hurry to invite either Eric Schmitt, Andrew Bailey, his successor as Missouri A–G, or Jeff Landry over for drinks, given various of their views, but at issue are constitutional rights, not Republican politics. Perniciously enough, we are now invited to take free speech as some kind of right-wing Republican cause.</bq> <bq>From The Times’s second-day story last Wednesday: Government efforts to interact with social media platforms took a major hit on Tuesday when a federal judge restricted the Biden administration from communicating with tech companies about a broad array of online content. Interacting with social media? Communicating with tech companies? These are references to long-established, brazenly illegal censorship operations, as we know from The Twitter Files and numerous other documents published over the past several years.</bq> <bq>the Biden regime having already signaled, via the DoJ, that it is likely to appeal the injunction. It will be interesting, I mean, to watch as mainstream media whitewash, to borrow from Doughty, “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” This will be a spectacle of self-degradation that will cost corporate media dearly.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/20/anderson-cooper-is-a-disgusting-cia-goon/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">Anderson Cooper Is A Disgusting CIA Goon</a> <bq>Mainstream estimates for the number of civilians killed in the Battle of Grozny range from five thousand to eight thousand. Estimates for the number of people killed as a result of the Iraq invasion range into the millions. One was a single battle in one city, the other was a years-long nationwide war which plunged an entire region into violence and chaos. Cooper is correct that it’s inaccurate to compare the two, but he’s obviously incorrect that this is because the Iraq invasion was less depraved.</bq> Grozny would be better compared to Fallujah, which was just a small component of the entire war. A significant one, as a focused, moral example of how the rest of the war went, but just a small part of the loss of life. Anderson Cooper was not impressed with this line of reasoning, though, and said, <bq>“I certainly understand,” said Cooper. “I also saw a lot of Americans getting killed. And I saw, you know, the horrors of Saddam Hussein. I don’t think it’s accurate to compare the pummeling of a city by Russian artillery, with civilians inside, pummeling every single day with the intention of just destroying and flattening a city with actions the US took.”</bq> <bq>Cooper immediately followed West’s appearance with an interview with Democratic Party swamp monster James Carville, who promptly began smearing West as a “menace” and a “threat to the continued constitutional order in the United States.” Carville then went on to assert that former Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who is West’s campaign manager, is “almost certainly an agent of the Russian government.”</bq> <bq>Calling a presidential candidate’s campaign manager a secret Russian agent is about as incendiary an accusation as you can possibly make, and Cooper just accepted it as an established fact and moved on.</bq> <bq>These are the kinds of people who are teaching Americans what to believe about their nation and their world.</bq> The level of brainwashing in that country is breathtaking. <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/journalists-abandoned-julian-assange" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Journalists Abandoned Julian Assange and Slit Their Own Throats</a> <bq>“This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’</bq> <bq>Julian was branded a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called a narcissist and accused of being unhygienic and slovenly. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero.</bq> <bq>“Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide,” Melzer concluded .</bq> <bq>“This was a completely new model of journalism,” she continued. “It is one [that] journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated . They didn’t like the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks was completely reader-funded. Its readers were global and responding enthusiastically. That’s why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America started the banking blockade in December 2010. This has become a standardized model of censorship to demonetize, to cut channels off from their readership and their supporters. The very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks within two or three days of the U.S. State Department cables being published.”</bq> <bq>While Visa cut off WikiLeaks, Stella noted, it continued to process donations to the Ku Klux Klan.</bq> The KKK is an easy target, but harmless to power because it supports existing power structures and serves as a distraction. Therefore, odious as their program is, the KKK get to be a legitimate business. The elites can point to it as "proof" of how freedom- and speech-loving they are. <bq>“For people who come out of university or journalism school, where do you go?” he asked. “People get mortgages. They have kids. They want to have a normal life…You enter the system. You slowly get all your rough edges shorn off. You become part of the uniformity of thought. I saw it explicitly at The Financial Times.”</bq> Well, yeah, duh. It's " the Financial Times". It's right in the name. It's purpose is clear. <bq>The D-notice committee, he explained, is composed of journalists and state security officials in the U.K. who meet every six months. They discuss what journalists can and can’t publish. The committee sends out regular advisories. The Guardian ignored advisories not to publish the revelations of illegal mass surveillance released by Edward Snowden. Finally, under intense pressure, including threats by the government to shut the paper down, The Guardian agreed to permit two Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) officials to oversee the destruction of the hard drives and memory devices that contained material provided by Snowden. The GCHQ officials on July 20, 2013 filmed three Guardian editors as they destroyed laptops with angle grinders and drills. The deputy editor of The Guardian, Paul Johnson — who was in the basement during the destruction of the laptops — was appointed to the D-notice committee. He served at the D-notice committee for four years. In his last committee meeting Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” between the committee and The Guardian. The paper’s adversarial reporting, by then, had been neutralized.</bq> <bq>“The Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan…I don’t know if anyone remembers back in 2003, and I know he is a controversial character and he’s hated by a lot of people, including me, but he was editor at The Daily Mirror. It was a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it’s doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war. He had headlines made out of oil company logos. He did Bush and Blair with blood all over their hands, amazing stuff, every day for months. He had John Pilger on the front page, stuff you would never see now. There was a major street movement against the war. The state thought ‘Shit, this is not good, we’ve gotta clamp down.’”</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://nautil.us/a-third-of-north-americas-birds-have-vanished-340007/" source="Nautilus" author="Anders & Beverly Gyllenhaal">A Third of North America’s Birds Have Vanished</a> <bq>The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows. That equates to 750 million birds,</bq> <bq>Forest birds lost a third of their numbers, or 500 million, including the compact, colorful warblers and speckle-breasted Wood Thrushes that sing like flutes. Common backyard birds experienced a seismic decline. That’s where 90 percent of the total loss of abundance occurred, among just twelve families of the best-known birds—including sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, and finches. There’s been relatively little research on these species, and there’s no sense of urgency when resources are already stretched thin for so many other birds in more dire need.</bq> <bq>After a day and a half of painstaking scrutiny, Smith realized there was no mistake. “I was speechless. We’ve lost almost 30 percent of an entire class of organisms in less than the span of a human lifetime, and we didn’t know it.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/13/lure-j13.html" source="WSWS" author="Niles Niemuth">Extent of record-breaking Canadian wildfire season continues to grow</a> <bq>As of July 12, fires have engulfed nearly 10 million hectares (100,000 square kilometers), a combined area which dwarfs the province of New Brunswick (72,908 square kilometers) or, to provide a US comparison, the state of Maine (79,883 sq. km.). With more than two months still to go in the country’s fire season, the area burned has already outstripped the fire season of 1989, the previous worst on record, when 7.5 million hectares were consumed by flames.</bq> <bq>A recent assessment by the Stanford Environmental Change and Human Outcomes (ECHO) Lab found that 2023 is already the worst year on record for cumulative fine particle smoke (PM2.5) exposure, with the average American experiencing a cumulative 400 micrograms per cubic meter of air. Unusually, most of this exposure has been from the Canadian fires, as the US fire season has yet to begin in earnest. The ECHO Lab has recorded a significant increase in smoke exposure since 2019, with the rate more than doubling.</bq> <bq>With the world experiencing record-breaking heat this year across North America to Asia and Europe, and other effects like flash flooding becoming more frequent, it is apparent that climate change is a global problem and that there will therefore be no solution found on the national level or within the confines of the capitalist nation-state system.</bq> <hr> <bq>There's no objective measure for when air conditioning should come on. People have different heat tolerances, and a lot of humanity doesn't even have access to air conditioning. But studies in the area typically use a measure called cooling degree days. These frequently use an outdoor temperature where things like office buildings or shopping centers would start using their air conditioning—often about 18° C (65° F). For each day that's warmer than the target, the cooling degree days are incremented by the number of degrees by which the target temperature is exceeded.</bq> You start using air-conditioning when it's only 18ºC outside? Well, there's part of the problem right there. <bq>But there is a general lesson: All of this will make decarbonizing even harder. Manufacturing air conditioning equipment is going to take energy. Running it is also going to take energy. And those added demands will come at a time when we should be limiting our energy use in order to get renewables to meet our needs faster. So, that's not ideal.</bq> No shit. It's why the uphill climb is starting to feel like an overhang. <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/16/assange-exposes-the-empires-true-face-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Assange Exposes The Empire’s True Face</a> <bq>The moderate position on Ukraine is to hold both Russia and the US empire responsible for their respective roles in starting and continuing this war. That’s the middle ground. But this position is regarded as freakish fringe extremism in the western mainstream and you’ll be accused of literally conducting psyops for a foreign government if you voice it, because the western mainstream is just that freakishly extremist.</bq> <bq>When you actually spell out what the mainstream position on Ukraine is it sounds like a silly fairy tale for children, but that’s what all the most influential western pundits, politicians and government officials are actually saying.</bq> <bq>The US presidential race is that wonderful season American liberals set aside to remind socialists that they hate them far more than they hate the right and would cheerfully burn the whole country to the ground before they’d share one iota of power with them.</bq> <bq>One reason it’s so hard to set up beneficial systems is because in negotiations manipulators always push for the absolute maximum amount of gain they can possibly grab while good people only push for a normal, human-sized amount of space for themselves. You see this constantly in union negotiations and politics alike: people come to the negotiation table with demands that are viewed as “reasonable” by those in power and then are negotiated back halfway from that point of “reason” as a “compromise”, while those with the power grab up everything they can get their mitts on and walk back only if forced to. This has a ratchet effect over the years which sees ordinary people losing more and more power to the ruling class.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/17/capitalism-is-a-giant-scam/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">Capitalism is a Giant Scam</a> <bq>I could see that these guys and people like them were going to turn consumer ecological responsibility into this trendy elite thing priced way out of range for normal people, and that’s exactly what ended up happening. It wasn’t long before I saw the arrival of eco chic and Whole Foods and Tesla and the rest of this whole new luxury market designed to let rich people feel good about themselves while the world burns and create the illusion that we can profiteer our way out of our problems.</bq> <bq>[...] the price was changed because the market would bear it. The hidden hand of the market was not going to magically restore the product to its “correct” value; the value of such products was going to be determined by the narrative manipulations of entrepreneurs, consultants, con-artists, marketeers and ad-men. “Let the market decide” really means let the manipulators decide, because the markets are dominated by those who excel at manipulating. We’re taught that letting the market decide means letting supply and demand take its natural course, as though we’re talking about ocean tides or seasons or something, but in reality both supply and demand are manipulated constantly with extreme aggression.</bq> <bq>Manipulating people into wanting things they’d never thought to want before through advertising. Manipulating women into feeling bad about their bodies so they’ll buy your beauty products. Manipulating people into paying $2000 for a $20 bag using branding. Manipulating people into buying Listerine by inventing the word “halitosis” and convincing them to be worried about it.</bq> <bq>How can you save the planet from destruction by human behavior when all of human behavior is driven by a bizarre scam competition? And the biggest scam of all is the narrative that this system is totally working and is entirely sustainable. That’s the overarching scam holding all the other scams together. Proponents of capitalism often decry socialism as a coercive system that people are forced to participate in, but what the hell do you call this? Did any of us sign up to be thrown into the middle of a giant unending scam competition? What if I don’t want to spend my whole life being subjected to people’s attempts to trick me? What if I don’t want to live in a society where everyone’s trying to trick and scam each other instead of collaborating toward the greater good of our world? Guess what? I don’t consent to any of that. I am being coerced into this.</bq> <bq>Yes I am coerced into participating in a capitalist society in order to pay the bills and stay alive. That’s the problem I’m trying to address here. It’s like prisoners complaining about the prison system and being called hypocrites because they are in prison.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/15/real-change-is-impossible-while-our-world-is-shrouded-in-secrecy/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">Real Change Is Impossible While Our World Is Shrouded In Secrecy</a> <bq>The fact that all the most important aspects of our civilization’s operation are hidden, manipulated and obfuscated by the powerful makes a joke of the very idea of democracy, because how can people know what government policies to vote for if they can’t even clearly see those policies? How can people know what to vote for when everything about their understanding of the world is being actively distorted for the benefit of the powerful?</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/07/boots-riley-im-a-virgo-racism-capitalism-exploitation-fresh-air-film-review/" source="Jacobin" author="Eileen Jones">Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo Is a Blast of Fresh Air</a> <bq>But it’s so startling to see a series like I’m a Virgo, defying expectations at every turn, that of course I plan to keep on watching. It’s not just the show’s politics that are a rarity in mainstream television, it’s the way the politics have freed the imaginations of the creative team to think of something far different from what we’ve all seen ten thousand times before.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/im-not-trying-to-be-dramatic-but" author="Freddie De Boer" source="SubStack">I'm Not Trying to be Dramatic, But I'm in Hell</a> <bq>Part of what makes finding and sticking with a therapist so difficult is that it’s close to impossible to divide your sense of what you want from a therapist from a broader understanding of what you need from a therapist. Are you sure you don’t like your current therapist because you’re “just not vibing with them”? Are you sure you want to fire your therapist because they seem “toxic”? Or is it because you signed up for therapy expecting it to be a constant exercise in validating everything you think and say and instead you’re one of the lucky few with a therapist who actually does their job and sometimes calls you on your bullshit?</bq> <bq>And here we have a woman who was, at the very least, coerced into unwanted sexual activity and who marks her story with an emoji. I found the replies to this tweet something tragic - people kept saying to her that this scenario wasn’t OK, that this wasn’t something she had to accept, and she reacted with what seemed like genuine confusion. A person who had made a claim of protected status in her social world, the claim of having “alters,” is someone seen as holding the limitless right to overwhelm her basic right to sexual autonomy. Is that the norm, to feel that way? No. Is that extreme? Yes. Is she the product of a youth culture that has become immensely influential and which is busily creating ethical values that are totally alien to the basic moral intuitions many of us hold? Most assuredly, yes.</bq> <bq>Where do I put my anger, here? A bunch of teenagers under the spell of technologies that have compelled them into the most psychically diseased communities possible? The anti-psychiatry cultists, who combine menace and vulnerability in quantities I’ve never observed before? The hive mind of social media, which understands mental illness as it understands all things, as a facile synopsis of itself utilized for the needs of competitive morality? An establishment media which manages to combine the worst instincts of all of them?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank?publication_id=89120&isFreemail=true" source="Astral Codex Ten" author="Scott Alexander">Why Match School And Student Rank?</a> <bq>I heard a fascinating variation of this hypothesis from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House: elite colleges are machines for laundering privilege. That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!</bq> <bq>People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/noam-chomsky/" source="" author="Tyler Cowen">Noam Chomsky on Language, Left Libertarianism, and Progress (Ep. 182)</a> <bq>The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.</bq> <bq>[...] something happened along with the appearance of modern humans, namely the emergence of these capacities that we’re talking about, that amazed Galileo, Humboldt, and others. And nothing’s changed since. There’s been no change that we can detect in the nature of these cognitive capacities, which seem to be species properties of humans in the technical sense, meaning common to all humans (apart from extreme pathology) and completely unique — nothing like them anywhere in the animal world.</bq> <bq>The large language models have a fundamental property which demonstrates that they cannot tell you anything about language and thought. Very simple property: its built-in principle can’t be modified, namely, they work just as well for impossible languages as for possible languages. It’s as if somebody came along with a new periodic table of the elements which included all the elements and all impossible elements and couldn’t make any distinction on them. It would tell us nothing about chemistry. That’s what large language models are. You give them a data set that violates all the principles of language, it will do fine, doesn’t make any distinction. What the systems do, basically, is scan an astronomical amount of data, find statistical regularities, string things together. And using these regularities, they can make a pretty good prediction about what word is likely to come next after a sequence of words. A lot of very clever programming, a lot of massive computer power, and of course, unbelievable amounts of data, but as I say, it does exactly as well with impossible systems as with languages. Therefore, in principle, it’s telling you nothing about language.</bq> Brilliant observation. I hadn't thought of that, but it's an elegant example that pops the bubble of "potential intelligence". <bq>Now, you can take the smartest chimpanzee or the dogs under my desk — they can listen to this noise forever. They have no idea there’s anything there but noise. Well, that’s a fundamental property of humans built in. It’s the reason why you and I can be having this discussion now, but a troop of chimpanzees can’t be.</bq> <bq>It’s important to understand that both Lippmann and Bernays adopted the standard liberal position, that the population is, as the terms were, stupid and ignorant. They don’t know what’s good for them. We, the responsible men, have to do their planning for their benefit, of course. Meanwhile, we have to, as Lippmann put it, protect ourselves from the roar and the trampling of the bewildered herd. A very Leninist doctrine, if you think of it. Very similar rhetoric. That goes right up to the present distinction that was made in the Kennedy years between what were called the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals, the good guys who worked on policy and so on, and the value-oriented intellectuals, the bad guys — what McGeorge Bundy called “the wild men in the wings” — who talk about ridiculous things like justice and rights and so on.</bq> <bq>In any event, manufacture of consent was, just to quote some more Lippmann — he said the public can be spectators but not participants in action. They are not supposed to take part in any public affairs. We do that. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it , they have to be fed necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications while we take care of things for the common good.</bq> <bq>One aspect of this was separating the economy from public affairs.</bq> <bq>Nevertheless, there are grounds. If you look over history, people have organized, resisted, stood up, overthrown repressive autocratic structures, created a broader reign of freedom and justice. Plenty of awful things remain, but if you look back at what used to be perfectly acceptable, you can see we’ve come a long way, even just in the last couple of decades.</bq> <bq>Women were still, in the 1960s, under federal law, not regarded as peers, basically regarded as property. Wasn’t until 1975 that the Supreme Court finally ruled that women have the right to serve on a federal jury , for example, would be peers.</bq> <bq>There are people who understand that, people like former Defense Secretary William Perry, for example. He spent his whole life in the nuclear establishment in the state system. He says he’s terrified, doubly terrified. Terrified once because we’re racing toward disaster day by day. Doubly terrified because there’s no attention being given to it.</bq> <bq>Sometimes it’s just astonishing. The Pew polling agency, a couple of weeks ago, came out with . . . They give regular studies of public attitudes on all sorts of things, very valuable. The latest one, they gave people a couple of dozen choices of issues and asked them to rank them in terms of urgency. Nuclear war was not even on the list. Climate change was on the list. It was ranked at the bottom of the 21 choices. That’s manufacture of consent in a form which is going to destroy us all.</bq> <bq>We have a class-based society, rigid class-based society. The business classes, the ultra-rich are dedicated to class war . They’re basically vulgar Marxists, fight values inverted, constantly fighting a harsh class war. They control the resources, control the institutions, control the economy. So yes, ideas that they don’t like, you don’t hear. Nothing novel about that.</bq> <bq>During the Trump years, there was one major legislation — what Joseph Stiglitz called the Donor Relief Act of 2017 — a tax cut that was a gift to the super-rich in the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else.</bq> <bq>One of the things that the Maoist policies did was save a hundred million people. A hundred million people were saved from death and starvation, as compared with democratic, capitalist India in the same years. You look from 1949 liberation to 1979, compare the demographics of the two countries. There’s a gap of a hundred million people killed in India as compared with China, simply because of the lack of carrying out rural development and healthcare programs.</bq> <bq>Cuba has been under savage attack for 60 years. It’s astonishing that it’s even survived. Well, it’s survived, barely. It has better health statistics than the United States. It’s developed a biomedical system which is one of the wonders of the world despite US sanctions, which are so strict that if Cuba wants something to use for vaccines from Sweden, they can’t get it. The United States is a very violent and brutal country. When the United States imposes sanctions, they are third-party sanctions. Every country in the world has to accept them. The world is overwhelmingly opposed. Look at the United Nations. The votes are 184 to 2, United States and Israel. Total opposition. Everybody obeys the US sanctions out of fear of the most violent country in the world.</bq> <bq>Cowen: And a lot of the health statistics have been revealed to be fraudulent . Latin America can trade with Cuba. You can fly from Mexico to Cuba.</bq> Really? The statistics are fraudulent? According to whom? <bq>We now have to decide within a couple of decades whether the human experiment is going to continue or whether it’ll go down in glorious disaster. That’s what we’re facing. We know answers, at least possible answers to all of the problems that face us. We’re not pursuing them. The leadership is going in the opposite direction. How can anybody relax under these circumstances?</bq> <bq>Cowen: Why do you answer every email? CHOMSKY: Because I take people seriously. I think people deserve respect.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/ubi-sunt" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu / Blaise Agüera y Arcas">Ubi Sunt</a> <bq>I have not seen many compelling literary or artistic treatments, yet, that verisimilitudinously capture this new experience, this “vibe”. I’m grateful that Ubi Sunt now exists, to show us, in language and image, what our new world, as far as I can tell, actually looks like.</bq> I love that adverb. What a triumph! <bq>Cholera, malaria, dysentery, and typhus claimed four times as many lives as the fighting, even prior to the outbreak of the Spanish flu. Not to mention trench fever, trench foot, venereal disease, shell shock, and myriad other afflictions. The germ theory was well established, but antibiotics did not yet exist; medicine offered few cures preferable to the ills they cured.</bq> <bq>The cover letter to Einstein accompanying Schwarzschild’s manuscript both glosses over and, perhaps, subtly alludes to his deteriorating physical condition, closing with the line: “As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow me to escape my terrestrial existence and take this walk in the land of your ideas.” In early 1916, Einstein replied, “I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem in such a simple way. I very much enjoyed your mathematical treatment of the subject. Next Thursday I shall present the work to the Academy with a few words of explanation.”</bq> <bq>For a time, convention held that for an observer at a safe distance, a person will seem to take forever to fall through the event horizon. This turned out to be only half-true. In reality, the falling person’s image will dim and wink out as they approach this threshold, so there’s no way of observing their notionally endless fall from our reference frame. That’s true of all infalling matter, which is why black holes are black.</bq> <bq>[...] technically, it’s dubious to refer to the event horizon as a singularity; it’s more of a coordinate system hiccup. The hiccup doesn’t even appear in Schwarzschild’s original solution. Nonetheless, Singularity people here in California have made it clear that their metaphor refers to the event horizon, not to the so-called “essential” singularity at the center of the black hole. They are referring to a veil beyond which things are unknowable, not a point at which things break down.</bq> <bq>Self-pity is a guilty pleasure—or maybe that’s the feeling of having an excuse to still be in bed at midday. And these are signs of a powerful immune response mobilizing. That’s good. Pain and discomfort are so powerfully modulated by what’s going on in your head, what kind of narrative is attached. I’m convincing myself that this is more like the good-ache of hard exercise than the bad-ache of injury. Though physiologically, I’m not sure there’s much difference.</bq> <bq>Swirling autumn leaves and errant plastic bags dancing across the floor; a skinny man on meth touretting through, somewhere else in his head, bandanna concealing his sunken mouth, his gospel insistent but unintelligible. Nobody seems sure how to gingerly usher him back out. Like a bird trapped inside, dashing itself against things.</bq> <bq>[...] it’s just a question of where in the universe to position my eyes prior to streaming the video into them. And what frustum of light rays to stream back into the camera. Though it increasingly feels like an Amish conceit, I allow real photons to expose the untidiness of the study, the unkemptness of my face, the misalignment of my gaze. While I withhold artifice like a lazy ass Lars von Trier, the people I’m meeting sheepishly, ironically, or triumphantly enter The Matrix one by one, first with the background, then with the foreground going synthetic. It doesn’t really matter; even in Dogma 95 mode, there are a million lines of code mediating us. Authenticity is artifice too.</bq>