<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/07/japan-economic-stagnation-shinzo-abe-liberal-democratic-party-militarism-politics/" source="Jacobin" author="Kristin Surak">Japan’s Long Stagnation Is a Case Study for the Future of Western Capitalism</a> <bq>The collapse of the real estate bubble produced a lot of <b>zombie companies</b>, as they were known, which had much greater debts than assets, but were at the same time too big to fail. These were some of the biggest companies in Japan. <b>The indebted companies were employing people and driving the country forward.</b></bq> <bq>For a period of almost thirty years from the early 1990s, Japan experienced no inflation. People have described it as an entirely comatose economy. There was a very low level of growth — much lower than before. Remarkably, <b>the price of something in 1990 would often still be exactly the same in 2015.</b></bq> That sounds wonderful. They did a national experiment with a no-growth economy. <bq>Historically, there was an image of lifetime employment in Japan: if you got a job with a major company, you were expected to be with that company for life, and you were completely protected. You didn’t have to worry about anything else, because it would be very hard to fire you when you were on a lifetime employment contract. However, <b>by the end of the 1990s, big business was trying to get rid of those lifetime contracts, reducing their scope to about 10 percent of the workforce. Today in Japan, about 60 percent of the workforce is in fixed-term contract work — that is, work without a secure future.</b></bq> <bq>There has also been a great rise in inequality, and <b>Japan is now one of the most unequal countries in the OECD.</b> There used to be an idea that everybody in Japan was middle class, but that certainly isn’t the case anymore. The <b>overall poverty rate is now about 15 percent, rising to approximately one-third of elderly people</b>, who make up a huge proportion of the Japanese population. Coming on top of all the deregulation, this has hit people very hard.</bq> <bq>The social welfare net has been rolled back as people move into work that is more temporary, because the people who are on permanent contracts receive better pensions, health care, bonuses, and so on. <b>Japan has become noticeably more divided and unequal, with more people falling behind during this period of deregulation.</b></bq> <bq>It’s quite pathetic. If you look at positions of power or leadership, women usually hold around 10 to 15 percent of seats in the national parliament, and around 15 percent of business and management roles. <b>About a third of all major firms in Japan have no female executives at all.</b> The targets they set for increasing the number of women in such positions, aiming to reach 20 percent, are still very low.</bq> <bq>[...] the system would encourage women to only get part-time jobs in which they earned less than £10,000 a year, because it made more economic sense to stay on the better pension scheme and health insurance of their husbands. <b>There were a lot of ways in which the system made it more rational for women to work in part-time jobs and not earn too much money while they were also taking care of the family.</b></bq> <bq><b>Foreigners still account for just over 2 percent of the Japanese population</b>, which is tiny in comparison to the United States or the UK or even Russia.</bq> That's absolutely minuscule; very interesting. <bq>There are some efforts to bring Korean and Chinese students into the country, because the low birth rates mean that universities don’t have enough Japanese youth to fill all the places that they have available. There are schemes to keep graduates of Japanese universities on in the country for a couple of years. But <b>it’s very hard to become a Japanese citizen, and Japan is still a closed country to a considerable extent.</b></bq> <bq>By the time of his death, Abe was much closer to achieving his goal of constitutional revision. The renunciation of war in the postwar constitution was very important for Japanese national identity, but its significance has been declining. <b>The number of people who think that Japan should never fight a war again or who support Article IX of the constitution is now somewhere around 50 percent.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-287-ass-82133648" source="Patreon" author="True Anon">Episode 287: Creative Ass</a> At <b>25:00</b>, there's an amazing discussion of homogeneity in building and construction. Again, capitalism and abstracted investment, interested only in returns, is the problem. <hr> <a href="https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1687155863453122577" author="Alan MacLeod" source="">This planet will not survive capitalism.</a> <img attachment="pearsgrowninargentinapackedinthailand.jpg" align="none" caption="Pears grown in Argentina; packed in Thailand"> The packaging says pears grown in Argentina, then packed in Thailand, then sold in the U.S. <hr> <a href="https://www.theonion.com/there-s-never-been-a-better-time-to-be-rich-in-america-1850722321" author="" source="The Onion">There’s Never Been A Better Time To Be Rich In America, So Why Aren’t Poor People Happy For Them?</a> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/15i9fnp/this_is_why_nobody_gives_a_shit_about_aliens/" author="saphirawater" source="Reddit">This is why nobody gives a shit about aliens</a> <bq>Let's just say this is real and not a blue beans ops. I still would give zero shits if a fucking ayyy landed on my neighbor's front fucking lawn. It would have zero effect on my life. <b>Unless their asses come over to my house and make a fucking star trek replicator where I don't have to pay 20 dollars for a T-bone, I don't give any fucks.</b> "Oh look we have cool flying ships!" I don't give a fuck. I work from home. I don't need to commute anymore. Plus I can't afford to register and insure that shit. <b>"Oh we can travel to different dimensions!". Oh cool, is there a dimension where I don't need to work to survive? No? Then, I don't give a fuck.</b> "Oh look we are going to kill all your important people!" Yay!. Keep it up!</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=586SO9-wWoA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/586SO9-wWoA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Adam Something" caption="Why US Malls Are Dying (And Why European Malls Aren't)"> <ol> Purchasing power has increased in Europe, while the U.S. has allowed entire swaths of the country to drop precipitously---e.g., the Rust Belt, The Appalachians, The Rural South, and even large parts of the West Coast. The U.S. absolutely drowned the market in oversupply, with e.g., 10x as much commercial space per capita than Germany. Europe generally has much stricter commerical regulation, which <iq>Libertarians call 'government red tape crippling the economy,' while adults call it 'necessary regulations to avoid mass closures and urban decay.'</iq> The oversupply also means that a large part of the malls are of very low quality and are already falling apart. <div>Bad urban planning is absolutely the most important reason: the U.S. has not designed anything to be nice and easy and convenient to get to, least of all malls. You have to drive everywhere and driving is, quite frankly, tedious. You can't walk or cycle or use public transportation. There is no nature or trees or ponds or anything to make the experience pleasant. You wouldn't walk to a mall for a coffee. My God, the notion is ludicrous. People would say 'that's not what it's for!' But why not? A shopping center should be a town square, else no-one will go unless they actually need something. From somewhere about 3/4 of the way through the video, <bq><b>American malls are usually not built near any meaningful public transit. In fact, they are usually not built near any meaningful <i>place</i></b>. Compare these four European malls---two from Prague and two from Budapest---with these four American malls---from Phoenix, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, and Orlando. The reason why Amazon---and similar online commerce platforms---cannot compete with the first group, but can threaten the second group is because malls in the first group are integrated into the city. <b>The surrounding environment isn't just a parking lot. There are things to do and see, and you can end up in those malls completely organically---as in: unplanned---as you're walking around downtown.</b> With the second group, you have to make a conscious effort to go there: nobody will trudge through a kilometer of parking lot on foot. The GPS won't take you there spontaneously. <b>You have to make the decision at home to go there, and then make the effort. And then companies like Amazon come along and say, 'hey buddy, we can save you all that effort.'</b></bq></div> </ol> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/11/roaming-charges-mad-at-the-world/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Mad at the World</a> <bq><b>With a $53 billion endowment, Harvard</b> is the world’s richest university. This week it <b>advised struggling grad students to go on food stamps.</b> Really, who would want to go here?</bq> <bq>The chip war, like any other war, on China seems destined to backfire, in part because <b>China possesses near sole access to materials that you can’t make but you need to manufacture the products needed to survive on a warming planet.</b> As the FT notes: “China is responsible for the production of 90% of the world’s rare earth elements, 80% of all the stages of making solar panels and 60% of wind turbines and electric-car batteries. <b>In some materials used in batteries, market share is close to 100%.</b>”</bq> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/nurses-fight-godzilla" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Nurses Fight Godzilla</a> <bq><b>The front line against corporate tyranny is not the ballot box. It is in the desperate struggle by the overworked and underpaid to prevent corporate behemoths from turning everyone into gig workers without health and retirement benefits, job security, sustainable incomes or equitable working conditions.</b> Nurses, battered by the almost inhuman demands put on them during the pandemic, have been especially hard hit. Almost one-third of New Jersey’s nurses have left the profession in the last three years.</bq> <bq><b>RWJBarnabas Health</b>, which owns 12 acute care hospitals, including Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and four specialty hospitals, is the largest healthcare provider in the state of New Jersey. Its <b>37,000 employees, including 9,000 physicians</b>, care for more than three million patients a year. <b>It has $6.6 billion in annual revenue. It is registered as a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit charitable organization.</b></bq> <bq>In a move that backfired, one of the deans from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers, Dr. Carol Terregino, sent an email to second, third and fourth year medical students asking them to volunteer when nurses go on strike. She said the students would be “answering call bells, checking in on patients and supporting the replacement nursing staff.” <b>The medical students refused, writing back that “the request to provide unpaid labor in jobs we are not trained to do at the expense of our own educational programming raises concerns about exploitation and risks creating an unsafe environment for patients.”</b></bq> Also, it's a scab move. They would have been undermining the nurse's strike with uncompensated labor---and for what? <bq><b>In 1975 the U.S. had about 1.5 million hospital beds and a population of about 216 million people. Now, with a population of over 330 million people, we have around 925,000 beds.</b> Fifty-six percent of Americans have medical debt and 23 percent owe $10,000 or more, according to a study by Affordable Health Insurance. The study found emergency room visits contributed to medical debt for 44 percent of Americans. <b>Some 330,000 Americans died during the pandemic because they could not afford to go to a doctor on time.</b></bq> <bq>[...] many of the functions once carried out by doctors have been turned over to nurses. <b>The heavy turnover means nurses with little experience are in senior positions in critical and acute care units, such as the ER.</b> Nurses said they often come to work sick to spare their short-staffed colleagues an onerous workload.</bq> <bq>In 2022, the former CEO of Barnabas, Barry Ostrowsky, was paid more than $16 million. <b>In 2020, the CEOs of 178 major healthcare companies collectively made $3.2 billion in total compensation, an increase of 31 percent from 2019</b>, all in the midst of the pandemic. According to Axios, in 2020, the CEO of Cigna made $79 million, the CEO of Centene made $59 million, and the CEO of UnitedHealth Group received $42 million in total compensation.</bq> <bq>“We have to educate ourselves and others. Health is fundamental. There is no incremental way that we can do this. <b>We cannot work within the for-profit system to fix this problem. We have to nationalize our healthcare system.</b> This means getting the profit out completely.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/03/scott-ritter-the-executioners-lament/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">The Executioner’s Lament</a> <bq>Concerned about the possibility of the B-29 crashing on takeoff, thereby triggering the explosive charge that would send the uranium slug into the uranium core (the so-called gun device), the decision was made that <b>the final assembly of the bomb would be done only after the Enola Gay took off. One of the 1st Ordnance Squadron technicians placed the uranium slug into the bomb at 7,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean.</b></bq> <bq>For the pilot and crew of the Enola Gay, there was no remorse over killing so many people. “I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we’d be doing that I thought, <b>yes, we’re going to kill a lot of people, but by God we’re going to save a lot of lives</b>,’ Tibbets recounted to Studs Terkel in 2002 . He added: “We won’t have to invade [Japan]. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people,” <b>Tibbets told Terkel. “If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians.’ That’s their tough luck for being there.”</b></bq> The sentiment of a member of a nation completely free of ethics, morals, principles, or even the rudiments of philosophy. <bq>Major Charles Sweeney, the pilot of <b>Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the second American atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki</b> on Aug. 9, 1945, held similar convictions about his role in killing 35,000 Japanese instantly.</bq> <bq>Those who will execute the orders to use nuclear weapons in any future nuclear conflict will, in fact, execute those orders. <b>They are trained, like Tibbets and Sweeney, to believe in the righteousness of their cause.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/02/niger-is-the-fourth-country-in-the-sahel-to-experience-an-anti-western-coup/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad & Kambale Musavuli">Niger is the Fourth Country in the Sahel to Experience an Anti-Western Coup</a> <bq>At the heart of the “corruption” is the so-called “joint venture” between Niger and France called Société des mines de l’Aïr (Somaïr), which owns and operates the uranium industry in the country. Strikingly, <b>85 percent of Somaïr is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies, while only 15 percent is owned by Niger’s government.</b></bq> <bq>Half of Niger’s export receipts are from sales of uranium, oil, and gold. <b>One in three lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium from Niger, at the same time as 42 percent of the African country’s population lived below the poverty line.</b></bq> <bq>Traoré reacted strongly to the condemnation of the military coups in the Sahel, including to a recent visit to his country by an African Union delegation. <b>“A slave that does not rebel does not deserve pity,” he said . “The African Union must stop condemning Africans who decide to fight against their own puppet regimes of the West.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=101933" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Pennys „wahre Kosten“ – Zynismus in Reinkultur</a> <bq>Leidtragende dieser Entwicklung sind vor allem die Bauern, die von der Einkaufsmacht der <b>vier Handelskonzerne, die zusammen 85 Prozent des deutschen Lebensmittelmarktes unter sich ausmachen</b>, die Einkaufspreise diktiert bekommen.</bq> <bq><b>Man instrumentalisiert Armut als Ausrede für den Missbrauch der Marktmacht der großen Handelskonzerne</b>, die ihrerseits den Bauern Dumpingpreise abpressen, zu denen nun einmal ökonomisch gar keine verantwortungsbewusste Produktion der Lebensmittel möglich ist.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>was nützt diese Erkenntnis, wenn der sicherlich klimafreundlicher produzierte Biokäse so teuer ist, dass ihn sich viele Geringverdiener ohnehin nicht leisten können?</b> Muss nun etwa die Rentnerin mit ihrem Penny-Maasdamer ein schlechtes Gewissen haben? Und der Besserverdiener mit seinem Biokäse ist fein raus? Prima, dann sei ihm ja der neue Audi Q8, die wohlverdiente Auszeit auf den Malediven und der Business-Trip nach New York vergeben. Und <b>was hält Penny eigentlich davon, Erdbeeren aus Marokko oder Äpfel aus Südafrika aus dem Sortiment zu nehmen? Sind die etwa gut für das Klima?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/02/how-to-ignore-4-5-million-deaths/" source="Scheer Post" author="Bryce Greene">How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths</a> <bq>No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes. How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine ( New Press ), offers a deep look at <b>the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.</b></bq> <bq>US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” <b>One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”</b></bq> <bq>These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. <b>Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/02/patrick-lawrence-reading-the-mess-the-democrats-have-made/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Reading the Mess the Democrats Have Made</a> <bq>[...] the <b>Democrats</b> have emerged since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 as a party of <b>liberal authoritarians intent on imposing their political hegemony on our republic by whatever means</b> this project requires. Nothing is out of bounds, as these people have already demonstrated. Two, in what looks like one of the great political miscalculations in my lifetime, the Democrats are <b>determined to stand a candidate in 2024 whose senility has been publicly on display for the past two years and change.</b></bq> <bq>Here is John Mearsheimer, the prominent foreign relations scholar, on this point during an interview The Grayzone published Sunday:<bq>I think it was stupidity. <b>I think you can’t underestimate just how foolish the West is when it comes to the whole question of Ukraine</b>—and all sorts of other issues as well. But I think that the West believed—and here we’re talking mainly about the United States—that if a war did break out between Ukraine and Russia, that the West plus Ukraine would prevail, that the Russians would be defeated. I believe we thought that was the case.</bq></bq> <bq>Not even Biden knows what <b>Bidenomics</b> is supposed to be about. It comes to little more than citations of <b>job numbers that do not mean much unless wage numbers are also considered</b>, and wage numbers are left out of the Bidenomics equation.</bq> <bq><b>A federal judge in Delaware has thrown back Hunter’s disgraceful plea bargain, rejecting the preposterous provision that the president’s son be immune from all future findings of corruption.</b> “The blanket shield against any other charges based on past misconduct was so inappropriate,” Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post over the weekend, “that the only possible explanation is that the aim was to shut down the probe of the family permanently.” No, they are not insentient. They are desperate.</bq> <bq>[...] turned the agency into a politicized instrument at the Democratic Party’s disposal, most recently by withholding for several years documents exposing Joe Biden’s direct involvement in Hunter’s influence-peddling schemes. <b>Anyone who does not recognize the political motives of Garland’s campaign to get Donald Trump jailed and, on the other side, his direction of the Hunter Biden plea deal, is reading too many Gail Collins columns.</b></bq> <bq>Look at this mess. <b>A senile president—the physicians call Biden’s condition “neurocognitive disorder,” but “senile” or “demented” is what they mean—is standing for reelection with a wasteful proxy war failing, nothing much to show for himself at home, mounting evidence of epic-scale personal corruption, institutional failure of the same magnitude:</b> There is only one way to explain this shambles: Every one of these crises traces back to the Democratic Party’s obsession with taking and holding power more or less indefinitely to suit its hubristic, end-of-history “narrative” of righteous liberal triumph. I do not approve of columnists who self-reference, but I will breach my own rule on this occasion. <b>I warned when all this started in 2016–2017 that liberal authoritarianism was vastly more dangerous than Trump’s arrival on the political scene. And here we are.</b></bq> <bq>Even among those driven by purely partisan sentiment, it is a very grave matter to impeach a president when you know you have the goods on him. <b>The Trump impeachments were spectacle and intended as such. The material coming to the surface against Biden is entirely more serious.</b></bq> <bq>Two weeks after I voted for the first and last time in my life, for <b>Bill Clinton</b> in 1998, he <b>sent a cruise missile into the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan to get people to stop thinking about his pleasures with Monica Lewinsky.</b></bq> This is 100% true. Mostly forgotten, but sadly and grossly indicative of how Americans think: anything is allowed if you're defending you and yours---as long as the victims are "others". <bq>Archer, formerly in business with Hunter Biden, was previously found guilty of some kind of swindle involving fraudulent bonds and was awaiting his reporting date to begin serving a sentence of one year and one day. No date had been set. Now to the chase: Archer was scheduled to appear at a House Oversight Committee hearing early this week, during which he was expected to testify under oath that he was present on various occasions when Joe and Hunter Biden conducted their influence-peddling business. Out of nowhere, the DoJ ordered him over the weekend to report immediately to the prison where he was to begin serving his sentence. <b>At one point, Archer was reported to be in hiding—in hiding from the judicial authorities charged with enforcing the law. And immediate uproar—James Comer, who chairs Oversight, denounced the move as straight-out obstruction of justice—appears to have forced the DoJ to relent. Archer testified for several hours behind closed doors on Monday.</b></bq> At least there's still the possibility of bucking the DOJ for now. <bq>The spin coming out of the Democratic quadrant since Archer’s testimony is quite beyond belief. Hunter wasn’t peddling access to Joe: That was just a ruse to fool those with whom he was dealing. All those telephone calls were just father-son stuff. <b>Yes, he met some of Hunter’s business “associates” and, yes, there were dinners at Georgetown restaurants, but it was all just “casual conversation.” They talked about “the weather.”</b></bq> <bq><b>Lies told straight to our faces. More or less complete unaccountability. Lawlessness in the name of the law. This is what I mean by acts of desperation.</b> And what I mean when I suggest we must brace ourselves for what is to come.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2023/07/28/ukraines-baby-factories-profits-war/" source="The Gray Zone" author="Jeremy Loffredo">Ukraine’s baby factories rake in record profits amid chaos of war</a> <bq>Eight years of civil war followed by a proxy war between NATO nations and Russia has plunged Ukraine into economic disaster. <b>As its citizens sank into poverty, the country swiftly emerged as the international epicenter for surrogacy, and now controls at least a quarter of the global market.</b></bq> <bq>The <b>BioTexCom Center for Reproduction</b> is by far the biggest player in the international surrogacy market. The owner of the “reproductive technology services” claimed in 2018 that the company <b>controlled a mammoth 70% of the national surrogacy market and a full 25% of the global market.</b></bq> <bq>BioTexCom’s Medical Director, Ihor Pechenoha, openly admitted to the Spanish investigative magazine La Marea that his company targets women from poor areas, and that “all those who work as surrogate mothers do so out of financial hardship.” “<b>We are looking for women in the former Soviet republics because, logically, [the women] have to be from poorer places than our clients</b>,” Pechenoha explained. Ultimately, he added, “<b>I have not met a single woman with a good economic situation who has decided to go through this process</b> out of kindness, because she thinks she has enough children and wants to help someone else who wants them.”</bq> <bq>Emma Lamberton, the author of the Princeton report on Ukraine’s surrogacy industry, noted BioTexCom is actually a foreign company operating inside of Ukraine. <b>Documents from the firm’s website suggest the company is registered in Switzerland.</b></bq> <bq>After birth, many infants are kept under lock and key in hotels with militarized security until their purchasers arrive to pick them up. As the Guardian reported in 2020 : “<b>These newborns</b> are not in the nursery of a maternity hospital, they <b>are lined up side by side in two large reception rooms of the improbably named Hotel Venice on the outskirts of Kyiv, protected by outer walls and barbed wire.</b>”</bq> <bq>In October 2022, The New York Times published an article that could have been drawn directly from BioTexCom marketing material. <b>The Times</b> framed the resumption of BioTexCom’s surrogacy operations in the midst of a war with Russia as a valiant act of patriotic defiance, <b>describing the baby business as “an industry that many childless people rely on.”</b></bq> <bq>When asked by the Ukrainian journalist how BioTexCom plans to resolve the legal and ethical issues around engineering and organizing baby factories, the CEO replied that the answer was simple: eliminate outside oversight. <b>“The most important thing,” he insisted, “is to prohibit law enforcement agencies from interfering in the work.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/31/scott-ritter-requiem-for-natos-nightmare/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">Requiem for NATO’s Nightmare</a> <bq><b>The Vilnius summit on July 11-12 in many ways represented the high-water mark of Europe’s old order.</b> The summit was the requiem for a nightmare of Europe’s own creation — the death of a nation, the nullification of a continent and the end of an order which had long ago lost its legitimacy.</bq> <bq>Left unsaid is that <b>Erdogan had to threaten NATO to get the U.S. to articulate a bribe that had the U.S. waiving its prior sanctioning of a NATO ally</b> while at the same time compelling the U.S. to consider the security implications of the deal, given the open hostility that exists between Turkey and fellow NATO member Greece.</bq> <bq>The Ukrainian counteroffensive was formed around a core force of some 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers who received special training by NATO and European militaries on weapons and tactics designed to defeat Russian defenses. Since the counteroffensive began on June 8, <b>Ukraine has lost nearly half of these troops, and a third of the equipment provided — including scores of the Leopard main battle tanks and Bradly infantry fighting vehicles that had been viewed by many as game-changing technology.</b></bq> <bq><b>Left unspoken are the hundreds of thousands of body bags that have already been lowered into the dark soil of Ukraine</b>, highlighting the callous disregard for that human tragedy by the Vilnius attendees.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/31/unsh-j31.html" source="WSWS" author="Nick Beams">China’s rising youth unemployment portends major social struggles</a> <bq>The most recent data showed that the unemployment rate for urban youth aged 16 to 24 years old was 21.3 percent, a record high, reflecting a continuing upward trend. In reality, the figure could be much higher. Earlier this month a Peking University professor, Zhang Dandan, wrote an online article in the financial magazine Caixin, stating that <b>if 16 million non-students staying at home and relying on their parents were included then the real youth jobless rate could be as high at 46.5 percent.</b></bq> <bq>“<b>Two thirds of the young people entering the labour market in China right now below the age of 24 are not college graduates, but have high school education or less.</b> This reflects the fact that 40 percent of Chinese young people do not make it into tertiary education. Indeed, a substantial minority barely finish high school and they make up the majority of people who enter the labour market ‘early’.”</bq> <bq>According to official data, <b>the number of so-called “flexibly employed” has reached 200 million or 27 percent of the working population.</b> Other estimates put the number at 250 million.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2023/07/bringing-war-home-to-border-to-make.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">Bringing the War Home to the Border to Make Imperialism Great Again</a> <bq><b>The man is a pathological liar with a long and well documented career of saying quite literally everything and anything to make a buck and keep his cojones out of the fire.</b> Just try taking a jog through the ruins of Atlantic City without a fully automatic Uzi if you don't fucking believe me.</bq> <bq><b>Orange-Man-Bad's America First strip tease was just his latest sales pitch but after eight years of George W. Bush and another eight of his mentholated doppelganger, Barack Obama</b>, a lot of disgruntled conservatives and independents were just pissed off enough to buy it, hook, line and sinker.</bq> <bq>[...] that walking jack-o-lantern did succeed in lighting a fire under right-wing isolationism that has significantly altered the DNA of America's bipartisan combat addiction. <b>Trump may be full of shit but the wave of rural disgust with America's runaway war machine that he inadvertently gave license to is not</b> and the recent wave of conservative dissent against Joe Biden's reckless proxy war in Ukraine proves it.</bq> <bq>But spectacle is not always reality, and you don't have to scratch the GOP's newfound isolationist rhetoric very hard to smell an illusion. <b>While half the GOP may be running for reelection on cutting arms shipments to Ukraine, the entire party remains frighteningly united on redirecting them much closer to home with an open shooting war at the border.</b></bq> <bq>Yep, that's right folks, the "isolationists" want to declare war on Mexico and the neocons and neoliberals do to. <b>Longshot Ziocon heartthrob Nikki Haley has joined her critics in the chorus by calling to send US Special Forces into Mexico to attack the cartels "just like we dealt with ISIS."</b> And none other than Hillary's 2016 VP pick, Senator Tim Kaine, is pushing bipartisan legislation to have fentanyl declared a "national security threat" as we speak.</bq> <bq>Plan Colombia, a Clinton/Bush era military crusade that was supposed to cleanse the Andes of the great white scourge of cocaine. The only thing it really achieved aside from mugging taxpayers of billions of dollars was help Colombia's despicably corrupt police state to expand its presence deep into the farthest reaches of the Amazon Jungle where <b>they carried out multiple genocides against indigenous people who had the misfortune of existing on territory slated for rape by American mining conglomerates.</b></bq> <bq>A lot of people forget that <b>old Dubya actually ran against Al Gore in 2000 as a quasi-isolationist promising an end to feckless globalist campaigns like Clinton's "humanitarian" disaster in the Balkans.</b> Then a few Saudis chucked some jetliners into Manhattan and the feeding frenzy began all over again.</bq> <bq>In 2024, the closest thing the war machine has to 9/11 is the Fentanyl Crisis. Another colossal clusterfuck of imperial blowback brought on by Big Pharma and Big Prohibition. Their hope is to sell forever war back to MAGA isolationists by cleverly labeling it as a matter of territorial integrity. But <b>if paleos foolishly believe that this thing is going to stop with a few drone strikes in Sinaloa then I have some swampland in Guantanamo Bay to sell them.</b></bq> <bq>We are also talking quite glibly about expanding this war to China by blaming a rising superpower for our nation's appetite to alter its own consciousness just <b>because Beijing happens to be home to the labs that make the best precursors for our current fix of choice.</b></bq> <bq>Rabid animals like Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis don't want peace and isolation. They want to make America great again and prevent a nuclear confrontation with Russia by making forever war great again on our own borders and provoking a nuclear confrontation with China. <b>This isn't populist regime change; it's imperial rebranding and you people should be smart enough by now not to buy this trash for the fiftieth goddamn time in a row. Justin Raimondo weeps.</b></bq> <bq><b>This screed is devoted in loving memory to Sinead O'Connor, a ferocious woman with a loud voice who gave a frightened little girl inside a broken man the courage to stand taller than towers.</b> She will not be forgotten and that is a promise you will have to kill me not to keep.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/30/five-myths-in-the-house-anti-trans-hearing-against-gender-affirming-care/" source="Scheer Post" author="Erin Reed">Five Myths In The House Anti-Trans Hearing Against Gender Affirming Care</a> <bq>Numerous studies have shown that it leads to positive psychological outcomes and reduces suicide rates significantly—some studies report a remarkable 73% decrease in suicide rates. <b>The endorsement of gender affirming care is supported by a collection of over 50 papers compiled by Cornell University, all of which underscore its beneficial effects.</b> Hence, gender affirming care is not an “unhealthy decision” but rather a medically sound approach grounded in scientific evidence, which greatly benefits transgender individuals who genuinely require it.</bq> That's a very carefully designed formulation that avoids mentioning that we are far from any conclusive evidence. The words <iq>supported</iq> and <iq>underscored</iq> lie closer to the realm of opinion than established scientific fact. It's fine, but it still doesn't solve the problem of who decides who gets gender-affirming care. The child? The child's parents? What if they disagree? One parent? Teachers who think the child shows signs? A psychologist? A doctor? How do you ensure that the care is provided to benefit the child/person rather than a profit motive or agenda? How do you ensure the child is making the correct life-altering and irreversible decision? This also goes for when a child does not get gender-affirming care, but should have. <bq>Under the current law, if transgender youth seek shelter, the shelter must report their presence to their parents immediately. However, <b>the bill adds an exception to this parental notification requirement, specifically when these youth have sought or are trying to access gender-affirming care or abortion services</b> and have reason to believe their parents will withhold them.</bq> But that's patently fucked up, no? The kids running away will exploit this loophole so their parents aren't notified and their decisions are left in the hands of strangers, who know better than the parents. Sliding toward state as cult. <bq>The bill is a compassionate solution to an existing problem in the state, not a means for the state to “take kids away and trans them.”</bq> Only in the most generous and unrealistic light. <bq>[...] it is essential to note that <b>transgender youth under 12 receive no medical interventions at all.</b> For this age group, the transition is primarily social, involving the use of a new name, preferred pronouns, haircut, and clothing choice.</bq> <bq>[...] even among adults, <b>the rate of gender reassignment surgery remains relatively low, with 1% for transgender men and 10% for transgender women.</b> Therefore, there is no basis for the claim of a “fast track to gender reassignment surgery” for transgender patients of any age.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/30/chris-hedges-the-forgotten-victims-of-americas-class-war/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">The Forgotten Victims of America’s Class War</a> <bq>The two American flags on the wall flanking the oval mirror. The plaque that reads: <b>“If a Man is Alone In the Woods, With No Woman to Hear Him, Is He Still Wrong?”</b></bq> You cannot argue with the basic humor of that. Every man I told this to in Central NY laughed ruefully; every woman simply said "yes." <bq>The bank in the center of town closed. It is now a photographer’s studio and a hair salon. <b>There is a casino in the town of Oxford which, like lottery tickets, functions as a stealth tax on the poor.</b> The day I visit, a fundraiser is being held at an ice cream shop for an eight-year-old boy who needs a kidney transplant.</bq> <bq>My grandfather had little use for Blacks, Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, communists, foreigners or anyone from Boston. <b>If you weren’t white, Protestant and from Mechanic Falls, you were far down on the racial and social ladder.</b> I cannot imagine him inviting the Wangs over for dinner.</bq> <bq>Maurice went with the regiment to the South Pacific, fighting in Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, the Russell Islands, New Georgia Islands, New Guinea and Luzon in the Philippines. He was wounded. <b>He returned to Mechanic Falls physically and psychologically broken. He worked in my uncle’s lumber mill, but often disappeared for days. He never spoke about the war. He lived in a trailer and drank himself to death.</b></bq> <bq>Maine breeds eccentrics. Nancy and Eriks tell me about Mesannie Wilkins , buried in the town cemetery, who in 1955, five weeks before her 63rd birthday, was told she had two to four years to live. The bank was poised to foreclose on her home. She decided, if life was to be that short and she was homeless, to ride horseback from Maine to California. She left town with $ 32 in her pocket. <b>She rode a horse named King. Depeche Toi, her dog, rode a rusty black horse named Tarzan. Mesannie, who made the seven-thousand-mile journey in 16 months dressed in a hunting cap with earflaps and lumberman’s felt boots, lived for another 25 years.</b></bq> <bq><b>“He saw bad stuff,” she says. “They would interrogate Vietcong and throw them alive out of the helicopters.</b> He had flashbacks. He would re-enact events. One night he forced me to crawl under the jeep yelling ‘They’re here! They’re here!’ <b>He really believed in this country. He didn’t want to know he went to war for nothing.</b>”</bq> What do you do with that? People go insane trying keep the myth alive. <bq><b>We cannot dismiss and demonize rural white Americans. The class war waged by corporations and the ruling oligarchs has devastated their lives and communities. They have been betrayed. They have every right to be angry.</b> That anger can sometimes be expressed in inappropriate ways, but they are not the enemy. They too are victims. In my case, they are family. I come from here. <b>Our fight for economic justice must include them. We will wrest back control of our nation together or not at all.</b></bq> Amen, brother. Took the words out of my mouth. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/05/caitlin-johnstone-disrupt-the-culture-wars/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Scheer Post">Disrupt The Culture Wars</a> <bq><b>The worse things get the more urgent the need to fight the class war will become, and the more urgent the need to fight the class war becomes the more vitriolic and intense the artificial culture war will become in order to prevent political changes which inconvenience the powerful.</b> This is 100 percent guaranteed. And what’s tricky is that all the vitriolic intensity will create the illusion that the <i>culture war</i> has gotten more important, when in reality the <i>class war</i> has.</bq> <bq>How fucked up is it that the most influential voices in our society on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide are <b>facilitating the abuse of marginalized groups in order to protect the powerful?</b></bq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="" author="" source=""></a> <bq>In April 2022, creator Paulomi Dholakia had some thoughts about Disney. Specifically, she was upset the company didn’t seem to be promoting the Ms. Marvel series, which features the franchise’s first Muslim superhero, as much as it had promoted its other series, like Hawkeye. She first posted this opinion on TikTok, and after people agreed with her, she brought the same video to Instagram. “It went viral in a very bad way,” Dholakia says. Instead of support, or civil discussion, she was met with comments like “F*ck you you clout chasing b*tch.” “It made me feel so self-conscious, that maybe I don’t need to say stuff,” she says. <b>Dholakia, who is 31 years old and aspiring to a full-time career as a travel agent, had been sharing more on social media to build business opportunities</b>, but the incident exposed the challenges of virality. “I try not to mess up, try not to stir the pot, and that’s probably why I’m not going to get anywhere on social media,” she concedes. “Because <b>if you don’t stir the pot or you don’t put yourself out there in a very raw, authentic way, then why are people watching you?</b>” Dholakia grew up in an online environment that encourages users to share everything from their thoughts on politics to their takes on pop culture. But <b>as the online landscape has grown into an all-encompassing digital town square, experiences like Dholakia’s have prompted her and other former social media power users to throw their hands up and admit “opinion fatigue.”</b></bq> This is just incredible, really, a completely alien lifestyle---almost another culture or species. The degree to which people don't understand how humanity works is astounding. They think that they have unfettered access to only positive feedback when they publish to the whole world at once on a very public platform. Just. Tell. Your. Friends. FFS. The Internet is not your friends. I suppose it starts with a 31-year-old who <iq>aspires</iq> to be a travel agent as the interview subject. That an actual online magazine thought to interview this obvious dodo is astounding. That she is offended that the world doesn't have overwhelmingly positive feedback for her opinions is icing on the cake. When she gets negative feedback, her answer is to <iq>throw [her] hands up</iq> and stop trying. That goes a long way to explaining why she's still "aspiring" to be something that is no longer relevant today (a travel agent), at 31 years old. <bq>“People feel like they finally have a voice,” says Linda Charmaraman, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab. “People want to feel validated. ‘Do you agree with me? What do you think?’ And just trying to keep up that engagement is a game in itself.”</bq> Next is a Ph.D. from the <iq>Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab</iq>. JFC. Do I even need to go on? <iq>People want to feel validated.</iq> Of course they do. But is it useful for society to reward everyone for every goddamned thing that falls out of their undereducated heads? That's what you have friends for: to help you figure out which opinions are bone-headed and which ones aren't. Since they're your friends, they might let you down easier (depending on what kind of friends you have). The Internet is not obliged to treat your completely unknown and anonymous ass in the same way. For God's sake, this is not rocket science. If you want to post something, post it on your own private site and don't allow comments---or only allow moderated comments, or ... whatever. Stop seeking the validation of strangers instead of people you know and love, is, I think, what I'm saying here. Blogs were already the correct solution at the beginning; they're the correct solution now. Stop trying to be viral and stop trying to figure out how to turn a single opinion of yours into a career. Just stop. Society doesn't need your bullshit. <bq>[...] silence on a prominent political or social issue can be interpreted as complicity. It took Taylor Swift three years to disavow white supremacy after the Daily Stormer referred to her as “pure Aryan goddess,” revealing her status as an (unintentional) neo-Nazi idol. She told Rolling Stone in 2019 that she wasn’t aware of how her image had been co-opted and attributed her silence to a “sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won.” For much of the public, however, this explanation was too little, too late.</bq> This entire paragraph is utter nonsense. This is no way to run a society. Why in God's name are people so stupid and petty? Who cares what other people think? You have to officially come out against white supremacy now? Because if you don't, people will think you're totally for it. Fuck those people, then. They're just karma-whoring on your reputation (especially TV shows in the traditional media, BTW). Do not give in to them and allow them to control how to waste your time. <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02445-4" source="Nature" author="McKenzie Prillaman">Four key questions on the new wave of anti-obesity drugs</a> <bq>People with type 2 diabetes, for instance, tend to lose less weight than do people without the disease when taking GLP-1 mimics. <b>Although a few hypotheses exist as to why, the reason still eludes researchers.</b></bq> <bq>Someone’s sex and starting weight could affect their response, too. In the retatrutide trial, female participants lost, on average, a higher proportion of their body weight than did male participants at all tested drug doses. And animal studies show that <b>the greater a mouse’s starting weight, the greater the amount of weight loss with triple-acting drugs such as retatrutide,</b></bq> <bq><b>The short-term side effects of this drug class are clear: nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and other digestion-related issues.</b> The problems cause some people to stop taking the medications.</bq> <bq>For those who begin treatment involving hormone mimics — and can weather any short-term side effects — <b>these drugs are likely to become a lifelong commitment to keep weight off.</b></bq> <bq>When someone starts losing weight, he says, the body responds by slowing the metabolism and increasing food cravings. But “<b>that system does not care about whether you have diabetes or sleep apnoea or fatty liver disease</b>”, Sharma says. Anti-obesity medications help to reduce this response, tweaking a user’s biology so that they feel satisfied on fewer calories. But <b>for most people, removing this external aid will simply result in regained weight.</b> So researchers think that most patients who start taking the drugs will stay on some form of them for life.</bq> That's super-convenient for those researchers' employers. <bq>Health exists at every size, says Geoff Ball, a clinical researcher specializing in paediatric obesity at the University of Alberta, who has served on a national advisory board on the subject for Novo Nordisk. <b>“There’s no right weight for people.”</b></bq> I'm at Gilbert Lake right now and I see people right in front of me who are definitely not the right weight. You can't tell me that people that young should have that much trouble moving around. One is smoking. This society is absolutely poisonous. Eat, smoke, drink whatever, then take a drug forever to fix it, or be told that you can be happy at that weight, despite the cornucopia of health problems. <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-dutiful-wife-zakaria" source="The Baffler" author="Rafia Zakaria">The Dutiful Wife</a> <bq><b>Like the “shitty media men” whose names appeared on an anonymously compiled list</b> at the height of the #MeToo era (<b>many of whom have kept their jobs and reputations</b>), the cheaters of old believed that power and literary genius meant the rules did not apply to them.</bq> As if a fucking anonymous list is proof of anything. Honestly, can people stop intimating that's it's a moral crime for a man accused of sexual impropriety (at least) to have kept his job or position or reputation after the accusation if nothing actually followed the accusation? Or are we just floating in a world whose morals are guided by the most offended and most strident, letting entire lives be ruined without evidence? That this happens regularly for the poor is well-known, but the answer isn't that we should make it unfair for everyone. The answer is that we should make it fair for everyone. Just because you don't like the target doesn't mean he's automatically guilty. Pull yourself together and get some empathy: if the accused were someone you knew well, would you so quickly and with so little evidence think that they deserved to lose their job and life? <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/28/challenging-times-and-intellectual-pleasures-my-talk-with-slavoj-zizek/" source="CounterPunch" author="Nilantha Ilangamuwa">Challenging Times and Intellectual Pleasures: My Talk with Slavoj Žižek</a> <bq>As virtual reality becomes more prevalent in our lives, I asked Slavoj about the safeguards needed to prevent the distortion of reality and preserve authentic human experiences. He explained, “<b>What we experience as social reality is already, in some sense, virtual. I’m not denying the existence of reality, but what we perceive as reality is already mediated through a virtual symbolic system.</b></bq> <bq>“I’m more pessimistic about this. We live in a global capitalist society where we appear to be increasingly free. On one hand, we are treated as free, but at the same time, we are part of a social world that is obscured and non-transparent. So, we need to clarify what we mean by freedom. I don’t believe we should oppose freedom, discipline, and social order. <b>Abstractly, freedom might mean doing whatever we want, but I wouldn’t want to live in such a society because it would be a horrible world if we couldn’t trust each other to respect basic rules of decency. True freedom requires explicit and implicit rules to be in operation.</b>”</bq> <bq>Regarding consumerism, he added, “When you talk about the upper middle-class, the problem might be consumerism, but for a poor person, the issue is getting new clothes and adequate food. <b>We shouldn’t criticize poor people for consumerism when they finally get a bit of money to buy something they need. Let them have a bit of pleasure.</b></bq> <bq>I’m not advocating for a totalitarian state regulating every aspect of life. <b>I like the form of freedom, but to achieve it, a full concrete network of state regulations, unwritten rules, and customs must be well established.</b> Unfortunately, this is something people tend to forget today.</bq> Absolutely. This is the so-called knife-edge on which all dance, every day. You see how many implicit rules there are when society starts to break down, when people no longer follow them, choosing instead to advantage themselves. We are on a knife edge with out culture, and also with our technology. We assume that clean, running water for drinking and showers will always be here, that sewers will always work, that trash is removed, that products and food are cheap and plentiful, that the weather allows us to function as we like. <hr> <a href="https://www.persuasion.community/p/neiman" source="Persuasion" author="Yascha Mounk">Susan Neiman on Why Left ≠ Woke</a> <bq>[...] traditionally, the Left has always been on the side of universalism rather than tribalism. Tribalism has always been a conservative view, suggesting that the only people you will have real connections with and therefore real obligations to are people who belong to your tribe. And for universalists on the liberal left, your tribe could encompass the entire world. Of course, <b>you have certain affinities to people who get your jokes or understand your allusions. But to be a universalist is to work hard to try and understand what is going on in other cultures.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the idea that your claims to representation are claims about justice, that it's not simply the strongest person or group of people in the neighborhood, but that <b>people deserve certain rights on the basis of human dignity, is a claim about justice.</b></bq> <bq>[...] if you don't actually believe that progress has taken place in the past, it's very hard to develop the will to make more. So claims like “Nothing has changed in the United States since slavery” or “We're still living under a patriarchy that hasn't fundamentally changed” are <b>statements about, really, the futility of actual change, which undermines efforts to make more.</b></bq> <bq>I believe that <b>social rights are human rights. All this was codified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948</b>, which is an aspirational doctrine. But it means that things like fair labor practices, education, health care, access to culture, are social rights. They're not benefits, they're not privileges. They're not safety nets. <b>They’re rights in the same way that the right to travel or the right to speak are rights.</b></bq> <bq>The idea that there would be an African American intellectual sitting in the White House for eight years was just not something that anybody imagined at the time. <b>Racism is too deep, long-lasting and, in some ways, systemic a phenomenon to be ended in one generation. But there was enormous progress.</b></bq> They just had to find a black man who would be a smiling, sadistic asshole like all the others. Which is why the question of class is much more important than race. Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas are what many would consider to be the right color, but they are members of an elite to which they pledge much stronger fealty than to members of the cohort defined by their shared skin color. That much should be utterly obvious. As Kanye West said, George Bush doesn't care about black people. Neither does Barack Obama. Barack Obama cares about himself and his rich friends. If they're all adequately cared for, then he might have some empathy left over for members outside of his class, but that's only a side-effect of the main thrust of his efforts, which aim to further enrich himself and the elite to which long aspired to belong, and to which he has belonged for decades. If he didn't do this thing, he would never have become president. <bq>They say “No, these principles have always just been make-believe, they've always just been a way of pretending, and in fact, the function is precisely to perpetuate this injustice. So we have to get rid of those principles. The only thing that's left is group power.” Now, I think there's a principled objection to this, that that's not the kind of society that I want to live in; and there’s a practical objection, which is, <b>what on earth makes you so confident that the people who've always been oppressed, have been in the minority, will suddenly be powerful enough that they can impose their group will on the others</b>, rather than that this competition for group struggle, for group power, will once again benefit the dominant group?</bq> <bq>[...] <b>you see Narendra Modi saying that human rights are a Western imposition, and besides, you colonized us, and there are no universal principles of justice. That's just simply not true.</b> And fortunately, there are some writers from formerly colonized countries who are speaking up against that sort of abuse now, and I quote some of them in my book, but it's a rather nefarious sort of move. Again, it's an old move. It's 2500 years old. And Socrates had a hard time refuting it then. But we have to keep refuting it in every generation.</bq> <bq>If you carry the “You can't possibly understand my experience” bit far enough then none of us can understand anyone. This is, for me, the point of great literature, great music, great film, which is why <b>I'm extremely annoyed by the claims about cultural appropriation—precisely the function of great art is to help us better understand both ourselves but also a culture that is not ours.</b></bq> <bq>Appropriation is, of course, not the same thing as exploitation. But if you pay some attention to other people's cultures and learn at least another language or two, you will never be able to do it for the plurality of different cultures in the world. But I always argue that <b>making an attempt to walk around into other cultures besides your own, just to realize that there are many different perspectives on the world gives you, first of all, a perspective on yourself, and, secondly, a sense of some others.</b></bq> <bq>[...] cultural pluralism is a wonderful thing. But <b>political universalism is the thing that holds us together.</b></bq> <bq>The philosopher, <b>Christian Wolff</b>, who was a big influence on Immanuel Kant, even if very few people have heard of him, studied some Confucius and Mencius, and <b>gave a lecture arguing that the Chinese had a perfectly good system of morals, even though they weren't Christians. And for this, he was ordered to leave not just his university position, but the entire state of Prussia, in 48 hours, or to face execution.</b> This is not a Twitter storm, ok, these people were standing up for a genuine universalism. And it's all over Enlightenment texts, if anybody actually bothers to read them.</bq> <bq>[...] would feel comfortable living in, in Germany. But things have gotten significantly worse in the past three years, where an over-focus on the German crimes of the past has led to two things that are incredibly problematic. One is it leaves Germany absolutely unable to talk about what's going on in the present, particularly in the state of Israel. But secondly, <b>it winds up in thinking that the only Jewish voices that count are the voices that talk about Jewish victimhood. They have completely forgotten about Jewish universalists.</b></bq> <bq>[...] if people agree with you on the main thesis of what you've been talking about, and they think of themselves as left-wing, and they’re in a milieu that is very left-wing, and they’re worried about making the points you just made to the friends and colleagues and so on, <b>do you have any advice for how to speak up for those ideas without ceasing to be in good standing with your leftist social circle?</b></bq> What the fuck is wrong with people? They seem obsessed with pleasing blinkered idiots who are in their "social circles". Why? Who cares what amoral fools think? Just say what you're going to say and let them digest it. If they can't? Reformulate. But don't give in on your principles unless you think you got something wrong. The opinions of strangers are more-or-less meaningless. If you know their credentials and respect their opinion, then go ahead and lend their opinion weight; otherwise, you can safely ignore the hysterical reactions of strangers online. It's all just fake Internet points anyway. And, maybe---just maybe---you could consider having discussions with a smaller circle than "the whole world", where you don't run such a large risk of reputational loss if an unrefined opinion should slip out of you. That's what private discussions are for---to bounce ideas and opinions off of people you trust to give you the benefit of the doubt before you show the whole world. People are skipping that step and are mystified why it doesn't seem to be working for them. <bq>[...] speak up. You will <b>find that many more people agree with you and will say things like “I was going to say that but I was afraid.”</b> That’s happened to me many, many times.</bq> Or, if you address too large and anonymous a group, you'll find out why those people were afraid to say anything. The larger a group you address, the more likely it is that you'll get feedback from hypersensitive lunatics or lulz-seeking trolls. <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/political-milestones-for-ai.html" source="" author="Bruce Schneier">Political Milestones for AI</a> <bq>While ChatGPT-generated businesses may not yet have taken the world by storm, this possibility is in the same spirit as the <b>algorithmic agents powering modern high-speed trading</b> and so-called autonomous finance capabilities <b>that are already helping to automate business and financial decisions.</b></bq> They are, but their goal is to maximize short-term profit for a handful, not creating a sustainable economic base for a society. It's trash. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/a-jargon-free-explanation-of-how-ai-large-language-models-work/" source="Ars Technica" author="Timothy B. Lee & Sean Trott">A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work</a> <bq>Google’s word vectors had another intriguing property: You could “reason” about words using vector arithmetic. For example, Google researchers took <b>the vector for "biggest," subtracted "big," and added "small." The word closest to the resulting vector was "smallest."</b></bq> <bq>For example, the most powerful version of <b>GPT-3</b> uses word vectors with 12,288 dimensions—that is, <b>each word is represented by a list of 12,288 numbers.</b> That’s 20 times larger than Google’s 2013 word2vec scheme.</bq> <bq><b>Each word makes a checklist (called a query vector) describing the characteristics of words it is looking for. Each word also makes a checklist (called a key vector) describing its own characteristics.</b> The network compares each key vector to each query vector (by computing a dot product ) to find the words that are the best match. Once it finds a match, it transfers information from the word that produced the key vector to the word that produced the query vector.</bq> <bq>[...] the feed-forward layer examines only one word at a time. So when it classifies the sequence “the original NBC daytime version, archived” as related to television, it only has access to the vector for archived, not words like NBC or daytime. <b>Presumably, the feed-forward layer can tell that "archived" is part of a television-related sequence because attention heads previously moved contextual information into the archived vector.</b></bq> <bq>For the first 15 layers, the top guess was a seemingly random word. Between the 16th and 19th layer, the model started predicting that the next word would be Poland—not correct, but getting warmer. Then <b>at the 20th layer, the top guess changed to Warsaw—the correct answer—and stayed that way in the last four layers.</b> The Brown researchers found that the 20th feed-forward layer converted Poland to Warsaw by adding a vector that maps country vectors to their corresponding capitals. <b>Adding the same vector to China produced Beijing.</b></bq> <bq>When the Brown researchers disabled the feed-forward layer that converted Poland to Warsaw, the model no longer predicted Warsaw as the next word. But interestingly, <b>if they then added the sentence “The capital of Poland is Warsaw” to the beginning of the prompt, then GPT-2 could answer the question again.</b> This is probably because GPT-2 used attention heads to copy the name Warsaw from earlier in the prompt.</bq> <bq>In digital neural networks, the role of the squirrels is played by an algorithm called <b>backpropagation, which “walks backward” through the network, using calculus to estimate how much to change each weight parameter.</b></bq> <bq>Completing this process—doing a forward pass with one example and then a backward pass to improve the network’s performance on that example—requires hundreds of billions of mathematical operations. And training a model as big as GPT-3 requires repeating the process across many, many examples. <b>OpenAI estimates that it took more than 300 billion trillion floating point calculations to train GPT-3—that’s months of work for dozens of high-end computer chips.</b></bq> <bq>It’s worth noting that researchers don’t all agree that these results indicate evidence of theory of mind; for example, small changes to the false-belief task led to much worse performance by GPT-3 , and GPT-3 exhibits more variable performance across other tasks measuring theory of mind. As one of us (Sean) has written, <b>it could be that successful performance is attributable to confounds in the task—a kind of “clever Hans” effect</b>, only in language models rather than horses.</bq> <bq>At the moment, we don’t have any real insight into how LLMs accomplish feats like this. Some people argue that such examples demonstrate that the models are starting to truly understand the meanings of the words in their training set. <b>Others insist that language models are “stochastic parrots” that merely repeat increasingly complex word sequences without truly understanding them.</b></bq> <bq>If a language model can consistently get the right answer for a particular type of question, and if researchers are confident that they have controlled for confounds (e.g., ensuring that the language model was not exposed to those questions during training), then <b>that is an interesting and important result, whether or not the model understands language in exactly the same sense that people do.</b></bq> Interesting in the sense that it can be put to use as a tool---i.e., interesting for capitalism. It's in a way similar to biological or pharmaceutical effects that we use without knowing the mechanism. <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2023/08/04/representing-heterogeneous-data/" source="Stuff with Stuff" author="Bob Nystrom">Representing Heterogeneous Data</a> <bq>Code that wants to work with weapons generally uses the Weapon supertype. The two subtypes for melee and ranged weapons each store the fields they need. If you want to go all the way to an object-oriented style, these fields would be private and then you’d have abstract methods in Weapon that are overridden in the subclasses to use them. <b>It’s a complex, heavyweight approach, but a powerful and flexible one.</b></bq> Yes, but it's also extendible without having to change existing code or the core structures. That can be advantageous, but of course decreases the predictability of the system because you can't statically analyze it.