<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258373" author="mihaic" source="Hacker News">More startups throw in the towel, unable to raise money for their ideas</a> <bq>Unless VC actually develop some patience on returns, I can't see much innovation happening in the next few years.</bq> Yup, we gave all the money to a handful of people who are only interested in short-term gains and have no idea how 99.9% of the population lives. They're out of ideas. Cool. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/08/ellen-brown-war-by-other-means-short-selling-jpmorgan-chase/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ellen Brown">War By Other Means: Short Selling JPMorgan Chase</a> <bq>In a 2010 article titled “ Wall Street’s Naked Swindle ,” <b>Matt Taibbi showed that the bankruptcies of both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which triggered the banking crisis of 2008-09, were the result of targeted short sales.</b> He wrote:<bq>[W]hen Bear and Lehman made their final leap off the cliff of history, both undeniably got a push —especially in the form of a flat-out counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling. … <b>Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.</b></bq></bq> <bq>We know that the Party has been successfully walling off the currency since there are no meaningful RMB/Yuan balances anywhere on the planet (other than the mainland). There’s no need … because nobody uses Chinese currency for commerce/investing (… other than on Mainland China). <b>Today, the World’s 2nd Largest Economy only lets about 2% of global settlements occur in RMB/Yuan.</b></bq> <bq>The Chinese government and affiliated Chinese entities have purchased not just U.S. Treasuries with their dollars, but U.S. stocks, real estate, farmland and other assets. DeepThroatIPO calculates that the Chinese have “accomplished constructive control of approximately $58.58 trillion of Western Financial Assets, stealthily hiding in Western Financial Markets, likely in plain sight. … <b>[T]hat $58.58 trillion, focused directly on select targets … is more than enough to sink our previously thought unsinkable fleet of battleship banks.</b>”</bq> Interesting. This is actually plausible and would be a likely lever to hold over the U.S. should China decide to fight back in an economic war. The U.S. flank is wide open there. It's too arrogant to consider it a possibility---even though China would possibly make the move if other U.S. economic pressure gets so high that it doesn't matter anymore. The U.S. might not be very good at estimating when that could happen because it has no feel for China. It knows nothing, and doesn't care that it knows nothing. <bq>We cannot continue to come to the nebulous conclusion that “Oh boy … it looks like we need another systemic liquidity boost” and blindly provide it. <b>We need to slow the entire process down.</b></bq> <bq>Another possibility comes to mind. <b>Banks are vulnerable to short selling only if they are publicly traded. State-owned or city-owned banks are impervious to that sort of attack.</b> The Bank of North Dakota, our one and only state-owned bank, is a stellar example. It cannot be short sold and it is not vulnerable to bank runs, since over 95% of its deposits come from the state itself. <b>The Bank of North Dakota also acts as a mini-Fed for local North Dakota banks, extending a lifeline in the event of capital or liquidity shortages.</b></bq> <bq><b>Like the U.S., China has a vast network of local banks; but most of its banks are government-owned. We may need to follow suit as a matter of defense.</b> We need to ensure, however, that the governments owning our local banks actually represent the people. <b>Banks should be public utilities, serving the public interest.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/08/the-obscenely-wealthy-have-recently-experienced-obscene-increases-in-their-wealth/" source="CounterPunch" author="Rick Baum">The Obscenely Wealthy Have Recently Experienced Obscene Increases in Their Wealth</a> <bq><b>These policies have certainly been successful at creating greater prosperity for the 10 wealthiest people in the United States.</b> Their wealth, after a large decline in 2022, is now almost 24% greater than it was at the beginning of 2021, right before the start of Biden’s presidency.</bq> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/harold-pinter-had-it-right" source="SubStack" author="Seymour Hersh">Harold Pinter had it right</a> <bq>In the fall of 2002, Pinter was invited to make his case against the war before the House of Commons. He began his talk with a bit of embellished British history about an earlier wave of terror in Ireland: <b>“There’s an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his Lieutenants: ‘Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men.’ One of his aides said: ‘Excuse me General. Isn’t it the other way around?’ A voice from the crowd called out: ‘Mr. Cromwell knows what he’s doing!’”</b> The voice in the crowd in Pinter’s telling was Blair’s, but today it could be German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has kept his silence about when and what he knew about President Biden’s decision to mangle Germany’s economy by destroying the Nord Stream pipelines last September.</bq> Even the first voice doesn't question that <i>someone</i> should be killed and others raped---the objection is about how to divide them up, not whether it should happen. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/10/patrick-lawrence-the-dialectic-of-the-draft/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Dialectic of the Draft</a> <bq><b>Tho</b>, a tough-minded revolutionary the whole of his life, <b>refused the Nobel Peace Prize when the committee in Oslo proposed later in 1973 that he share it with Nixon’s secretary of state</b> — a principled move, given there was no peace for two more years.</bq> <bq>In my view, America’s switch from a citizen’s army to a paid, “voluntary” army served in important respects to open the door to <b>a festival of public irresponsibility as to the conduct of the foreign and military policies executed in Americans’ names and by means of Americans’ tax dollars.</b></bq> <bq>It took some years after Saigon’s rise in 1975 to wonder about the consequences of the end of the draft and the new dependence Americans shared on an <b>army of volunteers. They were inevitably drawn from poor and working-class communities and were in it, in many, if not most cases, because they couldn’t otherwise find good work.</b></bq> <bq>Then came the meddling, the covert ops, the proxies, the bombings, the coups, the what have you, running from Zaire, to Angola, to Iran, to Libya (multiply), to Grenada, to Nicaragua, to Panama, to the big “etc.” <b>Anyone recall Operation Praying Mantis, in 1988, when the Pentagon attacked and more or less destroyed the Iranian Navy?</b> I didn’t think so: It’s a trivia question now.</bq> <bq>is there any question of <b>the apathy, the coarse indifference, the willful somnambulance abroad in the republic as the imperium proceeds with its imperial business?</b></bq> <bq>The bitter truth is that we have to include among these explanations the fact that <b>Americans are no longer held responsible for waging wars. They pay others to wage them.</b></bq> <bq>I am tempted — and no more at this point — merely to conclude, that were the draft to be reconstituted, <b>it would do a lot of Americans a lot of good by forcing them to</b> shut off the televisions, put away the Frisbees, stop daydreaming of high deeds on battlefields they will never see, <b>think seriously of what their country is doing in their names, and then assume responsibility for it.</b></bq> <bq>This leaves Americans with nothing left to believe in, nothing worth lifting a finger or even raising a voice to defend. <b>As our militarists mull whether to reinstitute the draft to fill the ranks of the reluctant, we should consider: This is what empire looks like.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/10/how-swedish-love-for-the-us-turned-deadly/" source="Scheer Post" author="Eleanor Golffield">How Swedish Love for the US Turned Deadly</a> <bq>[...] what curbs my chuckle reflex more than anything is the realization that these Swedes really are afraid—that they think it’s more likely that Russia will invade these red cottage-rimmed shores than that the US is engaging in a sadistically violent imperialist swan song, taking anyone and everyone down with it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2023/08/09/biden-escalates-trade-war-with-china/" source="Reason" author="Eric Boehm">Biden Escalates Trade War With China</a> <bq>The Biden administration escalated America's trade war with China on Wednesday, as President Joe Biden declared <b>a new national emergency and immediately used it as the justification for creating a new screening system that will limit Americans' ability to invest overseas.</b></bq> <bq>"However, certain United States investments may accelerate and increase the success of the development of sensitive technologies and products in countries that develop them to counter United States and allied capabilities."</bq> There is no way that Joe Biden either wrote or comprehended that sentence. Or, maybe he did. It's complete gobbledygook. <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/campaign-2024-not-left-versus-right" source="Racket" author="Matt Taibbi">Campaign 2024: Not Left Versus Right, But Aflluent Versus Everyone Else</a> <bq><b>American politics has long been a careful truce, in which natural economic tensions were obscured by an elegantly phony two-party structure that kept urban and rural poor separate, nurtured a politically unadventurous middle class, and tended to needs of the mega-rich no matter who won.</b> That system is in collapse. Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income.</bq> <bq>If Democrats should be panicking because they’re not trouncing an opponent whose biggest campaign events have been arraignments, <b>it’s just as bad for Trump that he polls even with a man who’s a threat to walk into a propeller or carry a child into a forest every time he walks outside.</b> Still, the abject horror Trump inspires among the Georgetown set may be his greatest political asset,</bq> <bq>In classic fashion, Democrats have dealt with the <b>[Cornel] West</b> issue in the most insulting and counter-productive manner possible, with Congressional Black Caucus chairman <b>Gregory Meeks for instance scoffing that voters won’t be “ hoodwinked by a sideshow .”</b></bq> Meeks is a bag of shit and I'm glad that I've never voted for him. <bq><b>They’re also enamored with the same mystical nonsense that captivated historical predecessors, with rich white co-eds gobbling up Ibram Kendi texts the way guilt-ridden Russian nobles lined up for the purifying touch of Rasputin.</b> Their “experts” even gather in places like Davos to concoct Swiftian parodies of upper-class condescension, like the WEF’s amazing “ Let them eat bugs !” plan. On top of everything, they deny a class angle to their problems.</bq> <bq><b>After 2008, when the finance sector bailed itself out and paid for it with the last equity the middle class had saved in their homes, I thought it was only a matter of time before parties broke down and voters re-aligned in the 99%-vs-1% direction the Occupy movement described.</b> We’re here. The phenomenon is obscured by Trumpmania, and the press will try to keep it obscured, but the subtext of Campaign 2024 is already the obvious drift of rich and poor voters in opposite directions, which can’t end well. Isn’t this the “conversation we’re not having” that really matters?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/08/kjsj-a08.html" source="WSWS" author="Clara Weiss">NATO-backed anti-Putin oppositionist Navalny sentenced to additional 19 years in prison</a> <bq><b>Navalny will have to serve the 19-year prison sentence in a maximum-security penal colony, reducing his ability to communicate with the outside world to almost zero.</b> So far, Navalny had been able to continue to post political commentaries on his Telegram channel from prison.</bq> Having a cell phone with Telegram installed on it is a privilege no prisoner in the U.S. has, as cell phones are forbidden everywhere. Cutting off access to the outside world is standard for everyone in U.S. prisons. Prisoners in the U.S. are not allowed to have visitors in many states. They have to pay exorbitant fees for access to terrible video-calling software to stay in seldom contact with their families. Russia, of course, doesn't have prisons; it has "penal colonies." <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/08/us-france-threaten-intervention-in-resource-rich-niger-fears-of-war-in-west-africa/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ben Norton">US/France Threaten Intervention in Resource-Rich Niger: Fears of War in West Africa</a> <bq>Niger’s historically subordinate relationship with the Western powers has not brought the Nigerien people any prosperity. <b>The country is a major producer of gold, but more than 40% of Nigeriens live in extreme poverty.</b> Niger is also one of the world’s largest producers of uranium. <b>This radioactive material is crucial for nuclear energy in Europe, especially in France</b>, where roughly one-third of electricity comes from nuclear power. Less known is that Niger also has sizeable oil reserves</bq> <bq>Politico added that “<b>the coup in Niger could be a challenge for Europe’s uranium needs in the longer term</b>, just as the continent is trying to phase out dependency on Russia, another top supplier of uranium used in European nuclear plants”.</bq> The arrogance is breathtaking. The west pats itself on the back all day long for its enlightened behavior, but it's always primarily concerned with how the west will continue to get the supplies it demands while paying rock-bottom.prices---or just outright appropriating it, i.e., stealing it. <bq><i>Germany</i>, the manufacturing superpower at the heart of the EU, <b>is deindustrializing at breakneck speed, largely because it has lost major sources of the cheap energy that its heavy industry needs.</b></bq> <bq>What is striking is <b>the neocolonial symbolism of the United States maintaining these high-tech military facilities worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Niger, one of the poorest countries on Earth</b>, where the majority of the population doesn’t even have access to electricity.</bq> <bq>In 1969, there was another coup led by a left-wing military leader, Muammar Gadhafi, who named his own anti-colonial, anti-monarchist Free Officers Movement after that of Egypt. Like Nasser, Gadhafi implemented socialist policies, using the oil riches in Libya to benefit the people of the country. <b>Gadhafi created robust social programs, drastically expending public investment in healthcare, education, and housing. Under Gadhafi, Libya had the highest living standards out of all of the African continent.</b></bq> <bq><b>The transparent goal of the United States and France is to re-impose political control over the region</b>, to exploit its plentiful natural resources and geostrategic location.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y_0rjKfyzw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/8Y_0rjKfyzw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Jonathan Pie" caption="Sunak Stops Stopping Oil"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8J5mK7JKMY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/O8J5mK7JKMY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="BreakThrough News" caption="Burkina Faso President: 'Russia Is Family for Africa'"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cqRMSuXLZk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/5cqRMSuXLZk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="BreakThrough News" caption="Eritrean President to Putin: ‘NATO War on Russia’ is Attempt to ‘Dominate Whole World’"> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/08/patrick-lawrence-independent-journalism-as-it-was/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Independent Journalism as It Was</a> <bq>Dreams of status at the elite end of the middle class and a life inside the tent rather than beyond it nearly always extinguished the flame burning within many newcomers to the craft. I still find it remarkable—and difficult to explain to those not in newspapers—how <b>second-home mortgages, school bills, BMWs, and European holidays can determine the way the most momentous world events are reported.</b></bq> <bq><b>There are rare occasions in fortunately lived young lives when one is visited by a premonition of things to come, the path out front illuminated.</b> So it seems to have been that morning. I knew then I was to live my life, or a good part of it, as a correspondent abroad. Wilfred was shortly to leave Lisbon. My quiet epiphany: I don’t know how else to explain the determination, unmarked by doubt, that drove me from that day forward to follow the route he had opened to me—in the first instance literally.</bq> I don't recall ever having consciously felt this for any of the large shifts in my life: <ol> Selecting Hamilton College Moving to New York City to start working Moving to Switzerland to start working Starting a business Leaving my business Starting work at Uster </ol> <bq>That autumn, 1974, The Associated Press reported that the agency had a hundred operatives on the ground. <b>We now know the Ford administration fully intended to intervene to block a NATO member’s leftward drift.</b> The question was how to get this done. Henry Kissinger, then Ford’s secretary of state, favored an alliance with extreme-right political parties and a military intervention—effectively a repeat of the Chilean coup two years earlier</bq> <bq><b>Americans—and how could I fail to notice?—read nothing of Washington’s machinations in Lisbon, nothing of Carlucci’s intervention. I was face to face with the ideological contaminations of American correspondents abroad.</b> I found The New York Times coverage especially dishonest by way of its fractionally accurate reports and frequent omissions, notably those concerning Carlucci’s operation, the realities of which were perfectly available to anyone with open eyes and ears…. <b>This was brazen malpractice—my estimation then and now.</b></bq> <bq>While we commonly associate this error with independent publications, let us be clear: <b>Every mainstream journalist serving the national security state is guilty of it—every one an activist.</b> It requires discipline and ordered priorities to get this question right. Learning these was a project of mine at this early moment in my professional life. I count this point as important now as I did then.</bq> <bq>A kindly Toulousain of a certain age took me to see the large fields outside the city where Spanish refugees had taken shelter after fleeing the Franco regime forty years earlier. <b>Half a million Spaniards had fled to grim, improvised camps on the French side of the Pyrénées and along the Atlantic coast. This was called la Retirada, the Retreat.</b> It was my first glimpse, in its early stage, of the ideological confrontation that marked the twentieth century.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/let-me-reiterate-the-questions-i" author="Freddie de Boer" source="SubStack">Let Me Reiterate the Questions I Asked in My AOC Essay</a> <bq>Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, <b>a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior.</b> I don’t know what that is, but it’s not progressive.</bq> This is the idolization of a person who is seen as a bulwark against things ostensibly even more evil. But, as listed in concise detail in the linked article, there are innumerable examples of how she is very hypocritical in her support of issues, how her behavior is indistinguishable from a legislator whose only goal is to increase the power of the Democratic party, no matter which issues are actually promoted. There was a lot of hope that she would be the person who would stand up for all of the issues, but, seemingly for a lot of people, it suffices to be the person who once could have been that person, even though she never materialized as that person, seemingly in any way whatsoever. Somehow, she has achieved reputational orbit. Nothing she has done since she earned her reputation as someone who could be rabble-rouser---when she had no power to change anything---will shake people's faith that she actually <i>is</i> that rabble-rouser, despite the utter lack of evidence, despite the large amount of evidence to the contrary. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-aoc-the-squad-left-criticism-policy-accomplishments/" author="Branko Marcetic" source="Jacobin">AOC and the Squad’s List of Left-Wing Accomplishments Is Quite Long</a> <bq>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad are elected officials. There’s any number of criticisms of their time in Congress that are fair, reasonable, and necessary, including over key votes they’ve been on the wrong side on, times they’ve failed to stand with unions, and their failure to, as promised, fully take advantage of the leverage they had under the Democrats’ formerly slim House majority.</bq> Bla, bla, bla. This is a really long article that emphasizes a handful of mostly incidental legislative improvements while ignoring the fact that AOC has voted the wrong side of all of the large, important issues. Tlaib has been better, but she, too, seems to sometimes be more interested in remaining elected than in actually taking a stand that will risk her electability. As Marcetic points out, this is not surprising ... but it doesn't make it <i>admirable</i>. It's not the low bar to which we should aspire. The only end to that sort of legislating is to end up constantly conceding on principle simply in order to remain elected so that we have someone with those principles---but who never acts on them. It's a catch-22, all right. You can only get re-elected when you don't act on the principles for which you were elected. I haven't seen any American politician who's ever decided to stand for a principle that would endanger their re-electability. AOC is no different. It makes her effectively useless. It also makes her annoying because she's constantly going on and on about the principles she constantly fails to enforce. I have no use for a legislator who is so dedicated to her party that she won't fight the military budget or the re-election campaign of a geriatric Alzheimer's patient. It's ridiculous to even talk about any other minor details of her legislative record, honestly, unless Marcetic is trying to get with her. <bq>The left pessimism embodied by New York magazine’s profile — which argues explicitly that socialists have nothing to show for five years of electoral victories and that the whole experiment should be abandoned — is a recipe for despair, apathy, and in the end, demobilization, which may already be having a trickle-down effect. It’s a self-defeating, possibly self-fulfilling prophecy that threatens to undermine socialist gains.</bq> Bullshit. Take your lesser-evil horseshit and stuff it. AOC doesn't stand for socialism in any real way. Bernie Sanders has also capitulated so many times that he's also useless. It pains me to say it, but it's true. I like him more, it's true. But, we have no use for socialists who promote war and the military and who capitulate to state demands for strike-breaking. None of these people is willing to put their political necks on the line for our principles. Why should we continue to waste time with them? I just don't understand how you can make that argument. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tReTqfyOKRk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/tReTqfyOKRk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="NachDenkSeiten" caption="36. Pleisweiler Gespräch mit Jacques Baud | Ukraine – aktuelle Lage und Friedensperspektiven Vortrag"> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/let-me-reiterate-the-questions-i" author="Freddie de Boer" source="SubStack">Let Me Reiterate the Questions I Asked in My AOC Essay</a> <bq>Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, <b>a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior.</b> I don’t know what that is, but it’s not progressive.</bq> This is the idolization of a person who is seen as a bulwark against things ostensibly even more evil. But, as listed in concise detail in the linked article, there are innumerable examples of how she is very hypocritical in her support of issues, how her behavior is indistinguishable from a legislator whose only goal is to increase the power of the Democratic party, no matter which issues are actually promoted. There was a lot of hope that she would be the person who would stand up for all of the issues, but, seemingly for a lot of people, it suffices to be the person who once could have been that person, even though she never materialized as that person, seemingly in any way whatsoever. Somehow, she has achieved reputational orbit. Nothing she has done since she earned her reputation as someone who could be rabble-rouser---when she had no power to change anything---will shake people's faith that she actually <i>is</i> that rabble-rouser, despite the utter lack of evidence, despite the large amount of evidence to the contrary. <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/does-europe-have-better-sunscreens/" source="EWG" author="">Does Europe have better sunscreens?</a> <bq>British researcher Brian Diffey evaluated the UV protection of four U.S. sunscreens and four sold in Europe, each of which had an SPF value of 50 or 50+. He found that the <b>U.S. sunscreens allowed, on average, three times more UVA rays to pass through to the skin than the European products did.</b></bq> <bq>There is a disconnect between the chemical approval process and what’s available on the market. <b>The FDA is reluctant to approve new sunscreen ingredients, but there’s little reassurance about most of the chemicals already being used in U.S. products.</b></bq> <bq>Our public comment letter to the FDA in 2019 suggested the agency consider allowing these four ingredients on the market while tests are still being conducted. The current data suggest these four ingredients are as safe – if not more so – as those chemicals, like oxybenzone, that have been on the market for many years. <b>These ingredients would give manufacturers – and therefore, consumers – more options for products with good broad-spectrum protection. For too long U.S. consumers have been stuck with inadequate products on store shelves.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/08/individualism-is-killing-the-planet/" source="CounterPunch" author="Derek Royden">Individualism is Killing the Planet</a> <bq>Fossil fuel companies like Exxon were aware of the coming problem in the 1970s but have spent the decades since <b>funding climate denialism while at the same time engaging in greenwashing campaigns portraying themselves as stewards of the natural world</b> rather than destroyers of it. Most of them reported record profits last year.</bq> <bq>The more paranoid on the far right insist, just as they did during the crisis provoked by Covid 19, that climate change is a cynical ‘hoax’ to take away the freedoms enjoyed by citizens of richer countries. <b>Even anodyne ideas that would at the very least make the lives of poorer people living in food deserts better, like ‘15 minute’ cities, are presented by these voices as an attack on… liberty.</b></bq> Fucking liberals do that too! Do you think any of them are willing to give up their SUVs or $10,000 children's birthday parties for the poor? Libs consume more than most right-wingers. They just donate to the Nature Conservancy and buy PBS tote-bags, but their consumption patterns beat the hell out of having a big truck or riding a jet-ski on weekends. Flying on vacation four times a year exacts a heavy toll. Having a lifestyle dependent on food delivery and ordering unneeded products constantly. <bq>For the clear majority of people who still believe in science, <b>individual actions</b> like eating less (or no) meat, avoiding air travel and using public transit or electric vehicles <b>are good in and of themselves but simply not enough to confront a problem of global scale.</b></bq> What majority? The one that pays lip service? Have you seen how this country functions from day to day? It's all driving all day, in horribly inefficient and gigantic ego-trucks. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/zl-AgmoZ5mo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sixty Symbols" caption="Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors"> <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmgH-P1uRZM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bmgH-P1uRZM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Like Stories of Old" caption="The Ultimate Christopher Nolan Analysis: Road to Oppenheimer"> <bq author="Hans Zimmer">Once your children are born, you can never look at yourself through your own eyes anymore, you always look at yourself through their eyes.</bq> But this statement bespeaks an egotism that existed before one had children. Doesn't a healthy person already have many people through whose eyes they see themselves <i>before</i> they have children? Did you really not care what anyone thought before you were worried about the opinions of completely unformed minds? This is the idolatry of parenthood. <bq author="Christopher Nolan">I very much related to the dilemma of somebody having to go off and do this thing, leave his kids, whom he dearly wants to be with, but really wants to go do this thing, there's a lot of guilt involved in doing that - a lot of guilt.</bq> But why, for God's sake? Do you have no remaining obligation to improving yourself once you've had children? Do you really value quantity over quality? The idea that you have to spend every waking minute with your children or you feel guilt is the sheerest stupidity. It's absolutely counterproductive. What is the point of even making new people if their only purpose is to stop their growth (moral, spiritual, philosophical) as soon as they procreate? Does nothing separate us from amoebae? <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9-GOmPIoxo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/V9-GOmPIoxo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kaliii" caption="KToven"> That is pronounced "K-Toven". It rhymes with "Beethoven", I'm almost certain. I think this is because the 2-minute video starts off with a double-time rendition of the first two hands of <i>Für Elise</i>---and then repeats it endlessly and gratingly. The person who I can only assume is Kaliii---three i's---starts singing about the magical power of her pussy over the piano. I first saw this video on a muted television, so I wasn't even graced with the power of the lyrics the first time around. I just wrote down a note that said "WTF is up with video?" because there are so many cuts in this one, it makes me seasick. There is thrusting and tongue-stabbing, all mixed up with no rhyme or rhythm. I shudder to think to whom this might appeal. Like, I literally worry about their mental health. It is not a song. It is not an anthem. I don't know what it is. It looks like a hyperactive, oversexualized commercial for sportswear? Or cars? At the very end, the grand piano explodes. Because of course it does. Nothing says success like destructive waste. Top comment at YouTube: <bq>Her sound is so fresh, I love this new wave of female rappers.</bq> Found the bot. On her <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliii">Wikipedia page</a>, it says, <iq>During an interview with HipHopDX, she cited her musical influences as rappers Nicki Minaj and Cardi B.</iq> No shit. <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://hazlitt.net/feature/we-are-all-animals-night" source="Hazlitt" author="Lana Hall">We Are All Animals at Night</a> <bq>it was also predicated on a precariously suspended reality, one I had to maintain with absolute precision to do my job well, to pretend that a profound mutual desire could be found for the low, low price of $80 in a strip mall off a freeway. In real life I wouldn’t dare be so giving. <b>I can’t say I was particularly good at any of this by the time 2 a.m. rolled around, makeup melting off my face, puffiness blooming under my eyes, a rapidly dwindling patience for the reassurance some men desperately sought: So, how was it for you?</b></bq> <bq>Kids in their early twenties manned the counter at all-night fast-food joints, where I’d go between clients on slow shifts, needing something to wake up my neurons: salt, heat, grease. The shock of cold air on my legs at midnight. <b>We knew so little about each other’s lives—how could we?—but forced into this strange cohort of ragged work hours, I felt we sometimes shared a look of recognition: of people whittling time away as we tended to the incessant hungers of others.</b></bq> <bq>Many sex workers, including myself, have long hypothesized that the reason so many people in power work to keep the commercial sex trade marginalized is because they’re threatened by it—by the idea that it’s the only field where women outearn men, that <b>it’s an industry where women get to call the shots, and that women profit off something that men have been told they’re entitled to for free: sex and attention in equal parts.</b></bq> Men of a certain age, in certain positions, in certain relationships, but not most men. <bq>When I read Adams’ quote, I was back, for the briefest of seconds, in that dark parking lot under a red-lit “massage” sign, watching the outline of a coffee shop server across the street as she wiped down the midnight counter, over and over. <b>I thought of her thankless work and the comfort she provided to so many people moving through that transient space, the way she may have wanted to do something—anything—else with her time, but perhaps was not afforded the opportunity to. What a world in which her labour went unvalued, perhaps unnoticed altogether.</b></bq> <bq><b>“You’re better than this job,”</b> clients sometimes said to me while I was working nights. Often they’d say it in the awkward and delicate moments immediately after a session, as we toweled off together and I stripped the massage table—moments where men were often fraught with shame, resignation, and satiation in equal parts, and words tumbled clumsily from their mouths. <b>They meant it as a compliment, but it was a sentiment I hated. You’re better than this. As though somewhere, there was a woman who wasn’t.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/state-of-the-stack-2023" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">State of the ‘Stack, 2023</a> <bq>I mean, I’m capable of rational argument, perhaps even sometimes able to shine in it. But <b>I have seen little evidence over my long career in philosophy that those of my colleagues who adore rational argument, who set it up as the supreme expression of human excellence, are really much better at it than any randomly chosen person.</b> Their adoration therefore seems to me fetishistic, and prideful, like the gleeful boo-yahs of some suburbanite in the middle of a winning streak at Wordle.</bq> <bq>I suppose I might bullshit my way through the “methodology” section of a grant application again if I have to, but the truth is <b>there can only ever be one methodology for the kind of humanistic scholarship I value: to read, to think, and to write</b>, generally in that order but also sometimes in reverse, or in hopscotch mode.</bq> <bq>The other obstacle, particularly onerous in the academic field of philosophy, is <b>the widespread habit of using the superficial trappings of scholarly argument for the defense of values that one holds on pre-rational grounds</b>, simply insofar as one is a member of the community that produces academic philosophers.</bq> <bq>We do not expect serious work in the philosophy of physics from students who have never studied physics or on the philosophy of law from students who have never studied law. But <b>there is not even a hint of a suggestion that courses in social and cultural anthropology and in certain areas of sociology and psychology should be a prerequisite for graduate work in moral philosophy…</b> [...] One remains imprisoned by one’s upbringing. And <b>the particular form that that imprisonment now takes is that of an inability to recognize, first, that the contemporary morality of advanced capitalist modernity is only one morality among many and second, that it is, as a morality of everyday life, in a state of disorder, a state of fragmentation, oscillation, and contradiction.</b> So we should not be surprised when academic moral philosophers misconstrue their own subject matter.</bq> <bq>The great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer <b>describes childhood as a “streak of light”, as the head of a comet, and everything that comes after as its long and ever-diminishing tail.</b> This seems to me to get things just right,</bq> I disagree utterly. But, unlike Justin, I've always been comfortable in my own skin, happy to be whatever age I was or am, and to be satisfied with how I've spent my time, what I'd learned, what I'd accomplished, and what I'd become. I rarely experience regret, and never serious regret. <bq>[...] to shed all the artifice of adulthood, to go where the necessarily grown-up project of the philosophers can’t go, <b>to escape from the dull grey tail that makes up the better part of our existence, and to try, at great risk of “burning out”, to reenter the comet’s head.</b> The risk of attempting such a thing is that one will appear unserious and will accordingly begin to lose <b>the professional and social advantages that slowly began accumulating throughout all those years of pretending to be an adult.</b></bq> My goodness, how you all waste your time! I suppose, in that light, that I have remained a child: no kids, no house, no big investment portfolio, with outdoor, playful hobbies, a BFF to whom I'm married, a very adult thing to do but whose shape we've kept decidedly nontraditional (other than monagamy). It's not that hard to remain in the <iq>comet's head</iq>---you just have to set your own goals, rather than picking up the poisonous ones imposed by a perverted, sociopathic society. <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2023/08/bowe-bergdahl-sinead-oconnor-and-virtue.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">Bowe Bergdahl, Sinead O'Connor and the Virtue of Mental Illness</a> <bq>"I am sorry for everything here... The people need help. Yet what they get is <b>the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live</b>... We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks." These were <b>the words that Bowe Bergdahl</b> sent his father in an email before he <b>walked away from a war that would take his country another decade to admit we lost before it even began.</b></bq> <bq>But <b>Sinead</b> also remained brazenly unapologetic, insisting that she "fucked up their career, not mine." And perhaps that was the craziest thing about this woman. She <b>never wanted the shallow idolatry of her vapid peers.</b> As she proudly proclaimed of the fallout from that telltale event, "There was no doubt about who this bitch is. There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star." Clearly, the words of a crazy woman. <b>For daring to utter such blasphemy, Sinead would only be honored in death.</b></bq> <bq>What the fuck is crazy anyway? And who exactly gets to decide? Insanity is defined as a deviation from normal behavior. But what would have been "normal behavior" for a soldier and a pop star? <b>Had Bowe Bergdahl been sane, he would have kept his mouth shut and his rifle steady while children continued to die in the streets and turned his career as a hired gun for the state into something to brag about in a resume for public office.</b> Had <b>Sinead O'Connor</b> been sane, she would have kept her mouth open but <b>allowed nothing but silly nonsense to escape it for the thoughtless pleasure of the masses.</b> Thank God that Bowe Bergdahl and Sinead O'Connor were insane because <b>when sanity is defined by a society that values blind patriotism and vapid cultural ephemera above the lives of children there is no virtue more honorable than insanity.</b></bq> <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <a href="https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=60081" source="Language Log" author="Mark Liberman">LLMs can't reason?</a> <bq>[...] the biggest surprise is that <b>they often do such a good job of pretending to answer questions that are entirely beyond them.</b> Although anyone with experience as a <b>teacher</b> (or for that matter as a student) is already <b>familiar with the same sort of behavior.</b></bq> <bq>[...] when <b>reasoning</b> comes into the picture, it's a different (and difficult) matter, and a problem that <b>deserves active investigation rather than a naive confidence that it's already been solved, or soon will be solved.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/does-ai-just-suck" author="Freddie deBoer" source="SubStack">Does AI Just Suck?</a> <bq>[...] you’d think that, <b>among the various tasks you might charge an AI image generator with, recreating faces that have been photographed many thousands of times would be one of the easiest.</b> What just drives me mental about this stuff is that tons of people insist on pretending that these technologies work as intended! In the thread where these images appear, <b>there’s plenty of people who point out that they look nothing like their human counterparts, but also people going “Wow! Amazing!”</b> That’s true of so much of AI-generated art; it feels like <b>people have been told so relentlessly by the media that what we are choosing to call artificial intelligence is currently, right now, already amazing that they feel compelled to go along with it.</b> But this isn’t amazing. It’s a demonstration of the profound limitations of these systems that people are choosing to see as a representation of their strengths.</bq> <bq>As I will go on saying, all of this would be much lower stakes and less aggravating if people had the slightest impulse toward restraint and perspective. But <b>our media continues its white-knuckled dedication to speaking about AI in only the most absurdly effusive terms</b>, terms that threaten to exceed the power of language.</bq> <bq>[...] what if this software just sucks? What if we’re all so desperate to move to the next era of human history that <b>we talked ourselves into the idea that not-very-impressive predictive text and image compilers are The Future</b>?</bq> That is entirely likely. Most software sucks. I find it hard to believe that software that has just appeared---grown, if you will---will be somehow better than software that actual developers have tried to design. People somehow think that it's <i>better</i> just because no-one understands how it does what it does. They like the mystery of it because literally everything else in their world moves in mysterious ways. They don't understand even 1% of how their world works. They don't know where resources come from, where trash goes, how food can exist, how any technology works---or why it doesn't or stops working---they don't understand biological limitations, or how chemicals and pharmaceuticals are researched and developed. They find it reassuring that, with so-called AIs, <i>no-one</i> understands them, so that they aren't even relatively stupid about them, as they are with everything else. In the other cases named above, they have to assume that there are smarter people out there who <i>do</i> understand how things work---and that those people are <i>better</i> than they themselves are, that those people are <i>more useful</i>. Those kinds of people are <i>not</i> reassured that we don't understand how these LLMs do what they do---because they understand the <i>scientific process</i>, they understand <i>engineering</i>, whereby one has to understand what is going on, in order to <i>improve it</i>. When you're a blithering dolt who's ignorant about everything, your approach to life is to just do stuff and hope for the best. There is no process. These LLMs are perfect for people like this. They already think they're amazing, mostly because of their ineffability, because it matches their own inability to grasp how anything works. They don't notice that there is no predictable path forward for improvement in something that we don't understand. But, in a country---heck, a <i>world</i>---addicted to gambling and ignorance, this fact won't bother anyone. Hell, you can tell people that things are getting better and <i>they will believe you</i>---especially if you tell them often enough. <hr> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/fresh-hell-mount-trashmore" author="Jason Arias" source="The Baffler">Fresh Hell: Mount Trashmore</a> <bq>A grave example of a powerful tool in the wrong hands, the school superintendents are grossly misusing the tech. <b>Artificial intelligence</b> is not for telling us that The Kite Runner is too rough for our sensitive young. It <b>is for showing us what Citizen Kane would look like as a Wes Anderson movie.</b></bq> <bq>Kentucky’s largest school district is still reeling from last week’s bus service meltdown, wherein children enrolled in Louisville’s public schools were made extremely late, returned home after dark, or not picked up at all after <b>a Massachusetts-based tech company reduced the number of routes to make up for a driver shortage and unleashed pandemonium.</b> Ninety-six thousand students had their actual first day at a staggered rate while Louisville scrambles to bring some kind of order to <b>the bus system, which is down some four hundred routes since 2013.</b> This is not the first time AlphaRoute has come under criticism for its chaotic truncation of bus systems, having been kicked out of Columbus and Cincinnati public schools last year for doing just that. Good. <b>You’re never too young to learn that school is a prison, American industry is the defective product of spoiled bums, and, even here in the future, nothing works.</b></bq> <bq>Miami-Dade County is awash in a river of human feces and soiled water after an influx of New Yorkers over the course of the pandemic has strained sewer systems and trash collection offices to the breaking point. Seriously, South Florida, fix your sewers and eject all squatters from Mount Trashmore (a real landfill that will run out of space in 2026). The county has spent $1 billion on water and sewer lines, with the mayor allocating another $160 million to combat the rising detritus and <b>placing a moratorium on real estate development in the area.</b></bq> Ya think? Ya think you should maybe stop building? What the actual hell is wrong with people? And they're probably paying a million bucks for 3-room apartments in this area. No-one knows to think about whether the toilets even work. It's just been taken for granted that they do that people are wholly unprepared for living in a country where that's a question you have to ask. Where my family lives in Central New York, the water is technically drinkable, but is alternately so rusty or saturated with chlorine that, even with a strong in-built filter, it tastes funny. My dad and my in-laws buy water from Wal-mart. Capitalism in America, baby! Nothing is given. <h><span id="fun">Fun</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiPQdVC5RHU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/KiPQdVC5RHU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="KRAZAM" caption="AI Boyfriend"> <bq>Oh my God, Grandpa, can we talk about refactorable code today, please?</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmVt8lC74ns" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/xmVt8lC74ns" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Programmers are also human" caption="I go to ABSURD tech conference."> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk9guzivxiU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/tk9guzivxiU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Guardian Sport" caption="Epic 211-shot badminton rally delights fans in Malaysia"> <bq>There are more exhibitors than participants.</bq> <bq>This is the networking area. This is where people without a job try to convince people without a company to hire them.</bq>