<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1985729" author="" source="Ars Technica">95% of OpenAI employees have threatened to quit in standoff with board</a> I don't even have a quote from this article because I didn't read much of it. I skimmed it, plus a few more. They're all super-excited about how a bunch of wealthy employees of an extremely well-funded Silicon Valley startup that's trying to take over everything are jockeying for more power. In a twist, the usual suspects are actual <i>for</i> worker power rather than against it. I guess when your own class stands up, you just can't help but cheer, ammirite? This whole story is about rich-people games, honestly. Microsoft is the savior? Really? They probably incited this whole thing to get all of the employees of the company over to their own headquarters. Does anyone feel sorry for mega-billionaire (or WHATEVER) Sam Altman? The guy has more control in Silicon Valley than anyone. Why do people care what happens to him? Are you sad that your visionary is no longer able to save humanity by the end of the year? When regular folks go on strike, there is no end to the number of hateful articles about how ungrateful workers can't just sit down and shut up while their betters run the world for them. When a whole company full of people making $500k per year rise up, they can barely contain themselves in their support. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/22/upsa-n22.html" author="Jane Wise" source="WSWS">UPS opens huge automated warehouse, where robots outnumber people 15 to 1</a> <bq>United Parcel Service opened a new, technologically advanced warehouse last week. The 900,000 square foot facility, the company’s largest, will operate with over 3,000 robots doing the heavy lifting. The warehouse will initially employ 200 workers, but that number may eventually grow to 500.</bq> You know what's crazy? In a sane society, this would be really good news. Fewer people need to do backbreaking work. And yet. This fiendish timeline requires that people work for a living or they will simply suffer and die. So, instead, a reduction in backbreaking jobs is greeted as something negative. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/15/yypk-n15.html" source="WSWS" author="Nick Beams">Moody’s lowers US debt outlook to “negative”</a> <bq>Notwithstanding its highly developed mathematical models and the availability of vast computing power, <b>bourgeois economics assumes that the capitalist profit system is the only possible and viable form of economic organisation.</b> It therefore ignores its inherent contradictions until they erupt in the form of crisis which it then puts down to some kind of accident or external factor.</bq> <bq>In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the Treasury market froze for several days when no buyers could be found for US government debt. <b>A full-blown meltdown of the entire US and global financial system was only averted when the Fed intervened to the tune of $4 trillion.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-average-american-is-a-millionaire/" source="City Journal" author="Jeremy Horpedahl">The Average American Is a Millionaire</a> <bq>First, it found that the <b>average American household’s net worth is over $1 million</b>. Outliers can distort averages, of course, but even <b>median household wealth is</b> at the Fed’s highest level ever recorded. In 2019, it was still stuck below pre-Great Recession levels. By 2022, however, it had reached <b>$192,000, eclipsing the 2007 mark by more than 10 percent</b>, and almost doubling the post-Great Recession 2010 figure. (These and all subsequent data are adjusted for inflation.)</bq> The average being four times higher than the median means you've got some <i>significant</i> outliers. Way to tone that down. Also, how much of that wealth is tied up in real estate? Illiquid equity does nothing for your day-to-day quality of life. <bq>Income data complicate this rosy picture. The Census Bureau found that median household income has declined by almost 5 percent since 2019. That raises a question: <b>How can median household wealth be up by 37 percent since 2019 at the same time median household income declined?</b></bq> <bq><b>For many households, their largest asset is their home. Median home-sale prices soared more than $130,000 between 2019 and 2022</b>, which may not have made you feel wealthier—if you were shopping for a home, you may have felt poorer—but it boosted household balance sheets. Those benefits extended across the income distribution, too, since a slight majority of households in the bottom half of the income distribution own their home.</bq> Golgafrinchans! Literally! No way to buy anything, but you've got a house! Your track-suit stuffed full of leaves. <bq>The pessimistic interpretation is that Millennials are unfairly burdened with much more debt than in the past. <b>The optimistic view is that because today’s young people are better educated, they will have higher lifetime earnings.</b></bq> What a shitty society. Wage-slavery now for vague promises later. It's scams all the way down. <bq>[...] <b>a sixfold gap between white and black median household wealth endures</b>, both races have seen significant wealth growth in recent years and saw all-time highs in the Fed’s 2022 dataset.</bq> The author just cruises right on by that <i>sixfold</i>... <bq><b>Asian-American households</b> have by far the greatest wealth among the racial groups identified in this survey, with a <b>median household net worth of $500,000 and an average of $1.8 million.</b></bq> <bq>Most of what I’ve reported so far is good news.</bq> Sure, it's all good news, if you're within the bubble. <bq><b>Median wealth for high-school-dropout households is about $38,000, compared with $464,000 for those of college graduates.</b> What’s more, dropouts’ household wealth is yet to recover to pre-2007 levels. Dropout-led households saw their wealth peak in the survey’s first year: 1989. <b>Their inflation-adjusted wealth is much lower today than it was two generations ago.</b></bq> Because fuck them, right? This is deliberate policy. Elites take care of their own. There is no place for you, dumb-ass. Have fun being poor. Try not attract too much attention. God, the elitism is breathtaking. <bq>[...] this sliver of bad news for high school dropouts, [...]</bq> A <iq>sliver</iq>! Just breath-fucking-taking. <bq>[...] <b>thanks to rising home values, stock markets, and other asset classes</b> since 2019—American households have record wealth across the distribution.</bq> Thanks to fairy tales, the right people's track suits are stuffed with leaves. <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israel-is-shutting-down-its-human" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Israel is Shutting Down its Human Laboratory in Gaza</a> <bq>[...] the Israeli settler colonial project. It is <b>accompanied, as is true for all settler colonial projects, by the theft of natural resources, land, water and the natural gas in the Gaza Marine fields, 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza, which could contain up to 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.</b> In a world of diminishing resources, especially water in the Middle East, and the dislocations caused by the climate crisis, Gaza is the prelude to a frightening new world order.</bq> <bq>It is not a far cry from Gaza to the camps and detention centers set up for migrants fleeing to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. It is not a far cry from the carpet bombing in Gaza to the endless wars in the Middle East and the global south. <b>It is not a far cry from the anti-terrorism laws used to criminalize dissent in Israel to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in Europe and the U.S.</b></bq> <bq>Nearly 3,000 Palestinians are missing or buried under the rubble. <b>Soon Palestinians will be convulsed by infectious diseases and starvation. Those who survive, if Israel succeeds in its ethnic cleansing, will become refugees, yet again, over the border in Egypt.</b> There remain plenty of Palestinian test subjects in the West Bank. Gaza will be closed for business.</bq> <bq>Heron TP “Eitan” drones, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries - Israel’s largest aerospace and defense company and the country’s largest arms exporter - are used by Frontex, the European Union’s external border and coastal agency, to monitor and deter migrant and refugee boats in the Mediterranean. <b>The drones, which fly up to 40 hours continuously, can be modified to carry four Spike rockets with fragmentation sleeves of thousands of 3mm tungsten cubes that puncture metal and “cause tissue to be torn from flesh,” in essence shredding the victim. They are routinely used on Palestinians.</b></bq> <bq>The global ruling class will counter the destabilizing forces of inequality, curtailment of civil liberties, collapsing infrastructure, failing health systems and increasing shortages caused by an accelerating climate crisis, by branding all who resist as “human animals.” <b>This new world order began in Gaza. It ends at home.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2023/11/17/mr-president-please-kill-the-homeless-woman-who-lives-outside-my-apartment" source="" author="Ted Rall">Mr. President, Please Kill the Homeless Woman Who Lives Outside My Apartment</a> <bq>Before she succumbed to schizophrenia, the woman who is going to die in my New York neighborhood <b>wouldn’t dream of suggesting that her desire to live indoors ought to come ahead of countering China in the Indo-Pacific.</b></bq> <bq>Whatever the physical sensations, dying from cold a hundred feet from a couple hundred <b>housing units so overheated that many New Yorkers keep their windows open all year long</b> has got to be one hell of a lonesome suck of depressing.</bq> <bq>I pitied her. I’ve watched her decline since spring. As six months dragged by this probably-fiftysomething-year-old woman has <b>deteriorated from “how did someone so normal become homeless?” to talking to herself to severely sunburned to “this person will die this winter.”</b></bq> <bq>It was in the high 30s last night and it will only get colder and <b>it is not a question of when or how she’ll die—the answers are (a) this winter and (b) hypothermia</b>—but whether the usual circle of votive candles and $5 bouquets of flowers will be placed by her bench or on the southwest corner of the intersection near the other one.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/17/patrick-lawrence-the-banality-of-propaganda/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Banality of Propaganda</a> <bq><b>This book was found just a few days ago in northern Gaza, in a children’s living room</b> which was turned into a military operations base of Hamas, on the body of one of the terrorists and murderers of Hamas, and he even makes notes, he marked, and learned again and again of Hitler’s ideology of killing the Jews, of burning the Jews, of slaughtering the Jews.</bq> Get the fuck out of here, you old liar. Thst book is not a training manual. It's a supremely boring, self-pitying bit of autobiography. Gazans hate you because you kill and torture, not because Hitler told them to. It's because you do shit like this stunt, which is fucking infuriating and insulting. It shows how little you think of us that you lie so transparently. Get the fuck out of here with that book. This is an actual grown-ass man who is president of a country, doing this shit. Embarrassing. <bq>[...] all those who demonstrated yesterday — I am not saying all of them support Hitler. <b>But all I’m saying is by omitting to understand what Hamas ideology is all about they are basically supporting this ideology.</b></bq> See above. Fuck off forever. <bq>After watching the Herzog video and then the London footage, I thought of a memorable passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism : “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. <b>Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.</b>”</bq> <bq>in 1975, Arendt had yet blunter words as to what eventually comes of circumstances such as ours. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “<b>the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/17/lleb-n17.html" source="WSWS" author="Andre Damon">US, Israeli lies about “command center” at Al-Shifa hospital fall apart</a> <bq>On Wednesday, the IDF posted a video showing a half-dozen assault rifles, two flak jackets, and a computer which it claims were hidden behind an MRI machine at Al-Shifa. <b>There was no attempt to explain why an MRI machine, with its powerful magnetic field, did not cause the weapons to fly across the room when it was in operation.</b></bq> <bq>Gaza’s telecommunications services were again shut down on Thursday, after providers announced that they had completely run out of fuel, and after Israel conducted strikes on communications infrastructure. For the second consecutive day, no aid trucks entered Gaza, following the collapse of humanitarian infrastructure in the country due to lack of fuel. <b>The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East said that it will no longer be able to coordinate any humanitarian aid convoys starting Friday.</b></bq> <bq><b>There have been no bakeries active in northern Gaza for over ten days, and no wheat flour is available on the market.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/15/pflv-n15.html" source="WSWS" author="Benjamin Mateus">The American Medical Association rejects a resolution for ceasefire in Gaza</a> <bq><b>For these well-established and well-heeled physicians, the genocide in Gaza meets none of their “neutrality” criteria and warrants no discussion. But that was not the case with regards to the US-NATO proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia.</b> A month after the conflict commenced in February 2022, the AMA had no problem asserting their opinions, regardless of their “neutrality.” The group released a statement noting, “The AMA is outraged by the senseless injury and death the Russian army has inflicted on the Ukrainian people. For those who survive these unprovoked attacks, the physical, emotional, and psychological health of Ukrainians will be felt for years.”</bq> <bq>Northern Gaza has been cut off from the South and more than a half-million people are trapped in place under siege. The major medical center in northern Gaza, Al-Shifa, has ended all services as lack of fuel and water means that the limited services they can render are under the most barbaric conditions. <b>Operations, including caesarean deliveries of babies, are done without anesthesia, blood products or antibiotics. Wounds fester untreated. Shrapnel lays buried deep in tissue among those that have survived. Some lay in soiled beds with amputated limbs without even bandages to cover them.</b></bq> <bq>The ventilators that had been supporting life for premature neonates and those requiring life support in the ICUs or dialysis machines for those without adequate kidney functions have stopped working. <b>Bodies of the dead are wrapped in linen and left to decompose in the open because there is no cold storage for these bodies.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/17/the-biden-xi-meeting-a-fable-of-the-scorpion-and-the-frog/" source="CounterPunch" author="KJ Noh">The Biden-Xi Meeting: A fable of the Scorpion and the Frog</a> <bq>The Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s reporting on the APEC meeting between Presdient Xi and President Biden can be neatly neatly summarized as China, playing the role of the adult, trying to summon a petulant US child back to its senses to avoid harming itself and others. <b>China’s message in brief is, “come back to win-win or we are all damned”.</b></bq> <bq><b>Notice that these are not lectures on what the US is to do by itself. It is all about “jointly developing” the above capacities together.</b> All of these are positive steps, positive injunctions built on a consciousness and foundation of intersubjectivity and mutuality. They are both modest and reasonable. They focus on peace, win-win, mutual respect, cooperation, mutual development and enrichment.</bq> What I notice is that China expects to be treated as an equal. The U.S. cannot even begin to wrap its head around this concept. That's the roadblock that prevents any cooperation, as relatively reasonably put forth by China. The U.S. can simply not imagine the Chinese as anything other than just as underhanded as it itself is. Its projection precludes all cooperation. The liar and rogue cannot trust anyone. <bq>These are also counterpoints to the 5 No’s (No regime change, No cold war [No bloc-forming], No hot war, No economic war [No obstruction of development], No taiwan secession/provocation) elucidated on the sidelines of the Bali Summit when President Biden met with President Xi in November of last year. <b>The US intoned and gave lip service to these agreements in Bali (now referred to as the “Bali Consensus”), but it has respected these agreements more in their breach than in their observation. In fact, it has crossed red lines on 4 of the 5 injunctions.</b> Here, China is taking the high road and seeking to accentuate the positive in order to implement Bali, <b>rather than calling out the US for its failures and perfidy.</b></bq> <bq>However, there is the warning on the last No: No provocation over Taiwan island. This is the red light, the reddest of China’s red lines, where Right intention is critical. Taiwan island is China’s core interest, and an inalienable part of China. <b>China’s message is: “Do not ukrainize Taiwan. Do not weaponize our own territory against us. Do not sever our limb from us and use it to attack us. Respect the one China Principle”.</b></bq> <bq><b>In Buddhism, there are three defilements, or poisons of the mind. They are greed, delusion, and hatred.</b> It doesn’t take long for these to return to an undisciplined mind.</bq> Citing Biden, after his conference with Xi: <bq>“The US and China are in competition…the United States would always stand up for its interests, its values, and its allies and partners”</bq> The U.S. only considers vassals as allies or partners. China will not be a vassal, so it can be neither and ally nor a partner. It can only be an enemy. <bq><b>Outside of the US-Washington neocon bubble, these are seen as ignorant statements of a deluded hegemon</b>, that simply do not wash any more for the world.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/17/provocations-by-the-u-s-state-department-can-chill-press-freedom-in-latin-america/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">Provocations by the U.S. State Department Can Chill Press Freedom in Latin America</a> <bq>The main speaker at the hearing was Amanda Bennett, the Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an umbrella group that runs several U.S. government media projects from Europe (Radio Liberty) to the Americas (Office of Cuba Broadcasting) with an $810 million annual budget. Bennett, the former director of the U.S. government’s Voice of America, told the senators that if the U.S. government fails to “target investments to counter inroads Russia, the [People’s Republic of China], and Iran are making, we run the risk of losing the global information war.” <b>These three countries, she argued, have “outspent” the United States in Latin America, an advantage that she said needed to be overcome by increased U.S. interference in Latin American media.</b></bq> <bq>In their joint statement, signed by David Andersson (editor of Pressenza) and Bruno Sommer Catalán (editor of El Ciudadano), they say, “We believe that this kind of attack is malicious, and <b>we insist that the US State Department withdraw this accusation as well as publicly apologize to us for maligning our reputations.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/17/u-s-china-extinction-level-event-narrowly-averted/" source="CounterPunch" author="Eve Ottenberg">U.S.-China Extinction-Level Event Narrowly Averted</a> <bq>U.S. corporate media was quick to blame Beijing for the Chinese pilot’s “dangerous maneuvers,” but such accusations beg the question: <b>What in God’s name were American fighter jets doing there, near Chinese airspace, eight thousand miles from U.S. borders in the first place? Their very presence is a provocation</b>, aka military aggression. It could easily ignite war and thence nuclear Armageddon. And that first step, starting a war, is almost what happened.</bq> <bq>About the October near-miss, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Nong said: <b>“U.S. fighter jets coming all the way to flex their muscles at our doorstep is the root cause of aviation and maritime safety risks.”</b></bq> <bq>In reality, <b>US imperialism has not the slightest intention of permitting China, the world’s second largest economy, to “coexist” with the US</b>, which has launched constant wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Ukraine, to seek to retain the international domination it obtained via World War II.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=106807" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Hat der Krieg in Gaza etwas mit Erdgas zu tun?</a> <bq>Ist die Lage in der Levante kompliziert, ist sie im Gebiet rund um die Insel Zypern ein einziges Minenfeld. Hier prallen nicht nur die alten Feinde Türkei und Griechenland aufeinander. <b>Die Türkei erkennt hier grundsätzlich die Seegrenzen und Wirtschaftszonen Zyperns nicht an, da diese die nur von der Türkei anerkannte „Republik“ Nordzypern nicht im von Ankara erwünschten Maße berücksichtigen.</b></bq> <bq>Hier kollidieren die Interessen der EU teils frontal mit den Interessen der USA, Russlands und der Türkei. <b>Eine Schlichtung der geopolitischen Konflikte in der Region wäre also aus energiepolitischer Sicht im obersten Interesse Europas.</b> Hier kann man bereits jetzt sagen, dass diese Perspektive durch die militärische Eskalation der letzten Wochen mehr und mehr schwindet. <b>Eine weitere geopolitische Niederlage für Europa – nicht die erste und sicherlich auch nicht die letzte, wenn man sich nicht endlich von den USA emanzipiert</b>, die auch hier diametral andere Interessen haben.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/14/patrick-lawrence-the-hinge-of-history/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">‘The Hinge of History’</a> <bq><b>We cannot make too much of events such as these, but we must not make too little of them, either.</b> These are signs on the surface of much deeper movements a few meters down in our civilization’s soil. Things are gradually coming apart in consequence of Israel’s savagery and America’s abetment of it, at home in the U.S., in the Atlantic world altogether and certainly between the West and the world beyond it. <b>Now it is time to look forward to see what we can see of the world to come.</b></bq> <bq>Here is Chas on our moment:<bq>This is clearly what Chancellor Scholz of Germany calls a Zeitenwende —that is, an epic-changing moment, a time of major change in a new direction in history. <b>We’ve talked before about the fact that 500 years of global dominance by the Euro–American culture, the Atlantic culture, has come to an end.</b> What we are seeing at the moment in Palestine is the end of settler colonialism. <b>Settler colonialism is a phenomenon of the last two centuries or so, and it is always accompanied by genocide.</b> The only exception I can think of is New Zealand, where Māori power countered the British sufficiently to preserve their culture as a separate one….</bq></bq> <bq><b>America’s so-called moral authority has been a fiction for decades, I would say since the 1945 victories, but it is now in something close to free-fall collapse.</b> Even the Israelis, in a weird, upside-down paradox, now question America’s right to criticize the indecencies and inhumanities of others. Back off with your “humanitarian pauses,” they say. You killed more Iraqis than we are killing Palestinians.<b> Two morally bankrupt regimes bickering: What’ll they think of next?</b></bq> <bq><b>The devastation of America’s status in the community of nations—and I do not think we witness anything less—is altogether the consequence of a complacency long evident among America’s policy cliques.</b> As Chas Freeman points out in his exchange with Chris Lydon, Israel is now breaking U.S. laws circumscribing the use of American-made armaments; it is in breach of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. And nobody in the U.S. says anything about it, Freeman says with obvious ire. It is the rest of the world that is beginning to speak up. I put it this way: <b>We watch as the Age of Hegemonic Hypocrisy, as I propose we call it, draws to a close.</b> <b>“The world’s patience with us and our arrogance and presumption is coming to an end,” Chas notes.</b> “We are going to have no choice but to recognize that we are one great power among other great powers.</bq> <bq>Biden’s ideologues, as I have noted severally in this space, fried the Sino–U.S. relationship the first chance they got after Joe took office. <b>Arrogance and ignorance, as a French deputy noted at the time of the Iraq invasion in 2003, are the worst of all possible combinations.</b></bq> <bq>Remember when Moscow and Beijing began to draw closer together a decade or so ago? Washington was recklessly pressing NATO as close as possible to Russia’s western frontier while getting going with its neo-containment of China. <b>The two nations said more or less in unison, Enough of this. There is no working with these people. The Russia–China relationship now stops just short of a formal alliance</b> and is the linchpin, or one of them, of what the Chinese, especially, now regularly refer to as “the new world order.” <b>This is the multipolar order of which Freeman speaks.</b></bq> <bq>We now have the Chinese preparing, by all appearances, to play a diplomatic role in the search for a settlement. We have Iran and Saudi Arabia summiting to determine a common course of action in response to the Gaza crisis. <b>We have Turkey militantly denouncing Israel and talking to Iran after long, long years of animosity. We have a goodly number of America’s friends pulling the plug on their relations with Tel Aviv.</b></bq> Israel is burning through the U.S.';s waning power to free itself of the Palestinians. They don't care about the U.S. and the U.S. is too stupid to notice what's happening. <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=106735" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Frank Blenz">Umfassend und ausgewogen? – „Damit sich mehr Menschen in Sicherheit bringen können“ – Kinder-Nachrichtensendung logo „erklärt“ den Krieg in Nahost</a> <bq>Die Zivilisten im Gazastreifen benötigen dringend Hilfe. Es fehlen zum Beispiel Lebensmittel, sauberes Trinkwasser, Medikamente und Kraftstoff. Einige LKW mit Hilfsleistungen konnten bereits in den Gazastreifen fahren. <b>Doch das ist nur ein Bruchteil der Lieferungen, die vor dem Krieg ankamen.</b></bq> Hiermit wird die Frage gefordert: warum benötigten die Menschen bereits vor dem Krieg so viel Hilfe? Waren die eventuell bereits vorher unterdrückt und verzweifelt? Warum werden bereits stark im Not gedrungene Menschen angegriffen? <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/pentagon-us-military-war-on-terror-africa-terrorism-global-foreign-policy/" source="Jacobin" author="Nick Turse">In Africa, the Legacy of the US War on Terror Is Death and Chaos</a> <bq>The raw numbers alone speak to the depths of the disaster. As the United States was beginning its forever wars in 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. This year, militant Islamist groups on that continent have, according to the Pentagon, already conducted 6,756 attacks. In other words, since the United States ramped up its counterterrorism operations in Africa, terrorism has spiked 75,000 percent.</bq> <bq>In Afghanistan, a two-decade-long war ended in 2021 with the rout of an American-built, -funded, -trained, and -armed military as the Taliban recaptured the country. In Iraq, the Islamic State nearly triumphed over a US-created Iraqi army in 2014, forcing Washington to reenter the conflict. <b>US troops remain embattled in Iraq and neighboring Syria to this very day.</b></bq> <bq><b>“We came, we saw, he died,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a US-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi</b>, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, but Libya slipped into near-failed-state status. <b>Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “ worst mistake ” of his presidency.</b></bq> They should both be dragged before the Hague. They're worse than Netanyahu, who's a rank amateur in comparison. <bq><b>Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the United States has launched thirty-one declared air strikes in Somalia</b>, six times the number carried out during President Obama’s first term, though far fewer than the record high set by President Trump, whose administration launched 208 attacks from 2017 to 2021.</bq> <bq>While the 75,000 percent increase in terror attacks and 42,500 percent increase in fatalities over the last two decades are nothing less than astounding, the most recent increases are no less devastating. “<b>A 50-percent spike in fatalities tied to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel and Somalia over the past year has eclipsed the previous high in 2015</b>,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers" source="The New Yorker" author="Isaac Chotiner">The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers</a> <bq>What are the borders of that Jewish nation? <b>The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest.</b> [This would include the territory of multiple Middle Eastern countries as well as the territory that Israel controls today.]</bq> <bq>If someone decides to invent a new religion today, who will decide the rules? <b>The first nation that got the word from God, the promise from God—the first nation is the one who has the right to it.</b> The others that follow—Christianity and Islam, with their demands, with their perceptions—they’re imitating what existed already. So, why in Israel? They could be anywhere in the world.</bq> Back away slowly from this nutter. What is she on about? God gave her the right to eradicate anyone living on her land? The one that God gave her people thousands of years ago? Is she absolutely mad? <bq>You did no homework before you interviewed me. <b>Everything that you say is the opposite of my personality and my philosophy.</b> You are interviewing a person, and you don’t know anything about them. It’s very strange. I’ve never encountered a situation like this.</bq> That is some boss-level gaslighting. <bq><b>Isaac Chotiner:</b> I was trying to understand where Palestinians who live in the West Bank should go. <b>Daniella Weiss:</b> Why should they go? Why should they go? They should stay where they are, you’re saying? <b>They should accept the fact that in the Land of Israel there is only one sovereign.</b> This is the issue. So let’s not confuse things. <b>We the Jews are the sovereigns in the state of Israel and in the Land of Israel. They have to accept it.</b></bq> The only solutions offered are: death, exile, or subjugation. Such an adorable little old lady she is. <bq><b>Isaac Chotiner:</b> When you say that you want more Jews in the West Bank, is your idea that the Palestinians there and the Jews will live side by side as friends, or that— <b>Daniella Weiss:</b> If they accept our sovereignty, they can live here.</bq> <bq><b>Isaac Chotiner:</b> So you think it was a mistake to pull out of settlements [in Gaza] nearly twenty years ago? <b>Daniella Weiss:</b> It was a mistake. The whole world is crying now because of that. The whole world suffers from Hamas’s rise. Not my problem. It’s your problem. <b>No country in the world said they were going to accept even a thousand people from Gaza. The world hates them. It was such a big mistake to let them rise.</b> <b>Isaac Chotiner:</b> Where should the Palestinians in Gaza go? <b>Daniella Weiss:</b> To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.</bq> This is what it looks like when you really and truly don't give a shit what anyone else thinks. <bq><b>Isaac Chotiner:</b> We saw some horrible images on October 7th of what happened to Israeli children, and now we see some horrible images in Gaza of what is happening to Palestinian children. When you see Palestinian children dying, what’s your emotional reaction as a human being? <b>Daniella Weiss:</b> I go by a very basic human law of nature. <b>My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first.</b> We are talking about children. I don’t know if the law of nature is what we need to be looking at here. Yeah. I say my children are first.</bq> Honesty, at least. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/west-bank-israeli-settlers-palestinian-olive-trees-violence-occupation/" source="Jacobin" author="Carolina S. Pedrazzi">In the West Bank, Israeli Settlers Are Burning Palestinians’ Olive Trees</a> <bq>On October 30, farmer Omar Ghoneym drove from al-Khader to his lands in the southern area of Bethlehem. On his way there, he received unfathomable news: <b>most of his property (mainly olive trees) had been uprooted and destroyed by settlers.</b> What he saw when he arrived broke him. Not only had he lost all of his harvest, but even the centuries-old dar ( دار — traditional rural house), which used to overlook the hill, <b>had been torn apart stone by stone by Israeli bulldozers.</b> Mahmoud Abdullah, another farmer, has acres of grape vines just next to Omar’s trees. He hadn’t been allowed to pick the fruits since October 7. But on the morning of October 30, nothing was left to harvest because his vines had been crushed into the soil. <b>Settlers vandalized everything on the Palestinian hills surrounding their colony, Efrat.</b></bq> <bq>After the attacks on October 7, the West Bank has experienced the deadliest weeks since the Second Intifada. As of this Tuesday, <b>over 140 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed, 2,040 people have been arrested</b>, and villages and cities have been placed under a blockade, which has prevented residents from traveling outside their towns.</bq> <bq>Area C is meant to be “progressively handed back to Palestinians.” <b>In reality, Area C, comprising nearly 70 percent of West Bank territory, remained under the complete military control of the Israeli army (Israel Defence Forces, IDF), and Israeli settlements have continually expanded there over the last three decades.</b></bq> <bq>Farmers haven’t been allowed to reach these territories at all over the last month, and the IDF has informed them that if they attempt to reach their olive groves, they will be killed. <b>Some farmers have shared photos of leaflets that settlers left on their groves, which read: “You have reached the border! Entry is forbidden and dangerous, and anyone who approaches will see burning trees.”</b></bq> <bq>One of Na’em’s siblings has been recording on camera all the attacks they’ve undergone in the past fifteen years and shares the videos with human rights NGOs such as B’Tselem. <b>Two weeks ago, a settler confiscated his phone and broke his fingers while doing so.</b></bq> <bq>The settlers have always beaten us and threatened to kill us. They call in the army, which expels us from our land under false pretexts.” He continues: “<b>Now we cannot return to harvest the crop because we fear for our lives and don’t know what to do. The crop will be destroyed as we won’t be able to pick it.</b> It constitutes 80 percent of my family’s income,</bq> <bq>[...] to put into perspective the IDF’s “counterterrorism” agenda, we should keep in mind that data before October 7 shows that settlers in the West Bank were already the residents with the highest gun ownership in all of Israel and Palestine, and that the use of firearms to perpetrate attacks against Palestinians has been exponentially growing in recent years. With this in mind, <b>the claim to self-defense as a justification for the violence unleashed against Palestinians is hugely disproportionate — and makes no sense when the victims of this violence are unarmed farmers.</b></bq> Honestly, it's just a bullshit cover story. Everybody knows it. This is just shocking racism, nothing more complex than that. You don't have to waste time debunking it. That's the intent---to waste everyone's time debating about stuff that's obvious to anyone with a conscience. <bq>Even before October 7, Palestinian farmers were never allowed free access to their land. <b>Every time they had to tend to their land, they needed to request a special permit from the IDF, which would authorize them to cultivate at prescribed times — in order not to be harassed by settlers.</b> And, because the Israeli army often didn’t release these permits, farmers faced the dilemma of whether to risk their lives to take care of their fields and trees or to take care of themselves and lose their harvest.</bq> <bq>Recent reports show that the IDF has used so many white phosphorus artillery shells in the conflict gradually developing on the Israeli-Lebanese border, that <b>over forty thousand acres of harvestable land is now burnt and left uncultivable. Hundreds of Lebanese farmers and their families have been displaced after losing their main source of income: their olive trees.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/17/times-up-for-netanyahu-and-biden/" author="Dan Siegel" source="Scheer Post">Time’s Up for Netanyahu and Biden</a> <bq><b>This is Joe Biden’s Lyndon Johnson moment, the time for him to follow LBJ’s 1968 decision to withdraw from the campaign for reelection.</b> The issue is not that Biden is too old. His policies are too old. The American Empire is no more. <b>We need leaders ready to engage the emerging multipolar world</b>, who do not imagine that the U.S. is going to war over Taiwan, who welcome sharing power with the nations of Europe and the BRICS countries. The end of America’s uncritical support of the Israeli government can be the first step in creating leadership for a world at peace.</bq> True, we do need them. We aren't going to find them, but that would be, technically, what would save the U.S. and the world. The U.S. hasn't hit rock-bottom yet. It still has a tremendously long way to go. And it's going to cause a lot more damage on the way---much more than it already has, if that's even conceivable. This week Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met in San Fransisco. China stretched out a hand with an olive branch, saying that they must work together in a cooperative, multi-polar world, that we must stop the zero-sum game that the U.S. insists on promulgating because it used to win all the time, and now it still think it's winning because a few of its citizens still benefit enormously. Biden confirmed that Xi is a dictator in the press conference that ensued the 4-hour summit. When asked whether he would still characterize Xi as a dictator, as he had earlier this year, Biden said, as shown in a short video clip in <a href="https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1725284634173325646" source="Twitter" author="Paris Marx">this tweet</a>, <bq>Well, look, he is. He's a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that is based on a form of government totally different than ours.</bq> So Biden's an utterly simplistic moron who thinks at the level of a third-grader trying to fill out a two-paragraph essay on China. His brain is filled with salad. He's even less eloquent than Trump, and his ideas are on the same level: China bad because different. God help us. So Biden steps down. Who fills his shoes? Kamala Harris? RFK? Marianne Williamson? What else do the Democrats have? And the Republicans? Trump? Vivek Ramaswamy? Nikki Haley? Chris Christie? Ron DeSantis? They are all maniacs and morons, utterly out of touch with even the basics of American and world history, sociology, culture, and philosophy with which one should gird oneself as a citizen, to say nothing of the President of the United States. They have no empathy, they speak in simplistic and cruel phrases, they think in sound bites. They have no inner monologue worth hearing, they have no principles, they have no morals, they have no ethics. They may purport to have principles but, at the drop of the hat, they will subvert them for personal gain. That is literally the opposite of the definition of "having principles". <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/17/roaming-charges-106/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Politics of the Lesser Exterminators</a> From China's report on the conference. <bq>President Xi Jinping noted that there are two options for China and the U.S. in the era of global transformations unseen in a century: One is to enhance solidarity and cooperation and join hands to meet global challenges and promote global security and prosperity; and the other is to cling to the zero-sum mentality, provoke rivalry and confrontation, and drive the world toward turmoil and division. <b>The two choices point to two different directions that will decide the future of humanity and Planet Earth.</b></bq> Yup. I'm sure they're watching with horror at the decay that is so clearly apparent in the U.S. body of state. They are not overjoyed in any way because they know how dangerous this is. I've used this metaphor before, but the balrog of the American State will take down more than just one wizard as it topples from the bridge and drops into the abyss. It is definitely dropping; the question is: what will remain? What will it allow to remain? The U.S. seems determined to drive us all into the wall on climate change. That damage would make all of the rest of its evil acts pale in comparison. <hr> <a href="https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/leaving-blobtopia/" author="James Howard Kunstler" source="Culsterfuck Nation">Leaving Blobtopia</a> <bq>That war is a lost cause, and the cause was extremely stupid in the first place. Do you even remember what it was? I’ll tell you: to prod Russia into destroying itself. Oh? But why? Because, you know . . . Russia (and Trump!). There is your blob logic. <b>Cost us something like $150 billion, a large part of that distributed among Mr. Zelensky’s circle while he sacrificed a whole generation of his country’s young men to Russian artillery fire and leaves what’s left of his sad-ass land an economic basket-case.</b></bq> Just to prove that there are reasonable thoughts and opinions in everyone's grey matter, nearly no matter how horrible their other opinions are, I noticed the paragraph above as I skimmed through the latest post from an author I used to hold in higher regard before first COVID, then the Democrats, sent him down a deep, dark rabbit hole, like so many others. So I agree with him, more or less, on Ukraine. On Israel/Gaza, he drops back into woefully uninformed mode. <bq>America is also taking the heat for Israeli-Gaza war. The reality — for those of you interested in reality — is that Bibi is doing what Bibi needs to do whether America likes it or not: a large-scale root-canal on this troublesome region, going literally deep beneath the surface to clean the rot of Hamas out from that underground tunnel world they squandered their people’s capital building.</bq> Yeah, he's just parroting mainstream media talking points. He probably thinks he's citing FOX News, but I heard snippets of this when the <i>Bad Faith Podcast</i> had Norman Finkelstein on to analyze a piece by Jake Tapper of CNN. What Kunstler outlined above was nearly exactly what Tapper was saying, perhaps sugar-coated a bit more than FOX News would. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/18/svca-n18.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">The forced evacuation of southern Gaza: The next stage in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine</a> <bq><b>On Thursday, Israeli forces dropped leaflets over major cities in southern Gaza, including Khan Younis, telling the population to evacuate or face the threat of death.</b> The displacement of the population of southern Gaza is the next stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which is being carried out by Israel with the support of the US and European imperialist powers. One area at a time, <b>Gaza is being depopulated through the combination of mass expulsion, massacres and starvation.</b> It is evident that the attacks of October 7 have been seized upon as a pretext by Israel to carry out <b>a long-planned scheme for the systematic depopulation of Palestine</b>, which began with northern Gaza, is now being extended to southern Gaza and will continue to the West Bank.</bq> <bq>By “what happened to Gaza City,” Regev is referring to the systematic carpet bombing that has <b>destroyed or damaged 40 percent of northern Gaza’s homes and shattered its healthcare, food distribution and water treatment systems.</b> All bakeries in Gaza have been shut down, and no wheat is available at any price. There is <b>no food, no water and no medical care.</b></bq> <bq>American imperialism’s wholesale embrace of Israel’s genocide exposes, for all time, the lie that US foreign policy has anything to do with “human rights.” Throughout the 1990s, the United States used allegations of “ethnic cleansing” to justify military interventions in the Balkans, culminating in the bombing of Serbia in 1999. But the Biden administration’s systematic encouragement of Israel’s ethnic cleansing makes clear that the feigned concern for “human rights” was nothing more than a pretext for its stated goal of dissolving Yugoslavia in order to place the Balkans under US and NATO domination.</bq> That is the fervent hope, yes, that the scales will fall from more eyes, that Empire will be revealed for what it is to more people, that they will no longer support it in all that it does. That is the fervent hope every time it does something horrible. That was the fervent hope of those who watched NATO drop a tremendous amount of ordnance on a formerly Soviet-allied and then Russia-allied country, while pretending to look for "ethnic cleansing". That was the fervent hope of those who tried desperately to stop the second Gulf War in 2003, when millions marched for peace. No-one even remembers that they did that. Empire lost little to no international standing for its crimes. That was the fervent hope of those who watched NATO destroy Libya and Syria. We always hope that the latest crime, that latest affront to any human decency, will be the straw that breaks that camel's back, the thing that causes the world to demand that Empire toe the line, stop the self-serving hypocrisy, and live up to its espoused principles Nothing has worked in the past. The allure of the MCU is too strong for the world. How can you stay mad at the US? They produce so many cool TV shows about cool Americans doing cool things. So much culture produced to explain how rich you can get in America, how awesome the police are at their jobs, how hot the sluts are. Maybe this latest attack on Palestine will be the straw. I doubt it, but maybe. Israel has gone much farther than it has before. It's much more brazen in its disdain for international law. It wears its inherent cultural and racial arrogance and superiority on its sleeve. It makes it clear that it doesn't care about a judgment levied by inferior beings---which includes the rest of the world. It challenges the world to do something about it. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0gECjlpXF8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/d0gECjlpXF8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Real News Network" caption="What really happened in Israel on Oct. 7? w/Max Blumenthal | The Chris Hedges Report"> Max and Chris discuss the most current information available on what actually happened on October 7th, 2023, using Israeli media, the Israeli government, and the IDF itself as sources. If you last stopped paying attention to what Israel thinks happened on that day on <i>that day</i>, then you have a completely warped picture that was intended to build unquestioning support. Many of the more lurid details of that day have been reneged and the numbers of civilians killed is considerably lower than it was. This is no excuse, of course, but "you murdered a thousand babies after raping them and putting them in ovens" hits different than "you killed a lot of civilians, but also a lot of the ones we thought you'd killed actually turn out to have not been civilians or, if they were, we were actually the ones who killed them, our bad." <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRb4QhZi2MA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JRb4QhZi2MA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Dialogue works" caption="This Is Not a War, but a Mass Murder Tragedy | Chas Freeman"> Chas Freeman's insight is still incisive, even if he looks a lot older than he did when I saw him interviewed several times at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has a tremendous amount of knowledge on foreign policy, even in the Middle East, even though his focus during his career was on a Sino-Soviet relations. He even has 傅立民 next to his Latin-alphabet name in the video. At <b>06:48</b>, he says, <bq>Well, I have to say that you need to start with the recognition that President Biden is ... for decades, has been an avowed Zionist. He's very, very pro-Israel and very, very indifferent to the Palestinians. Antony Blinken is also a Zionist. He landed in Israel as Secretary of State, identifying himself as a Jew and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. So, there's no question about where the leadership of the United States stands.</bq> At about <b>19:00</b>, he says, <bq>I think [Israel] can go on for as long as they're willing to pay the price that they are beginning to pay in terms of global opinion. We've already seen a number of countries downgrade relations. Bolivia broke them with with Israel. Colombia and Chile have recalled their ambassadors, at least for some time. Other countries have condemned Israel. We have the vote in the general assembly, the ability of the United States to protect Israel politically, which we have done with numerous vetos, is declining and there is a victim, if you will---a collateral damage---from this whole thing, in terms of the global order. The United Nations, which has a security council composed of the victors in World War I, which excludes Rising Powers. Whether they are India or Brazil---and does not allow permanent representation for Africa. [...] does not take account of the resurgence in power of Japan and Germany and does overvalue both France and Britain in the security council. This constellation of power was already seen by many as outmoded and requiring reform. I think the obstruction that the United States has been able to engineer with its veto and the security council actually threatens the continued existence of the United Nations. In other arenas we have seen countries step outside the post World War II order. For example, the BRICS, the Asian infrastructure Investment Bank as a complement/supplement to the World Bank. Many other institutions coming about which basically try to perpetuate the rules of the United Nations system but to do so with separate organizations. I should mention also the World Trade Organization which the United States has sabotaged. Countries are trying to work out new mechanisms for commercial dispute resolution, so something like this is possible with the UN.</bq> <bq>Israel is an ethnocracy. a rule by a single ethnic group, or in this case ethnic religious group [ethno-theocracy] namely Jews over another ethnic religious group namely Palestinian, Muslims, and Christians. The only crime that people in Gaza have committed is that they [...] identify themselves as Arab, Muslim, Christian, and therefore their identity makes them the enemy of Zionism. I want to say that there is a very clear difference between Zionism and Judaism. Zionism is a form of nationalism. It's a an ideology originally secular, [but] now combined with religious fervor.</bq> At <b>27:30</b>, he says, <bq>Israel, like white South Africa, is a democracy. That is, the Afrikaans and other whites in South Africa had a very democratic system. It was a tyranny from the perspective of black South Africans. The same is true of Israel, [which] is a democracy for Jews. There are some Arab citizens of Israel---about 20% of the population---they are second-class citizens. discriminated against, denied resources and access to facilities that are open to their Jewish fellow citizens. There are also two other categories of people under Israeli rule: those in the West Bank, who are disenfranchised, subject to a Kafkaesque system of pass-controls and checkpoints and [who are] often murdered by settlers, who are protected by the Israeli Defense Force. And, finally, there is Gaza, which has been correctly described as the world's largest concentration camp, an open-air prison, where Israel will basically not only doesn't allow people any freedoms but periodically murders large numbers of people.</bq> At <b>35:30</b>, he says, <bq>If the whole program was to fight to the last Ukrainian, and you're running out of Ukrainians, then you don't have a policy. I think it's becoming clearer and clearer to people that it would have been far preferable for Ukraine to implement the Minsk Accords, by which the Donbas retion would have remained part of Ukraine, although about to speak Russian like people in Quebec can speak French.</bq> Or as people in many countries speak multiple languages, as Freeman well knows. Very few countries are as mono-lingual as Ukraine was trying to be. Even the U.S. has a tremendous amount of Spanish by now, even if it hasn't officially enshrined the language legally as Switzerland has with its four official languages. In Switzerland's case, English is a de-facto language in that it is spoken nearly everywhere. At <b>47:16</b>, he says, <bq>I would say the Ukraine War began or [...] established a very clear process of lost American influence in the so-called Global south---or Global majority as some people call it---and the United States lost influence. The war in Gaza---this war of annihilation against Palestinians---is costing the US the rest of its influence. [...] I don't think anyone will take us seriously in the future when we offer advice on human rights.</bq> At <b>49:15</b>, he says, <bq>I think the United States has decided that China is its principal adversary. It's the only country that has the weight in world affairs and the technological capacity to contest for the control of East Asia or the globe. This is the mentality. I don't believe China has any aspiration to do either. It's not going to invade its neighbors, with the exception of Taiwan, which is not a neighbor. It is part of China, separated by Civil War and the Cold War by American intervention. Ironically, the more the United States doubles down in our commitment to Taiwan, the greater the affront and the greater the effort China will make to take Taiwan. If the United States were not defending Taiwan, the two sides of the state would come to some political agreement about how to manage their relationship. And I think it probably could be quite generous on the part of Beijing. But the presence of the United States complicates that and makes it impossible. On the American side, Taiwan is---nobody remembers the history, nobody has read the agreements we made with the Chinese on how to manage the Taiwan issue. So, we've just set those issues aside. We've broken our word on everything we agreed and we don't seem to recognize that [...] or consider that important. So, what we have is a relationship with China that is entirely focused on a war over Taiwan. And I think there's very likely to be a war over Taiwan. When will it happen? It will happen when China decides that it can win easily.</bq> At <b>55:13</b>, he says, <bq>The United States never recognized their incorporation into the Soviet Union but we did not actively contest their incorporation because the Soviet Union was a nuclear power. China's a nuclear power but we are actively contesting its sovereignty and territorial Integrity. This is very dangerous</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/18/305282/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Enter the Moral Abyss</a> <bq>According to Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev, 200 of the bodies initially identified as Israelis, were actually Hamas. “<b>We had the number at 1400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1200.</b> Because we understood, we had over-estimated. We made a mistake. They’re actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas.” <b>How did they get burned? Who burned them? Why were the Hamas corpses lumped with Israeli bodies? Where did the killing take place? Were they killed at the same time as the Israelis? By what?</b></bq> <bq> In less than 40 days, Israel killed more than 11,000 people. <b>During the Troubles in Northern Ireland around 3,700 people—combatants and civilians—were killed over the course of…29 years!</b></bq> And 11,000 is just the last number we got days ago, when the Palestinians stopped being able to collect and disseminate information. <bq>When asked whether Israel has the “right of self-defense under international law,” Frances Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories said no and explained: <b>“Israel cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from the territory that it occupies, that is kept under belligerent occupation.”</b></bq> <bq>The UN World Food Program said Gaza faces a swelling food gap. Hunger is widespread throughout the Strip with nearly the entire population in desperate need of food assistance, and <b>only 10 percent of necessary food supplies entering Gaza since the war began.</b></bq> <bq>The UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution calling for “humanitarian corridors” and the release of hostages. <b>The vote, the first UNSC resolution on Palestine since 2016, passed 12 – 0. (The US and UK abstained because the resolution didn’t explicitly condemn Hamas and Russia abstained because the resolution didn’t call for a ceasefire.)</b> However, even this timid resolution was immediately rejected by Israel, prompting Palestine’s UN Rep. Riyad Mansour what actions the UN would take to enforce the resolution. <b>When Saddam and Qaddafi defied similar resolutions, the US invaded their countries, toppled their governments and executed their leaders.</b></bq> Well, that's obviously not going to happen to Israel, but it's nice to see the consistent hypocrisy. More fuel for that fire, I suppose. <bq>Let’s give the last word this week to Anne Boyer, former poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine….<bq>[...] I can’t write about poetry amidst <b>the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering.</b> No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies. <b>If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.</b></bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/20/love-gaza/" author="Mr. Fish" source="Scheer Post">Love Gaza</a> <img src="{att_link}love-gaza_mr._fish.jpg" href="{att_link}love-gaza_mr._fish.jpg" align="none" caption="Happy Thanksgiving, America. Love, Gaza by Mr. Fish" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/20/qovm-n20.html" author="David Walsh" source="WSWS">Widespread resistance from actors to SAG-AFTRA betrayal on Artificial Intelligence, streaming residuals</a> <bq>Sharma makes the obvious point that if “you want to get hired, you have to be ready to consent to be replicated, so there are people who are out there saying that consent at the time of engagement is coercion because they won’t hire you unless you give them those rights.” <b>Of course, it is coercion, with powerful corporations lined up against actors desperate for work.</b></bq> <bq>To spell it out: wealthy company executives like Bob Iger of Disney and Ted Sarandos of Netflix and a group of millionaire performers issued the orders for a return to work and SAG-AFTRA officials jumped to obey. The Biden administration was also involved. <b>It is a repugnant spectacle, although entirely typical of the way in which every union bureaucracy, nothing more than an arm of management, operates.</b></bq> <bq>The union has refused to release the actual agreement, claiming—revealingly—that the deal is not yet completed! This didn’t prevent these scoundrels from declaring the “strike is over” and launching into an appalling and inappropriate round of self-congratulation. <b>Actors are supposed to vote to approve a deal into which all sorts of changes and fine print can still be introduced. This is a corrupt and discredited proceeding.</b></bq> I think the strikers are doing a good thing, defending the trade they've invested years into learning. I do think that "extra" and "voice actor" are endangered, though. It's just too easy to generate voices right now---with low-to-middling quality that people don't seem to care about---that there's no way it won't be perfected in the future. So many short videos are narrated by computer voices already. Nobody wants to pay anything for anything. Amateurs creating content online---sometimes with billions of views---don't want to pay anything. Studios don't want to pay anything. The studios will happily cut their costs by 50% and then turn around and raise their monthly streaming rates. They. Do. Not. Care. Society and government will not jump in to remedy this complete destruction of culture. <bq>Crabtree-Ireland went on, “<b>For many actors, something like $1,000 or $2,000 can mean the difference between qualifying for health insurance or not.</b> It can mean everything for someone who’s making $23,000-$24,000 a year and that’s the difference for their benefits. So I do think that it has real significant potential to change how actors perceive the way the streaming business is treating them.”</bq> Crabtree-Ireland is a union rep who makes over $1M per year. Once again, the fact that health insurance is tied to the job mucks everything up. <bq>[...] <b>renew the strike and set it on a different course: for minimum increases of at least 25 percent in the first year; for a ban on digital replicas as long as the conglomerates have control over them</b>; for residuals corresponding to the massive profits being made; for preparation against the coming attack on jobs; and for the socialist reorganization of economic, social and cultural life.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2023/11/22/ceasefire-follies/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">Ceasefire Follies</a> Just a quick update on where our long-ailing blogger is at, mentally. <bq>Note for future terrorists. Take some hostages atop your rapes and murders, and they give you huge leverage to stop your victims from coming after you. That, and convincing the useful idiots to march for the sake of the babies you use as shields so you can perpetrate terror but they can’t do anything to stop you.</bq> <bq>[...] those demanding a ceasefire from the side that didn’t break the ceasefire on October 7th.</bq> <bq>Oddly, Gazan lives matter. Israeli lives, not so much because they deserve to die for being a Jewish state. The connection there with Jewishness seems not to matter much, even as they indulge in sophistry to differentiate between Zionism and Judaism so they won’t feel like the hypocrties and fools they are.</bq> <bq>As for the Gazan children, they’ll be martyrs as far as Hamas is concerned [...]</bq> He's not doing so hot. He still hasn't put a second of his time into finding out what's has been going on there, what is going on there now, or what would be a possible solution that doesn't involve more tragedy. There is no speaking to someone who's out of the gate with this viewpoint, unless they're family or friends or someone you need to invest time in. Everyone else can just back away slowly and hope that someone like this doesn't have too much influence on anyone else. He's still absolutely livid, incoherent, and about as grounded in reality as a Trump-Uncle at Thanksgiving. You know, the kind that sends me political cartoons of Joe Biden giving away the U.S. to China. Just batshit. I wonder if he knows he's writing at the same intellectual level as the Babylon Bee these days? (<a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/hamas-offers-to-release-hostages-if-israel-agrees-to-not-exist" author="" source="Babylon Bee">Hamas Offers To Release Hostages If Israel Agrees To Not Exist</a>). <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/this-is-the-real-face-of-the-us-empire" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Caitlin's Newsletter">This Is The Real Face Of The US Empire</a> The article links to this <a href="https://twitter.com/SeanMcCarthyCom/status/1727038847664468343" author="Sean P. McCarthy" source="Twitter">tweet</a> that includes a 2:18 video of a man harassing a food vendor in New York. As noted in the quoted <a href="https://twitter.com/zaramagnusson/status/1727023334444138812" source="Twitter" author="Zara Magnusson">tweet</a>, <bq>Meet Stuart Seldowitz, a former advisor to the White House who used to advise Obama on foreign policy. He is a three-time winner of the State Department’s Superior Honour Award.</bq> <bq><b>That such a horrible person could climb his way to the highest echelons of the world’s most powerful government — working on Palestinian affairs no less — illustrates an important point about the US empire and what it is.</b> There are no barriers stopping such creatures from rising to the top of that power structure, just the opposite in fact — they get an express lane to the top. That’s why bloodthirsty swamp monsters like John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland and Elliott Abrams find themselves so intimately involved with US policymaking.</bq> <bq><b>Stuart Seldowitz is not an aberration</b> but a perfect manifestation of all this. <b>This is the sort of mind which keeps the empire marching along from administration to administration no matter who Americans elect.</b> This is the sort of mind which keeps the weapons flowing, the blood pouring, the fossil fuels burning, and the terrified screams which power the imperial machine continually erupting into the night sky.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/24/cppd-n24.html" author="Patrick Martin" source="WSWS">While hunger soars in US, Biden feasts at billionaire’s estate</a> <bq><b>President Joe Biden is spending his Thanksgiving holiday at the $34 million Nantucket estate of David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group</b>, a hedge fund notorious for buying up companies, slashing their workforces, stripping their assets, and selling off what remains at a profit.</bq> <bq><b>Biden is the friend of the unions, not the workers.</b> He regards the unions and their highly paid bureaucratic apparatuses as the best mechanism for slashing working-class living standards and suppressing the class struggle. <b>He counts on the unions to straitjacket the working class politically, particularly on the questions of foreign policy and war.</b> The main focus of Democratic Party policy is the aggressive promotion of American imperialist interests overseas through an explosion of militarism against Russia, in the Middle East against Iran, and in the Indo-Pacific against China, which is increasingly taking on the form of a third world war.</bq> <bq><b>Biden and [Clarence] Thomas are corrupt political instruments of rival factions of the capitalist ruling elite.</b> They may quarrel bitterly over policy, but on the fundamental class questions they are in unison: They defend capitalism and the domination of the wealthy at home, and the assertion of US imperialist interests abroad. <b>Those who claim that it is possible to “pressure” the Biden administration to enact reformist policies</b>, oppose the threat to democratic rights posed by Donald Trump, or restrain the genocidal violence of Israel, the military spearhead of American imperialism in the Middle East, <b>are spreading fatal political delusions.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/24/americas-peculiar-genocide-fetish/" author="Nicky Reid" source="CounterPunch">America’s Peculiar Genocide Fetish</a> <bq>Well, here it is America, here’s your fucking holocaust giftwrapped like a holiday goose and complete with its very own Hitler and a clearly mapped out Final Solution. <b>You wanna be the hero so goddamn badly? Here’s your shot. Bibi’s bombing babies and somebody needs to stop him before it’s too late. We’ll even let you wear the cape if it turns you on.</b> There’s just one little problem here. The campaign to erase Gaza from the face of the map may be the next big thing in genocide but it turns out that America-the-beautiful is the power behind the new Hitler making it happen. Every bomb, every bullet, every canister of white phosphorous that gasses the ghettos of Gaza comes directly from your pocket, and to make things even more confounding, <b>all the usual assholes from the news to the Hill seem to be using the ghost of the Holocaust to justify committing another goddamn Holocaust.</b></bq> <bq><b>It didn’t matter that Hitler was actually done in by his fellow monster Stalin or that America vaporized entire cities like Dresden and Hiroshima just to steal his thunder, the mythology of America-the-indispensable-solution stuck</b> and every time we get carried away with our latest massacre in Indochina or our latest quagmire in Babylon and our mask of sanity begins to slip, we just go right back to searching for another Hitler to stop.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/25/305869/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Complete and Utter Carnage</a> <bq><b>The deal to release Israeli women and children held by Hamas for Palestinian women and children held by Israel could have been brokered at any time since October 8th.</b> Neither Netanyahu nor Biden wanted one, until much of Gaza, including its entire health care system had been destroyed, more than a third of its residents displaced and more than 6,000 murdered kids.</bq> <bq>Israeli police officers have been instructed to forcibly prevent celebrations of the release of Palestinian prisoners, some of whom live in East Jerusalem, within Israeli territory–instructions which are bound (if not intended) to provoke violent confrontations and crackdowns, which <b>will almost certainly result in more arrests and detentions, perhaps even more than were released.</b> Noura Erakat: “Palestinians released in prisoner exchange, like all Palestinians, remain at acute risk of rearrest for traveling beyond their bantustan, praying in Jerusalem if they reside outside it, digging a water well too deep, for driving on a segregated road, & often, for existing.</bq> <bq>According to The Economist, “<b>1.7M Gazans, 77% of the population, have been displaced. More than half are crammed into” densely-packed UN shelters where “skin diseases and diarrhea are rife.</b> A brief pause in the fighting will not offer Gazans much respite from this miserable existence.”</bq> <bq>Martin Griffiths, UN chief for humanitarian relief, began his career dealing with the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. But <b>he says the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is “the worst ever…I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s complete, utter carnage.</b>”</bq> <bq>After Facebook approved an ad calling for the assassination of a pro-Palestinian political activist, <b>7Amleh bought 19 test ads that explicitly contained hate speech and incitement to violence against Palestinians. Facebook approved every single one.</b></bq> <bq>The attack on the Nova music festival didn’t go down the way it was initially reported. It turns out the festival was originally scheduled to end the event on Friday, but the organizers got permission midweek from the Army to extend to Saturday. <b>Hamas did not know about the music festival and only learning about it after entering Israeli territory,</b> as shown in bodycam footage of a terrorist asking a captured civilian where the “bad guys” are. An Israeli attack helicopter fired on Hamas fighters and also killed “some” partygoers.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/25/israels-october-7-propaganda-tank-eyewitnesses/" author="Max Blumenthal" source="The Grayzone">Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal</a> <bq>[...] the <b>12-year-old Hetzroni</b> was not slain by Hamas. According to new testimony by an Israeli eyewitness to the girl’s death, she <b>was killed by an Israeli tank shell alongside several neighbors.</b> The revelation of Hetzroni’s friendly fire death came as the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhahu attempts to shut down the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for reporting that <b>Israeli Apache helicopters killed Israeli citizens fleeing the Nova electronic music festival on October 7.</b> Haaretz’s reporting confirmed a viral Grayzone investigation which highlighted disclosures by Israeli helicopter pilots and security officials of friendly fire orders throughout the fateful day.</bq> <bq>Dagan confirmed that the tank shells killed Liel Hatsroni: “‘The girl did not stop screaming for all those hours,” she told Porat, referring to Liel. “<b>She didn’t stop screaming… [but] when those two shells hit, [Liel] stopped screaming. There was silence then.</b>” Porat concluded, “So what can you take away from that? That after that very massive incident, the shooting, which <b>concluded with two shells, that is pretty much when everyone died.</b>”</bq> <bq><b>It is impossible to know if the standoff between Israeli and Hamas forces at the Dagan home could have been resolved without bloodshed.</b> But it is clear that the Israeli decision to shell the home with tanks wound up killing almost everyone inside, including the child who has become a centerpiece of Israel’s international anti-Hamas propaganda campaign. <b>All the Israelis left behind, Porat said, was “a house full of corpses.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-has-damaged-israels-reputation" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Israel Has Damaged Israel's Reputation Far Worse Than Its Enemies Ever Have</a> <bq><b>It’s maddening to see grown adults acting like Hamas are these foreign invaders who attacked Israelis out of the blue</b> because of a hatred for Jewish people, like they’re internet-radicalized neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or something.</bq> <bq>If you’ve ever wondered why society’s most famous and influential voices all have dogshit status quo politics, just look at the current purge of pro-Palestine actors in Hollywood. <b>If your own elite class interests and having loyalty to your rich friends isn’t enough to keep you supporting the empire’s information interests, you’ll just get thrown out.</b></bq> Except for Tom Cruise, who's defended his agent's positions and told their company, in no uncertain terms, not to dare fire her. <bq>[...] the US is as far from a normal country as can be. It’s the hub of a vast, undeclared empire made up of allies, client states, proxies, and systems of military, economic and financial coercion which <b>keeps most of the world moving in accordance with the wishes of the empire managers.</b></bq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-doesnt-have-a-gen-z-problem" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Caitlin's Newsletter">Israel Doesn't Have A Gen-Z Problem, It Has A Morality Problem</a> <bq>Nobody starts out as the sort of person who would support a genocidal bombing campaign that murders children by the thousands. <b>It’s something you come into gradually over the years, one moral compromise at a time.</b> [...] <b>Deep down you know you’re on the wrong path. You know this isn’t how you started out, isn’t how you’re meant to be living your life.</b> But you drown out that small voice inside with the much louder voices of life in a modern industrialized society, many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year to tell you your worldview is the correct one.</bq> Also, your own very lucrative job is very often predicated on keeping your mouth shut about certain uncomfortable truths about how the Empire runs society. For example, you won't get anywhere in politics on the Eastern seaboard if you're pro-Palestinian, no matter what the rest of your agenda looks like. It doesn't matter how progressive and open and human-friendly you are: if you don't accept the prevailing narrative of how Western Asia is configured, AIPAC will bury you. <bq>This is why there’s such a massive generation gap on the Israel-Palestine issue; <b>young people haven’t spent a long time gradually eroding their moral compass into a worthless trinket, and they don’t consume enough mass media to have been convinced that doing so would be worthwhile.</b> They have not been sufficiently indoctrinated into depraved indifference toward the suffering of others.</bq> This is a very interesting theory: that the young haven't been steeped long enough in indoctrination to believe the prevailing myth. It's also been about 16 years since the last major incursion, since the last time the plight of the Palestinians was major news. They'd never heard of the place before. The suppression worked against the propagandists because, instead of being able to shape the narrative, there <i>was no</i> narrative. They'd memory-holed all of Western Asia. When it reappeared on the scene with such violence, young people learned of the situation for the first time---and were rightly appalled. They hadn't been prepared with the proper filters, so they can't react appropriately, i.e., inhumanely. Also, the latest generation is one that truly has less to lose than previous ones. Threatening a whole generation with taking away their possibility of good jobs is a cruel joke in an economy where there are very few so-called good jobs to go around anyway. The propagandists running Empire <bq>[...] have a large group of people who have not been indoctrinated into accepting madness and amputating parts of their own conscience over the years, and so are able to look at the mass murder of civilians in Gaza with clear eyes. [...] <b>Israel’s problem is not that people are being propagandized into hating it, it’s that people are not being successfully propagandized into supporting it.</b></bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/17/zpgc-n17.html" source="WSWS" author="Brian Dyne">Useless hand wringing and empty platitudes in the latest US climate report</a> <bq>The dire situation described completely dwarfs the series of implausible proposed remedies. This disparity again underscores <b>the impossibility of combining a scientific approach to resolving climate change with the ongoing existence of capitalism</b> and the dominance of the world economy by the <b>drive for private profits and the division of the world into rival nation-states.</b></bq> <bq>The most optimistic outlook, in which carbon dioxide emissions are “Very Low,” has CO2 emissions reach net zero when more of the greenhouse gas is removed from the atmosphere than added by human activity, closer to 2060 than 2050. And <b>the report projects that global temperatures will increase beyond 2 degrees Celsius starting in the 2040s, possibly even the 2030s.</b> Moreover, current CO2 emissions are nowhere near the levels needed for the “Very Low” scenario. For that to occur, global emissions must by 2100 fall from where they are now, an estimated 37.12 gigatons of CO2 a year, to about half of what they were in 2000, about 14 gigatons. <b>The last time global greenhouse gas emissions were that low, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.</b></bq> <bq>The current trajectory is more akin to the “High” scenario, which predicts what will happen if CO2 emissions in 2100 are 75 percent greater than what they were in 2000. Under those conditions, <b>global temperatures will increase beyond 2 degrees Celsius in the 2030s, nearly 3 degrees Celsius in the 2040s, and 4 degrees Celsius in the 2060s. In 2023, emissions are already 45 percent greater.</b></bq> <bq><b>In today’s United States, however, solutions are instead limited to the most tepid measures.</b> One example from the report reads, “Mitigation and adaptation activities are advancing from planning stages to deployment in many areas, including improved grid design and workforce training for electrification, building upgrades, and land-use choices.”</bq> It’s laughable that such pathetic measures are even highlighted as progress, and not as a colossal failure to respond to the climate crisis for four decades. It's over because we don't have time to dismantle the U.S. empire before it finishes killing the planet. <bq>The fact that climate change is caused by human activity has been known for decades, but is still flatly denied by a large section of the capitalist ruling elite, and virtually the entire Republican Party (and many Democrats). <b>The basic science behind global warming, that higher atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as CO2 will trap more incoming heat from the sun, has been known for more than a century.</b> And even major fossil fuel corporations such as ExxonMobil have admitted to the relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperature changes since at least the early 1980s.</bq> <bq>Under Obama, Trump and now Biden, the ongoing initiatives promoting alternative energy, electric vehicles, etc. have been promoted not because of concern over planetary ecology, but <b>because there is now profit to be made from new markets emerging out of “green” technologies.</b></bq> <bq>There is also an immense amount of geostrategic jockeying, particularly sparked by the industrial growth of China. <b>Every US-based climate report makes special mention that China is now the single largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, while downplaying the fact that the US, UK and European Union combined are responsible for the lion’s share of CO2 emissions.</b> Ecology has become one more pretext for trade warfare measures against the world’s second largest economy, and even for military conflict.</bq> China's 1/3 larger by PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). Has been for years.. <bq>There is no reason to surrender to these circumstances. The tasks are immense, but they are fundamentally political, not technological. <b>It is not “humanity” in the abstract that is responsible for the crisis, it is capitalism, a definite form of socioeconomic organization developed around the pursuit of private profit and the division of the world into nation-states.</b> Thus it is the struggle against capitalism that must form the basis for a real solution to climate change.</bq> <bq>Appeals to the powers-that-be for a change in policies fall on deaf ears. <b>The capitalists are concerned with making profit and defending their wealth</b>, and that means ecological devastation, genocidal wars, surrender to global pandemics, endless growth of social inequality, and a frontal assault on democratic rights.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQYuyHNLPTQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/RQYuyHNLPTQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Veritasium" caption="The Surprising Genius of Sewing Machines"> <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/polonius-his-muse" source="Hinternet" author="Sam Jennings">Polonius, His Muse</a> <bq>The character’s silence has been read by some as the very silence of God. Yet what is most mysterious, made subject over the years to hundreds of theories and dozens of books, is that the name Josefine does not once occur in the course of the novel. Not once. At this point, the name is practically a folk tale, an appellation handed down through the years. We can only hope it is the one Sayer first intended for her silent Lady, and the result is not unlike a precocious child’s reading of an ancient myth. Or, if you will allow me to be poetic once more: it is something like the initiation rite of a mystery cult, as conceived by an insane epigeneticist. <b>We have inherited the name, none may know where from. All we can trace this knowledge back to are second-hand words, words themselves half-heard from some other person: a cosmic game of telephone, eventually vanishing into the past, murky as the lineage of the prehistoric hominids we believe to have birthed us.</b></bq> <bq>It is clear to anyone who reads Polonius, His Muse today that, just as the starting point of the story was seemingly chosen quite arbitrarily, so the rest of the work might have proceeded forward forever, towards any end at all. <b>Implied at either extreme of the narrative is an understanding that it goes on infinitely in either direction, to the very beginning, or else the end, of time itself.</b></bq> <bq><b>When we read Sayer, we find Shakespeare’s work transmuted — on the one hand, into a microscopically limited, yet on the other hand into a paradoxically limitless, chapter of one brief moment in the entire flow of time and space.</b> And so Hamlet itself becomes recognized throughout the course of Sayer’s mother/daughter work as <b>an almost psychedelic irruption of all that creative cosmology into the dramatist’s limited, treble dimension.</b> In this way, Sayer’s more discursive Hamlet is, essentially, <b>a kind of demiurge: human consciousness as a sort of quantum vessel, shuttling its energy across the boundaries of the space-time continuum.</b> It is science-fiction, even if only by caveat.</bq> <bq>Not for nothing did Viswanathan give the name Babel’s Last Jest to his landmark study of the novel. For as he so eloquently pointed out, <b>Josefine’s muteness is perhaps best read as a truly cosmic refutation of each of us, of the human soul’s nearly pathological compulsion to speak in the face of a silent Nature, or to pray in the presence of a silent God.</b> If Hamlet once stood as the foremost celebration of mankind’s creative power, then Polonius, His Muse has now risen as its shadow — a humbling representation of that wordless cosmic witness, that judgeless Nature extending eternally beneath us, and within us, and beyond us.</bq> <bq>What we have —and it is ultimately, only this— is the story: the tale of Sayer and the apparent inspiration for her mammoth undertaking. Though many scholars have tried, none have managed to determine the actual origins of any of these accounts. <b>Each seems to come to us out of nothingness, sui generis. Just like the book’s subject. Just like its writer. And just like the book itself, at first: hand-printed, self-published, circulated in the countercultural milieux of Southern California in the dawning days of the Age of Aquarius.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-moose-jaw-event" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The Moose Jaw Event</a> <bq>I hung up without saying a word. That apology of mine was long in coming, and it took an awful lot to get me there. How could I possibly accept thanks, now, for something that only moments before had been the gravest crime in the world? I had owned it — it was my asteroid. Perhaps I had wanted to blow up the world, now that I think about it. No point in thanking me for failing. And anyhow who knows what tomorrow will bring? <b>The mood of humanity now undulates as a single wave, from euphoria to terror and back again, day after day, year after year. For now no one is asking themselves what the space-bacteria will eat when they run out of plastic. As for me, I am fully expecting a whole new fucking freak-out soon enough.</b></bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/13/the-religion-of-the-engineers-and-hayek-its-true-prophet/" source="Crooked Timber" author="Henry Farrell">The Religion of the Engineers; and Hayek Its True Prophet</a> <bq><b>The core precept of this secular religion is faith in technology.</b> From Andreessen’s opening section: “We believe growth is progress … the only perpetual source of growth is technology … this is why we are not still living in mud huts … this is why our descendents [sic] will live in the stars.”</bq> <bq>Both the old time religion and the new one invoke grand visions to wave away the mess, disagreements and complexities of the present. <b>They depict those who oppose the actions of a tiny self-elected elite as champions of ignorance and enemies of progress.</b> If we only just let the engineers run things, we could be sure that our descendants will have the universe for their inheritance.</bq> <bq>Andreessen’s tirade was largely motivated by his anger at AI skeptics. Certainly, one of his proposed articles of faith is that “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. <b>Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.</b>”</bq> Cool. Just from that statement alone, I feel secure in not listening to or reading another word that Andreessen or his ilk have to say. You can use that line of argumentation for anything: deaths that were preventable by not having invented that piece of technology---say, fossil-fuel refinement and burning for everything---is a form of murder. People like this wield sophistry and casuistry so casually, then accuse others of hypothetical murders. <bq><b>We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more</b>, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets. We believe that out of all of these people will come scientists, technologists, artists, and visionaries beyond our wildest dreams. We believe the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth and in the stars.</bq> What is the proposed mechanism for scaling up to 5x this level? Poverty is an anchor. <bq>There isn’t any room for complexity in Andreessen’s vision. The politics are all stripped out. <b>There is only a struggle between the Good who embrace technological progress, and the Enemies of Progress.</b></bq> <bq>The religion of the engineers is the hopium of Silicon Valley elites. It’s less a complex theology than <b>an eschatological soporific, a prosperity gospel for venture capitalists, founders and wannabes.</b> It tells its votaries that profits and progress point in exactly the same direction, and that by doing well they will most certainly do good.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/14/if-its-a-ponzi-get-in-early-the-ideology-of-scam-futures/" source="Crooked Timber" author="Kevin Cox">“If it’s a Ponzi, get in early”: The Ideology of Scam Futures</a> <bq>We only accept money from other people today because we think that someone will accept it from us tomorrow, and so on, into multiple tomorrows. <b>When we invest, we are laying bets on particular visions of the future.</b></bq> <bq>Studying retail investing is one way to explore how Silicon Valley ideologies move from centers of power, such as the actual physical placed called “Silicon Valley,” and diffuse to the rest of the world. <b>Retail investing resembles Althusser’s notion of the classic Ideological State Apparatus. It is a vector of ideology, a way of mediating it.</b></bq> <bq>I have been told, by probably about four different interviewees in crypto, that they (or “someone they know”) became more of an ideological believer in the politics of crypto as they watched the line go up and the potential cash-out value of their investment grow. <b>When the line goes down, they don’t abandon those beliefs. Instead they revise them, and qualify them to rationalize either selling at a loss or “hodling” on.</b></bq> <bq>There is an osmotic threshold where scam reality just becomes a reality. Even if the promised future doesn’t come to be, some future inevitably does. What kind of future happens in the aftermath of scams? <b>The key question on my mind these days is: how do you keep living in a future that was never meant to actually exist because it was supposed to be a scam?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/15/silicon-valleys-worldview-is-not-just-an-ideology-its-a-personality-disorder/" source="Crooked Timber" author="Cheryl Rofer">Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.</a> <bq><b>Silicon Valley ideology is a master-slave mentality, a hierarchical worldview that we all exist in extractive relation to someone stronger, and exploit and despise anyone weaker.</b> Its only relations to other humans are supplication in one direction and subjugation in the other, hence its poster-boys’ constant yoyoing between grandiosity and victimhood. Tech bros like Thiel, Musk and Andreesen are the fluffers in the global authoritarian circle jerk.</bq> <bq><b>Silicon Valley ideology is organising economic, political and social relations into a zero-sum hierarchical chain in which democratic accountability is irrelevant, where beta politicians suck up to the alpha tech-oligarchs, offering their citizens as tribute.</b>* To wit, the thoroughly interchangeable Matt Hancocks, Rishi Sunaks, Wes Streetings; all selling out UK citizens’ data and life chances for pennies on the pound and a glint of northern California’s reflected glory.</bq> <bq>Silicon Valley ideology is using private equity to buy a new marketplace, flood it with capital to flush out competitors, and <b>use economic dominance to eviscerate working conditions and the cost of labour before jacking up the prices again, this time with the surplus all going to investors.</b></bq> <bq>It’s <b>hyping specific technologies as universal</b>, structural game-changers in accelerating hype cycles designed to fleece their marks quickly enough to drive growth and <b>cash out before most people realise the technology simply doesn’t work as they were told.</b> Bonus points for damaging trusted institutions (crypto) or labour (AI) along the way.</bq> <bq><b>Silicon Valley ideology is robbing states of tax and taking over the wrecked public services that result.</b></bq> <bq><b>Silicon Valley ideology blames others for its harms. Its titans built the machines currently dismantling democracies. So, to absolve themselves of responsibility, they’ve come to see democracy itself as flawed and weak.</b> Silicon Valley ideology quietly admits (its) freedom is not compatible with (our) democracy. So it wrecks it, destroying our information systems, gutting our infrastructure and essential services, and gathering digital lynch mobs to hound women and people of colour out of public life. Then, <b>like the violent abuser who stands back, momentarily awed at what he has wrought, it says in a moment of startled vulnerability; ‘Look what you made me do.’</b></bq> <bq>Silicon Valley ideology says safeguarding intelligence in the future is more important than its systems systematically crushing and killing black and brown people right now. <b>Long-termism grabs attention back from people being harmed, who were beginning to make too much noise.</b></bq> <bq>Silicon Valley’s extractive systems are only a real problem when they come after what the tech bros most value, their own brain function and autonomy. Racism, for them, is not ‘existential’. Misogyny is a matter of indifference when your goal is to ‘extend the light of consciousness’ across the solar system. <b>It’s only when you look straight at Silicon Valley’s leaders you realise its core beliefs aren’t an ideology. They’re a personality disorder.</b></bq> <bq>I’ll never get what these men see in Silicon Valley’s boy-kings. I don’t mean that rhetorically. There’s clearly an itch the tech oligarchs scratch for those who brush up against them, but looking at the exact same person, <b>my brain clocks ‘predator’ at a thousand paces</b>, and theirs seem to switch into a purring, excited mode that’s wholly unavailable to me.</bq> <bq>The sensibles identify with the aggressor, align themselves with money, flutter like fangirls in the face of power. They never say ‘far right’ or ‘fascist’. <b>They pat themselves on the back for occasionally calling Silicon Valley’s titans ‘controversial’.</b></bq> <bq>I, quite frankly, am tired. <b>I find myself yet again in a conversation dominated by beneficiaries of a dirty system</b> while the conscience, critique and force of collective action for alternatives are provided by women, and women of colour, predominantly.</bq> Honestly? I like this essay. It's been a lot of fun. Why end it with this divisive bullshit? Get the fuck out of here with your alienating and frankly condescending identitarianism, which challenges everyone who doesn't have the right skin color or gender to "try harder". Turnabout is fair play is stupid when you copy stupid. <bq>When one moderately powerful person steps up it emboldens others to act. It would signal to Musk’s shoulder-shrugging supporters inside US government – and especially the DoD – that <b>you cannot run critical communications and defence infrastructure while being a far-right stooge sympathetic to foreign powers.</b></bq> WTF are you on about? I feel like the wheels are coming off of this essay. Which rabbit hole did you go down? <hr> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/23/opinion/patagonia-environnment-fast-fashion.html" author="Yvon Chouinard" source="NY Times">The High Stakes of Low Quality</a> <bq>[...] people keep buying junk. In a world where it’s often cheaper to replace goods than to repair them, <b>we have gone from a society of caretaker owners to one of consumers.</b></bq> <bq>The novelist Terry Pratchett captured the problem in his “boots theory” of socioeconomics: “<b>A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet</b>.”</bq> <bq>Quality is smart business. Even during economic downturns, people don’t stop spending. In our experience, instead of wanting more, they value better. <b>Consumers should demand — and companies should deliver — products that are more durable, multifunctional and, crucially, socially and environmentally responsible.</b></bq> <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/11/this-inside-out-design-solves-most-of-the-rotary-engines-problems/" source="Ars Technica" author="Jonathan M. Gitlin">This inside-out design solves most of the rotary engine’s problems</a> <bq>The solution involves turning the engine inside out. <b>Instead of an oval-shaped combustion chamber and a triangular rotor, now the combustion chamber is triangular and the rotor is an oval, which contains a pre-chamber.</b> "So instead of a long, skinny, moving combustion chamber, we now have a stationary combustion chamber inside of the housing," Shkolnik said. "What that means is we can make it smaller, and that drives a higher compression ratio. And because it's stationary, it's suitable for direct injection of fuel," he said. And <b>since the seals are stationary, the oil problem should be fixed.</b></bq> <bq>"That's a big reason why we are raising outside capital, to cross these productionization and emissions bridges so that we can get to the commercial market. <b>I would estimate about two years to where we are hopefully delivering with the DoD and then maybe one or two years after that for broader commercial markets</b>," Shkolnik said.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/you-are-tearing-me-apart-eacc" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">You are tearing me apart, e/acc!</a> <bq>The altruists, which includes folks like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried, believe that maximum human happiness is a math equation you can solve with money, which should be what steers technological innovation. While the accelerationists believe almost the inverse, that innovation matters more than human happiness and the internet can, and should, rewire how our brains work. <b>Either way, both groups are obsessed with race science, want to replace democratic institutions with privately-owned automations — that they control — and are utterly convinced that technology and, specifically, the emergence of AI is a cataclysmic doomsday moment for humanity. The accelerationists just think it should happen immediately.</b> Of course, as is the case with everything in Silicon Valley, all of this is predicated on the unwavering belief in its own importance. So it’s very possible that if we were to take the actually longtermist view of all of this, we’d actually end up looking back at this whole thing as a bunch a weird nerds fighting over Reddit threads.</bq> The author wrote this about something else, but I thought it could be appropriate in many, many places. <bq>I wish all of the unwell people trapped inside of this cultural prison the best</bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft" source="The New Yorker" author="James Somers">A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft</a> <bq>Fluency with code would round out my children’s literacy—and keep them employable. But as I write this my wife is pregnant with our first child, due in about three weeks. <b>I code professionally, but, by the time that child can type, coding as a valuable skill might have faded from the world.</b></bq> I can't help but react violently to the idea that the only reason to learn something is because it will help you make money. Fuck. Off. Moron. <bq>[...] we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and <b>while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.</b></bq> I would hope so. It's kind of a two-liner. <bq>As it became clear that he was going to lose, Sedol said, in a press conference, “I want to apologize for being so powerless.” He retired three years later. <b>Sedol seemed weighed down by a question that has started to feel familiar, and urgent: What will become of this thing I’ve given so much of my life to?</b></bq> C'mon, you pathetic whiners. All I'm hearing is that you were always doing whatever you were doing for the wrong reason. You're supposed to what you love, because you can't not do it. You're happy if someone pays you for it. Let me know how updating and maintaining this morass produced by your precious LLMs goes. It never worked before, and it won't work now. As long as you restrict yourself to toy POCs that are largely stuff that already exists, you're good. Why doesn't the LLM deliver tests? Because no-one really writes them, so it has no source material. The only saving grace is that no-one will ever maintain or refactor that code, so it needs no tests? <bq>Medieval students called the moment at which casual learners fail the pons asinorum , or “bridge of asses.” The term was inspired by Proposition 5 of Euclid’s Elements I, the first truly difficult idea in the book. Those who crossed the bridge would go on to master geometry; those who didn’t would remain dabblers. <b>Section 4.3 of “Beginning Visual C++,” on “Dynamic Memory Allocation,” was my bridge of asses. I did not cross.</b></bq> Cool. I guess you're not a coder, not really? You don't have to use dynamic memory allocation, but you have to be capable of understanding it. This person is a coder whose output can easily be replicated by a machine, because he can't build anything complex anyway. Neither can an LLM. Who will build complex things if we convince engineers to stop? I think this affects those "learn to code" people. <bq><b>What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession.</b></bq> All of those are important. What are you talking about? No knowledge or skill? No wonder you can be easily replaced. You never offered anything of value in the first place. You enjoyed a few decades in the sun where you were able to run an arbitrage scam where you could pretend to be able to provide a service that people thought they needed. They didn't need it, because otherwise they might have noticed your failure to provide it. <bq><b>Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles.</b> Imagine explaining to a simpleton how to assemble furniture over the phone, with no pictures, in a language you barely speak. Imagine, too, that the only response you ever get is that you’ve suggested an absurdity and the whole thing has gone awry.</bq> Jesus, dude. That's not coding as I know it. What you're describing is a horror show. Dude, you should be happy that you don't have to do what you're calling "programming" anymore. <bq>Their skills were considered so crucial and delicate that a kind of superstition developed around the work. For instance, it was considered foolish to estimate how long a coding task might take, since at any moment the programmer might turn over a rock and discover a tangle of bugs. Deadlines were anathema. <b>If the pressure to deliver ever got too intense, a coder needed only to speak the word “burnout” to buy a few months.</b></bq> This wa always stupid---a product of too much money sloshing around, which was a product of grifter capitalism and regulatory capture. This was never the fairy-tale world that I lived in. Dude, what I'm hearing is that you were spoiled in a major way, never aware that you were incredibly spoiled and never actually deserved the privilege you'd been granted. <bq>[...] thousands of dollars for a project that took a weekend. But along came tools like Squarespace, which allowed pizzeria owners and freelance artists to make their own Web sites just by clicking around. <b>For professional coders, a tranche of high-paying, relatively low-effort work disappeared.</b></bq> Again, of course they did. You automate low-effort bullshit. If that's all people want, then it's done quickly. You want a few pages that you rarely if ever update? Click, click, done. Quino and Atlas did that too. Can an LLM build a tool like Atlas or Quino? <bq>Software engineers, as a species, love automation. Inevitably, <b>the best of them build tools that make other kinds of work obsolete</b>. This very instinct explained why we were so well taken care of: <b>code had immense leverage</b>.</bq> I've always told people that my job was technically to optimize processes and increase efficiency, but it was always equivalent to eliminating jobs. <bq>Ben asked me for advice, and I mumbled a few possibilities; in truth, I wasn’t sure that what he wanted would be possible. <b>Then he asked GPT-4. It told Ben that Firebase had a capability that would make the project much simpler.</b> Here it was—and here was some code to use that would be compatible with the microcontroller.</bq> You could have also searched it! Why did you have to get 6000 GPUs to give you that answer? It was probably right there in the first StackOverflow response. 🤦‍♂️ <bq>In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. <b>GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.</b></bq> This has been happening for a while. A lot of what people call programming is menial labor. As long as you don't need cutting edge, it's fine. A snake game is Walmart code. I can't do it as fast, but I'm happy to John Henry it for you, if you like. I'll definitely have fun doing it. It's Like painting: most people won't be paid to do it. <bq>In a 1978 essay titled “On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming,’ ” the computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra argued that if you were to instruct computers not in a specialized language like C++ or Python but <b>in your native tongue you’d be rejecting the very precision that made computers useful.</b> Formal programming languages, he wrote, are “an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”</bq> <bq>When I first used GPT-4, I could see what Dijkstra was talking about. You can’t just say to the A.I., “Solve my problem.” That day may come, but for now it is more like an instrument you must learn to play. You have to specify what you want carefully, as though talking to a beginner. In the search-highlighting problem, I found myself asking GPT-4 to do too much at once, watching it fail, and then starting over. Each time, my prompts became less ambitious. <b>By the end of the conversation, I wasn’t talking about search or highlighting; I had broken the problem into specific, abstract, unambiguous sub-problems that, together, would give me what I wanted.</b></bq> No tests, no docs, no experience. The "sub-problems" are functions that you could have tested. <bq>When I got into programming, it was because computers felt like a form of magic. The machine gave you powers but required you to study its arcane secrets—to learn a spell language. This took a particular cast of mind. I felt selected. I devoted myself to tedium, to careful thinking, and to the accumulation of obscure knowledge. Then, one day, <b>it became possible to achieve many of the same ends without the thinking and without the knowledge. Looked at in a certain light, this can make quite a lot of one’s working life seem like a waste of time.</b></bq> This is a personal problem based where the author doesn't know what he even enjoys. I know electric hedge shears are faster. A chainsaw too. I use manual shears and a handsaw when I clean up the garden in the fall. What's your hurry, dude? I have honed my skills and mind for general problem-solving. The time was not wasted. You don't have to stop just because you can't win. That's a corrosive, late-stage-capitalist mindset. If it resonates, I feel sorry for you. <bq>I suspect that, as my child comes of age, <b>we will think of “the programmer” the way we now look back on “the computer,”</b> when that phrase referred to a person who did calculations by hand.</bq> First of all: I know that this line is exactly the reason that the New Yorker paid you for this essay because all ya all think it's exceedingly clever. Second of all: Ok. Your job will be gone, maybe. You seem to not have understand what a developer does. A developer transforms requirements into machines. As for me, I'm going to be more careful about which principles I throw out. We should remember we have those principles and see if they still apply. Instead of letting all of the shitty programmers who never knew them push past us and tell none of that is necessary anymore. They're Like stupid, young, green, untrained soldiers in hyper armor storming the field but unsure where to go or what to shoot at. They'll buzz off into all sorts of directions without a plan, until their batteries die and their ammo runs out. Change is not necessarily progress. <bq>[...] getting computers to do precisely what you want <b>might become a matter of asking politely</b>.</bq> Just keep saying it until nobody risks saying the emperor has no clothes. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DORZA_S7f9w" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/DORZA_S7f9w" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Nick Chapsas" caption="What Is .NET Aspire? The Insane Future of .NET!"> <hr> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2023/11/20/trimming-a-fake-object/" author="Mark Seemann" source="Ploeh Blog">Trimming a Fake Object</a> <bq>A word of caution before we proceed. <b>When deciding to pull some of that test code into the production code, I'm making a decision about architecture.</b> Until now, I'd been following the Dependency Inversion Principle closely. The interfaces exist because the client code needs them. Those interfaces could be implemented in various ways: You could use a relational database, a document database, files, blobs, etc. Once I decide to pull the above algorithm into the production code, I'm choosing a particular persistent data structure. <b>This now locks the data storage system into a design where there's a persistent view per date, and another database of bookings.</b></bq> <bq>Test-driven development is a feedback mechanism. If something is difficult to test, it tells you something about your System Under Test (SUT). <b>If your test code looks bloated, that tells you something too. Perhaps part of the test code really belongs in the production code.</b> In this article, we started with a Fake Object that looked like it contained too much production code. Via a series of refactorings I moved the relevant parts to the production code, leaving me with a more idiomatic and conforming implementation.</bq> <hr> <span id="primary-constructors"></span> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IABO8O9cZOw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/IABO8O9cZOw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Nick Chapsas" caption="The C# 12 Feature You Shouldn’t Use, Yet"> He talks about the downsides of the current implementation of primary constructors: <ul> They don't have a readonly backing field; you can assign to it You can't control visibility of the generated property of backing field You can't throw exceptions, exception in a field initializer, which isn't as obvious or clean as doing so from the constructor </ul> He contrasts with the language feature in Kotlin, which allows all modifiers in the declaration, but has the same problem that the class definition gets pretty wordy. The article <a href="https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2023/11/23/primary-constructors-using-csharp-12-in-rider-and-resharper/" author="Matthias Koch" source="JetBrains Blog">Primary Constructors – Using C# 12 in Rider and ReSharper</a> describes another ugly phenomenon: double capture. <bq quote-style="none"> Let’s consider the following example:<code>public class Person(int age) { // initialization public int Age { get; set; } = age; // capture public string Bio => $"My age is {age}!"; }</code>In this class, the parameter <c>age</c> is exposed both through the <c>Age</c> and <c>Bio</c> property. As a result, the object stores the state of <c>age</c> twice! For reference types, a double capture leads to an increased memory footprint and possibly even memory leaks. In our concrete example, you will observe the following unintended behavior:<code>var p = new Person(42); p.Age.Dump(); // Output: 42 p.Bio.Dump(); // Output: My age is 42! p.Age++; p.Age.Dump(); // Output: 43 p.Bio.Dump(); // Output: My age is 42! // !!!!</code></bq> <h><span id="fun">Fun</span></h> <a href="https://www.eurosport.com/snooker/uk-championship/2023-2024/uk-championship-2023-snooker-live-mark-allen-meets-ding-junhui-in-blockbuster-opener-mark-williams-f_sto9895006/story.shtml" author="" source="Eurosport">UK CHAMPIONSHIP 2023 SNOOKER LIVE – MARK ALLEN MEETS DING JUNHUI IN BLOCKBUSTER OPENER</a> I just watched Ding Junhui play some absolutely nervy and spectacular snooker to defeat defending champion Mark Allen. It was 4--2 for Allen when I started watching. Jinhui came back with three 60+ clearances, dropped a frame to 5--5, then capitalized on an error by Allen to clear the frame with perfection and move on to the next round. Curiously, Allen said in the post-game interview that he <iq>played better than Ding</iq>, even though his potting success was 78% to Ding's 90%. Allen played some gritty and doughty snooker, but he made his mistakes. Ding, on the other hand, was quite consistent, especially considering that he admits to being a bit <iq>under the weather</iq> and had <iq>taken some tablets</iq> that <iq>don't seem to be working</iq> yet. He squeaked it out and has a couple of rest days now. Lovely stuff. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/183ho9a/bear_spray_doesnt_work_like_that/" author="" source="Reddit">Bear spray doesn’t work like that 😂</a> <img src="{att_link}bear_spray_is_not_bug_spray.jpg" href="{att_link}bear_spray_is_not_bug_spray.jpg" align="none" caption="bear spray is not bug spray" scale="75%"> <bq>Listen, bear spray DOES NOT work like bug spray. We would like to not have to say that again.</bq> <h><span id="games">Video Games</span></h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/11/the-sad-story-of-cities-skylines-2s-launch-and-how-the-game-hopes-to-get-better/" author="Kevin Purdy" source="Ars Technica"><i>Cities: Skylines 2</i>’s troubled launch, and why simulation games are freaking hard</a> <bq><b>The game's default settings, and bugs in the settings themselves, are "a bit of an unforced error" and "make performance that's already pretty pedestrian look downright awful</b>," Philip wrote. Things have improved since release, and he's glad to see Colossal Order putting off DLC and mods to work on performance and game bugs. It's necessary, he believes, for the title "to have a chance." Zubek is rooting for the C:S2 team, not least of all because <b>he wants to see simulation game makers rewarded for their efforts. Such games are inherently difficult to make.</b> You have to get funding for something that's often entirely new. You have to develop it, walking the tightrope of testing and perfection against timely release and feedback. And you have to market it when it doesn’t necessarily fit any established genres.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlQ3FeNu5Yw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/dlQ3FeNu5Yw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Playstation" caption="Alan Wake 2 - Launch Trailer | PS5 Games"> I'm on season two of <i>Mindhunter</i> on Netflix, so this fits right in with that.