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Links and Notes for March 29th, 2024

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_invasion_of_the_Gaza_Strip_(2023–present)" author="" source="Wikipedia">Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip (2023–present)</a> is code-named "Operation Swords of Iron". I just wanted to note that, since it's probably going to be important to remember. Just as we occasionally hear "Cast Lead", we will probably be treated to "Swords of Iron" in the future, when we hear about the last time that Israel had to repulse the writhing hordes of Arabs from will have ended up becoming their land. This is just the latest in a long line of whimsically named operations, one among many in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israel_Defense_Forces_operations" author="" source="Wikipedia">List of Israel Defense Forces operations</a>, including "Sea Breeze", "Just Reward", "Summer Rains", "Sharp and Smooth", "Protective Edge", and "Iron Law". <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/29/patrick-lawrence-imperium-decline-on-the-way-to-fall/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Imperium: Decline on the Way to Fall</a> <bq>On the eastern flank of the Atlantic world the imperium’s managers have lost a war they were confident they would win when they started it with the coup they arranged in Kiev a decade ago. The West’s wild miscalculation in Ukraine leaves Russia the victor, and it would be hard to overstate the consequences of this blow for American power and prestige.</bq> <bq>Washington’s policy cliques, stupidly unwilling to accept 21st century realities, are likely to act with increasing desperation as U.S. primacy finally gives way to a global order worthy of the term. If you thought the past couple of decades have been violent, chaotic and destructive, brace yourself: There is almost certainly worse to come.</bq> <bq>As a negotiated peace on any terms acceptable to Moscow is out of the question, and as subverting “Putin’s Russia” remains the objective, the U.S. is likely to intensify the sorts of covert ops and “hybrid warfare” that have been on Washington’s menu for decades. This stands to get very dangerous very fast. Did we have a preview of messes to come with the shocking attack on the concert auditorium and shopping arcade near Moscow on Mar. 22?</bq> <bq>The same day Bortnikov spoke, Russia sent a hypersonic missile—the kind that eludes standard air defense systems—to destroy the SBU’s headquarters building in Kyiv. This is what I mean by things getting very dangerous very fast.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/palestinian-painted-plates-and-the" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">Palestinian Painted Plates & the Nothing Party</a> <bq>“You can’t be a leftist because you criticize liberals” is the wildest shit I’ve ever heard; the natural enemy of the leftist is the liberal. Not because conservatives aren’t worse - they are worse - but because dragging liberals left is inevitably more realistic and more valuable than trying to turn reactionaries into socialists.</bq> <bq>At the end of the day, my politics stand in favor of the liberation of all mankind, and I will keep my own counsel as to what it means to be left-wing. A lot of people in media call me a reactionary because they don’t like me personally and they want everyone they don’t like personally to be a Republican. There are writers who will say I’m just anti-left and editors who will let them get away with it because I am unpopular in the industry and an easy target. But that’s not my problem, that’s their problem.</bq> <bq>Never before or since in the history of the world was slavery practiced at that scale across distances of that magnitude, nor produced an identifiable offspring population as consistently oppressed as Black Americans. That is what should matter to us. Slavery was wrong. The plight of Black people today is wrong. The rest is sophistry.</bq> <bq>Unfortunately, Palestine does not have ideal conditions for a healthy alternative party, given that its people are stateless and dispossessed and have had land stolen out from under them for generations and are subject to periodic displays of mass violence on the part of the IDF. That is not fertile soil for liberal secularism; it’s fertile soil for extremism.</bq> <bq>[...] think the outcome of the battle ahead for who gains control of the American right is not at all clear. We know what it has been, for some time now: conservative Christianity, an incumbent-protecting vision of free market capitalism, militaristic nationalism, and a general antipathy to reducing hierarchy in the social order. Fundamentally, it’s an ideological giftbag devoted to the already-comfortable that has caused a tremendous amount of injustice but which benefits from the fact that the already-comfortable have the power.</bq> <bq>The problem with liberals (among other things) is that they can’t let go of the flawed logic that suggests that because conservatives are stupid, anything conservatives criticize must be good.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/26/taurus-and-the-bullfighters/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">Taurus and the Bullfighters</a> <bq>As for appeasement, Neville Chamberlain and Daladier let Hitler expand in Spain, then tolerated his expansion eastward to Austria and Czechoslovakia because it meant closing in on the hated USSR. His all-European attack in June 1941 was more analogous to EU-NATO eastward-aimed unanimity than the reverse!</bq> <bq>A second group demanding negotiations and an end to the Ukraine war, perhaps very surprisingly, is the AfD. Although it supports big business, NATO, the draft and German rearmament enthusiastically, it calls nevertheless for negotiations, peace and a resumption of normal trade relations. It is possible that the AfD simply wants only to further increase its popularity, especially in eastern Germany, where there is the least military enthusiasm – and it is already amazingly strong (and dangerous) position, at about 30%. Of course they are called “Putin-lovers.” Who knows, perhaps they are. But their top woman in leadership, Alice Weidel, is intelligent, shrewd, a skilled speaker, and made an eloquent plea for peace, while thanking Mützenich and congratulating Scholz for not sending Taurus to Kyiv. Thus creating a difficult complication.</bq> <bq>Their increasingly respectable status led to interest in “identity rights”, immigrant rights, gender rights, but too often to a growing distance from neglected, underpaid, overburdened working people, including temps and the jobless. Some leaders, hoping to crown state cabinet posts with those in a national coalition, watered down their rejection of NATO and its relentless eastward moves and threats. Their rejection of even meager approval of the giant peace demonstration led by Sahra Wagenknecht last year on flimsy grounds borrowed from the mass media proved the last straw for many members and led to the formation of a breakaway party, called (temporarily it is hoped) Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht.</bq> <bq>As for Sahra’s BSW, it stands full square for negotiations and peace, like no other, and certainly for working people’s rights and needs. But much of its program remains vague as yet and seems to be turning out to be less militant than expected. It polls 5 to 7% nationally, not bad for a newbie with rudimentary state structures but less than some had expected in view of Sahra’s popularity.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/27/chris-hedges-the-crucifixion-of-julian-assange-2/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">The Crucifixion of Julian Assange</a> <bq>The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege. The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to carry Julian into a waiting van. The courts have denied Julian’s status as a legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses. The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in exchange for immunity for past crimes.. Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S when he was sent the leaked documents. The British courts are considering extradition, despite the CIA’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s Metropolitan Police.</bq> <bq>Use Julian’s slow motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and extradited to the U.S. Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian, already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates. This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is about vengeance.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/25/nwto-m25.html" source="WSWS" author="Jacob Crosse">Following bipartisan vote, Biden signs $1.2 trillion budget bill devoted to war, genocide</a> <bq>Out of the $1.2 trillion appropriated by Congress and signed into law by Biden, the vast majority of it, over 70 percent, is earmarked for military spending. Minutes after signing the spending bill, Biden demanded that the House take up the National Security Supplemental bill previously passed by the Senate, which includes over $60 billion for the Ukrainian military, over $14 billion for Israel and billions more for Taiwan and future conflict with China.</bq> <bq>Defense News reported the bill “includes $33.5 billion to build eight ships,” while allocating billions more towards the construction of 86 F-35 and 24 F-15EX fighter jets, as well as 15KC-46A tankers.</bq> <bq>Another $2.1 billion is earmarked for the “Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon” and the “Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike Hypersonic Weapon System.”</bq> <bq>This includes $3.3 billion through the State Department, while another $500 million is earmarked for Israel through the Pentagon budget. At the same time, the law prohibits “any taxpayer funding from going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)” and eliminates funding for the “United Nations Commission of Inquiry against Israel.”</bq> <bq>The legislation also compels the Palestinian Authority not to initiate or support any International Criminal Court inquiry against Israeli nationals “for alleged crimes against Palestinians” if it wants any economic support from the United States.</bq> <bq>The vast majority of the 112 House Republicans and 22 Senate Republicans who voted against the bill did so on the grounds that it did not include sufficient cuts in social spending or provide enough money for the military.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/30/wholl-stop-the-rain/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Who’ll Stop the Rain?</a> <bq>Israeli Knesset Member Almog Cohen, reacting to the UN Resolution calling for a ceasefire during Ramadan: “The Prime Minister [not the UN] is the one who decides. The Prime Minister must lead the army to enter Rafah. Yes, when they’re fasting, when they’re tired, and exhausted, to tear their bones apart. I can’t even fathom the point we’ve come to. Our brothers are there [in Gaza], our sisters are there, hostages. And we’re waiting because we’re in the middle of Ramadan fasting? During Ramadan, now is the best time to kill them, because they’re weak. And no, I do not have mercy. I have mercy on my brothers. And I call on him [Netanyahu] today to lead the army to enter Rafah and kill them.”</bq> <bq>Ilhan Omar succinctly pointed out the absurdity of the finding: “If that’s the case, why are we airdropping food and building a port? Stop with this ridiculous nonsense.”</bq> <bq>Bernie Sanders: “To pretend that Israel is not violating international law or interfering with U.S. humanitarian aid is absurd on its face. The State Department’s position makes a mockery of U.S. law and assurances provided to Congress.”</bq> <bq>Nader Jerada, 33-year-old mother, from Gaza City: “I cannot describe the situation we are in now. We are exhausted from hunger. I want to scream that we have no food. I have six children: six mouths to feed. Yesterday, my daughter was crying from hunger. I want to cut myself hearing her cry. Before the war, I used to help everyone and feed everyone, but look at us now: we’re eating raw wheat and barley, even bird feed — which, like everything else, is running out at the market. One kilo costs NIS 35 (around $10).”</bq> <bq>From a report by the Swedish news outlet Journalisten: “A little boy with a bruised face, no more than 11 or 12, exited the ambulance. I asked if he was okay and saw blood dripping from his backpack. “Do you know what I have [in the backpack]?” he asked. “My little brother Ahmed.”</bq> <bq>Memo to ICC Prosecutor Khan: isn’t it better legally and morally to arrest someone (Netanyahu, Herzog, Gallant, Biden, Blinken) during the commission of a crime rather than after it’s been committed, when the blood has dried and the evidence bulldozed into rubble?</bq> <bq>A leaked memo by Assistant Secretary of State Bill Russo notes: “The Israelis seemed oblivious to the fact that they are facing major, possibly generational damage to their reputation not just in the region but elsewhere in the world.” Of course “repetitional damage” seems like a fairly light punishment compared to the bodily, structural, economic, psychic and cultural damage it has inflicted on Gaza.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/29/roaming-charges-114/" author="Jeffrey st. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Nowhere Men</a> <bq>Landline phones only ever reached 20% of the world’s population. Now there are around 110 mobile phones for each person on Earth… and the waste piles and rare earth mines to prove it.</bq> <bq>Blackrock’s Larry Fink on the retirement crisis: “The real drawback of defined contribution was that it removed most of the retirement responsibility from employers and put it squarely on the shoulders of the employees themselves. With pensions, companies had a very clear obligation to their workers. Their retirement money was a financial liability on the corporate balance sheet. Companies knew they’d have to write a check every month to each one of their retirees. But defined contributions plans ended that, forcing retirees to trade a steady stream of income for an impossible math problem…The shift from defined benefit to defined contribution has been, for most people, a shift from financial certainty to financial uncertainty.”</bq> <bq>Price of Ozempic per month:<ul>USA: Nearly $1,000 Canada: $155 Germany: $59 Cost to Manufacture Ozempic: $5</ul></bq> <bq>RFK, Jr. passed over Aaron Rodgers to pick Nicole Shanahan as his running mate. Shanahan is a 38-year-old patent attorney whose affair with Elon Musk, reportedly ended her marriage to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Shanahan met Brin at a yoga festival in Tahoe. She met her new partner, Jacob Strumwasser, an executive at a Bitcoin company, at Burning Man, naturally, and the couple were married in a Druidic “handfasting” love ceremony with included a “water blessing” to symbolize their mutual passion for surfing. Shanahan walked away with a reported billion dollars from her split with Brin.</bq> JFC. This is what the rich are like. Worth a billion bucks. Is this one of Rand's entrepreneuers? <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/a-genocide-foretold" author="Chris Hedges" source="Substack">A Genocide Foretold</a> <bq>The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VtaKMoS-KE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/-VtaKMoS-KE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Princeton Students for Justice" caption="[HD] Conversation on the Gaza Genocide with Norman Finkelstein and Chris Hedges"> Although so many comments talked about the "great conversation", Chris Hedges spent very little time talking. It was mostly Norman Finkelstein, who didn't say much new, but was powerful and consistent and as always. If you've never seen him before, then this is an excellent start. I've just seen dozens of interviews with him in the last six months. It was fascinating to see how the first 15 minute of questions were turned by the first questioner---who was clutching a little Israeli flag---to the question of the Houthis and their slogan. It reads, "God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam." This is not good, of course, but it's so far beside the point. That they are monsters you wouldn't want to have as neighbors doesn't change the fact that they are the only state that has actively tried to prevent the ongoing genocide---with no effectiveness, but no matter. They are honest about their aims, whereas the Israeli motto could be "God is the Greatest, Life to America, Death to Palestine, A Curse Upon the Muslims, Victory to Israel." It's incredible that campus security gets to decide to cut off the event, right in the middle of a fascinating question-and-answer session. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0atzea-mPY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/_0atzea-mPY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Al Jazeera English" caption="October 7 | Al Jazeera Investigations"> This is a 1-hour-long documentary about the October 7th attacks and the ensuing Israeli military operation. It's pretty even-handed and includes a lot of footage from both Hamas and IDF soldiers, mostly from the first day of the conflict. I'd never seen any footage before and was struck by how eerily it looked like Call of Duty video-game footage. The documentary doesn't shrink from showing war crimes on both sides---you definitely see both Hamas and IDF attacking civilians---but also takes time to show that many of the most egregious allegations of what happened are wholly without evidence, a fact that's long since been not only acknowledged, but accepted and evenly reported in Israel, even if it still remains wholly ignored in the Western media. So much so that many people have no idea that most of the most horrible stuff that they think that Hamas did never happened---again, even as acknowledged by the IDF, which is fine with admitting to "inaccuracy" (i.e., lying, or, at best, cynical propaganda) once the propaganda has served its purpose. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/02/gcth-a02.html" author="Peter Symonds" source="WSWS">Israeli airstrike destroys Iranian consulate in Syria</a> <bq>“Israel believes that Iran is effectively deterred, and is willing to risk a war in order to degrade significantly Iran and Hizbollah,” said Emile Hokayem, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the FT. “This calculation will work until it will not, and then it will be catastrophic,” he warned. In reality, it is not just Israel, but US imperialism, which has backed Israel politically, financially and militarily to the hilt, that is seeking to provoke a catastrophic conflict against Iran. Already engaged in an expanding war with nuclear-armed Russia in Ukraine and advanced preparations for war with China, the US regards control of the Middle East as a critical element of the developing global conflict and Iran as the key obstacle that must be removed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/04/03/no-margin-for-tragedy/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">No Margin For Tragedy</a> <bq>For those who have chosen to believe they can support Palestinians without a grasp of the dynamics of terrorism, this tragedy will be seen, and proclaimed, proof that Israel is a genocidal nation bent on killing all Gazans. The strikes against the World Central Kitchen humanitarian aid workers will be spun as a weapon to prevent food from getting to starving Gazans, to ensure widespread famine, to kill more women and children, innocent civilians who are doing nothing more than trying to survive. For Israel’s enemies and wannbe [sic] enemies, meaning those who supported Israel but need an off-ramp to appease loud and angry constituents, Israel has just handed them a gift. This is the ready excuse to abandon Israel for having been responsible for this tragedy. Even though this changes nothing about the underlying situation in Gaza, where the hostages remain in custody and Hamas remains in control, this is all the excuse needed to end support for Israel. One tragic accident.</bq> He started off well, though! He started with <iq>Israel knew whose trucks they were, what they were doing there, where they were going and that they were not Hamas, but humanitarian aid workers. It seems impossible that such a mistake could be made.</iq> But then he still ended up saying that somehow Hamas is in control. He acknowledges that it's a bad look, but that anyone who actually thinks its more than just a bad look is a terrorist-lover. He interprets Israel's having chosen a path that will, at best, result in a Pyrrhic victory, as Hamas being in control. This is really powerful self-deception at this point. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/03/chris-hedges-the-death-of-amr/" author="Chris Hedges" source="Scheer Post">The Death of Amr</a> <bq>Amr’s father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, fell sick. The family took him to the European Hospital near Khan Yunis. The doctor told him he was ill because he was not eating enough. “We can’t handle your case,” the doctor told him. “There are more critical cases.” “He had a beautiful house,” Abdallah says of his older brother. “Now he is homeless. He knew everyone in his hometown. Now he lives on the street with crowds of strangers. No one has enough to eat. There is no clean water. There are no proper facilities or bathrooms.” The family decided to move again to al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian area” by Israel. They would at least be in open land, some of which belonged to their family. The coastal area, filled with dunes, now holds some 380,000 displaced Palestinians. The Israelis promised the delivery of international humanitarian aid to al-Mawasi, little of which arrived. Water has to be trucked in. There is no electricity.</bq> <bq>The Egyptian firm Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, provided travel permits for Gazans to enter Egypt for $350, before the Israeli assault. Since the genocide began, the firm has raised the price to $5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child. It has sometimes charged as much as $10,000 for a travel permit.</bq> Capitalism eats its young. There is probably no real reason why the price rose, other than that people are more desperate. They don't have money. You can't squeeze blood from a tone. But you can try. Capitalism demands that you try. Otherwise someone else will. Do you want someone else to drink your milkshake? <bq>It would cost around $25,000 to get Amr’s family out of Gaza, double that if they included his widowed aunt and three cousins. This was not a sum Amr’s relatives abroad could raise quickly. They set up a GoFundMe page here. They are still trying to collect enough money.</bq> <bq>A shell exploded near the tent. Shrapnel tore apart his aunt’s leg and critically injured his cousins. Amr frantically tried to help them. A second shell exploded. Shrapnel ripped through Amr’s stomach and exited from his back. He was dead. Later that night the Israelis shelled again. Several Palestinians were wounded and killed. The empty tent, occupied the day before by Amr’s family, was obliterated.</bq> Well, at least no-one has to worry about that GoFundMe anymore. Israel solved the problem of Amr starving to death. He was probably in Hamas or going to join anyway, so no big loss, ammirite? My goodness, it's difficult to write that sentence, even in cynical jest. I'll let it stand, though, and see if it's cited out of context at some point. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/04/there-are-limits-to-our-patience-iran-at-united-nations-security-council/" author="The Cradle" source="Scheer Post">‘There Are Limits to Our Patience’: Iran at United Nations Security Council</a> <bq>During the session, Tehran’s ambassador to the UN, Zahra Ershadi, renewed the promise made by several Iranian officials that the Islamic Republic reserves the right “to take a decisive response” to the Israeli airstrike. Iran “has exercised considerable restraint, but it is imperative to acknowledge there are limits to such forbearance,” Ershadi said, adding that it holds Washington “responsible for all crimes committed by the Israeli regime.” She also blamed the US for destabilizing Syria and the region and for continuing its support of the Israeli war on Gaza. “This crime bluntly breaches the fundamental principle of diplomatic and consular immunity and flagrantly violated the 1961 Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, including Diplomatic Agents of 1973,” Ershadi continued. Russia’s UN representative, Vasily Nebenzia, said during the emergency meeting that Israel’s attack was a “flagrant violation” of Syrian sovereignty and said Moscow believes “that such aggressive actions by Israel are designed to further fuel the conflict. They are absolutely unacceptable and must stop.”</bq> <bq>Washington’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Robert Wood, warned Iran “and its proxies not to take advantage of the situation” by resuming attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, stressing the US “had no involvement or advanced knowledge” of the attack on the consulate.</bq> Just gobsmacking boldness. Just utterly divorced from reality. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/04/patrick-lawrence-europes-identity-crisis/" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="Scheer Post">Europe’s Identity Crisis</a> <bq>“Europe’s leaders have woken up to hard power” is the headline atop a commentary Janan Ganesh, a Financial Times columnist, published on this topic last week. “To militarize as much as it needs to,” he wrote, “Europe needs its citizens to bear higher taxes or a smaller welfare state.” This is bitterly succinct. Europe’s leaders and the media that serve them are in the process of normalizing the “need” to turn Europe into a warrior state in the American image — suffused with animus and paranoia, beset with “threats,” never at ease as the social fabric deteriorates.</bq> <bq>[...] the Ukraine war is lost and America’s enthusiasm for the Kiev regime has plainly weakened. This leaves Europe to manage the mess on its doorstep while the U.S. can, as is its habit, “move on.” Hence the European Union’s commitment two months ago to provide Ukraine with €50 billion in “reliable and predictable financial support” over the next four years.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/04/idf-allowed-100-civilian-deaths-for-every-hamas-official-targeted-by-error-prone-ai-system/" author="Julia Conley" source="Scheer Post">IDF Allowed 100 Civilian Deaths for Every Hamas Official Targeted by Error-Prone AI System</a> <bq>“Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war,” wrote Abraham. “In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine ‘as if it were a human decision.'”</bq> <bq>“A human being had to [verify the target] for just a few seconds,” a source identified as B. told +972. “At first, we did checks to ensure that the machine didn’t get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man—that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice.” “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day,” B. added. “I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time. If [the operative] came up in the automated mechanism, and I checked that he was a man, there would be permission to bomb him, subject to an examination of collateral damage.”</bq> <bq>[...] the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option,” an officer identified as A. told +972 and Local Call. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”</bq> <bq>The investigation also found that, according to two of the sources, the IDF decided in the early weeks of the war that “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians”—an unprecedented approach by Israel to so-called “collateral damage.”</bq> They're aiming for 95% civilian casualties. A tweet by Yanis Varoufakis cited in the article writes <iq>Have they lost their minds, along with their humanity?</iq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/05/doctor-at-israeli-detention-camp-for-gazans-blows-whistle-on-war-crimes/" author="Brett Wilkins" source="Scheer Post">Doctor at Israeli Detention Camp for Gazans Blows Whistle on War Crimes</a> <bq>Gazans arrested and detained by Israeli forces are not legally considered prisoners of war by Israel because it does not recognize Gaza as a state. These detainees are mostly held under the Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows the imprisonment of anyone suspected of taking part in hostilities against Israel for up to 75 days without seeing a judge.</bq> <bq>The whistleblowing Sde Teiman physician said that all patients at the camp’s field hospital are handcuffed by all four limbs, regardless of how dangerous they are deemed. In December, Israeli Health Ministry officials ordered such treatment after a medical worker at the facility was attacked. Now the camp’s estimated 600-800 prisoners are shackled 24 hours a day.</bq> <bq>Enough, just enough. We have to stop this gallop into the abyss,” urged Hebrew University senior lecturer Tamar Megiddo on Wednesday. “This war has to end. This government needs to end.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-human-shields-lie-has-been-conclusively" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">The 'Human Shields' Lie Has Been Conclusively, Irrefutably Debunked</a> <bq>One aspect of the recent revelations about the IDF’s Lavender AI system that’s not getting enough consideration is the fact that it is completely devastating to the narrative that Israel has been killing so many civilians in Gaza because Hamas uses “human shields”.</bq> <bq>[...] as The Intercept’s Ryan Grim recently observed on Twitter, this is soundly refuted by the revelation that Israel has been intentionally waiting to target suspected Hamas members when it knows they’ll be surrounded by civilians.</bq> <bq>One automated system, psychopathically named “Where’s Daddy?”, tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families. The IDF has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/05/incident-at-deir-al-balah/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Incident on the Al-Rashid Coastal Road</a> <bq>The cars were white and clearly marked with the humanitarian group’s logo. The route was in a deconfliction zone that had been cleared by the IDF for travel. The vehicles’ trip and purpose to Deir al-Balah had been coordinated with and pre-approved by the IDF. None of this mattered to the IDF officials operating a Hermes 450 drone that stalked the cars from above as they left the food warehouse. Or perhaps it did matter. Perhaps the intent of the strike was not just to kill the humanitarian aid workers, but to kill humanitarian aid to Gaza altogether. How else to explain the logic of the IDF officers who ordered a drone strike on the first car after the convoy left the warehouse, then when survivors of the missile strike scrambled into the second car and called the IDF to describe being attacked, ordered a strike on the second car and then as the occupants of the last car rushed to rescue their injured colleagues, ordered a third missile strike, killing all seven aid workers. If this was the goal of these murderous missile strikes, it seems to have succeeded. Within hours of the killings, World Central Kitchen executives announced it was suspending operations in Gaza and that the ship that sailing toward Gaza with aid shipments would return to Cyprus. WCF’s announcement was swiftly followed by ANERA, which runs the second largest humanitarian operation in Gaza after UNRWA, suspending its work in Gaza.</bq> Israel is already obviously irritated with how long its taking for the Palestinians to starve to death. While they'd rather they all just moved to Egypt---they're certainly not thrilled about the prospect of cleaning up 2 million emaciated corpses---but they'll take the land any way they can get it. High road. Low road. Easy way. Hard way. The main thing is to get rid of the Palestinians. Stopping aid delivery will hopefully hurry things along, as far as they're concerned. <bq>“Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed the WCK workers so that donors would pull out & civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the Occupied Territories. “Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.”</bq> <bq>A day later, however, Biden, with a new $18 billion weapons deal for Israel in the works, let it be known he had no plans to change US policy toward Gaza.</bq> <bq>Where is the ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan? If Khan had taken action on any of the previous deaths, he might have prevented the 7 deaths Western elites seem to finally care about.</bq> <bq>“I’m not sure an investigation is needed,” the great Israeli journalist Gideon Levy told the BBC. What do you think you will find out, the name of the commander who gave the order? Who cares. It’s the policy…” BBC Presenter: “I suppose the investigation would establish whether it was a mistake…” Levy: ”How can it be a mistake?”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/06/zone-of-extermination/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Zone of Extermination</a> <bq>I was in Ukraine recently and talked to aid groups about how deconfliction works there. They said that Russia has been consistent about not striking deconflicted aid operations; sometimes to the point of calling to ask if convoys have departed an area before they resume attacks. I say this not to defend Russia – their IHL track record is horrible. And yet even they are managing to make aid deconfliction work in Ukraine, even as they continue committing countless other war crimes there. So there is NO REASON that Israel couldn’t have fixed this in the past six months. They simply didn’t want to.</bq> <bq>According to the World Health Organization, Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital is in ruins and no longer able to function as a hospital “in any shape or form.” The WHO described the destruction of Al-Shifa as having “ripped the heart out of healthcare” in Gaza.</bq> <bq>Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, pediatric care physician: “I have run out of words to express the horror and shame that we have allowed this to get to this point…We have watched the entire healthcare system of the Gaza Strip be destroyed… We’re watching the population of the Gaza Strip be systematically eliminated.” SkyNews interviewer: “Do you know if Hamas were there [in Al Shifa hospital]?” Haj-Hassan: “I am just shocked that we’re still having this conversation. [The Israelis] executed tens of people point blank, including one of our colleagues, Dr Ahmed Almaqadma, & his mother, who’s also a physician…When [health care workers] leave the hospital, civilians give them civilian clothing, because wearing scrubs is sticking a target sticker on their back. That is how systematically health care has been targeted.”</bq> Of course, she gave the right answer, but it would have been interesting to see his reaction had she answered, "Of course they were. That's why Israel was attacking the hospital. Hamas was posing as doctors, so what choice did Israel have but to shoot every doctor they could find? Hamas posed as patients, so what choice did Israel have but to shoot every patient they could find? Hamas was hiding in the walls, so what choice did Israel have but to tear down every last wall until not a single brick remained atop another? Hamas made Israel destroy the Al-Shifa hospital. It's unfair to even blame Israel for the destruction, when it was Hamas that made them do it." <bq>[...] what we have is a process by which these children–and my estimate is that they are probably around 4,000 to 5,000–these children are now left with disabilities that will change the course of their lives. We know from the medical literature that each child with a lower limb prosthetic will need a new prosthetic every six months, because their body outgrows the length of the prosthesis, and will need between 8 and 12 surgeries by the time they’re of adult age, because the bone grows faster than the soft tissues, or the nerves attach themselves to the skin and they can’t wear the prosthesis. And so, this is a lifelong journey of surgery and of disability and of mental health scarring as a result of the deformity.</bq> <bq>[...] the Knesset passed a law on Monday giving the prime minister the power to immediately close the offices of Al Jazeera citing a “direct threat to the country’s security” in the context of its coverage since October 7. The bill was backed by 71 lawmakers, while 10 only opposed. The bill allows the Israeli government to close Al Jazeera’s offices in Israel, take down its website, and confiscate equipment used to deliver its content.</bq> <bq> Let’s give the last word this week to John Mearsheimer on the power of the Israel lobby to shape US foreign policy in the Middle East:<bq>The United States doesn’t just give Israel a lot of weapons and lots of money, and support it diplomatically. It does it unconditionally. There is no relationship between any two countries in world history that looks like this relationship. The United States supports Israel no matter what it does. This is truly remarkable. We don’t treat Israel like a normal country and help it because it’s to our benefit strategically…[Why is it doing it?] Because of the Lobby. The United States has a political system that is set up in ways that allow interest groups to have great influence. The Israel lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies, if not the most powerful lobby in the United States. And the lobby goes to enormous lengths to make sure that American foreign policy supports Israel unconditionally. And it is wildly successful. Truly impressive how good the Lobby is at getting US foreign policymakers to support Israel hook, line and sinker.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/israels-moral-dilemma-april-5-2024" author="Norman Finkelstein" source="Substack">ISRAEL’S MORAL DILEMMA (April 5, 2024)</a> <bq>The World Bank’s “Gaza Strip Interim Damage Assessment” (March 2024) reports that since October 7 Israel has, among other things, damaged or destroyed 290,820 housing units (of which 76% were totally destroyed), and as a result “more than 1.08 million people will not be able to return to their homes.” It has killed more than 31,000 Gazans (of whom 70% are women and children) and wounded 75,000 others. The objective of the Israeli assault has been to, once and for all, solve the Gaza “problem.” It has carried out a deliberately indiscriminate assault targeting Gaza’s entire civilian population and infrastructure. If this or that killed Gazan proves to be a militant or this or that destroyed housing unit stands above a tunnel, it amounts to little more than the margin of error in the totality of this onslaught. Here, then, is Israel’s moral dilemma: were it to prosecute every war criminal in its ranks, there wouldn’t be anyone left to finish the job in Gaza.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-lets-some-aid-into-gaza-so" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Israel Lets Some Aid Into Gaza So The US Will Keep Giving It Weapons To Kill People In Gaza</a> <bq>Biden sent Netanyahu one warning about a failure to protect civilians possibly costing Israel its US support and the crossing opened immediately, which proves (A) that Israel has been intentionally starving Gazans by closing entrances off from aid and (B) that Biden could have ordered this to stop at any time.</bq> <bq>Stop calling this a “war”. A war doesn’t involve conversations about whether or not a walled-in population should be allowed to have food, medicine and electricity. If you have that much control over a population, you can’t be at war with it. You’re just killing a bunch of prisoners.</bq> <bq>Biden and his cohorts aren’t mad at Netanyahu for committing a genocide, they’re mad at Netanyahu for not hiding a genocide.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-keeps-getting-more-murderous" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Israel Keeps Getting More Murderous</a> <bq>Rightists who see through the empire propaganda on the Ukraine proxy war but unquestioningly swallow all empire propaganda about Gaza are even dumber than people who’ve swallowed both, because they’re just letting their favorite political faction do their thinking for them. They’re also dumber because they saw and understood that the mass media churn out propaganda constantly, but still assumed we’re being told the truth about Gaza. They broke out of the propaganda matrix, then jacked their minds right back into it. They’re like someone who pulled his head out of his ass, looked around, and then shoved it right back in.</bq> <bq>If only the Democrats who rallied so aggressively against a fictional conspiracy between Trump and Russia could harness that same energy to oppose a real genocide by Biden and Israel.</bq> Wrong enemy. Hard pass. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ8j5uzCb0U" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/DJ8j5uzCb0U" caption="“Shockingly Deranged.” Glenn Debunks Havana Syndrome Propaganda" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" source="YouTube"> This is front-page, top-headinline news today (03.04.2024) in the commuter newspaper (20 minutes) in Switzerland. I actually saw the headline and saw "Havana Syndrome" in the first sentence, then thought "Bellingcat, probably." I get back to my desk and start this video ... and tada! At any rate, the propaganda campaign is working, spreading very quickly, and isn't just for "old people". The 20 minutes is a top news source for Switzerland's youth. <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/on-the-view-a-crack-finally-shows" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">On "The View," A Crack Finally Shows in the Propaganda Facade</a> <bq>“The default right now in a lot of areas of policy is to use black and Hispanic identity as a proxy for disadvantage,” he said. “And my argument is that you actually get a better picture of who needs help by looking at socioeconomics and income that picks out people in a more accurate way.”</bq> <bq>Hughes cited Martin Luther King to make the rational argument that race-specific policies are unnecessary because class-based action will “disproportionately target blacks and Hispanics because they’re disproportionately poor.” Even doing that, he said, would also address poverty generally [...]</bq> <bq>Hughes explained that anti-racism and white supremacy both operate on the premise that your race is a central component of your identity, if not the defining element. He summed up:<bq>Neo-racists like Robin DiAngelo, they say that to be white is to be ignorant, for example. Well, this is a racial stereotype, and I want to call a spade a spade and say, this is not the style of anti-racism we have to be teaching our kids… We should be teaching them that your race is not a significant feature of who you are. Who you are is your character and your value, and your skin color doesn’t say anything about that.</bq>The View audience once again burst into applause.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/starve-or-leave" author="Norman Finkelstein" source="Substack">Starve or Leave</a> <bq>it might be wondered: Wasn’t it foolhardy for Israel to risk international opprobrium? Not at all. Israel has targeted by various metrics an historically unprecedented number of hospitals, medics, journalists, and aid workers; it has killed an unprecedented number of women and children. It is ever testing the limits of the permissible. So far, it’s successfully crossed every downward threshold into barbarism with impunity. It’s impossible to predict in advance which story will be picked up by the fickle international media and which story will just get passing notice. The latest atrocity could just as easily have been subsumed in a paragraph on the inside pages under the title “Aid workers killed in Gaza.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/on-rising-debating-briahna-joy-gray" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">On "Rising": Debating Briahna Joy Gray</a> Matt is bending over backwards to avoid offending Brie, but the evidence is pretty damning: for someone who runs a podcast called "bad faith", she seems to be trying to "gotcha" Matt in any way possible---especially in bad faith. She kept making up arguments against him while she tried to prosecute him in her own little "trial" of a show, dredging up long-debunked arguments that she'd already made the last time. Then she complained that Matt hadn't been writing about persecution of left sources recently even though he'd sent her a whole passel of links from the last year that did just that. Brie clearly revealed that she'd only been selectively reading Taibbi's output---specifically whatever the hostile left, intent on torpedoing someone they hate---and then trying to nail him on her "evidence". This is the pinnacle of "bad faith" reporting and this isn't the first time she's succumbed to lazy research. It's maddening, especially when Matt bends over backwards to stay polite and to provide evidence to the contrary. He's also quite shy in interviews and her aggressive style makes her look like she's just trying to entrap him, no matter what. It smacks of the gotcha journalism she's only too happy to trash when she's chatting with e.g., Norman Finkelstein. <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/05/bidenomics-and-its-discontents/" author="James Galbraith" source="Scheer Post">Bidenomics and Its Discontents</a> <bq>Today’s typical American working household has several earners, sometimes in multiple jobs. If one earner loses a job while the others keep theirs, she may leave the workforce for a time; there is the option of making do with less, and for some there is early retirement. She will not, in that case, count as unemployed—however difficult her life. A low jobless rate can mask a great deal of stress in such households. The employment-to-population ratio is still a bit below where it was in 2020, and far below where it was in 2000; average weekly hours are still falling.</bq> <bq>[...] what matters to consumers is prices in relation to household incomes over several years. In 1980 Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Today, millions of American households are worse off than they were in 2020. Basic living costs, such as gasoline, utilities, food, and housing, have risen more than their incomes have. Real median household income peaked in 2019 and fell at least through 2022. Yes, but didn’t real wages go up sharply in 2023? According to the Biden-friendly Center for American Progress, real wages (for those continuously employed) have indeed now recovered roughly to where they would have been had no pandemic occurred. But there is a great distinction between steady progress and a sawtooth down-and-up. The former breeds confidence; the latter does not.</bq> And it's really people's confidence that things will continue to be OK that is utterly lacking. People sense how the focus is laser-like on short-term gains for the ultra-rich. They know that, even if they've gotten a little tide to life their boats as well, that this isn't the focus of the economy. If you know that you basically just got lucky to not be regressing financially, then you're not going to be very confident in the economy. You're basically just waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under you. <bq>(By 2021 Covid tax credits and relief payments brought child poverty down to a record low of 5.2 percent.) Most Americans were prudent with the support, but they often used it, not unwisely, to achieve a touch of independence from dreary jobs. With that support gone, the cushions erode, savings decline, debt rises–and families feel the pressure to go back to work on whatever terms that employers offer. They don’t like that very much.</bq> Yeah, so they think the economy sucks---because it does suck. For them. For the lords of industry, whom economists like Paul Krugman exclusively represent, the economy's doing great. He's got binders full of figures proving that since his portfolio is increasing in value, everyone else must be doing great. Of course he does. He needs to believe this, so that he can simultaneously get richer and be a very moral person who cares about his fellow, though benighted, citizen. <bq>As people return to work, how secure are their jobs? In the golden years during which today’s older generation of economists learned their textbook tools, a worker’s job was often a lifetime affair. Autoworkers (and their associates in rubber and glass) might suffer periodic layoffs, but they could expect to be called back; their skills and experience remained useful. That was all over by the 1980s.</bq> This still exists, but is absolutely not encouraged by the economy as she is. Companies that continue to work like this have damned well better have an advantage in the market and good margins, otherwise, they'll be hammered out of existence by companies that don't give a flying blue f*&k about their employees. <bq>The growth of GDP, another once-reliable icon of prosperity, has also lost much of its meaning. The concentration of gains in the small, ultra-rich sectors of finance and technology is one reason. Another has to do with the nature of government-supported investments in chips, in renewable energy and in military hardware, all of which have been contributing to growth and to massive corporate profits. Such investments do create jobs. But they add nothing visible to living standards.</bq> This is a very astute observation. Improvements are concentrated at the very top. The numbers look great. The averages and indexes are all booming---because of about seven companies, without whose progress the rest of the index is in free-fall. Those companies are booming because of a huge bubble in "AI" that is bound to fall to Earth quite soon. The first signs are already here that it's too expensive and unreliable and that the current state of the technology cannot be scaled to address either of those problems. <bq>Although there were good things in it, even Biden’s infrastructure bill was largely a conventional roads program, notoriously likely to foster suburban sprawl and to enrich developers, rather than to visibly repair the decaying core of most American cities and towns.</bq> <bq>what are Biden’s priorities these days? They are to get money for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan—that is, for (respectively) distant, dishonorable, and prospective wars. The belligerence with which he opened his State of the Union address was astonishing. Yet looming failure in Ukraine and mass murders committed with American bombs in Gaza add to the war-weariness that many Americans feel, after 23 years of brutal and fruitless fighting. The notion that the United States could fight and win a war against China over Taiwan—150 miles from the mainland but more than 5,000 from Hawaii—is too ludicrous for words. When foreign policy is delusional, it’s not unreasonable to lose confidence in economic policy as well.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <img src="{att_link}francis_scott_key_bridge_and_cargo_ship_dali_ntsb_view-1536x810.jpg" href="{att_link}francis_scott_key_bridge_and_cargo_ship_dali_ntsb_view-1536x810.jpg" align="none" caption="Francis Scott Key Bridge and Cargo Ship Dali" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/03/greece-austerity-economy-far-right/" source="Jacobin" author="Yanis Varoufakis">“Debt Is to Capitalism What Hell Is to Christianity”</a> <bq>Today there are 1.2 million homes being repossessed, in a land of ten million. Let’s say a house was bought for $250,000 before the crisis. Now it’s worth €200,000. It had a loan on it of €150,000, of which €50,000 was repaid. The mortgagee can’t repay the other €100,000 because of the crisis, loss of income, etc. Then a vulture fund registered in Delaware, with a bank account in the Cayman Islands, buys up the loan for €5,000. Even if they sell it for only €100,000, they’ve gained €95,000 on €5,000. I doubt there’s anywhere you can get higher rates of return. This is happening on an industrial scale.</bq> <bq>Then came the cost-of-living crisis, which has hit the Greek working class and underprivileged harder than anywhere else in Europe. Inflation is class-conscious: if you’re on lower incomes, your inflation rate is far higher. So, put all that together and you have this remarkable bifurcation: Greece, the best place in the world to be a vulture fund and the worst if you’re not.</bq> <bq>On the Left, if we’re lucky, we can get majority support once every fifty years, during the acute phase of a capitalist crisis. If we blow the opportunity, we have to wait another fifty years. That doesn’t mean we stop fighting. MeRA25 keeps doing all that we think needs doing, because in the end, we’re a bit like surfers: you can’t control when the wave comes, but you’d better be ready to catch it when it does.</bq> <bq>In my estimation, it would have cost them more than €1 trillion if they did crush us. That’s serious money for a monetary union that doesn’t have a fiscal union to back its expenditure. I don’t think Merkel would have dared. I think we’d have had a chance, and then Podemos would have had a chance, and then our Italian comrades . . . . So, Greece was the linchpin, and when Tsipras sold us down the line, he was also selling the whole European left down the line.</bq> <bq>That’s always the case. Think of [Donald] Trump: he told blue-collar workers in the Midwest that he was going to get rid of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street from Washington. Then what’s the first thing he did? He took the CEO of Goldman Sachs and made him head of the US Treasury. It is a mistake to think that the nationalist, or fascist, international are clashing with a radical center. We should think of them as different sides of the same coin. They are symbiotic. [Emmanuel] Macron would never have become president if [Marine] Le Pen did not threaten the system. And Le Pen would never rise to challenge for the presidency if you didn’t have people like Macron introducing the austerity that causes the discontent that feeds her rise.</bq> <bq>Bernie Sanders and I started the Progressive International together in Vermont. However, I’ve been in disagreement with him — a comrade and friend — since 2016. After the then primaries, when the nomination was stolen from him and handed over to Hillary Clinton, Bernie had nine hundred thousand wonderful volunteers all over the country, ready to become the third force in US politics. I thought he should have started a new party. Instead, he let those young activists go to ground — and then disappointed them entirely, four years later, when he sided with [Joe] Biden.</bq> <bq>The dynamism of the political revolution that Bernie had started in 2016 dissipated. I’m afraid that the new wave that Bernie energized is not going to survive in a Democratic Party, which like Labour in Britain, is extremely good at destroying all progressive energy within itself.</bq> <bq>They’ve reacted disgracefully. The EU and almost every government will go down in history as aiding and abetting the genocide of the Palestinians. It’s not just complicity but a mode of behavior that is turning our prime ministers and presidents into prospective defendants in the International Criminal Court [ICC]. When Ursula von der Leyen — as it happens, without any authority — went to Israel to cheerlead the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], she deserves not only to be condemned by future historians, but also to be prosecuted by the ICC.</bq> <bq>My concern is that we’re putting too much — but also too little — emphasis on BRICS. It’d be a huge mistake for progressives to do what they used to do with the USSR, to imagine that, whatever its authoritarian aspects, at least it’s the counterweight to the United States. Let’s not think of the BRICS that way.</bq> <bq>India’s Narendra Modi is a fascist. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are edging closer to BRICS, have a currency that is pegged to the US dollar. With BRICS, they are creating a plan B for themselves, not for the world’s dispossessed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/03/billionaire-larry-fink-of-blackrock-which-grabbed-fed-bailouts-in-2020-2021-lectures-struggling-seniors-on-making-more-sacrifices/" source="Wall Street on Parade" author="Pam Martens and Russ Martens">Billionaire Larry Fink of BlackRock, Which Grabbed Fed Bailouts in 2020-2021, Lectures Struggling Seniors on Making More Sacrifices</a> <bq>The inability of younger Americans to save enough for retirement couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Wall Street gobbling up two-thirds of lifetime retirement savings in fees, as Frontline documented back in 2013. The late John Bogle explained in the program that if a person works for 50 years and receives the typical long-term return of 7 percent on their 401(k) plan and Wall Street’s fees are 2 percent, almost two-thirds of their retirement account will go to Wall Street.</bq> <bq>Maiden Lane purchased $30 billion of toxic assets from Bear Stearns as an inducement by the New York Fed to get JPMorgan to purchase the good parts of Bear Stearns. Maiden Lane II purchased mortgage-backed securities from the giant insurer, AIG, as part of a program to bail out its securities lending to Wall Street banks. Maiden Lane III purchased collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) on which AIG Financial Products had written credit default swaps that it couldn’t make good on to the Wall Street and foreign global banks to whom it owed the money. (Thus, the AIG bailout was actually a bailout of mega banks.)</bq> God I almost miss reading about all of these shenanigans. Maiden Lanes I--III! A blast from the past! That was back when they distributed money to the rich in parcels over years---before COVID made them shit their pants and they blew $5 trillion into the rich's coffers in March of 2020. <bq>The capital markets did not save Wall Street. The secret and unprecedented $29 trillion money spigot from the Fed saved Wall Street and resuscitated the very villains who had brought on the financial crisis through unbridled greed and crony capitalism. It is nothing short of a disgrace that mainstream media is giving a platform to Fink to spew his propaganda.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2024/03/25/capitalism-is-dead-long-live-capital/" source="Crooked Timber" author="Raven Onthill">Capitalism Is Dead – Long Live Capital</a> <bq>The idea, in a nutshell, is the following. As a response to the combined effect of the privatisation of the internet on the one hand, and the nearly no-strings-attached way with which states have injected eye-wateringly large sums of money into banks and large businesses after the 2008 financial crisis on the other, rent has supplanted profit as the main driver of the global economy. As Varoufakis put it, “Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech’s hold over every aspect of the economy.”</bq> <bq>This might be the end of capitalism; it’s transformation into something even more sinister; or simply a new brand of global market economy. Maybe Varoufakis’s technofeudalism is yet another seriously mistaken prediction of capitalism’s death. Yet the idea that fighting it requires grappling with how to escape collectively from “carefully curated isolation” remains a crucial insight.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/01/profits-are-still-rising-why-is-the-fed-worried-about-wage-growth/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Profits Are Still Rising, Why Is the Fed Worried About Wage Growth?</a> <bq>I was more than a bit surprised to see the profit data this morning. I really did believe that the profit surge during the pandemic was a one-off, associated with supply-chain issues. We can argue about how much of this increase was a predictable story, where profits rise due to shortages, and how much was about companies exploiting market power to jack up prices, but the fact that profit shares increased is not disputable. In any case, it was reasonable to expect that profits would return to their pre-pandemic shares after supply chains returned to normal.</bq> Was it really reasonable to expect that to happen, Dean? In what world? This one? Fat chance. What was reasonable to expect to happen is that the fat piggies running society would try to stuff as much as they can into their maws---even if they're not hungry anymore. This is the rich: <img src="{att_link}mr._creosote_-_monty_python_s_meaning_of_life.jpeg" href="{att_link}mr._creosote_-_monty_python_s_meaning_of_life.jpeg" align="none" caption="Mr. Creosote - Monty Python's Meaning of Life" scale="75%"> Sometimes I worry about Dean. Sometimes he's so spot-on with his appraisal of both economics and politics and sometimes I wonder if he's got his head stuck up his ass. Or is he just covering his ass for having talked about how great the Biden economy is for the last two months? I know he just looks at numbers---like a good economist does---without really lending and weight or credence to the economy as she is experienced by her subjects but he can't have completely missed the looting and pillaging for the last year, can he? Well, here he is saying that he's <iq>a bit surprised</iq> that profits are up---and persistently so. Yeah, why wouldn't those durned corporations be willing to share their overflowing profits as increased wages with the employees whose surplus value generated those profits. It's a plunder-based, rent-based economy that barely manages to produce enough stuff of value as a side-effect of the profits. How can Dean claim to be <iq>surprised</iq>? He ends his short article with <iq>If profit shares are rising, there is no reason for it to be trying to slow wage growth.</iq> Yeah, Dean there's absolutely no economic reason why that would be. But you know as well as I do that the goal of the economy is to funnel money upwards. This will continue until there is a violent revolution. No-one in charge has shown the slightest tendency to being satisfied with the level of plunder. Not while a single grubby 99.9% hand holds a single grubby penny will they be happy. Think of the Grinch swiping the last Christmas ornament and you have a good picture of the upper class. <img src="{att_link}grinch_snatches_the_last_crumb_from_the_mouse.jpg" href="{att_link}grinch_snatches_the_last_crumb_from_the_mouse.jpg" align="none" caption="Grinch snatches the last crumb from the mouse" scale="50%"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN2_0WC7UfU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/zN2_0WC7UfU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Last Week Tonight (HBO)" caption="Student Loans: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver"> This is a pretty good summary of the student-loan crisis. $1.7T of debt, most of which is owed by people who aren't making much money, who owe less than $25,000, who are paying back primarily interest, and who will never pay back the principal. It's just not feasible. They can't declare bankruptcy to get rid of the debt. They are caught in a scam that the U.S. government lured them into, to the benefit of large banks that get to keep their interest---and large universities that hiked their rates into the stratosphere as soon as they saw how much free government money there was to hoover up. It's a drag on the economy and it was a mistake to do it. The only real beneficiaries are the usual suspects---the people who already had most of the money in the first place. The student-loan system to squeeze blood from a stone. I can concede the point that forgiving this pile of federal loans is only a band-aid, because there's just another generation of loans coming. Nothing will have been done to address the fact that the job market requires college degrees for jobs that don't need them, and that college prices have outpaced inflation and cost-of-living increases by a tremendous amount (two orders of magnitude?). <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/aFsfJYWpqII" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Last Week Tonight" caption="Food Delivery Apps: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)"> Food-delivery apps are predate the local restaurants. No-one makes money, though. The customer actually gets delivery more cheaply than the service actually costs. The delivery companies are hemorrhaging money and don't have a path to a viable business model. Local restaurants are being dragged into delivery service against their will. Customers are required to tip or the delivery workers remain woefully underpaid. This is a giant clusterfuck of a business to which a bunch of people have become addicted. Meals on wheels is something that's absolutely necessary for many people, but not nearly the number of people who use these services. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/radios-how-do-they-work" source="lcamtuf’s thing" author="lcamtuf">Radios, how do they work?</a> <bq>Other antenna lengths are not perfectly resonant, although they might be close enough. An antenna that’s way too short to resonate properly can be improved with an in-line inductor, adding some current lag. You might have seen antennas with spring-like sections at the base; the practice called electrical lengthening. It doesn’t make a stubby antenna perform as well as a the real deal, but it helps keep the input impedance in check.</bq> <bq>Indeed, all modulation is frequency modulation: it boils down to taking a low-frequency signal band, such as audio — and transposing it in one way or another to a similarly-sized slice of the spectrum in the vicinity of the carrier frequency.</bq> <bq>At this point, some readers might object: the Fourier transform is not the only way to think about the frequency spectrum, so just because we see halos on an FFT plot, it doesn’t mean they’re really real. In an epistemological sense, this might be right. But as it happens, radio receivers work by doing something that walks and quacks a lot like Fourier.</bq> <bq>[...] the basic operation of almost every radio receiver boils down to mixing (multiplying) the amplified antenna signal with a sine wave of a chosen frequency.</bq> <bq>From the earlier article on the Fourier transform, you might remember that if a matching frequency is present in the input signal, similar multiplications produce a DC bias proportional to the magnitude of that signal component.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt6WQYtefXA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Tt6WQYtefXA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Veritasium" caption="How The Most Expensive Swords In The World Are Made"> Fascinating and worth every minute. I learned a lot. Of course, there are industrial processes that make superior cutting surfaces, but this is about how a dedication to quality produces something of value that is useful, but also beautiful, and has value because of the human concentration and effort that went into it. It produces objects that have a je ne sais quoi rather than just something that is functional. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujYYlXP12m4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ujYYlXP12m4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="minutephysics" caption="Why Do Eclipses Travel WEST to EAST?"> The moon travels faster along its orbit (2200mph) than a point on Earth rotates (1000mph). <hr> <a href="https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-saving-time-in-the-70s-people-hated-it/" author="Andrew Beaujon" source="Washingtonian">The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People Hated It</a> <bq>Congress had voted on December 14, 1973, to put the US on daylight saving time for two years. President Nixon signed the bill the next day.</bq> <bq>While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later, the New York Times reported. Seven days after President Nixon resigned, US Senator Bob Dole of Kansas introduced an amendment in August that would end the DST experiment. It passed. A similar bill passed the House. In late September, the full Congress passed a bill that would restore standard time on October 27.</bq> I wonder how much this was driven by business and media, as it so clearly would be today. I can't imagine that people just changed their own minds to that degree inside of three months. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/the-diagnosis-is-in-bad-memory-knocked-nasas-aging-voyager-1-offline/" author="Stephen Clark" source="Ars Technica">NASA knows what knocked Voyager 1 offline, but it will take a while to fix</a> <bq>The Flight Data Subsystem was an innovation in computing when it was developed five decades ago. It was the first computer on a spacecraft to use volatile memory. Most of NASA's missions operate with redundancy, so each Voyager spacecraft launched with two FDS computers. But the backup FDS on Voyager 1 failed in 1982. Due to the Voyagers' age, engineers had to reference paper documents, memos, and blueprints to help understand the spacecraft's design details. After months of brainstorming and planning, teams at JPL uplinked a command in early March to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory. The command worked, and Voyager.1 responded with a signal different from the code the spacecraft had been transmitting since November. After several weeks of meticulous examination of the new code, engineers pinpointed the locations of the bad memory.</bq> <bq>"Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again," NASA said.</bq> I'm honestly so glad that this era is not quite yet coming to an end. It's an unalloyed good thing. <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=113020" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">RKI-Files – Hoffnungsschimmer und Wagenburgmentalität bei den Medien</a> <bq>Spätestens hier stellt sich ohnehin die Frage, warum die mit Milliarden und Abermilliarden Euro Gebührengeldern ausgestatteten Öffentlich-Rechtlichen oder ihre auch nicht gerade an Budgetknappheit leidenden ach so ehrenwerten privaten Großmedien vom SPIEGEL bis zur BILD nicht selbst die RKI-Protokolle eingeklagt haben. Das musste dann schon der im Vergleich zu diesen Medien bettelarme Paul Schreyer mit seinem spendenfinanzierten alternativen Medium Multipolar machen.</bq> <bq>Sowohl Gesundheitsminister Lauterbach als auch Janosch Dahmen, seines Zeichens gesundheitspolitischer Sprecher der Grünen, versuchen mittlerweile sogar die Veröffentlichung der RKI-Files als eine „Einmischung fremder Regierungen“ bzw. „ausländischer Nachrichtendienste“ zu framen. Geht’s auch noch dümmer? Mit solchen Politikern scheint eine ernsthafte Aufarbeitung wohl eher ausgeschlossen.</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-terror-of-reality-was-the-true-horror-for-h-p-lovecraft" source="Aeon" author="Sam Woodward / Cameron Allan McKean">The terror of reality was the true horror for H P Lovecraft</a> <bq>Lovecraft captures the spirit of his philosophy in the opening paragraph of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, a story about an expedition to the sunken dwelling of a tentacled Old God worshipped by an ancient cult who pray for their deity to awaken from its slumber and resume its control over mortal-kind. How would Lovecraft start such a fantastic tale? Like this:<bq>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.</bq></bq> <bq>These tales, he wrote, were based on one fundamental cosmic premise: ‘that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large’.</bq> <bq>These views shaped the nightmarish figures in his tales, which are not apparitions or spectres, the ‘supernatural’ beings of conventional horror writing, but materially real horrors that only appear supernatural because of humanity’s inability to comprehend their true nature.</bq> <bq>Lovecraft’s stories are dotted with attempts to describe the impossible within the limitations of human expression and experience. Cthulhu, his ancient cosmic god, is described as constituting ‘eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order’ and its dwelling comprises ‘non-Euclidean’ geometry with angles of masonry seemingly acute but that ‘behaved as if [they] were obtuse’.</bq> <bq>In the surreal odyssey The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath , Azathoth is the instantiation of primordial chaos, who lives beyond ‘the bright clusters of dimensioned space’. In ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ (1932-33), Yog-Sothoth is the infinity of all that is, an entity resembling ‘congeries of iridescent globes’ that encompasses the past, present and future.</bq> <bq>[...] there is no telling what we might find in the deepest recesses of the universe as our understanding of reality grows. Real knowledge, Lovecraft suggests, is impossible; humans have a limited capacity to think in truly rational ways. This perspective might explain why Lovecraft was not an evangelical atheist and accepted the usefulness of religion for the vast majority of the population, for whom a godless existence would be intolerable: ‘It helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could,’ he wrote, ‘and gives them an emotional satisfaction they could not get elsewhere.’ And besides, if we ever discovered that the universe really was as cosmically purposeless as Lovecraft imagined, then delusions of Cthulhu-esque gods might seem reasonable — or even desirable.</bq> <bq>‘I cannot think of the deep sea,’ Lovecraft writes at the end of ‘Dagon’, ‘without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind – of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.’</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-storyteller" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The Storyteller</a> <bq>I reminded him that he could plausibly be accused of the same mistake, but at a far greater scale, as the physical universe itself is said by many to have slipped into existence inadvertently, to have flown out as a droplet of his overexcited spittle, once, long ago, when he was in the course of telling an amusing but ultimately forgettable little tale about the tedium of bookkeeping. The Magsman just laughed in his good-natured way, and said: “I suppose you’re right. We all make mistakes every now and then.”</bq> <bq>Down there it’s just one damned thing after another. No narrative cohesion at all. You see a rifle on the wall in the first act? When you’re on earth, it might still be hanging there at the end of the third. It’s as if no one has thought things through, no one is paying attention. No one cares.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIoFpxAo93U" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/rIoFpxAo93U" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="awti" caption="Awti Answers: What is ASL Rhyme?"> The rhyme is translated into similar visual motions, exaggerated to effect a child-like nonsensicality similar to the original rhyme. The first line ends in "diddle diddle", which, given that the context is a child's rhyme is meant to be onomatopoeic rather than the slang for "having sex", so this section is translated to a body motion that "rhymes" with an exaggeratedly signed version of the word for "fiddle". <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis</a> <bq>There are dozens – hundreds! – of life-or-death, highly technical questions you have to resolve every day just to survive. Should you trust the antilock braking firmware in your car? How about the food hygiene rules in the factories that produced the food in your shopping cart? Or the kitchen that made the pizza that was just delivered? Is your kid's school teaching them well, or will they grow up to be ignoramuses and thus economic roadkill?</bq> <bq>I'm perfectly prepared to believe that there are safe levels of chemical runoff in the water supply. There's a lot of water in the water supply, after all, and "the dose makes the poison." What's more, I use the products whose manufacture results in that chemical waste. I want them to be made safely, but I do want them to be made – for one thing, the next time I have surgery, I want the anesthesiologist to start an IV with fresh, sterile plastic tubing.</bq> <bq>For me, faith in vaccines didn't come from a broad, newfound trust in the pharmaceutical system: rather, I judged that there was so much scrutiny on these new medications that it would overwhelm even pharma's ability to corruptly continue to sell a medication that they secretly knew to be harmful, as they'd done so many times before:</bq> <bq>[...] schismogenesis isn't merely a reactionary way of flip-flopping on issues based on reflexive enmity. It's actually a reasonable epistemological tactic: in a world where there are more issues you need to be clear on than you can possibly inform yourself about, you need some shortcuts. One shortcut – a shortcut that's failing – is to say, "Well, I'll provisionally believe whatever the expert system tells me is true." Another shortcut is, "I will provisionally disbelieve in whatever the people I know to act in bad faith are saying is true." That is, "schismogenesis."</bq> <bq>[...] the evidence for Big Tech's persuasion machines is very poor: mostly, it consists of tech platforms' own boasts to potential investors and customers for their advertising products. "We can change peoples' minds" has long been the boast of advertising companies, and it's clear that they can change the minds of customers for advertising.</bq> <bq>Now, I do think that Facebook and other tech giants play an important role in the rise of conspiratorial beliefs. However, that role isn't using algorithms to persuade people to mistrust our institutions. Rather Big Tech – like other corporate cartels – has so corrupted our regulatory system that they make trusting our institutions irrational.</bq> <bq>[...] the vulnerability to conspiratorialism that algorithms identify and target people based on isn't a function of Big Data. It's a function of corruption – of life in a world in which real conspiracies (to steal your wages, or let rich people escape the consequences of their crimes, or sacrifice your safety to protect large firms' profits) are everywhere.</bq> <bq>This is a long tradition in politics: hundreds of years ago, some leftists branded antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Rather than condemning the system's embrace of the finance sector and its wealthy beneficiaries, anti-semites blame a disfavored group of people – people who are just as likely as anyone to suffer under the system. It's an ugly, shallow, cartoon version of socialism's measured and comprehensive analysis of how the class system actually works and why it's so harmful to everyone except a tiny elite. Literally cartoonish: the shadow-world version of socialism co-opts and simplifies the iconography of class struggle. And schismogenesis – "if the right likes this, I don't" – sends "progressive" scolds after anyone who dares to criticize finance as the crux of our world's problems as popularizing "antisemetic dog-whistles."</bq> <bq>But by blaming the problem of conspiratorialism on the credulity of believers (rather than the deserved disrepute of the institutions they have lost faith in) we adopt the logic of the right: "conspiratorialism is a problem of individuals believing wrong things," rather than "a system that makes wrong explanations credible – and a schismogenic insistence that these institutions are sound and trustworthy."</bq> <hr> <a href="https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-have-i-what-have-i-done-to-deserve-c5d" author="Andrew Sullivan" source="Substack">What Have I, What Have I Done To Deserve This?</a> <bq>If I were to imagine a scenario in which I did something that could put me in jail for life, it would probably be on the lines of one recent resident of the Bronx, Shaun Piles. Ms Piles, after a series of escalating fights with her next-door neighbor over the loudness of his music at all hours of the day and night, stabbed him multiple times with a kitchen knife when he was keeping her awake at 2 am — finally losing what was left of her shit.</bq> <bq>National parks? They are now often intermittent raves, where younger peeps play loud, amplified dance music as they walk their trails. On trains? There is now a single “quiet car” when once they all were, because we were a civilized culture. Walk down a street and you’ll catch a cyclist with a speaker attached to the handlebars, broadcasting at incredible volume for 50 feet ahead and behind him, obliterating every stranger’s conversation in his path.</bq> <bq>On a bus? Expect the person sitting right behind you with her mouth four inches from your ears to have a very loud phone conversation, with the speaker turned up, and the phone held in front of her like a waiter holding a platter. The things she’ll tell you! Go to a beach and have your neighbors play volleyball — but with a loud speaker playing Kylie Minogue remixes to generate “atmosphere”.</bq> <bq>The younger generation — the most fucked-up and miserable of our lifetimes — knows everything about white supremacy in bird watching, but they have no idea what basic manners are. When everyone is playing the main character — and in Gen Z, they all are — no one else matters. And when you have become used to performing in public in every area of online life, adding a soundtrack to every Insta-story, you see little wrong in one more act of self-regard in the actual physical presence of strangers: showing the world how cool your world is by forcing others to live in it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/nailed-it-commenter-of-the-week-a56" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Nailed It! Commenter of the Week</a> <bq author="C. S. Lewis">Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Apr/1/chatgpt-instantly/" author="Simon Willison" source="">OpenAI: Start using ChatGPT instantly</a> <bq>OpenAI say that this initiative is to support "the aim to make AI accessible to anyone curious about its capabilities." This makes sense to me: there are [sic] still a huge number of people who haven't tried any of the LLM chat tools due to the friction of creating an account.</bq> I wish Willison didn't have such rose-colored glasses about this stuff. OpenAI is desperately trying to lock down users while they still can, before other AIs have outpaced them or the market changes too much. They're trying to capitalize on their current pole position. It's laughable to think they're doing this for everyone's good. Shake it off, Willison. Capitalism is still in the driver's seat. <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Humans are not perfectly vigilant</a> <bq>Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:<ol>There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation; There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator; Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."</ol>These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks – political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs – but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies.</bq> <bq>[...] even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem. All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably very good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels.</bq> <bq>That leaves us with "humans in the loop" – the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible – the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.</bq> <bq>Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying. But a hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).</bq> <bq>[...] the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at a robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Apr/2/alex-komoroske/" author="Alex Komoroske via Simon Willison" source="">LLMs are like a trained circus bear...</a> <bq>LLMs are like a trained circus bear that can make you porridge in your kitchen. It's a miracle that it's able to do it at all, but watch out because no matter how well they can act like a human on some tasks, they're still a wild animal. They might ransack your kitchen, and they could kill you, accidentally or intentionally!</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/talk/2024/01/21/bringing-csharp-nullability-into-existing-code.html" author="Maarten Balliauw">Talk - Bringing C# nullability into existing code</a> This is a 66-slide deck that I summarize as follows: <ul> The C# nullability feature is for build- and design-time. It does not enforce anything at runtime. That means that you still have to check parameters for <c>null</c>. The C# nullability feature is available to solutions working with .NET Framework and .NET. For .NET Framework, you have to explicitly set the <c><languageversion></c> to <c>8.0</c> (however, there are a bunch of cons associated with doing this, as the runtime library itself is not annotated).<fn> The presentation shows how to enable and disable for the whole solution, project, or code region. For new solutions, enable at the solution level. For small solutions, enable at the solution level and just work through it. For large solutions, enable project-by-project or file-by-file---or even class-by-class.<ul> <iq>Start at the center and work outwards.</iq> While <c>?</c> suffices in most cases, consider annotations to improve your own APIs Consider redesigning APIs that return <c>null</c> (use the <c>bool TryGet<t>(..., out T)</c> pattern or return a "null" object instead). Avoid allowing <c>null</c> parameters (these force a decision on the implementation that is often better handled by the caller). Don't use <c>!</c> except temporarily Don't use suppression except temporarily Start with types that aren't depended on a lot. Those are easy. Take types with lots of dependents one-by-one. </ul> </ul> <hr> <ft>For more information, see <a href="https://endjin.com/blog/2020/07/dotnet-csharp-8-nullable-references-supporting-older-runtimes" author="Ian Griffiths">C# 8.0 nullable references: supporting older runtimes</a>, published in July of 2021. Also, the article <a href="https://medium.com/@joni2nja/consider-using-c-8-with-the-net-framework-9dceb20647c5">Consider using C# 8 with the .NET Framework</a> cites from <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/building-c-8-0/">Building C# 8.0</a> by Mads Torgersen. Both of those articles are from 2018. <bq>using C# 8.0 is only supported on platforms that implement .NET Standard 2.1</bq> .NET Framework doesn't implement .NET Standard 2.1 However, the StackOverflow post <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56651472/does-c-sharp-8-support-the-net-framework">Does C# 8 support the .NET Framework?</a> goes into some detail about which features of C# 8.0 could be supported under .NET Framework. That post notes that syntax-only changes will continue to work, which makes sense. As long as you use a newer compiler that understands the syntax, the lowered code and subsequent generated IL will be compatible with the .NET Framework runtime. That's what syntax-only means: no new functionality was required in the runtime for the generated output. <ul> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#static-local-functions">Static local functions</a> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#using-declarations">Using declarations</a> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#null-coalescing-assignment">Null-coalescing assignment</a> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#readonly-members">Readonly members</a> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#disposable-ref-structs">Disposable ref structs</a> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#positional-patterns">Positional patterns</a> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#tuple-patterns">Tuple patterns</a> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#switch-expressions">Switch expressions</a> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-8#nullable-reference-types">Nullable reference types</a> are also supported, but the new <a href="http://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/nullable-attributes">nullable attributes</a> required to design the more complex nullable use cases are not. However, according to <a href="https://endjin.com/blog/2020/07/dotnet-csharp-8-nullable-references-supporting-older-runtimes) (from July 2020">C# 8.0 nullable references: supporting older runtimes</a>, there's a <a href="https://www.nuget.org/packages/Nullable/">Nullable Nuget package</a>. Be aware, though, that the .NET Framework is not itself annotated, so you will probably see spurious warnings when the compiler can't tell that a result can never be null. </ul> That's a lot of features, actually! The StackOverflow post linked above lists them quite well, and <a href="https://stu.dev/csharp8-doing-unsupported-things/">C# 8.0 and .NET Standard 2.0 - Doing Unsupported Things</a> has some more information about which level of change each C# 8.0 feature requires. That said, <bq>The C# 8/.NET Framework combination is not officially supported by Microsoft. It is, they say, for experts only.</bq></ft> <hr> <a href="https://dunnhq.com/posts/2024/prefer-test-doubles-over-mocking/" author="">Prefer test-doubles over mocking frameworks</a> <bq>This is testing implementation and not behaviour. Your SUT called something and there is likely an observable side-effect of that. Test the side-effect and not that a particular method was called. If the code is refactored (e.g. you change the implementation but not the behaviour), then your test that checked that a method was called will likely break, but your test that tested the behaviour should remain unchanged and should still pass.</bq> I think we have to be more careful here. Sometimes you want to test the implementation, no? Hear me out. If you look at the simplest test double that he's written in the article, shown below, you can see that there is an implicit assumption that would have to be tested: that is, that the <c>Get</c> method in the test-double accurately represents the actual implementation. This is the interface to be tested. <code>public interface IProductRepository { void Store(Product product); Product Get(int id); }</code> This is the test using the test double: <code>[Fact] public void Using_test_doubles() { var repo = new InMemoryProductRepository(); var sut = new ProductService(repo); sut.OnboardNewProduct(123, "Product 123"); repo.DidStore(123).Should().BeTrue(); } </code> Note that the test calls a test-double-only method called <c>DidStore()</c>, which is assumed to have been implemented as expected. A naive implementation would just return <c>true</c>. Since this is a test double, there are no tests verifying that it doesn't always return true. Shouldn't the test instead verify that the product is not stored first---i.e., <c>repo.Get(123)</c> returns <c>false</c>---before calling <c>OnboardNewProduct(123, ...)</c> and then testing <c>repo.Get(123)</c> again to verify that it returns <c>true</c>? The following is the implementation of the test-double. <code>public class InMemoryProductRepository : IProductRepository { private readonly List<product> _products = new(); public void Store(Product product) => _products.Add(product); public Product Get(int id) => _products.FirstOrDefault(p => p.Id == id); // This is not part of the interface, but is useful for testing public bool DidStore(int id) => Get(id) is not null; }</code> If you leave the test as formulated, there is literally no guarantee that anything changed at all. The author is simply assuming that <c>Store</c> adds a product because he can see that it does. The author wasn't quite clear why his mock-based implementation isn't good, though. He proposed the code below. <code>[Fact] public void Using_mocks() { var repo = Substitute.For<iproductrepository>(); var sut = new ProductService(mock); sut.OnboardNewProduct(123, "Product 123"); repo.Received().Store(Arg.Is<product>(p => p.Id == 123)); }</code> Do you see how he checked whether the <c>Store()</c> method had been called rather than testing whether <c>Get(123)</c> returns <c>true</c>? He had to do that because the mock would always return <c>false</c> unless the author had also set up the <c>Get()</c> method to return <c>true</c> if the method were to be called with <c>123</c>. Why wouldn't he do this? Because you'd just be testing the mock. However, if you look closely at the previous example, the author is also just testing his test-double. I have another problem with the statement above: sometimes I very much want to verify that a specific method is being called. I'm not trying to verify the behavior of the test-double; I'm trying to verify the behavior of the actual implementation. Let me explain. If, for whatever reason, I can't use the actual implementation, then I want to verify that a certain method was called because e.g., I know that that method calls a system API directly. That is, I trust that the system API will do what it says on the tin. I'm able to verify manually that the parameters to the method are passed on to the API faithfully. I can't call the API in the test suite---maybe it's a call to the Windows Registry or accessing a USB stick that doesn't exist in CI---but I can get as close as possible. If something still goes wrong, then I know that I just have to examine the one line of code in the actual implementation. In that way, I've verified a fact about the system that means something. This comes up often enough in more complex component graphs, where you've had a bug that, under certain circumstances, a certain notification is not sent. In that case, you might be unable to verify that the message arrives---as we do by testing <c>Get(123)</c> above---because the actual message would end up on a mobile device somewhere, and maybe you don't want to build the testing infrastructure that mocks a receiving device that you can check. It wouldn't help you because you'd just be testing the test-double implementation anyway. Instead, you would trigger a high-level actual that, eventually, bubbles through several layers until the notifier is triggered with a certain message. In that case, an efficient and effective test would be to test that the <c>INotifier.Send()</c> method was called with the expected parameters. Even in the author's example, there is presumably an external data store of some sort that is being mocked. I'm actually not interested in testing whether that data store interprets my command to store correctly. I'm going to assume that it does. What I want to confirm is that I sent the command to the store. That is, I want to verify that a particular method was called with particular parameters. Perhaps I'll use a snapshot test to verify that the generated SQL is correct. Then I don't have to actually run the SQL against the database. In the author's case, he's calling a method on one interface and verifying that a property of another interface has changed. He is testing the interplay of those two components. That he used test-double doesn't help at all---it's because the test-double was written correctly that the test means anything. And there are no tests to verify that the test-double actually does what we assume it is doing. While I agree that test-doubles have their place, I think that mocking frameworks can also be very helpful. That's why I don't like rules like "test behavior not implementation". I prefer to consider it a guideline, so that I can remember to write high-level, well-abstracted tests where possible but I can also just test that a certain method on a certain component will be executed. <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g1i4yx_bks" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/3g1i4yx_bks" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Renato Kaiser" caption="Nicht so gutes Fondue"> At 07:00: <bq>Die Frechheit, die Dreistigkeit, dass alle a' dem Tisch für das minderwertige Gericht münd au mit'schaffe. Die Person, die Euch einlädt, sagt eigentlich: "Weil Ihr meine besten Freund*innen seid" "meine Familie, meine absolut Liebsten, "hab ich Euch Käse in einen Topf geworfen. Billigen Wein und Schnaps reingeleert. Darunter ein Feuer angezündet. Und wenn Ihr jetzt nicht sofort zu rühren anfangt, brennt der ganze Scheiss an. Hopp. En guete. Leckt mir doch alle am Arsch. Das ist Zwangsarbeit.</bq>