<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</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> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/musk-the-myth-of-usaid/" source="Z Network" author="Patrick Lawrence">Musk & the Myth of USAID</a> <bq>The aid and humanitarian programs remain, and millions of disadvantaged people in more than 100 countries depend on them. But <b>USAID is all about American self-interest now — acting as an instrument of the imperium’s foreign policies with no exceptions that come readily to mind.</b> Along with the National Endowment for Democracy , it has taken over the coup function from the C.I.A. when this is possible — infamously in NED’s case.</bq> <bq><b>USAID shrieked and shouted foul last August, when the Parliament in Tbilisi passed a law requiring NGOs receiving a fifth or more of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents.</b> Some $95 million in U.S. funding, a good bit of it going to “civil society operations” via USAID, has since been on hold. What? <b>We’re here to manipulate your political process to tilt Georgia Westward, and you, the elected government in Tbilisi, object? How undemocratic of you.</b> How authoritarian. How… how “pro–Russian.” Netted out, this is USAID’s position on the question.</bq> <bq>I look at the people in the photo — the dress, the demeanor. They seem to me a latter-day gathering of counterculture folk, intent on doing good and keeping their hands clean. It is good to know such people are still among us. But they are either lost or they are liars. Assuming the former, <b>their references are to an aid agency that long ago succumbed to ideology and corruption. Their USAID is a mythological object at this point, a museum piece.</b></bq> <bq>I doubt altogether that Trump and Musk have mounted their campaign against USAID for the right reasons, whatever they may be. The rump contingent of USAID staff that will remain after the purge, I read, will be those dedicated to humanitarian assistance. This is curious, certainly. But <b>it is always this way with Trump. We are left to wonder what he is trying to do and why he is trying to do it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/15/trump-military-spending-could-be-cut-in-half-and-theres-no-reason-to-build-new-nuclear-weapons/" author="Dave DeCamp" source="Antiwar.com">Trump: Military Spending Could Be Cut in Half and There’s No Reason To Build New Nuclear Weapons</a> <bq>“At some point, when things settle down, I’m going to meet with China and I’m going to meet with Russia, in particular those two, and I’m going to say <b>there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military</b> … and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things,” Trump said. “When we straighten it all out, then <b>one of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China and President Putin of Russia, and I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that</b>, and I think we’ll be able to do that,” he added.</bq> <bq>Discussing nuclear weapons, Trump said, “<b>There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many you could destroy the world 50 times over or 100 times over.</b> And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and [Russia] is building new nuclear weapons, and China is building new nuclear weapons.” The US has been working to modernize its nuclear triad, a project that’s expected to cost $1.5 trillion. <b>Trump also repeated his call to seek “denuclearization” with Russia and said Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to do so “in a very big way.”</b></bq> Man, I dunno. I wish these were two things that he actually did and didn't just say he was going to do one time, and then forget about it forever. This is the same guy who's proposing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians as if he doesn't really understand that what he's proposing is ethnic cleansing. It's just hard to ignore the statements above because they're not really self-serving. They go against the big-money donors. I don't know who he'd be saying this for, except for himself. Maybe he saw how Ronald Reagan still gets so much credit for having decreased nuclear weapons, despite being such an asshole on the economy. Maybe he just really wants to rid the world of them. Maybe he's checking a box. It's so hard to know with Trump. Is the rest of his merry crew onboard with this? Do they really want to cut the military budget in half in order to decrease waste? I would have never believed it; I would have never thought that he would even say it. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCHOp36-qw8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/GCHOp36-qw8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Tadhg Hickey" caption="'What about hijabs?'"> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/jd-vances-speech-in-munich" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">J.D. Vance's Speech in Munich</a> <bq>What I worry about is the threat from within. <b>The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.</b> <b>I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election.</b> He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.</bq> He's wrong about a bunch of things but he's not wrong to bring this up. This is important and disastrous if they want to maintain a pretense of democracy in Europe. <bq>[...] when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, <b>we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.</b> And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.</bq> I honestly just want to point out the points of agreement I have but I can't help pointing out things that nearly everyone will nod their heads in agreement about but which are the <i>real</i> reason that J.D. Vance is wrong: he fails to contextualize his statements in an at-all fair characterization of history. He appeals to a warped history in which there were good guys and bad guys, to we could all return. He acts as if anti-democratic behavior just <i>began</i> in Europe and as if the U.S. hadn't been deeply involved in promoting it. And he's not even referring to the Germans here! No, of course not. He's referring to the Soviets---the predecessors to the Russians with whom they presumably plan to negotiate with over and end to hostilities in Ukraine. It's gobsmacking to think that this anti-diplomatic horseshit is going to continue uninterrupted. The Commies were the bad guys and "we" were the good guys. You utter fucking simpleton. You hopped-up, bullshit, wanna-be, PMC Ivy grad. Goddamn, do you never tire of ruining everything with your superficial knowledge, paucity of philosophy, and dearth of empathy and nuance? He then lists a ton of examples of restricted free speech, with which I sympathize deeply...and yet, I cannot fail to note that he only mentions white, Christian people's rights being infringed. After 16 months of stomping the utter fuck out of anyone's rights to free speech who dared utter the words "Free Palestine", Europe got a free pass from Vance on that one. Instead of wondering aloud about Julian Assange or Richard Medhurst or Ali Abunimah, he focused on people getting fined for praying outside of abortion clinics. It's all bad, of course, but his cherry-picked examples say as much about whose rights he supports as his words. Omission says volumes. It's also pretty awesome to see that utter fucking poltroon Vance standing in Munich and citing cases from Great Britain, seemingly utterly unaware that they are no longer part of Europe as a governed democracy. For fuck's sake. <bq>I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.</bq> It just keeps on coming: the lab-leak theory is anything but proven, except, perhaps, in J.D. Vance's silo. The scientific consensus is actually that it was <i>not</i> a lab leak because literally none of the COVID strains in the wild match any of the strains obtained from the labs. This is pretty conclusive, but when has evidence gotten in the way of a good theory? To recap: J.D. Vance comes up with an example of misinformation---COVID, where, yes, there absolutely was a ton of misinformation---and manages to double down on a completely incorrect theory in order to prove that the other version was misinformation. The mind reels. <bq>But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.</bq> I can't tell whether he doesn't know about Russiagate or he's taking the piss here. If he's taking the piss, then it's actually a pretty clever way of lashing out at the Democrats for having shat---and continuing to shit---their pants about Russian interference in its elections. <bq>[...] what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.</bq> Well, all right now. Ok. Ok. This might be a case of absolutely the right message from the wrong messenger, but man. That's pretty good. <bq>If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.</bq> Oh shit, he keeps right on coming. I can't believe that this message wasn't intended just as much for the audience in front of him as for the audience at home. The people who should be hearing this loud and clear aren't listening, though. Wrong messenger. But then, just as you're rooting for Vance and his barely veiled references to "alternative" political views (in Germany, harhar), he spends a while ramping up to it, then gets to what one can only imagine is the actual thesis sentence of his whole speech: <bq>[...] more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration.</bq> As I wrote, he worked his way up to this and the context he provided is not very exonerating at all, so I've left it out. He then simply pretends that cars driving into people at markets would not be happening if it weren't for those damned immigrants. The link to CBS news about the most recent attack in München wrote that the attacker <iq>appears to have had an Islamic extremist motive, but there was no evidence that he was involved with any radical network.</iq> Mull that one over for its delicious evidence-free conviction. I'm going to cite the final few paragraphs in full. See if you can read them as if you didn't know who had said them and then wonder to yourself whether you'd have said Vice President to President Donald Trump, J.D. Vance. <bq>Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. Europeans, the people have a choice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future. Embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you. And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we built together as a shared society. To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice. And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said: “Do not be afraid.” We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.</bq> What we know is that Vance is saying these things only because the wind is blowing his way. As soon as it turns, these words will be long-forgotten. Still, they're pretty words. Obama said pretty things, too, as he launched wave after wave of drone bombers. Kennedy said pretty things as he launched an attack on Cuba and nearly started a nuclear war out of pride. Don't get me wrong: he's 100% correct. A democracy lives and dies by the word of the people. If we think that the majority can be wrong enough that it needs to be ignored or suppressed, then we don't believe in democracy. The right-wing party is by far the largest in Switzerland and has been for the nearly 1/4-century that I've lived here. It doesn't make Switzerland a right-wing bastion. The AfD is probably more extreme---I know much more about the views of the SVP than the AfD but the SVP has some pretty rigid views on immigration---but it doesn't matter if that's what people are choosing. Choosing is the main part of democracy. You may believe that they're choosing because they're brainwashed but man, that never bothers anybody when people are choosing they way they want them to. Vance didn't come right out and say that he was talking about the AfD but the subtext was there. Just because it was there doesn't mean you get to pretend that his main message <i>was</i> the subtext, though! His message was one of support for democracy, a fine message. Just because <i>right now</i> that would mean listening to a good part of the population---about 25%---who are voting for a more right-wing party than cooler heads would like doesn't make him <i>wrong</i>. And it doesn't mean that he's supporting the AfD. His words support any party that faces suppression. I just can't imagine that he was thinking about the evisceration of <i>Die Linke</i>, though. I bet he wasn't thinking about the triumph of an anti-communist and anti-socialist mindset and propaganda that has <i>dominated</i> Western discourse for <i>decades</i>. That, in face, most people would be socialists if given half a chance but that European and U.S. governments have consistently <i>flattened</i> this natural tendency and have, by now, completely forgotten that this anti-democratic behavior is happening all the time. It's like wallpaper; no-one notices it at all anymore. An optimistic take would be that J.D. Vance supports people who want communism because it's the <i>democratic</i> thing to do. I think J.D. Vance would sputter and, perhaps realizing that he'd been cornered, grudgingly admit that people should be able to vote to be communist or socialist as well---but I don't even know if he could. The point above stands: most people's devotion to democracy is contingent on the wind blowing their way. You should really read the speech yourself. It's a very interesting bit of propaganda. Taibbi was right to publish it in full. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/15/at-the-gates-of-hell-2/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">At the Gates of Hell</a> <bq>Let’s leave the last word this week to the esteemed diplomat, physician and former Prime Minister from Malaysia, 99-year-old Mahatir Mohamad: “<b>The America which wants to be great again, aid and abet the genocide by the Israelis. So do its European allies. This is the behavior of savages, not civilized people.</b> We cannot claim to be civilized when we ignore all those high moral values that we associate with modern civilization. The mass murder being committed by Israel… is supported financially and with weapons by the great advocates of human rights, the sanctity of human life, the abhorrence of cruelty. <b>We see tens of thousands of people being killed, starved to death, and denied a supply of water and medicine. We see hospitals and schools and refugee camps being bombed and rocketed. Yes. Civilization has failed.</b>”</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i-tyLshBR4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/1i-tyLshBR4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bad Faith / Briahna Joy Gray" caption="Democrats Are NEVER Coming Back After Genocide Support (w/ Butch Ware)"> Fantastic interview with Butch Ware. He's great. I voted for him on the green ticket. Between <b>01:05:00</b> and <b>01:13:00</b>, he goes on a very good run. Before that, he was making a good case for why he should be governor of California. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/i-write-about-israel-all-the-time" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">I Write About Israel All The Time Because I Have To, Not Because I Want To</a> <bq>On Saturday night an Israeli national shot two other Israelis in Miami because he mistook them for Palestinians. The phenomenon of Israelis shooting Israelis who appear Arab has spread to the United States. <b>The only way to be safe from friendly fire as an Israeli is to be the white-skinned kind of Israeli whose family comes from Europe.</b></bq> <bq><b>People who are medically evacuated from Gaza are reportedly being forced to sign paperwork at exiting checkpoints saying they cannot return to the enclave.</b> This revelation comes shortly after <b>Doctors Without Borders informed us that Israeli forces have been entering hospitals in Gaza and methodically destroying all the medical equipment inside them.</b> This is a cold, calculated move to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.</bq> <bq>Someone accused me of being “obsessed with Israel” yesterday and it just blew my mind. <b>Civil rights are being destroyed throughout the west to defend a state that’s committing genocide and ethnic cleansing</b> with western backing, and we’re not meant to talk about that state and the things it’s doing? Huh?</bq> <bq>Trump says he wants to mutually <b>denuclearize with Russia and China and negotiate a mutual 50 percent cut to the military budget</b> of all three nations. These would both be wonderful new developments. And, <b>I’ll believe it when I see it. As always, ignore their words. Watch their actions.</b></bq> <bq>I wouldn’t be mad at a blind person for knocking over my things, but someone who has one working eye and stumbles around wearing two eyepatches is just being a douchebag. <b>They’re like a man who pulled his head out of his ass, looked around, and then knowingly re-inserted it.</b></bq> <bq>Trump is the president now. Biden is completely irrelevant. <b>There is no excuse for defending the depraved actions of the president of the world’s most powerful and destructive nation.</b> The experience of talking to Trump supporters about Trump’s Israel sycophancy is identical to the experience of talking to Biden supporters about Biden’s Israel sycophancy. It’s exactly the same. <b>These partisan livestock will make excuses for literally anything.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2025/02/19/to-russia-with-love/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">To Russia, With Love</a> I don't really want to cite anything from this point. I just included the link to note that Greenfield rather succinctly summarized the stupidest possible take on U.S./Ukraine/Russia negotiations that he probably got directly from the New York Times. If you want a taste, here's his conclusion. <bq>This damage has already been done, and the United States has burned generations of international good will so that Trump’s bizarre adoration for Putin can blossom. Once trust has been broken, it’s hard, if not impossible, to gain it back. In one day, Trump broke trust with Europe and Ukraine, and shared hugs and kisses with Russia.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=128967" author="Albrecht Müller" source="NachDenkSeiten">Gestern fernzusehen oder Nachrichten zu lesen, war das pure Vergnügen</a> <bq>Besonders schlimm ist, dass so unsere mühsam aufgebauten Feindbilder in Schall und Rauch aufgelöst werden. <b>Gerade hatten wir im Fernsehen am Dienstag mal wieder gehört, der böse Russe wolle sich die gesamte Ukraine einverleiben. – Der Russe ist böse! – Das glaubt doch keiner mehr, wenn Trump mit Putin plaudert.</b> Der Hühnerhaufen von Scholz, Baerbock, Merz und Co. merkt offenbar gar nicht, auf was das laufende Spiel hinausläuft: Wenn sie rundum ihre Pro-Ukraine-Schwüre abgeliefert haben, dann <b>kann Trump sagen: Dann bezahlt mal schön, Ihr Helden! Wir Amis haben die Kacke zwar angerührt, aber jetzt seid ihr dran.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/anyone-who-wants-the-ukraine-war" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Anyone Who Wants The Ukraine War To Continue Is A Monster</a> <bq>These histrionics are as ridiculous as they are depraved. Obviously the war in Ukraine needs to end. Polls say Ukrainians themselves want the war to end. <b>If you want Ukrainians to keep dying in this war against the will of the Ukrainians themselves while you sit safe at home eating snacks and posting on the internet, you’re a monster.</b></bq> <bq><b>The sitting president is on social media right now trying to pin this whole thing on Zelensky, when Trump himself helped pave the way to this horror by becoming the first president to start openly pouring weapons into Ukraine while ramping up cold war tensions and shredding treaties with Russia.</b> Trump, Obama, Biden, Boris Johnson, and all of NATO helped throw Ukraine into the meat grinder while countless western experts and analysts warned urgently that their actions would result in Ukraine’s destruction. <b>They should all suffer immense consequences.</b> But of course we all know they won’t. <b>None of the government officials, empire managers, career politicians, pundits and think tank swamp monsters who helped steer Ukraine into the inferno will suffer any consequences of any kind for their atrocities. Nobody will even lose their career.</b> And what’s worse is knowing that most of them <b>will re-emerge like zombies from the grave to help manufacture support for the next imperial bloodbath.</b> Many of the same people who drummed up support for the war in Ukraine were responsible for helping to destroy Iraq, when they should have been languishing in a prison cell at The Hague this entire time. <b>We are ruled by the worst among us. Our world will never know peace as long as these freaks are at the steering wheel.</b></bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuIb4j_hxSw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/PuIb4j_hxSw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Chris Hedges Report" caption="Virtue Hoarders and the Rejection of Liberalism (w/ Catherine Liu)"> This was a great discussion. Chris was effusive about Catherine's book (which I've purchased and is in my queue) as well as her engaging writing style, which is a far sight from the dry, academic and often-impenetrable style that has established itself as the standard. For fun, I used a service I'd learned about recently that lets you summarize a video. It's called <i>tl;dw</i> (too long; didn't watch). When I tried a different 90-minute video, it complained that the transcript was too long. When I tried a five-minute video that was a cartoon with no dialogue, it complained that there was <i>no</i> transcript. It <a href="https://tldw.tube/?v=PuIb4j_hxSw">managed to summarize</a> this video as follows, but be warned: this is the standard LLM wall of text with no small amount of redundancy. Overall, the summary contains some good recapitulations of Catherine's thesis. It is unclear the degree to which the LLM elucidated this all from the transcript itself, but it more or less follows the discussion. Unfortunately, it lost all of the flavor that these two erudite and funny scholars and human beings brought to the conversation. There are no citations of pithy passages, as I would have done had I been focusing more on the video as it played. For example, the following direct quote from the video, at <b>22:40</b>, is relevant, and a much more memorable formulation of Liu's thesis than the dry summary below. <bq>I can totally understand the average American going, you know, what I would prefer? The real thing---red blood, red meat, hate workers but speak-my-anger guy than those of you who are telling me I'm inferior, who tell me that my life choices are terrible, and who are going to punish me anyway. I'd rather be punished by the big, orange baby than by the Ozempic-shooting, Hollywood-liberal mogul.</bq> In order to clean up the transcript, I had the benefit of actually listening to Liu as I was proofreading it. The LLM most likely just had the raw text input, which looks like this, <pre>so I can totally Vibe understand the average American going you know what I would prefer the real thing red blood red meat you know hate workers but um speak my anger guy then those of you who are telling me I'm inferior who tell me that my life my my my life choices are terrible and who are going to punish me anyway I'd rather be punished by the Big Orange baby than by the you know uh OIC um OIC shooting you know hollyw Hollywood um liberal Mogul</pre> There are a lot of places to go wrong in that transcript if you don't have any context or understanding of the subject matter. Without further ado, here is the LLM summary. I will highlight the bits I found to be particularly appropriate or illuminating, as a navigational aid through the wall of text. <bq>Catherine Liu's "Virtue Hoarders" <b>critiques the professional managerial class (PMC) for betraying the working class while seeking alignment with oligarchic power structures.</b> This class, which includes academics, media professionals, and nonprofit leaders, is characterized by <b>a form of liberal elitism that prioritizes individual virtue signaling over meaningful political actions or policies that genuinely address workers' rights and economic inequality.</b> Liu argues that rather than serving the interests of the broader public, <b>the PMC engages in moral panics, cultural wars, and identity politics that obscure serious economic discussions</b> and fail to advocate for structural changes necessary to support everyday Americans. Instead of fostering solidarity among diverse working populations, <b>this class often demonizes those it perceives as beneath them and promotes a narrow vision of progress that serves their own interests</b> but neglects the broader disempowerment experienced by the working class. Liu warns that this trajectory <b>creates an environment ripe for reactionary politics</b>, ultimately harming democracy and civic engagement. The conversation highlights the need for a leftist resurgence that prioritizes economic justice and acts in solidarity with working-class struggles, <b>rejecting the superficiality of contemporary identity politics.</b> <hl>[It's repeating here, nearly directly]</hl> In "Virtue Hoarders," Catherine Liu critiques the professional managerial class (PMC) for prioritizing individualism and virtue signaling while betraying the working class and perpetuating a disempowered society. She argues that the PMC, captured by liberal values, focuses on culture wars over meaningful policies, diminishing solidarity and supporting oligarchic interests. Liu calls for a leftist movement that engages with economic issues rather than identity politics to empower workers and revive democracy. <hl>[It's repeating here <i>again</i>, nearly directly]</hl> Catherine Liu's "Virtue Hoarders" critiques the professional managerial class for prioritizing individual virtue over genuine working-class interests, arguing that this class engages in culture wars instead of meaningful economic advocacy, ultimately harming democracy. Catherine Liu critiques the professional managerial class for prioritizing virtue signaling over genuine worker advocacy, undermining democracy. Catherine Liu critiques the PMC for substituting virtue signaling for real worker advocacy.</bq> You can see how the "summary" is actually about three times longer than it needs to be, as it is quite repetitive---like a student writing an essay that has to hit a certain word count---while, at the same time, eliding much of the value that the discussion added to the themes from the book itself. The summary of the video ended up being more of a blurb for her book. Now that I've examined the initial response in more detail, I realized that I could try summarizing it again, with Copilot. The result is below. <bq>In "Virtue Hoarders," Catherine Liu critiques the professional managerial class (PMC) for prioritizing individual virtue signaling over meaningful political actions and policies that support workers' rights and economic equality. Liu argues that this class, which includes academics, media professionals, and nonprofit leaders, engages in moral panics, culture wars, and identity politics, ultimately betraying the working class and perpetuating oligarchic power structures. She calls for a leftist resurgence that prioritizes economic justice and solidarity with working-class struggles, rejecting the superficiality of contemporary identity politics to empower workers and revive democracy.</bq> There ya go. You can skip an eminently human, wide-ranging, and idiomatic discussion rooted in decades worth of human experience ... or you can read a single paragraph that summarizes Liu's book instead. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/meditations-on-the-notion-that-obama" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Meditations On The Notion That Obama "Never Had Any Scandals"</a> <bq>The typical westerner inhabits a mental universe that is completely divorced from reality. <b>Atrocities are only committed by foreign states that their government doesn’t like. Propaganda is something that only happens to people in other countries, or to people with different political ideologies. Scandals are whatever controversies the imperial media choose to focus on and inflame.</b> The actual things that are happening in our world don’t register.</bq> <bq><b>They can’t see Libya. They can only see the feelings they felt while Obama was in office, and contrast them with the feelings they feel under Trump.</b> This is the way they have been conditioned to relate to the world. <b>Mass-scale psychological manipulation has turned them into drooling infants. And nobody benefits from this but the powerful.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/trump-is-trolling-the-ap" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Trump is Trolling the AP</a> <bq>Because so many newspapers use AP as their chief wire service, its Stylebook dominates journalistic language. I was raised on AP style. It was strictly enforced at the Moscow Times and at other outlets where I worked as a young reporter. The book stressed using “clear and simple” rules that kept copy taut and crisp. <b>It’s why I still start sentences using constructions like “On Monday…” and try to refer to a politician’s full name and title in the first mention of an article.</b> Lately, it morphed into more of a “reference” book that resembled the old NIH style guides on “person-first destigmatizing language” (which AP endorses) that instructed you to write things like person with cancer instead of cancer patient. <b>The NIH guides were infuriating because they quickly became more about authority than usage</b>, often encouraging use of certain terms like <i>marginalized community</i> only to tell you a year later that <i>groups that have been socially marginalized</i> was now preferable. <b>The AP has been doing the same thing for years.</b></bq> <bq>The real issue is why Trump felt it could bar the AP at all. Normally the White House is afraid to make enemies of a big, influential news organization. They stop being afraid when a) those organizations lose audience or influence, or b) when they figure they have no chance of getting anything but negative coverage anyway. Both factors come into play now. <b>News organizations want to force politicians to treat them well. When they lose the ability to do that despite enormous resources, they should ask themselves why. Will AP ask itself that question?</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31hH9ORs3VE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/31hH9ORs3VE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Rachel Maddow Brings Back Russiagate INSANITY"> At <b>06:45</b>, <bq><b>I also love the conceit that only now is the United States lining up with the world's dictators.</b> Does she have any idea who American allies are? What governments we've installed? Which governments we prop up? Did she watch Joe Biden go and meet with Mohamad bin Salman? After promising to turn the Saudis into outcasts after they got caught murdering a journalist from the Washington Post? As she watched the billions of dollars every year going from [...] Washington to Cairo to prop up the incredibly violent brutal Egyptian dictator? Does she know anything about American history? <b>These people really believe in this fairy tale, that the United States upholds the rules-based international order.</b> The same country that cheered the ICC when it declared Putin a war criminal said, 'oh that's very good, ICC. That's the right move. That's very important what you did,' and then sanction them---the same court---when, a year later, they reached the same conclusion about America's ally Israel. And then sanction the judges and the prosecutors responsible. <b>Only in the United States and a few capitals in Western Europe can you still say that crap</b> 'oh the United States stands for the 80 years of the post World War I rules-based International order,' <b>and not provoke a laughing fit.</b> Everyone outside of the United States understands that that is a joke.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/chinas-long-economic-slowdown/" source="Dissent Magazine" author="Ho-fung Hung">China’s Long Economic Slowdown - Dissent Magazine</a> <bq>Ten years ago, I argued in <i>The China Boom</i> that the difficulty in embracing such a shift to stimulating household consumption, despite the availability of effective policies, was a political one. <b>Manufacturers and local governments that depended heavily on land development and construction projects had extensive influence over policy-making, while the rural and urban laboring classes were underrepresented.</b> Direct cash transfer programs, adopted by governments around the world partly out of electoral considerations, had few advocates within the Chinese system, even as many scholars suggested they were necessary for the long-term rebalancing of the economy. <b>The political order was preventing the government from pursuing bold consumption stimulus policy.</b></bq> <bq>[...] more than 90 percent of China-registered patents are not renewed after five years. As government investigations have recently revealed, <b>many patents are fraudulent or of low quality, churned out by research units or enterprises to show results after pocketing huge sums from research grants.</b> The situation is so serious that the government recently initiated an anti-corruption campaign specifically targeting fake innovations.</bq> I wouldn't expect people in China to be any more resistant to inefficient and criminal incentives than people in other countries. <bq>China pays much more for foreign patents and copyrights than foreign entities pay for Chinese ones. This deficit has deepened just as China’s manufactured products have moved up the value chain, further showing that many of its high-tech products rely on foreign technology.</bq> Hard to reconcile with other sources that describe a decreasing reliance on outside sources. This is, though, the standard story: that any success that China has is because it has stolen the knowhow of the intellectually and technologically superior WEST. <bq>[...] this technological advance came only through wasteful expansion of EV investment that led to overcapacity and price wars. Chinese EV manufacturer BYD has managed to break into global markets, but myriad other EV makers have gone under or are on the road to oblivion. <b>The sector’s technological gains came at the cost of inefficient, wasteful allocation of capital.</b></bq> This is a valid criticism of the capitalist model, as designed. <bq>The reforms necessary for reigniting economic dynamism in China would involve mobilizing massive fiscal resources to empower the laboring classes, <b>shoring up an independent legal system to protect intellectual property rights, and liberalizing a financial system tightly controlled by the state</b>, to name just a few of the needed steps.</bq> I have to wonder to what degree this whole essay was leading up to him being able to plead for <iq>intellectual property rights</iq> and a <iq>liberalization of finance</iq> in China. It's a red flag. <bq>This is how many autocratic regimes—from North Korea and Russia to Iran and Venezuela, and others—survive economic crises. Despite the wishful thinking of many China observers that Beijing will opt for the first path, it looks like it is digging in on the second.</bq> It's also a red flag for this guy to list all of the bugbears of NATO, lumping them together as if they were all the same, purely autocratic and purely autocratic in the exact same way. I suspected early that this was where the author was headed but I persevered. I'm not surprised that this essay ended up here, though. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/liberals-hate-socialists-because" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix">Liberals Hate Socialists Because Socialists Are The Real Thing</a> <bq>The unspoken premise behind the plan to keep capitalism going is that the world will be saved by sociopathic tech plutocrats like Elon Musk. The idea is to <b>just continue the plan of infinite growth on a finite world until hopefully some tech company produces technology that makes such growth sustainable in a way that both (A) benefits everybody and (B) turns billionaires into trillionaires.</b> That’s the assumption underlying the decision to keep capitalism in place even as we watch our biosphere disappear before our eyes, and it’s pure fantasy. <b>As long as mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, you’re going to see the interests of humanity and the ecosystem subverted by that pursuit.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the belief that capitalism will be able to carry us into the future is entirely faith-based and premised upon many unknowns and absurdities. We can keep clinging to those baseless superstitions hoping our evidence-free gamble eventually pays off so we never have to change ourselves, <b>or we can move into a mature relationship with reality and start building something different together.</b></bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/science-will-not-save-us-bassiri" source="The Baffler" author="Nima Bassiri">Science Will Not Save Us</a> <bq>His reproach of the complicity between regulators and corporate lobbyist is far from unfounded; Biden’s secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who held the same position under the Obama administration, spent his time between the two administrations as a dairy industry lobbyist, a position he will likely return to. This is notable when we consider that <b>agribusiness fears of revenue loss may have likely influenced the USDA’s delayed efforts to curb the rising prevalence of bird flu among cattle.</b></bq> <bq>What’s interesting about Kennedy’s environmental protectionism, however, is that it could have translated into a form of activism that might have taken on a distinctly anti-capitalist course. This is not to suggest that all forms of environmental activism amount to left-oriented forms of climate justice or eco-socialism, but that <b>a dedicated environmentalist might, at some point, find it difficult to avoid acknowledging the link between capital and climate catastrophe.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>from where Kennedy stands, there is no daylight between a corporate polluter and a vaccine manufacturer. Dupont’s chemical dumping is functionally equivalent to public fluoridation programs and vaccine mandates</b>; and that interchangeability only makes sense when capitalism is no longer seen as a disorder tout court but, instead, in its unencumbered form, as a necessary precondition for social health and vigor. For this is what medical freedom ultimately means for Kennedy—a medically encoded form of economic freedom.</bq> <bq>Kennedy, of course, is hardly responsible for the privatization and commercialization of science and medicine that has taken place over the past five decades and, with it, <b>the subsumption of medicine into an unadulterated form of economic thought. Health and illness have been effectively transmuted into economic concepts</b>, and it’s for this reason that we must understand vaccine skepticism as an expression of economic reasoning rather than as a form of irrationalism or illiteracy. Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism, however, represents something of an inverse position to most vaccine skeptics who do not share Kennedy’s dynastic and financial privilege.</bq> <bq><b>Why do defenders of science see more of a threat in science skepticism than in the rampant commercialization of science that has developed unabated since 1980</b>, or in the militarization of science which has been one of the hallmarks of scientific research since the end of WWII?</bq> <bq>[...] what is especially striking about the concern over scientific politicization is how much some transfigurations of science are regarded as clearly political while others are not. <b>Why, for instance, do we not tend to consider the fact that American taxpayer dollars subsize private vaccine research, the products of which companies like Pfizer sell back to the federal government at tremendous profit, as an unambiguous instance of the dangerous suffusion of politics into science?</b> Or the fact that federal agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency receive billions of dollars of federal funding, while the Pentagon continues to fail independent audits? <b>Why, in other words, is it not considered political to mold the aims of science to serve U.S. military hegemony or the accumulation of private profit?</b></bq> <bq>Science, after all, is never value-free, nor does it possess any inherent moral worth, since it only ever reflects the values of its practitioners. <b>Perhaps the most dangerous way to politicize science is to claim that it is off-limits to debate, safeguarded in some way by truth and expertise.</b></bq> <bq><b>Give science over to the people! Fight the politicizations of science with politics, not with the veil of reason and neutrality!</b> Political and democratic control over science does not mean threatening expert judgment with lay opinion; it means, for example, demilitarizing science, or severing the relationship between health and capitalism which so profoundly animates a notion like medical freedom, and which likely underwrites so much scientific skepticism today.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UZ4XdoONpo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/1UZ4XdoONpo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Etymology Nerd" caption="How Deaf Children Made Their Own Language"> I'm low-key obsessed with this guy's one-minute whirlwind tours of language quirks. Today I learned that sign languages have families and that Canadian and Nigerian are in the same family but British and American are not, but American and French are. Also, that wasn't even the main point of the video: it was that deaf children in Nicaragua invented their own language entirely. <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/here-come-the-allodidacts" source="The Hinternet" author="William Deresiewicz">Here Come the Allodidacts</a> <bq>A clear split has emerged within the broad coalition of people who share this concern, between those who are seeking to bend tech to their own creative will in new ways, and those who argue it’s best just to leave your tech in the lockers by the door when you enter a space of human creativity at work, whether intellectual or artistic. Both sides agree that the effort of preservation and stewardship must be assured through new forms of allodidacticism — not sequestering yourself as an intellectual hikikomori, but also <b>not pretending that the traditional credential-granting institutions are fulfilling their responsibility to keep our humanistic and artistic traditions alive.</b> Nay indeed, we are all in agreement that <b>universities, at this point, are where intellectual passion goes to die, buried under mountains of pointless grant applications imposed on us humanists by the insane and suicidal cargo-cult of STEM worship, which in the end is just a poorly disguised worship of money and power</b> (to name only one of several conjoint threats).</bq> <bq>[...] an overt <b>emphasis placed on who you are going to be in the world, not what.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the way Virginia Woolf concludes her essay “How Should One Read a Book?”:<bq>I have sometimes dreamt…that when the Day of Judgment dawns…the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, <b>“Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."</b></bq></bq> <bq>David Neidorf, the former longtime president of Deep Springs College:<bq><b>To read a book truly is to cooperate with its effort to teach you something.</b></bq>The second was from Ursula K. Le Guin:<bq>The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. <b>The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.</b></bq>Says it, that is, like all art, through form, which it is the purpose of close reading to expound.</bq> <bq>The point was to have us attend to the novel’s aesthetic dimension, the sensuality of its language, its beauty rather than its meaning — something that is rarely if ever discussed in a college class, still less one <b>in graduate school, where the idea of beauty is indeed anathema, retrograde, naïve.</b></bq> <bq>I am reminded of a passage from Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, in which “the reading person” is described as “gluttonous in the most revolting manner”:<bq>It is better to read twelve lines of a book with the utmost intensity and thus to penetrate into them to the full, as one might say, rather than read the whole book as the normal reader does, <b>who in the end knows the book he has read no more than an air passenger knows the landscape he overflies.</b> He does not even perceive the contours. Thus all <b>people nowadays read everything by flying over, they read everything and know nothing.</b></bq></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjuW1orijDc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/gjuW1orijDc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="CinemaStix / Danny Boyd" caption="when a modern director makes a fake old movie"> This seven-minute video is generally about how attention to detail can bring digital films to non-digital life, as evidenced in David Fincher's body of work. The focus is on the movie <i>Mank</i>, which was explicitly made to look as if it had been discovered in film canisters next to a copy of <i>Citizen Kane</i>. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://drewdevault.com/2025/02/13/2025-02-13-On-intellectual-property.html" source="" author="Drew DeVault">A holistic perspective on intellectual property, part 1</a> <bq>I’d like to take a moment here to acknowledge <b>the hubris of property: we see the bounty of the natural world and impose upon it these imagined rights and privileges, divvy it up and hand it out and hoard it, and resort to cruelty if anyone steps out of line.</b> Indeed this may be justifiable if the system of private property is sufficiently beneficial to society, and <b>the notion of property is so deeply ingrained into our system that it feels normal and unremarkable.</b> It’s worth remembering that it has trade-offs, that we made the whole thing up, and that <b>we can make up something else with different trade-offs.</b> That being said, I’m personally fond of most of my personal property and I’d like to keep enjoying most of my property rights as such, so take from that what you will.</bq> <bq>I suppose that the social convention of property can derive some natural legitimacy from the fact that some resources are scarce. In this sense, <b>private property relates to the problem of distribution.</b></bq> <bq>Screwdrivers are not fundamentally scarce, given that the supply of idle screwdrivers far outpaces the demand for screwdriver use, but <b>our modern conception of property has the unintended consequence of creating scarcity where there is none by denying the use of idle screwdrivers where they are needed.</b></bq> <bq>But a <b>domain name</b> doesn’t really exist per-se: it’s just an entry in a ledger. The electric charge on the hard drives in your nearest DNS server’s database exist, but the domain name it represents doesn’t exist in quite the same sense as the electrons do: it’s immaterial. <b>Is applying our conception of property to these immaterial things justifiable?</b></bq> I have just as much right to a given name as anyone else. Is first-come-first-served justifiable, if we think about it? What just reason could you give to force someone off of an address? That they have too many of them where some have none? If you have one address, should you be able to keep it, no matter what? <bq>The social justification for intellectual property as a legal concept is rooted in the value of this labor. We recognize that intellectual labor is valuable, and produces an artifact — e.g. a story — which is valuable, but is not scarce. A capitalist society fundamentally depends on scarcity to function, and so <b>through intellectual property norms we create an artificial scarcity to reward (and incentivize) intellectual labor without questioning our fundamental assumptions about capitalism and value.</b></bq> <bq>I personally envision a system in which wealth is capped, hoarding is illegal, and everyone has an unconditional right to food, shelter, healthcare, and so on, and I’ll support reforming property rights in a heartbeat if that’s what it takes to get all of those things done.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>you see someone stealing groceries, you didn’t see anything.</b> My willingness to accept property as a legitimate social convention is conditional on it not producing antisocial outcomes like homelessness or food insecurity.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/02/streeck-global-governance-democracy-economics/" source="Jacobin" author="Wolfgang Streeck">“Global Governance” Is a Pipe Dream</a> <bq>The Polanyian twist of my book is not only that the idea of regulating capitalism from the top of the world by experts is a pipedream. It is also that <b>capitalism needs to be made compatible with the values underlying the different human societies, which cannot be restructured so that they fit the needs of global capitalism.</b> Normatively and politically, things are the other way around: capitalism — that is, the economy — has to be structured so that it is compatible with the needs of people, and these latter resist being structured for capitalism.</bq> <bq>Polanyi knew all this. He was not only a radical critic of capitalism but also a social conservative. He admitted that the engine of growth may well be capitalism’s drive to accumulation, but he knew at the same time that <b>societies are in essence conservative in that they cannot at will be reorganized at the same speed and in the same way as capitalist growth</b> [...]</bq> <bq>In that world, you are pressed to become a universalist: you have to feel as close to a Pakistani peasant or a Norwegian reindeer herder as you feel to your neighbor in the Italian village where you have grown up. People read this and say to themselves: this is demanding a lot, but I’d better not talk about it because that makes me an immoral racist. <b>Philosophy forces you to be a moral universalist; economics forces you to be a universalist utility maximizer.</b></bq> <bq>[...] not many people would be able like the Pole Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, better-known as Joseph Conrad, to emigrate to another country and become one of its greatest writers in his adopted language. <b>I enjoyed living in several other countries, but I always knew that the nooks and crannies of those societies are not accessible to me, except if I am a social anthropologist.</b> But even these can deeply misunderstand the societies they are studying — the history of social anthropology is full of astonishing examples.</bq> <bq><b>A good state allows the different nationalities that exist within its borders to govern themselves to the largest extent possible.</b></bq> <bq><b>A mindless nationalism that fails to distinguish between state and society has nothing promising to offer.</b> To understand the state system, you have to understand its endemic tension with the social communities upon which it is built. At the same time, social communities require capacities for authoritative government to be able to be democratic in the first place;</bq> <bq>In an introduction to a book titled <i>The Foundational Economy</i>, I argue that there cannot be capitalism without communism — without the collective goods that a society needs to be a society, without which it is not even exploitable by capital. In that sense, I am quite comfortable with someone telling me that my “socialism” is in reality communitarianism. My rejoinder would then be that <b>my “communitarianism” is in reality socialism, to the extent that when we talk about the structure of the community, it is going to be egalitarian, nonhierarchical, one that cares for its members — which, obviously, is the exact opposite of the Hayekian market economy that lets you down if you cannot perform.</b></bq> <bq>This is linked to the question of what kind of economy we will have after the end of the US empire. I have no doubt that getting there will be a messy and potentially violent political process. If we need democratic control over our economies, and if for that purpose we need national sovereignty to be reinstated, as well as a world in which we collectively have choices, <b>we must be willing to accept the costs of such a transition. In addition, enhancing the well-being of societies and communities requires a massive investment in local collective goods that will have to be liberated from the imperatives of private property and capital accumulation.</b> Then we will have to see how this will play itself out over time.</bq> <bq>In the book, I do not so much put my hopes on politicians and policies but rather on structural shifts that <b>force a particular policy dilemma into the foreground to which states and governments then have to respond.</b></bq> <bq>Brexit was the first, and is not going to be the last, breakaway from the centralized neoliberal, technocratic, bureaucratic, mercantilistic governance of Brussels. <b>I know that democracy is risky, and that there is no guarantee that people will always make the right, sensible, intelligent choices. I can only say that we must hope they will because in the end there is no other way.</b></bq> Amen. There really isn't. The only alternative involves elites making decisions for everyone else. That always ends up being great for the elites and somehow shitty for everyone else. <hr> <a href="https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/gold-and-brown" source="Unpopular Front" author="John Ganz">Gold and Brown</a> <bq><b>the fascist ego and the radical, “anarchist” libertarian ego are identical on a structural level, that is to say, they are the same form of subjectivity in different moments.</b> That is not to say that every single fascist is a libertarian or vice versa, or that they exactly have the same psychological origin story. What they both share is a fundamental misrecognition of the Other: the other is just a thing, some material for exploitation or domination. As such, <b>they cannot understand and fundamentally distrust anything that doesn’t openly declare a relation between self and others that is non-exploitative or based on non-domination.</b> They both cannot recognize any universal interest, only the wars and temporary alliances of particular interests, be they individuals, nations, or races.</bq> <bq>The state as fascists understand it is not the state as liberals and socialists understand it: as the sphere where pluralistic, particular interests are reconciled for the general good. They have no such ideal. <b>They view the state instead as a crude vehicle or weapon for the movement or the race.</b> And neither have any conception of “citizenship” as conventionally understood, a set of inalienable rights: <b>citizenship is a mutable and revocable thing like employment, based on the notion of one’s productive contribution to the whole.</b></bq> <bq>Both the “corporatist” and the “anarcho-capitalist” want to replace the State with Civil Society itself, just understood in slightly different ways: a corporatist views Civil Society in terms of self-organizing, hierarchical wholes, while the anarcho-capitalist views market competition as the only necessary principle of organization. <b>The process of privatization and corporate coordination are identical in effect: they both seek the replacement of the state with the direct, unmediated rule of industrial concerns.</b> This accounts for Yarvin’s synthesis of monarchism and libertarian anarchism and is the inner truth of Ross Perot and Donald Trump’s desire to “run America like a business.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-uselessness-of-liberal" source="Weaponized Immigrant" author="Yasha Levine">The unbearable uselessness of liberal anti-zionism</a> <bq>The fact is, <b>Israel and zionist Jews have won this war. They made Gaza unlivable, killed several hundred thousand Palestinians, orphaned tens of thousands of babies, and maimed countless people, and…they got away with it.</b> On top of that, they have defeated their regional foes in both Lebanon and Syria and for now have neutralized any real regional opposition to zionist and American power in the region. Their primary and secondary sponsors — the US and the EU — are behind them 100 percent because they are the beneficiaries of Israel’s regional wrecking ball. <b>The lesson Israelis and zionist Jews got out of all of this is that their nationalist bloodlust has produced nothing but positive results.</b> It has been so good, in fact, that Israel is using the Gaza ceasefire to take the same strategy to the West Bank, where a smaller-scale Gaza-style bombing and ethnic cleansing campaign is currently underway.</bq> <bq>[...] the book is an appeal to the material self-interest of zionist Jews…while also dangling a bit of moralizing scripture and biblical analysis. It feels very strange, as <b>it is directed at people who are having a blast being genocidal and enjoying their power to kill and crush the Palestinians with impunity. They don’t care!</b></bq> Maybe it's a way of closing off the moral high ground even more? I dunno. <bq>[...] if you <b>read the Torah for yourself</b>, you will very quickly see that the text was obsessed with state power and control of territory. <b>The religion is all about the land. In fact, it is obsessed with it.</b></bq> <bq><b>But I’ve read the Torah, too, and there is plenty in there pointing the Jewish religion caring very little about sanctity of human life.</b> In fact, the Jewish holy book is filled with story upon story of Jews killing Jews and Jews killing non-Jews — all in the name of a theocratic state.</bq> <bq>I get why Peter is so squishy on a lot of this stuff. <b>He is surrounded by Jews who are fully onboard with Israel’s nationalistic brutality and murder. These are people who he loves and cares about, and he knows they are good people and wants to believe they can be brought back from this madness.</b> I sympathize because like many Jews I am in a similar situation. I know a lot of people who are either ambivalent or 100 percent supportive of what Israel is doing. And I’ve thought about it quite a bit, too. How can people be reasoned with? <b>How can they be brought back from their obsession with their nationalist identity? I’ve come to the conclusion that it is basically impossible to do on an individual basis.</b> The structural forces that pull them in that direction are too strong, too one-sided. In PKD terms, <b>the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valis_(novel)#Black_Iron_Prison">Black Iron Prison</a> has grabbed them in totality.</b></bq> <bq><b>All he does is offer a flaccid sermon. It’s all scripture and morality for him</b>…directed at a culture that’s having a blast being genocidal and enjoying its power to kill and crush Palestinians with impunity.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> <a href="https://www.webkit.org/blog/16458/announcing-interop-2025/#remove-mutation-events" author="Nicole Sullivan" source="Webkit Blog">Announcing Interop 2025</a> <bq>In addition to the focus areas, the Interop Project includes several investigation areas. These are projects where teams gather to assess the current state of testing infrastructure and sort through issues that are blocking progress. For instance, two years ago accessibility could not be an Interop focus area, because there just wasn’t enough test coverage in the WPT test suite. So <b>Apple led a project to create over 1,100 subtests. Accessibility then became a focus area for Interop 2024, where it reached almost perfect interoperability.</b> There are five investigations for Interop 2025. We are especially excited about another Accessibility investigation to create even more accessibility tests. <b>A new WebVTT investigation will look to improve the text tracks that are synchronized to videos, used most often for closed captioning.</b> And a new Privacy investigation will dive into what privacy-related standardized features need tests, develop automated tests or document manual tests, and <b>improve interoperability of privacy protections.</b></bq> <bq>Modern JavaScript is all about modularity, and in 2025, Modules are getting a little extra love. This includes <b>allowing you to import JSON files directly into your scripts.</b> And refining import attributes (like <c>type:"json"</c>) to ensure they work seamlessly, reducing the need for custom parsing logic.</bq> <bq>For developers working with complex CSS rules, <b><c>@scope</c> offers the ability to apply a set of styles within a specific subtree of the DOM.</b> Think of it as a more efficient way to apply styles to certain areas of your page, avoiding global overrides. This year, the focus is on ensuring that @scope works consistently and correctly across all browsers.</bq> <bq><ul><c>RTCRtpScriptTransform</c>, which allows scripts to modify the media stream, and which is commonly used to implement end-to-end encryption in WebRTC applications. Make <c>RTCDataChannels</c> transferable to workers to enable off-main-thread processing of data.</ul></bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/02/are-contemporary-language-models-helping-destroy-the-planet-and-whatever-happened-to-neuromorphic-models-in-ai.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="David J. Lobina">Are contemporary Language Models helping destroy the planet? And whatever happened to neuromorphic models in AI?</a> <bq>I have often described LLMs as very sophisticated auto-completion tools, but it is more accurate to state that LLMs are large networks of matrix/tensor products, with no model of semantics or facts about the world included in the system, and thus, with no marker of what is true or false – <b>LLMs find patterns of word/letter/sound co-occurrences, and the result is the interactions that a dialogue management system such as ChatGPT affords.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.propel.app/insights/building-a-snap-llm-eval-part-1/" source="Propel" author="Dave Guarino">Building a SNAP LLM eval: part 1</a> <bq>Amanda Askell — one of the primary Anthropic AI researchers behind Claude — had a particularly useful line on evals: The boring yet crucial secret behind good system prompts is test-driven development. <b>You don't write down a system prompt and find ways to test it. You write down tests and find a system prompt that passes them.</b></bq> <bq><b>Just using the models and taking notes on the nuanced “good”, “meh”, “bad!” is a much faster</b> way to get to a useful starting eval set than writing or automating evals in code.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://vale.rocks/posts/ai-is-stifling-tech-adoption" author="Declan Chidlow" source="Vale">AI is Stifling Tech Adoption</a> <bq> if people are reluctant to adopt a new technology because of a lack of AI support, there will be fewer people likely to produce material regarding said technology, which leads to an overall inverse feedback effect. <b>Lack of AI support prevents a technology from gaining the required critical adoption mass, which in turn prevents a technology from entering use and having material made for it, which in turn starves the model of training data, which in turn disincentivises selecting that technology</b>, and so on and so forth. Consider a developer working with a cutting-edge JavaScript framework released just months ago. <b>When they turn to AI coding assistants for help, they find these tools unable to provide meaningful guidance because their training data predates the framework’s release.</b> This forces developers to rely solely on potentially limited official documentation and early adopter experiences, which, for better or worse, tends to be an ‘old’ way of doing things and incentivises them to use something else.</bq> <bq>With Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which is generally my AI offering of choice given its superior coding ability, my “What personal preferences should Claude consider in responses?” profile setting includes the line “When writing code, use vanilla HTML/CSS/JS unless otherwise noted by me”. Despite this, <b>Claude will frequently opt to generate new code with React, and in some occurrences even rewrite my existing code into React</b> against my intent and without my consultation.</bq> <bq>I think it is evident that AI models are influencing technology, and that the technologies currently in use – especially those that reached popularity before November 2022, when ChatGPT was released, or that are otherwise in current data sets – will be around for a long time to come, and that <b>AI models’ preferential treatment of them will expand their adoption and lifespan.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://svpow.com/2025/02/14/if-you-believe-in-artificial-intelligence-take-five-minutes-to-ask-it-about-stuff-you-know-well/" author="Mike Taylor" source="SV-POW!">If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well</a> <bq>the worst part of this is not the errors. It’s not the blithe confidence with which the false facts are recited. It’s not even the bland “I apologize for the mistake in my previous response” to be followed by more utter nonsense. It’s that <b>these incorrect answers look so plausible.</b> For a lay-person — someone who, foolishly, has not been reading this blog for the last eighteen years — the answers given here look superficially reasonable. <b>A kid doing a homework report on Brachiosaurus could take these answers and weave them into the submission without even having an inkling that they’re completely wrong. And the teacher who has to mark the essay will also likely swallow them.</b> <b>Because LLMs get catastrophically wrong answers on topics I know well, I do not trust them at all on topics I don’t already know.</b> And if you do trust them, I urge you to spend five minutes asking your favourite one about something you know in detail.</bq> <bq>LLMs are useful for some classes of queries. I use them a lot to remind me of programming-language idioms, [...] They’re good for this because you can <b>quickly determine whether the answer is correct or not, thanks to the merciless compiler.</b> LLMs are <b>not useless</b>; they’re just <b>way overhyped and misapplied</b>.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/02/microsofts-new-ai-agent-can-control-software-and-robots/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">Microsoft’s new AI agent can control software and robots</a> <bq>Magma is also a sign of how quickly the culture around AI can change. Just a few years ago, this kind of agentic talk scared many people who feared it might lead to AI taking over the world. While some people still fear that outcome, <b>in 2025, AI agents are a common topic of mainstream AI research that regularly takes place without triggering calls to pause all of AI development.</b></bq> It's called brainwashing, you pathetic <i>summer child</i>. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/" author="W3C" source="WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)">Stories of Web Users / How People with Disabilities Use the Web</a> There are nine users, each of whom describes how they work with the Internet, and which assistive technologies they use to access text, audio, and video content. Each of them also has a list of use cases ("Barrier examples"), as well as solutions that would work for them and their particular restrictions. The people range widely in capability. There's <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-seven/">Marta</a>, who is deaf and blind and who is <iq>taking classes in fashion design and knows she will need to discuss her unique needs with the college since she will likely need class materials to be available on her braille display.</iq>. I mean, she's nearly blind and wants to be a fashion designer? Are we just not even trying to match capabilities to dreams anymore? I'm sure she has a sense of style but her ability to communicate it is not just limited, but just not efficient, no matter how accessible you make web sites or tools. <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-three/">Lakshmi</a>, who is completely blind, is a more typical example of a user who is completely dependent on a screenreader that only really works well with well-structured, semantically sound pages that clearly label all elements (either in the content itself or using <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA">ARIA</a>), with headings and a logical structure that can be easily navigated. There's also <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-one/">Ade</a>, who has limited use of his arms (and thus a pointing device). This the kind of ailment that could happen to anyone, should an accident temporarily rob you of the use of one or both arms. Keyboard navigation is paramount for Ade---and a lot of users at various times. <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-nine/">Elias</a> has low vision, hand tremor, and mild short-term memory loss (he's 85). This comes for all of us, if we're lucky. Tiny text, silly contrasts, squirrelly fonts, and designers self-pleasuring themselves are the death of the web for these people. Large tables can be nearly unusable when zoomed beyond the size at which they were designed. <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-four/">Lexie</a>, who has <iq>deuteranopia and protanopia</iq>, also has problems with contrasts that other people can easily distinguish. <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-two/">Ian</a> is autistic, for whom <iq>[w]ebsites that spell everything out and don’t use metaphors are easier for me to understand.</iq> This is one I'd not considered in terms of a disability, but only because much of the world speaks English, but at B2 level or much less. They will understand basic-to-intermediate communication but you can't be breaking out idioms (there's one right there) that are highly culturally dependent, or even generationally dependent. Ian's not going to understand your clever quips. This is where things get quite difficult. To what degree do you dilute your presentation? Do you want to make art or something that everyone can use? Or is it good to keep Ian and non-native readers/listeners in mind, just in case you can quickly and easily think of a way of making something that is both artistic and accessible. A win-win. That also applies to users like <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-five/">Sophie</a>, who has Down's Syndrome and gets <iq>confused and overwhelmed when I’m on a page that has a lot of text.</iq> Look, maybe not everything is for Sophie, but this whole section makes me remember that non-native readers are also very limited in their ability to absorb text quickly---or at all. If the writing style is too complex, then they'll be unable to use your site. This doesn't mean that you should <i>write down</i> to the lowest common denominator! It just means that you should keep it in mind, wielding your rapier wit and demonstrating your erudition where appropriate rather than <i>partout</i>. If you can't control yourself---or don't want to---then you can make sure that text is selectable and extractable so that LLM-based summarizers can manipulate it. This is a form of progressive enhancement as well---some readers will see the high-falutin' version, while others will read a bare-bones summary, according to their needs and wishes. This same need also comes from <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-six/">Dhruv</a>, who is deaf. He needs accurate captions in order to participate in classes or watch videos. Controls that allow him to slow down the content or easily pause/restart it are also immensely helpful. This goes for people watching content who are either not so quick on the uptake, who tire more quickly than others, or who are viewing content in a non-native language. <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/story-eight/">Stefan</a> has ADHD and dyslexia and falls somewhat into the same camp. I am much less a fan, though, of the rainbow-colored, karaoke-style-animated, and hard-coded captions right in the middle of the video that have begun appearing in many places, especially in short videos intended for dissemination on social-media networks like TikTok. This is not a progressive enhancement I find them incredibly distracting, pulling attention away from the actual video, which, for me, is often a demonstration of a programming technique. Honestly, this is required reading for anyone building user interfaces. It really makes you think about what you're building. My main takeaway is that we all have varying capabilities at various times. Throughout our lives, we will acquire and lose capabilities. Sometimes our abilities range throughout the day, or from day to day. Are you holding a baby in one hand? Can you navigate the site with the keyboard? Did you break an arm? Did you have surgery on your eye? Are you tired? Sick? Is your screen really small? Really big? Did you get interrupted while filling out a form? Are you working in a non-native language? This stuff affects us all, to varying degrees and at varying times. My technology and design takeaways are, <ul><b>Rely on the platform</b> as much as possible. It has excellent assistive support for built-in elements. This <b>goes double for forms</b> and form elements. <b>Be declarative</b> (is it required?) and provide input examples (<b>placeholders</b>). <b>Keep it simple</b> wherever possible. <b>Animation</b> and effects should be <b>optional</b>. Consider <b>color and shape contrasts</b> when grouping elements. <b>Respect user preferences</b> for less animation, high contrast, or anything else that you can set in a modern browser. Leaning on the platform of HTML/CSS will give you a lot of these things for free. <b>Presentation</b> should be <b>consistent</b>. Everything should be <b>zoomable and responsive</b>. Lean on <b>well-established presentation conventions</b> for the culture or cultures you're addressing. Provide <b>alternatives</b> for images (captions) and videos (transcripts). Content should be well-written, in that it should not run on and should be <b>divided into easily navigated, logical sections.</b> <b>Keyboard support</b> is vital. Longer <b>processes should be resumable</b> (e.g., return to a form in-progress). Be <b>careful with session timeouts</b>. They're usually unnecessary and may be far too short for some years, effectively blocking them from using your site. </ul> <hr> <a href="https://ajone239.github.io/2025/02/15/mvvm-understanding.html" author="Austin Jones" source="Austin's Journey for Meaning">MVVM understandings</a> <bq>The View Model’s function is separate from the Model. Abstraction requires discipline to not let two pieces of code that do the same thing <i>become</i> the same thing, purely out of convenience. Things that operate together should be functionally coupled, not just that same code.</bq> While I deeply appreciate the sentiment, I think that (A) most people are going to be unconvinced that they need additional complexity for such a vague goal, and (B) there are more concrete reasons to keep them separate. In <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=5289">Real quick on MVVM</a>, I posited a simple example, repeated below. <code> record Person( string FirstName, string LastName, Company Company, DateTime BirthDate); </code> The view model might want to expose: <code> int Age => DateTime.Now.Year - _model.BirthDate.Year; string FullName => $"{_model.FirstName} {_model.LastName}"; Company Company { get; } IReadOnlyList<company> AvailableCompanies { get; } </code> The <c>AvailableCompanies</c> is for the drop-down menu. The data in the model is a different <i>shape</i> than that required by the view. It is the view-model's job to marshal that data from one shape to the other. It is decidedly <i>not</i> the model's job to do that, because it <i>exposes</i> data, while one or more views might display it in different ways. Perhaps another view is showing the birthdate directly, in which case it just passes the value through with no marshaling. <bq>Most logic seems to fall into the View Model as your business logic rules are often mirrored by presentation rules. E.g. a button has to be disabled if the user hasn’t met some requirement.</bq> I would instead use the verb <i>reflect</i>, as in the view model exposes properties that <i>reflect</i> the state in the model. Just off the top of my head, I imagine that each component of the model has unique duties, as illustrated in the example below, <ul>A <b>model</b> contains several properties that must adhere to certain rules in order to be saved. A validation <b>service</b> determines whether those rules have been satisfied, returning a list of zero or more validation results. A <b>view model</b> could exposes the most recent list of validations as a property, as well as a property called <c>readyToSubmit</c> A <b>view</b> binds the validations as it sees fit---either attaching them to their respective controls, or exposing the list of validations to the user in some other way---as well as binding the <c>Enabled</c> property of the submission button to the <c>readyToSubmit</c> property.</ul> In this way, the model is just a dumb data container. In classic OO, the service would have been part of those objects. However, it's far more flexible to keep the model as a set of "dumb" DTOs and the logic in the service. This makes it much easier to replace the validation logic in specific cases, without touching the data layer, which doesn't need to change. The view model does the work of managing calls to the validation service as well as retaining the results as long as the view needs them. The view model doesn't even know about buttons and that they can be enabled or not. That's the view's job, which deals with the actual representations presented to the user. This makes the view model, in turn, flexible enough to be used with alternate representations. For example, we can imagine a view that simply auto-saves when <c>readyToSubmit</c> is <c>true</c>, so it would have been a shame to have named that property <c>saveButtonEnabled</c> because it would have been an awkward fit for the hypothetical second view. As you can well imagine, it's incredibly easy to test systems built in this way, as you can very easily construct the data/model that you want and test something like the validation service. You can also very easily build on top of that to verify that the view model updates and notifies as expected. You can even bind to its properties to verify that a potential view would have received the expected notifications. The view doesn't have more logic in it than <i>binding</i>. It is more finicky to test---although not impossible or even especially difficult with practice---but it's also not usually necessary. When a problem crops up, you usually very quickly locate it in the view and fix the broken binding. Obviously, if errors like this are chronic---or if you have very complex views---then you'll want to test the view as well. Just remember that it's the part that requires the most effort, results in the slowest tests, and provides the least benefit, so you should really be doing those last, if at all. Austin's example focuses more on the service layer as it pertains to persistence, loading and storing models. I wanted to provide an example that doesn't have anything to do with persistence but shows that there is non-persistence logic that obviously---at least in hindsight---doesn't belong anywhere but in the service layer. I've been working with this type of abstraction since at least 2002, when I started working on the Atlas framework at Opus Software AG, which was written in Delphi Pascal. We didn't call it MVVM but we had a very clear separation between the <i>object model</i>, the <i>view model</i>, and <i>renderers</i>. <hr> <a href="https://www.cosive.com/blog/my-washing-machine-refreshed-my-thinking-on-software-effort-estimation" source="Cosive" author="Chris Horsley">My Washing Machine Refreshed My Thinking on Software Effort Estimation</a> <bq>[...] <b>while 90% of the project will be the same, there's going to be one critical difference between the last 5 projects and this project that seemed trivial at the time of estimation</b> but will throw off our whole schedule. It could be one or all of:<ol>Our <b>well-used task-running framework</b> we were going to use for a relatively small part of the system <b>is totally unmaintained now</b> and we'd have to fork it to make it fit for purpose again. <b>Our entire development tooling ecosystem was obsoleted 18 months after the last time we did this</b>, so we're going to be learning the sharp edges of a whole new toolchain from scratch. <b>We find that our OS version has moved on and no longer supports key requirements for our existing dependencies</b>, requiring rethinking or developing from scratch. We need our infrastructure stack to <b>use one component we've never used before and it doesn't work anything like we expected.</b></ol></bq> These are exactly the kinds of things that you should keep in mind when doing an estimate, though! When you copy/paste an existing solution, you have to consider the context in which it was developed and the degree to which that context might be different this time around. It's not easy but it's <i>your job</i> to be aware of limitations and concessions at all times. His story about how long it took to set up his washing machine is because he's a rank amateur at doing that, despite having done it so many times. He got lucky the first nine times because literally nothing that could go wrong went wrong. On his tenth time, everything went wrong and he was totally blindsided by it---but only because he'd learned nothing about how the system he was working on works. He didn't learn, for example, what his requirements or environmental expectations were nor that he should quickly check to verify that they were satisfied before he started. It's like he went downstairs to check his car's oil but didn't bring his house keys with him because the door to the garage had always been propped before. When he had to go back upstairs to get his house keys, that was considered a blindsiding showstopper that you couldn't have accounted for. <h id="fun">Fun</h> <img src="{att_link}i_choo_choo_choose_you.jpg" href="{att_link}i_choo_choo_choose_you.jpg" align="none" caption="I choo-choo-choose you" scale="60%"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRPey4Hy_ZM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/NRPey4Hy_ZM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="SNL" caption="SNL’s First Episode with Host George Carlin and Musical Guest Billy Preston and Janis Ian"> <ul> The cold opening was about 45 seconds long. It was a language lesson involving wolverines and is quite famous. The feel of the skit felt much more like Monty Python than modern-day Saturday Night Live---or any SNL from the last 30 years. The entire show was just under 68 minutes long. Each of the two musical guests played twice. Janis's songs were each about 4--5 minutes long. She was interesting, singing songs that were almost like poetry that she wrote for herself---we just go to listen along. The second song sounded kind of like the beginning of <i>Gutter Ballet</i> by <i>Savatage</i>; at other times, she sounded a bit like <i>Billy Joel</i>. The skits in general were much, much shorter, so there were more of them. Dan Akroyd was very good, not reading from his cards at all. There was a long segment involving muppets, which was absolutely amazing. George Carlin hosted and did about 15 minutes of material, distributed over about five different segments throughout the show. He did not clean up his act for the show, shooting straight at religion pretty heard, as is his wont. Albert Brooks presented a film that was quite odd, and quite risqué, with a quick segment about Oregon having lowered its age of consent to seven years old---and then showing a date with a man and a seven-year-old girl eating a sundae. Avant garde as hell. Chevy Chase did a Weekend Update. Andy Kaufman lip-synced part of the Mighty Mouse theme, illustrating his more-than-offbeat brand of comedy and amply showing why he was funny. He was funny because we couldn't figure out why he made us laugh, so we laughed more. So, he was a comedian. Al Franken in the credits as a writer. There was some on-the-street stuff featuring a blind cab driver. There was a short skit about the population of the state of Georgia switching places with the people of Israel. There was an odd two-minute stand-up by a comedienne I'd never heard of, and whose name I already cannot remember. There was a fake commercial mocking the razor-blade companies for ever thinking that anyone could need more than two blades on a razor, presenting what they clearly deemed a laughable number of blades: three. </ul>